Julian Dorey Podcast - 🤯 [VIDEO] - CIA Spy Confronts Psychological Shadow Wars & Assassin Protocol | Andrew Bustamante • #150

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

- Julian Dorey Podcast MERCH: ⁠https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured⁠ - Support Our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Ron James' UFO Documentary for next week: https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Truth-Col-John-Alexander/dp/B0BXX3BV8Q - Find your SECRET spy superpower: https://everydayspy.com/quiz - Learn more from Andy: https://everydayspy.com/ - Follow Andy's Podcast: https://everydayspy.com/podcast (***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 Agent), lived abroad as undercover agents for the US Gov. While he cannot reveal his precise locations during his time as a spy, Andy operated primarily out of Asia –– and completed missions on 6 of the 7 continents over the course of his career. As a result of his actions in the line of duty, Bustamante is forever very unwelcome in many countries around the world. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Andy is no longer a spy, allegedly 4:07 - The GDP Race & China’s Threat 7:08 - Peter Zeihan vs Andrew Bustamante; China’s BRI & Africa 15:12 - Isolationists vs War Hawks 19:12 - Andy: Why CIA taught me Human Beings are NOT Good 27:17 - Andy tells his WILD origin story 33:29 - Why Authority isn’t real 38:37 - Why Andy doesn’t trust people & breaks the rules 44:49 - CIA teaches you to lie; Bustamante’s psychology 50:14 - America’s Constitutional rights & cultural values 54:43 - 2 Ways to Flip an Asset: Trust or Blackmail; Cold Approach vs. Warm Approach 1:01:49 - CIA & Intimidating Assets; CIA Reality vs Hollywood Movies 1:07:32 - How Andy got sent to missions abroad; High Value Targets 1:11:28 - Andy’s wife: Legendary CIA Targeter 1:15:52 - CIA Life & Death Situations; Andy’s name change story 1:22:20 - Why Andy got banned from certain countries 1:25:43 - What power does CIA Director have? 1:29:49 - Andy breaks down Syria & why WW3 is a proxy war 1:36:04 - Obama’s red line policy in Syria; Rise of Authoritarianism abroad 1:44:20 - The rapidly dividing East & West; BRIC Nations (and South Africa) 1:50:16 - Russia Ukraine War; Putin & the build up to war; Ukraine’s weapon status 1:57:40 - Intelligence Agencies & International Arms Deals 2:00:49 - The War in Yemen; The Forgotten Proxy Wars 2:08:35 - The Worst Cases Scenarios in Iran; Bustamante explains Ayatollah Succession plan 2:13:01 - Iran funds Hezbollah break down 2:16:45 - Israel & the power of Mossad 2:20:50 - Mossad’s methodology; CIA & Assassination Protocol 2:28:01 - Why CIA is compartmentalized 2:31:22 - Bustamante’s work w/ foreign intel agencies; the Five Eyes Intel Alliance 2:35:29 - Andy reflects sadly on countries he can never visit again 2:38:51 - Andy’s new UFO show on History Channel, “Beyond Skinwalker Ranch” 2:43:02 - Andy’s stance on UFOs & UAPs; How filming worked for show 2:47:29 - Is the show scripted? 2:50:13 - What Andy & the team found re: UFO / Multiverse Evidence 2:53:16 - Michio Kaku’s Multiverse explanation; Quantum Multiverse 2:58:52 - The mysterious Indian Reservation w/ other-worldly energy 3:01:06 - Why are UFOs being pushed so hard?; The turning point for UFOs 3:05:29 - Government Secrets; Henry Kissinger’s new China Policy 3:10:45 - Why Andy left CIA 3:13:31 - Andy gives inside details from the show’s UFO investigations 3:17:37 - Julian comments on Andy’s to becoming the Number 1 Spy on the internet ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. access to secrets that would impact how the American public would respond. What do you mean by that? Meaning the roles that I filled, the operations that I participated in, were operations that were relevant and impactful to Americans. They were relevant and impactful to other countries as well, but never humanity as a whole. Thank you. Andy Bustamante, welcome back, sir. Hey, I'm happy to be here, Julian. Thanks for having me, man. It's good to have you in New Jersey, man. It's been a while.

We did the one down at Concrete, which was great, with you and Jim DiIorio. Can't wait to do that again. But you always get requested, man. People always want to hear Bustamante again. After the last two episodes we did, each week, they're like, bring him back in next week. I'm like, he lives in Florida. It doesn't work this way. And now you're the biggest spy in the world. Now, you know, it's crazy, man. It's crazy seeing how the internet has reacted from the first time we had a conversation to the conversation that we're having today. And what's wild is the stuff

that you want to talk about today. Just the questions that you've kind of just given me to chew on coming up here are so relevant. I'm just super excited. Which questions were those? You said you want to talk about Syria? Oh, right. Talk about Iran Yeah, you want to talk about I mean, dude What I love about coming up here is that you never talk about boring stuff You always talk about relevant impactful stuff and I'll take that 100% of the days Hey, that's what we're trying to do, man I mean It's I I never lose sight of fact that I'm some dude in a hat who works in a podcast

on a podcast in his parents house and there's a whole world out there of shit going on and guys like you were in the middle of that and that is the beauty of having a platform like this i get to talk to people doing cool shit around the world so if we're going to have discussions on highly nuanced complicated crazy shit going on i want to do it with guys who have been in the middle of it with espionage and everything and have to think about these things and you know might still actively be working on it too that's always for sure we had to hit that the accusations keep flying if if i had time to spy on top of this on top of the stuff that i'm already doing i don't even know that would pay the bills i don't think it would be i'd make enough money spying if i had to work for cia right now actually i know i wouldn't my company made more money last month

than i made in a year i believe that when i was a cia officer it was mind-boggling dude first time that has ever happened to me and it was absolutely mind-boggling and it was absolutely one of those moments where you realize you did something right you know we always so i don't know if you know this and i don't know if i've told you this before the average person has somewhere to the tune of 120 000000 thoughts a day. 70,000 of those thoughts are negative thoughts. So the vast majority of the thoughts that we have on any given day are negative thoughts, right? And one of those thoughts that I know plagues me all the time is, did I make the right call? Did I make the right call? Did I make the right call? Because you

never really know if you could have made a call differently, if it would have gone better. But after finding, after doing the accounting last month i was like i made the right call made the right call getting out of cia financially at least made the right call starting a business uh and to think that i spent most of that month you know playing with my kids on the floor taking my wife out to dinner it was a good month that's pretty good you live in florida too that helps always always helps we got good weather this time of year around here but in in the winter i keep thinking that like maybe the move is miami but anyway yeah there is as we bury the lead right there out front there is a lot of shit going on one of the things that i've been talking with you on the phone a couple months ago when we're

talking about sean ryan and everything was about the state of the country though and like our place in the world and this is a topic that you're really really good at delving into all the things that go into that and probably the most prescient the most prescient thing you ever said to me that was simple that made me reset like oh my god i was thinking of this all wrong was when you said the only thing that matters is gdp and like that when you said that on that first podcast we did, I'm like, of course, what the fuck was I thinking my whole life? You know what I mean?

And so I ask this because there is a country right now, China, who is just barely second in GDP to us. They have a bigger population. There's a whole bunch of things obviously going on. So you've always been picky about your produce. But now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first.

Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details. On over there. But there seems to be this whole like pushing going on now, even in media. This kind of did a 180 where it's like suddenly like oh we got to talk about china left and right and you're a guy who has expertise in that part of the world and has been talking about this since long before it was in vogue so as it stands right now do you still view china as like the number one threat to let's say the superiority of our currency in the world and our currency in the world

and our place in the standings of GDP? So I think it's important to note that I don't have to have an opinion, right? Because opinions mean that there's not enough evidence. What we have here is actual documented fact. We have the intelligence assessment of the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, plus we have the assessment from the Joint Chiefs of Staff here in the United States, right? So these are to the military and the intelligence leadership of the country, have both released estimates in 2023

that clearly show that China is the number one largest strategic threat to American primacy in the immediate future and in the foreseeable future. And what they're saying there is that it's a threat to us and our national security, not because they're pointing guns at us, right? Other people are pointing much more dangerous weapons at us than China. North Korea launches test missiles and test nukes, test missiles that are capable of carrying nukes.

You know, Iran talks about wiping Israel and Americans in the West off the face of the planet. There are much more boisterous, flamboyant threats. So really what these assessments are saying is that China is the biggest threat because it has the opportunity, it has the potential to become the largest economy. And when you are the largest economy,

you have the largest economy. And when you are the largest economy, you have the largest budget to build weapons, sell weapons, research and develop new weapons, and export your foreign policy ambitions around the world. So it's not my opinion. It's actual documented fact

from the highest levels of American government that the Chinese threat is our number one strategic threat as American citizens. What do you think of – I don't know if you've seen some of the stuff that Peter Zahn said. You and I have talked about him at least once, but I don't know how much of it you've watched or anything. But he's this geopolitical strategist who goes online and has a lot of takes on a lot of different things. But one of the things he really goes at is specifically like 10 to 15 years out demographically speaking he's like china's fucked yeah you know he keeps saying that they're gonna have a major famine their supply chains are all messed up after covid because

that did some of that really actually did backfire on them which is pretty interesting but he's also saying like oh they're not having kids so yes they have 1.4 1.5 billion right now but they won't and they're gonna have an economic crisis when that starts to crash. I've always thought like a lot can happen in 10 to 15 years on the way there. So that's always a concern. So it's like, well, if there's going to be problems in the meantime, I care about that. But like do you think that there's any validity to what he says-term on some of those things? You know, I think you nailed it right there. A lot can happen in 10 to 15 years. And that's why CIA and the intelligence infrastructure of the United States, we don't really worry about long-term assessments. If anything, what we do – so there's a term that analysts use called the cone of uncertainty. And the cone of uncertainty is exactly what it sounds like it's if you can

imagine a cone you can imagine a cone that's following like a string all right the string is what's happened in the past you know exactly what's happened in the past so it's a very finite thing it's it's already happened and then where the string enters into the cone it enters into the small end of the cone right now what it's saying there is that you can't really see what's inside the cone so there's an area in there between the string and the cone that's an area of possibility but then as the cone goes out further and further the cone gets wider and wider right because the opening of a cone is so much bigger than the small triangular entrance of a cone that's the same thing that we use when we talk about the cone of uncertainty.

It means that as time progresses on, you become less and less confident in what's going to happen in the future. We can forecast with relative confidence what's going to happen 12 hours from now, 36 hours from now, three days from now, two weeks from now. But as time goes on further and further, it becomes even more difficult to forecast. So when Peter Zahan talks about 10 to 15 years from now, China's going to have this massive collapse, I trust that whatever analysis he's doing right now

that's giving him the confidence to say that publicly, I trust that he believes the data that he's looking at. But 10 to 15 years is the fat part of the cone of uncertainty. Yes, that could happen. What he's assessing could happen. But a lot of other things could happen too. Think about the policy changes they could make in the next 10 to 15 years to fix their demographic problem. Think about the countries that are going to exist and not exist anymore.

Sudan used to be one country. Now it's two. Potentially, it's going to turn into three. Right? All of one country. Now it's two. Potentially, it's going to turn into three, right? All of that's happened in the last two decades. Sean talked about this a little bit. What are they doing in Africa? Like he mentioned that they're basically buying up real estate everywhere. And so they're making those deals directly with the governments there. Is it deeper than that, though? Yeah. So what you see China specifically doing, not just in Africa, but throughout the third world,

is something formerly known as the Belt and Road Initiative, the BRI. And it's their chance to fund bankroll infrastructure and development projects around the third world. Now, there's two benefits to that. One, they become the economic beneficiary of whatever trade comes as a result of those new roads or the new ports or the new electric infrastructure, whatever else. Plus, they're employing Chinese to build those things overseas.

So they're creating jobs and they're creating revenue and they're creating resources for the future of china by building these or investing in these projects around the world but then the second benefit to them is they also have leverage over that country because they just built clean water for ghana and now ghana couldn't pay for it so ghana took a loan from the chinese it It's loan sharking. Yeah, it's essentially that's what it is, right? So now they have two distinct benefits, a strategic location, all the resources that come from that location, plus they have a financial edge. So it's really that financial piece that China's looking for, because China has looked to the United States

and watched what the United States has done for the last 40 years. And unfortunately, I think China understands our GDP, to use your term, better than most Americans understand our GDP. America's wealth does not come from the fact that we are innovative with good colleges and we create high technology. That's not where it comes from. The vast majority of the wealth and the GDP that we generate actually comes from financial institutions. It comes from the fact that we are the center of financial investment information, financial products, financial transactions, all over the world.

And we take a piece of everything. So what China really wants to do is find a way to expand their financial footprint. How do they have more people taking more loans in UN? How do they have more people taking more loans in u.n how do they have more people taking more loans in chinese currency how do they have more more stocks more shares more publicly traded companies that can actually generate financial transactions without having to produce an actual physical product and that means that obviously all their private citizens or companies that are quote unquote on the end of these transactions, they're owned by the

government. They have to show everything to the government. So the government is obviously counting that towards the actual control that they have. It obviously it helps their GDP when they're getting on in on these deals. But this is, I assume that this also goes into like you're talking about finances and everything, but this goes right into like buying up our real estate and some of the other places, I guess, like what they're doing in Africa, but they're doing here too in America. Yeah. And it's funny because a lot of the investments that China has put into Africa specifically, especially in recent history, in the last 60 days or so, those have started to fail. They've leveraged loans or given loans to countries that can't pay them back. And now there's the IMF has been trying to challenge China to say, hey, you know, Ghana is another great example of this. This country has six billion, I think, six billion in loans that they owe back to China.

And China's trying to say that they have to pay back those loans, but Ghana doesn't have that money. And the IMF said, we're not going to come true and we're not going to pay China $6 million because of Ghana's debt. So they're forcing the Chinese now to have to learn how to accept and balance sheets even when they don't get money back. And that's a big part of the challenge that's existing right now in Africa and in China's efforts with their Belt and Road Initiative. It's not just one country. There's actually multiple countries between Southeast Asia and Africa who are unable to pay back the debts that China gave them. There's some problems with that

in South America too, I think, right? Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a problem as China learns how to be more of a financial player around the world. The United States has been doing this for a long time. So we understand that's one of the reasons that we don't give everybody loans. One of the big challenges that the United States has is that we try not to participate in transactions that aren't going to be profitable. And because of that, we have lost influence

over the last 30 years. Countries that used to want to do business with the United States still want to do business with the United States, but the United States says, no, you're not reliable. Your countries are unstable. You're not democracies. So we stiff arm these countries and then they end up being pissed at us. So they go to somewhere else. So then China has learned that loans are a way to win influence all over the world because the United States is saying no. We've kind of painted ourselves into that corner. But now China is starting to pay the price of,

you know, sometimes when you give a loan to somebody who doesn't deserve a loan, you don't get your money back. See, this is the core of a, like this right here is a symbol for the core of like the central question when it comes to any policy foreign-wise that America could have

and our citizens' attitudes towards that you know i i hear from two crowds because they're the two loudest online all the time when it comes to say foreign policy for america and it's either america's all war criminals we need to retreat from the world libertarians or it's no we need to be the police everywhere war hawks and like everything else in in society i think the answer is somewhere in the middle but one thing i do think about a lot not to not to prop it up and like write it off and say oh well for sure but when you start putting rules on yourself on how you deal with other countries someone else is going to break those rules and then take

advantage of that and so this is a very the reason i'm saying this is very messy is all the obvious points that are probably popping into people's heads right now when you think about like well the rights we have under the constitution in america when you think about the types of people we are in bed with money wise which is exactly what you were just laying out. When you think about the symbolism and how the media can run with certain narratives on decisions you may make that are pro-America and not necessarily good for another place, but it's what we got to do. So sitting in your kind of seat where you've had to be a soldier on the ground, so to speak, in the middle of this stuff, what do you say to the people who are idealists and want everything

that we do to be totally clean? They don't want to ever hear about us influencing an election in South America. They don't want to hear about putting people inside the cartels and dealing with that trade to an advantageous way that doesn't end it. Like, what do you say to those people who want that utopitarian world? They don't want that world. They think they want that world because they don't know what the other world looks like, right? So we've got to understand that there are, you're exactly right. There are two very loud camps, ruckus camps that are 95% of what we hear, right? We hear extreme points of view on the left, extreme points of view on the right, and nobody says anything about the middle. But one of the things that's really important is

when you look at human beings, when you look at a society, a society is a normalized population. The United States has roughly 180 million adults, right? 300 million people live in the United States. I think it's 350 now is it 350 yeah so somewhere somewhere to the tune of 200 million adults right china has obviously many many more than that but the way that you can compare groups of people despite the fact that they have different different uh cultural identities different spiritual backgrounds whatever else is you look at the normalized set when you look at all the adults in the United States, you have what's known as a bell curve. And everybody remembers bell curves from economics and from mathematics.

So when we talk about the extreme left and the extreme right, and you look at a bell curve, you're literally talking about the shallow ends of the bell curve. So that means the shallow ends of the bell curve on both sides are making the majority of the content, the noise, the criticism that we hear. Well, what about everybody in the fat part of the bell curve? That's what I call the silent masses, right? The silent middle part or the crazy right. But they listen because that's what's out there. And they are always kind of difficult to pin down because they have some beliefs that lean left and some beliefs that lean right. So it's really important to understand that when you ask your question to me, what about the people who want this perfect utopian,

whatever, whatever, whatever? That is a small population that really has surrounded themselves with only one one source of information that's feeding this garbage to them that somehow the world and human beings are good human beings are not good human beings aren't kind they're not generous can people be kind and can people be generous absolutely especially when they have an excess of resources, right? There's a reason why the Middle East, like Bedouins in the Middle East, there's a reason why they fought their entire history while people in the Amazon learned to live at peace. Because one had naturally more resources. I don't feel like I have to fight you to the death over a mango when there's 600 mangoes growing around us.

But when you're in the middle of the desert and there's like one date tree and that one date tree produces 50 dates, we might have to fight to the death to make sure that I have dates to feed my family for the next month and you don't. All right, guys, the Julian Dory pop-up shop is officially live. The link is down in the description below. Go check out the items. There's 13 different designs we put in there. And by we, I mean me and my friends over at 23.5. Big shout out to Poria, John, and Belmer who have been helping me out as well as Chris, who's no longer on their team, but was a huge help behind the scenes for the last four months. So what we did is you can see on the screen right now, I'm putting a couple of the designs we did, but there's just some different things were thrown at the wall to see what you

guys like. So let me know in the comments below if you bought something and what you bought. And also tag me on Instagram. I'll put it on the story. I want to get some buzz around this, but the shop is only going to be available for a limited time. It is going to be going down. I'm not telling you when, but it's not going to be up very soon so make sure you get in there hit that link in the description go check out what you want and i'm really looking forward to getting the feedback on this first drop we were working hard on it and want to make sure you guys get some really good gear from the show and there will be more moving forward for sure so go get it. Well, just like you said, these annoying people on the ends of the bell curve make up 95% of the noise. The annoying people who are either all bad or like, I don't know, holy or something like that, they tend to make up the bell curve on – at least from what I see – on a foreign scale and diplomatically and things like that.

So do you think it's more like you've seen the worst of the worst in the environments you've had to be in because it's not like you were sent into great environments they didn't be like they're not like yo andy we're gonna send you to utopia ville over here with all these fucking people who are happy and they own nothing and are happy you know all that shit yeah they sent you to places where it's like yo you this guy's gotta go i think more than that what it was is my experience with people around the world in different conditions like you're describing has shown me that we're not as different as we try we try to think we are so maybe in in poverty-stricken southeast asia or poverty-stricken africa maybe there

you'll actually find two 10 year olds that hit each other with clubs that might actually happen because they're fighting over whatever, right? You wouldn't find that in most civilized parts of the United States. But that doesn't necessarily mean that violent thoughts don't go through their heads. Mm. Right?

So when I say that people aren't kind, what I mean is people aren't kind. Like, what happens is that when we have an opportunity to show kindness or selfishness to somebody else, usually the first thought that goes through our head is a thought of self-preservation, a thought of survival. What do I need? If what I need is met and I have excess, then I'll share it with you. If I have excess time, then I might say something kind. If I don't have time and you need kindness, I might just walk right past you

because I'm not gonna spend what time I don't have trying to comfort you or say something nice to you. Are you commingling urge with action now? That's what it sounds like to me. It sounds like you're referring to the natural, just like you said, we have 70,000 negative thoughts out of 120 a day, which actually I thought that was low.

I would have said it was 80 or 90 because humans are wired to run away from the fucking bear chasing them towards their cave right that's not a positive thought like we're wired towards survival fighting off death that's like the meaning of life which is very bizarre thing to think about but like when you're talking about they're not kind you are referring to those initial impulses not necessarily what they end up doing correct correct because what you end up doing becomes a matter Correct. Because what you end up doing becomes a matter of how many resources you have. But our initial instincts,

our initial reaction is going to be self-preservation first over our fellow man, which is completely the opposite of what people think of when they think of utopia. In utopia, they think that your fellow man is watching out for you. I'm sorry, that's not how human beings work. We are pack animals.

We are tribal creatures, which means we bond into packs and we bond into tribes, not because we care about the other people in the tribe. It's because we know that the tribe can take care of us. That's what makes us tribal, just like wolves, just like lions, right? That's why we come together because we see a benefit for ourselves when we're together. How do people gain your trust? I don't know that people gain my trust very well. That's what I thought.

Yeah, the number of people that I trust, I mean, I can count them on my two hands. And when I think about the people that I trust, it's really more, who do I trust to do certain things? There are some people I trust to actually have my back back no matter what happens. My wife is one of those people.

No matter what happens, I know she's got my back. Then there's other people that I trust, but maybe just short of anything, right? Somebody says something shitty about me on the internet, somebody will back me up. Somebody takes me to court, some guys will back me up, but not all of them. Was it like that before the CIA too? No. Yeah. So the CIA does a great job of kind of helping you to understand your own flawed points of view.

Like most of our values, our preferences, our ideas about how the world works, most of them actually are conditioned into us through childhood. So they're conditioned into us by what we see from our parents, what we see in our family, what we see on television or in the movies, what we learn in church, what we see in school from other children, that kind of conditions us to be the way we are. So when you are brought up in an environment that's maybe public school with a little bit of, you know, church on Sunday two or three times a week, let's say, now you're being raised to kind of inherently believe that people are gracious and people are kind and people are, you know, you're supposed to do things to help each other and you're supposed to work together and teamwork makes the dream work, right? And you're conditioned to believe that stuff.

Well, all it takes is a child that's raised somewhere differently. Maybe not in a public school, but in a private school. This is a fantastic example when you consider public school students versus private school students for the very wealthy. Have you ever wondered why it is that the children of the very wealthy have a higher success rate in terms of long-term success than the children of the not so wealthy? It's because the children of the wealthy go to school where wealthy people send their kids.

They grow up around wealthy kids who are also raised by wealthy parents who are surrounded by wealth. Exactly. So they learn very early on on you got to pick who you choose there's a whole group of people that are worse than you they're poorer than you they're needier than you they're not going to have the opportunities you have but they're also raised with that idea that you have a responsibility you have to take care of the wealth that your mother and i have made you have to take care of the family name that your father and your grandfather and your grandfather's grandfather before him built. Right?

So they're still messed up in their own way, but they're conditioned differently. They still need that pack, but they're conditioned differently. You're saying, like, you've obviously seen this because you didn't grow up that way. No. Not at all. I was the poor kid that grew up in a rural part of Pennsylvania that believed we were all going to come together and do the right thing because it was the right thing oh you did believe that i did believe that yeah that's that's how i grew up and i believe that that's what took me into the military and then when the military was

disappointing to me all those times where i did the right thing but it still was somehow the wrong thing to do right do you have an example of that? Yeah. So I went to the Air Force Academy and I was a, there's two ways to get the Air Force. There's two ways to get into a military academy. The first way is you meet all the requirements right out of high school and you go right into your freshman year. The other way is you miss some of those requirements, but you still are a good candidate. So they send you to something called the military prep school, which is a one year preparatory school so that you can get yourself up to those requirements before you go into the mainstream academy. So I went to the Air

Force Academy prep school because I did not have all the requirements I needed when I graduated high school. So during that year, I took it very seriously because I was like, this is my chance. My chance to like go to a great school and get out of Pennsylvania and all this other stuff. I did my best with my grades. I did my best to keep myself military disciplined and physically active and all the stuff that I had to do. And I was doing great. I made it to the place where by the end of my time at the prep school, I was the second in command of the prep school because it's student led, right? So of the, whatever it was, 400 students there, I was second in command of all of them. And then

finals week came. And during finals week, I walked into my dorm room. I was doing a bunch of stuff that I had to do as the second in command of the school, administrative stuff. And I walk into my dorm room. I was doing a bunch of stuff that I had to do as the second-in-command of the school, administrative stuff. And I walk into my dorm room, and I see my roommate is drinking underage with, like, three or four other friends in the dorm room at the prep school on a military base during finals week. What do you think is the military school's policy

on underage drinking in the dorm room? I'm gonna say you're not allowed to do that zero tolerance zero tolerance so we are all taught we're told and we're trained and everything you read and everything you sign so as soon as you see it did you narc on them that's exactly what i did guess what it was the right thing that got me in all kinds of trouble because oh it got you in trouble got me in tons of trouble for an arcanum yep because i went so if you're right so this is no dude you're fucking with me but it's laughable to you yeah because you were not conditioned like i was conditioned right to me this was a clear-cut simple thing they're drinking underage in the

dorm room everything that i've been trained at in the the year before this event happened because remember i've been in the military academy for a year now right plus getting through high school and everything else my my church background blah blah blah all that stuff together i was like oh this is very clearly they are making a bad decision because of whatever reason right but my obligation my moral obligation here is to turn them in. So I did exactly what my moral obligation told me to do. I went, I pulled my roommate out first, right? Hey, can I talk to you for a second in the hallway?

In the hallway. Hey, you're breaking the rules. This is something we can't do. I'm the number two cadet in charge of the entire school right now, right? I don't really want to have to turn you in. What I would much prefer is if you can't close this party down, get rid of the liquor, and then go tell, go tell like the officer in command that weekend. Just go tell them what happened.

You self-report, then we're good to go. I've done my obligation because I've told you to self-report. You've done your obligation because you have self-reported and nobody else in the room gets in trouble because you self-reported right you know what my roommate said to that go fuck yourself what are you gonna do you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna narc on us you're gonna turn us in it's like dude i don't want to but this is what i have to do so and then so as if that wasn't awkward enough to find them and if that wasn't awkward enough to find them. And then that wasn't awkward enough to have that conversation and get shot down by my roommate. Then I go talk to the fucking officer in charge. And when I sit in the room with the

officer in charge, I'm like, Hey, this is what I just saw. That dude looks at me and he's like, you're turning in your roommate. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, this is what I'm supposed to do. He's like, dude, haven't you ever heard of like loyalty and cooperate to graduate? And I'm like, yeah, I've heard of all those things, but like, this is what you guys told us to do. And he's like, well, now that you've reported it to me, I have to do something with it. Right. Again, making it my fault. Now that you've told me, I have to do something with this. So here's how it's going to work. You can go back to your roommate and you can tell him to self-report.

And if he self-reports, then, you know, he gets to stay, you get to stay. But everybody who was drinking with him and didn't self-report has to leave. Like finals week, they're gone. He's like, or if he doesn't self-report, he leaves, but the people that he covers for stays. And I'm like, this is bullshit. Go back to my roommate. I lay it out for him. He says the same thing. He's like, fuck you, Andy. this is bullshit go back to my roommate i lay it out for him he says the same thing he's like fuck you andy this is bullshit and i'm like well i've done everything i can do i am very confused right now by a zero tolerance policy that clearly has tolerance and that somehow

i'm the villain in all this but i'm gonna try to figure this out on my own so the way that ended he never turned himself in. He got kicked out of the Air Force Academy prep school the week of finals. The five or six other people drinking with him were never turned in. They graduated. They went on to then continue at the Air Force Academy. I have no idea what happened to him. And, uh, and I kind of carried that, uh, that scarlet letter for the entire four years I was at the Air Force Academy. Everybody knew me as the guy that turned in my roommate. And of course, I had six other guys

who were more than happy to share that story with everybody about how I turned in my roommate. So, that's some bullshit, dude. And that's what I'm talking about. We don't actually know how shit works. People lie to us, we believe it, and we shouldn't. out a few minutes ago people's environments determine who they are and they they shape them and there's people who can kind of be an outlier from environments for sure but more often than not surroundings equal where you end up and you obviously we know where you ended up and you got yourself in these situations where you became a successful guy in the government and worked in

some pretty wild places but you know to get to that point where you're just in prep school at this point, you're on the right path. But like, you already had something in you that matches what I see today in the sense that like, you're a very analytical guy, extremely analytical. And when I was listening to you tell that story, I'm not sure how Alessi here felt hearing it. But all i could think about was you were looking at this situation as a zero or a one so the rule says this therefore that is how we have to proceed like very military kind of based and yet you started off that whole story by saying that part of what molded you to realize that people suck and you're insinuating here, correct me if I'm wrong, like you don't necessarily follow some rules is the fact that when I did it, I was told to go fuck myself. That's very – I'm saying a lot right now, but like between your analytical nature that has remained with you through all this and then your attitude of kind of like, you know what? Throw up the middle fingers.

Fuck the police. Let's go do my goddamn thing you know something there to me doesn't line up and i would think that it has to do with things that occurred in your childhood this is what you're what's happening is exactly what we talked about with peter zaihan's 10 to 15 year theory right there's a cone of uncertainty and that's you're you're admitting that there's this uncertainty that you don't understand and you're wondering where it's coming from. It's pretty simple, right? I was conditioned to believe that if I did what I was told and I met the expectation, I would have success. That's how my mom raised me. That's how my dad raised me. That's how the public school system raised me. That's how I got accepted to the Air Force Academy

prep school. That's how I got to the second in command of the school by meeting the expectation that was set in front of me. And then at this scenario, the expectation was actually not the same as what was set. Do you want to know what goes through someone's brain whenever they decide to make a decision? They go, like when someone is following a rule, there's a certain process that their brain is going through. First, there's the rule. They understand that there's a rule. They understand the rule clearly. There's no questions about the rule.

But then they also think the rule came from somewhere. And the rule did not come arbitrarily. Somebody thought of the rule. Some other people sat around and discussed the rule. Multiple people all agreed that this needs to be the rule. Perhaps even somebody else didn't follow the rule and something bad happened, and therefore this rule is now codified

in a rule book. When people follow rules, that's what they believe. What I'm saying is that that experience taught me that that's not how it works. That there are some rules that are put in place just because people are too fucking batshit like cowardly to stand up and change the rule. That maybe instead of a zero tolerance policy, it would have taken just some colonel or some captain or even a panel of

colonels or captains to stand up to the general and say, you know what, general, maybe we should make it so that everybody's allowed to get caught drinking once. But those fucking pussy captains and colonels never said what they really thought. So that's why when I went to a captain and followed the rule, he was like, you're the asshole. And now because of your decision to follow the rules, you put me in this awkward predicament because now I have to explain to my colonels above me why I have to do all this bullshit.

And this is going to make a big stink on the record like we we are fundamentally this is what the agency showed me this is what the experience that i had when i when i turned in my roommate not realizing that it was the wrong thing the experience there was it planted a seed and that seed suggested to me that maybe all this time that i've thought that authority really is fake maybe it really is and then i went on to have an air force academy career and i was a horrible horrible cadet i went from being a near 4.0 student at the prep school to barely graduating the air force academy yeah right. Right? I was a bullshit kid because all I did was spend four years hiding from that scarlet letter that I took with me from the Air Force Academy prep school. Everybody knew who I was.

Basic training was miserable. My freshman year was miserable. It wasn't until I was a junior, three years into the Air Force Academy, that all the upperclassmen had finally left who knew the story about who I was. And by then, all I wanted to do was just not even be noticed. I did everything I could to just not even be noticed. Did you have a lot of friends eventually there? None.

I've never had a lot of friends in my life, man. Because I don't trust people. And I most certainly don't trust people after what the agency taught me about how people work. When you say they taught you, are you talking about on the job or before you even did it? Both. So when you go through the agency's training school, right, when you go through the farm, the official term for the farm is FTC, Field Tradecraft Course.

When you go through FTC, you learn about how the human mind works, how psyche works. And then you learn how that psyche works through the lens of culture. Because your brain and my brain are the same brain. Same pink matter, same biological matter. Our cultures are very similar. But if we were to be sitting next to two guys from China and two guys from brazil completely different cultures same biological brain right for the most part so we have to learn how psych how human brains how they psychologically work through the lens of culture that's all the stuff that you learn at ftc so you

learn it there and then you go out in the field and you actually practice what you learned and then you refine it into something that's much more nuanced than just the academic study of how brains work. So if you didn't – if you already had this predisposition though before knowing any of that and you went out into the field, the thing that doesn't – well, maybe it should equate to me. But the thing that doesn't equate to me right away is it sounds like you had more of an attitude of, you know what, fuck everybody. Right? And so now just me translating this to you being a spy, part of being a spy is you got to go out there and you got to at least fake it. Yeah. You got to make friends with people.

Like, did you... Your assumptions are wrong. Your reasoning path here is wrong. Okay. Right? The seed that was planted to me is that authority isn't real. Right? your assumptions are wrong that your your reasoning path here is wrong okay right the seed that was planted to me is that authority isn't real right so let's go back to 19 year old me right what happened is i lived in this world where i thought military discipline was accurate and authority was real and like you had to respect authority well now there's a chink in the armor

that just plants a seed that doesn't make me think fuck people. That makes me think maybe not everything I'm reading is true. Maybe not every person who's in a position of authority is someone I can trust. That started when I was, well, probably started when I was much younger, but it was certainly codified. It became like a core part of how I was conditioned starting at about 19. So then I was a shit bird cadet. Like I was a bad student for four years because I put myself in the back row. I put myself in the back of the bus. Why do we like to sit in the back of the bus? Because you can see everything in front of you. So I became an observer for those four years. Let me see how other people do this. Here are the people who do really well at the academy. Here are the people who barely make it through the academy. Here are the people that get laid at the academy. Here are the people who do drugs and don't get caught at the academy. Like, I see it, and I can learn from it, and I can observe it, and I can see more kinks in the armor. Because now I'm looking for kinks. Before, I thought the armor was sound. Now I'm actually looking for the places where things don't line up. Oh, how is it

that these people can cheat? Even though it says right there that we don't accept cheaters. Oh, how is it that these people, how did this person get in just because his dad's a senator but he's struggling

to keep his grades up? Maybe his dad being a senator is why he's here at all. Maybe it's not. One of them gave that one away. Right? Like, you start to put this stuff together.

I know it's comical to you because, like you start to put this stuff together i know it's comical to you because like you never question for you this all makes sense for me i had to learn it that's interesting right i had to learn it and then when i finally learned like shit doesn't work according to the rules then i get to cia and guess what the first lesson is at cia we're going to teach you how to live outside the rules and i was like oh that makes that's so encouraging to me because i've been watching people live outside the rules and i I was like, oh, that makes, that's so encouraging to me because I've been watching people live outside the rules. And I've been wondering how they do that and how they do it and succeed. Cause it's not hard to find people who don't live outside the rules.

It's hard to find people who don't live. It's hard to find people who live outside the rules and succeed. You can find them living outside the rules and failing all day long. You can find broke people who smoke weed and who do drugs. You can find poor people who, you know, fail people who failed out of whatever because they couldn't keep their shit straight and lied to their wife or who knows whatever else. But it's hard to find the super successful person who lied to their wife, the super successful person who does drugs. It's a much harder person to find before they even tell you that though at the cia like we're going to teach how to break the rules though you have to accept the idea to like go visit it it sounds to me like if i had the attitude that you do the last thing i would want to do is go join up with another arm of the government where it's all about the same things you dealt with. Authority, because at the CIA, there's layers to it just like everything else. The order comes down from an order, comes down from an order, go do this. So why did you even open yourself up to it at that point?

Because in the military, in the military, the authority is granted by rank. At the agency, the authority is granted by rank at the agency the authority is granted by success so yes there's layers of authority but the difference is in like if i deploy with the military i deploy with a squadron of people who are part of a wing of people who are part of a group of people who are part of a like a detachment people. And there's commanders at every level. So I actually need, like, if I'm doing XYZ, I have somebody supervising my every step of XYZ. When I'm with the agency

and I go to execute a mission in the field, nobody goes with me. I have a supervisor who's supervising the end result of the mission from somewhere else usually from Langley, Virginia I do whatever I gotta do and I either bring back like the bacon or I don't

but did you know that before? you didn't know that before no I didn't know that before but what I knew before is that I wanted to get out of the military and CIA was the best offer on the table it was the best offer on the table I was trying to go to the peace corps yeah yeah we talked about that that's just i don't know that's very fascinating

to me but then you go in and now you do get to be it makes sense like you get to take your four years of observational learning add that to the education they give you at CIA and then put that out into the field and cultivate assets. I just, you get to use people, dude. You get to, you get to not be, you get to stop being the person that's being lied to. And you get to start being the person that lies to others. You get to stop being the person who is being disappointed by the rules. And you get to start being the person who lives outside the rules. Even if, even if somebody's listening to this right now and hating everything I say, I guarantee you that son of a bitch wants to live outside the rules and succeed while doing it. That's the secret we all actually want that

we never admit out loud. We don't want the rules to apply to us. And we especially don't want to have the rules apply to us and gain success, financial success, relationship success, career success. If we could have success and not follow the rules, there isn't a single one of us who would say no to that. I don't care if they go to church every Sunday. I don't care if they wear a robe and a fucking white collar, right? We all want to live outside the rules. It's the way we are wired. We oftentimes appreciate, we invite the rules in because we feel so bad about how we want to live outside the rules. So we subject ourselves to rules.

We give ourselves boundaries. We create limits. And they're like a comfort blanket where we're like, oh, now I know how to prevent myself from becoming an evil, horrible person. I'll just follow the rules. And so you don't do that then in your career. And now – because it seems like you live – being outside the CIA, you live with a very similar attitude. Like you're an entrepreneur. You work for yourself.

You go make your deals you want to make. You don't assume people are going to hold up on their end of the offer on a lot of things and it probably serves you you really well i just like your psychology fascinates me so much because we've done so much on camera and off camera just talking with you and hearing where you come from it i kind of nerd out on it because i believe that these places when i've talked with people like you when i've talked with people like joe ted i talked even with sean ryan and and and guys or jim diorio guys who have been high up in in various agencies or placing the government you know i do tend to think that like when these guys go to talk to you like when you got that first message you had talked about on our first podcast together that the CIA said, oh, stop your Peace Corps application. They already in the Air Force. But like you were for some reason such a prime candidate.

And I think what made you a prime candidate is that you got weathered to get there. You weren't born wired with all these things. You were probably born analytical. That is probably some sort of trait you always had. But a lot of these psychological beliefs about other people about you know how you would handle hypothetical situations as well like you're what it what seems very clear on all the on all these examples and explanations you're giving about you know what happened to you over the years it seems like the answers you gave at 17 minus just breaking rules

minus that i'm looking at all the other stuff right now are diametrically opposed to the answers you would have given at 31. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. And I think that that happens to all of us. There's the world that we're conditioned by. And then there's the world that we test our conditions against. And then there's the world that we build for ourselves afterwards. Now, where I think a lot of people struggle is that the world that they're conditioned in

never really gets tested because they don't grow much, right? They're, take my hometown, Enola, Pennsylvania. There's a lot of people who go to high school in Enola, Pennsylvania, and then they graduate high school in Enola, Pennsylvania. And then maybe they go to a local school

in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, right? 30 miles away. That's not really a good test bed to test all of your original conditioning. So then they go to school there and maybe they get a job there. And when they get a job, when they're working age, 22, 23, 24 years old, and they get their professional job out of college, maybe they stay in Enola, Pennsylvania, or they go to Mechanicsburg, or they go to Camp Hill, or they go, you know, wherever. They go somewhere else, also within about a 30 mile distance. You're not challenging the conditions that you were raised in. And now you're to the place where you're actually, like, you're creating your own life. So you're just building the same life that you were conditioned in, which is why parents do to their kids the same thing that their parents did to them, even though they hated it when their parents did that to them as kids, because they never learn a different way.

Right. To really test the conditions that you were raised in, you've got to go to a very foreign environment. I'm not saying you have to go to Vietnam. You have to go somewhere different. Yeah. Get out of Harrisburg. Go to Chicago. Yeah.

How does your conditioning hold up there? Go to Dallas. How does your conditioning hold up there? Go to Dallas. How does your conditioning hold up there? So one of the things that's great about the military is the military because it's a free place. There's all different cultures, ideas. People can say what they want, do what they want, hang out with who they want. Then it's self-explanatory. We go to another country, whether it's dictatorial or not. It's just a different environment, totally different foreign place.

But a lot of these places where you were that you've seen around the world, countries, what it seems to me – and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that, I'll use an example even. If I'm from Pakistan, yes, there are different, obviously a lot of different tribes, there's different small cultural norms, but the overall attitude and type of person is a lot more similar than it would be across the spectrum, say, in like America. So when you go to these, I'm trying to make sense of this, when you go to some of these other places and when you, I should say when you went there with the CIA, you're getting your own experience because you are putting yourself in a whole new environment and learning about these customs

you talked about with other people. But did you notice that a lot of people were molded by their environments in these foreign countries and remained in that environment even if they traveled 200 miles away and lived somewhere new because the environment was so similar and kept those same attitudes? In the last podcast we did, or two podcasts ago, collegiate culture, where it's like, this isn't grain. This is what it is. Whether you're in this part or that part, like, this is what they think. Whereas in America, we're always changing, you know, you drive 20 miles and some things can even change. Yeah, we're not changing as much as you might think we're changing, right? That's what's the first homogeneous to their original conditioning. What we care about at CIA, though, is usually we care about decision makers. We're looking for senior people in the government.

We're looking for senior people in the military, senior people in business and enterprise. Whenever you get to people who are that successful, they've gone through the full life cycle already. They had their conditioning, they challenged it against the outside world, and then they built a life for themselves. That doesn't mean that they're like open minds. It just means that they have created a third set of conditions that they follow

instead of following the conditions that they were originally given. So what we learned to do at the agency is we learn how to hack into the minds of intelligent, successful people, because intelligent, successful people are some of the most vulnerable people, vulnerable people in the world, because they don't think they have vulnerabilities anymore. Ignorant masses who don't really have access to secrets, who don't really have influence, don't really have power, don't really have money. Those are people who are paranoid of everything, right? They think someone's trying to steal their privacy and someone's trying to steal their guns and someone's trying to like steal their wife, right? They're

paranoid of everything because they don't have much. So what they do have, they're terrified of losing. But when you get to people who have power, influence, and money, oftentimes they're kind of asleep at the wheel. They don't realize how much they have because they're also tied up in very human issues. Fighting with their daughter or their son doesn't want to be their son anymore, or their wife might be cheating on them, or they might be cheating on their wife. The company might be going through a hostile takeover and they're not even thinking about their family anymore. Like, those successful people in business and in government,

uh, political work, are some of the most vulnerable people out there. So, we learn how to think like they think, how to read the conditions that they've built for themselves, and then how to appear like we believe the same context that they believe because the people that you trust the most are the people who you see and meet who are the most like you you naturally trust people who what we call mirror you they mirror your values they mirror your life experiences they even mirror your behavior so that's all mirroring is something you can teach someone to even mirror your behavior. So that's all...

Mirroring is something you can teach someone to do. Right? So that's what the agency does. That's what espionage is all about. It's not about trying to fit to the conditions of ignorant people. It's about trying to mimic that you believe the conditions of very successful people. That's what makes it such a gentleman's game when you go in to talk with these people to turn them into an asset though which is obviously a huge part of what case

officers do there seems to be two ways that that happens listening to you listening to jim lawler some other guys on the internet who talk about this. You either A, do all the things you just said to develop trust and then find that vulnerability thing that makes them feel like, you know what? This guy's got my back. I will work with him. And it, in a way, manipulatively inspires them to work with you. There's that category. Then the other category is you find their weak spot. You find not the vulnerability I was just talking about. That's a weak spot, but I'm saying like their weak spot, like you get information that other people can't know and you got to make them into an asset.

What does that conversation look like? I mean, we've already covered, people can listen to you on other podcasts, talk about how catching people with pattern of life and stuff like that we don't need to go down all that again but like you're going after somebody some high level guy that you need to make into an asset for the ci it is like a direct mission like andy we need this guy and you find out that you know he has this vulnerability it is, and you got him. Is it like in the movies where you walk up and you're sitting at the bar and then suddenly you're like, you know, we know about that, right? Or is it much more like friendly and calm and like not necessarily saying the obvious but getting the point across? No, it's very much about saying the obvious.

So what you're talking about there is the difference between what we call a warm approach and a cold approach. A warm approach is a relational approach. You find their vulnerability, you make everybody feel like they're friends, and you make everybody feel like they're warm and cozy, and you do all the mirroring stuff I talked about. All the stuff you don't want to talk about, that's all warm approach. What you're getting at right now is what's known as a cold approach. And a cold approach is usually very heavily centered on some, uh, on a motivation that we know is coercive in nature. And I think I've told you about the four different motivators

in the past, right? One of the four motivators is coercion. I know you're in debt. I know you're cheating on your wife. I know your son's dying of a rare form of cancer. I know that whatever, right? I know that the mob is out to kill you and whatever else. I have some piece of information that you have that you don't share with anybody. You probably also heard me talk about our three lives, public life, secret life, and private life. I have some piece of information from your secret life that you don't share with anybody. And now I'm coming up to you and I'm very, I'm still being cordial when I step into the bar and I say, hi, Julian, how are you today? And you look at me and you're like, I'm fine. Have we met somewhere? And I was like, no, but I'm really glad that we had a chance

to meet today because I understand that you're in a situation with your son right now and that you're having a hard time finding any place that'll give him the medical attention that he needs and i'm here to tell you i can solve that for you i can have your son in front of a doctor that's going to give him life-saving medical care within the next six months but what i need you to do for me is xyz and most people are going to give me a look that's like because they're frozen in the in the hierarchy of how people respond to strangers, there's three phases. Okay.

There's an avoidant phase, a competition phase, and then there's a phase where they comply. Avoidance, competition, compliance, right? Those are the three phases. Everybody starts from avoidance. So when you hit on a cute girl, or when a cute girl says something nice to you, there's a reason that you stand there and you just go, because you're in the avoidance phase.

You're not engaging her. When you compliment a cute girl and she looks at you like you're crazy, she's in the avoidance phase too. She might actually think you're cute. She might actually like the compliment, but her natural human instinct has her in a position where she's not going to talk and she's not going to engage because the first phase is avoidance. So I'm expecting that when I tell this person, I can save your son's life. And I know that you've been trying to do that for the last six months, and we're going to have it fixed within the, within the year. I'm expecting that person to look at me and be like,

fuck you. Who are you? I don't know what you're talking about. Right? That's the avoidance phase. As we continue to push on that. And I tell them, look, the life-saving care that we have is waiting for him in a specialty hospital in Maryland, in Maryland, inside the United States. I can have all expenses paid and we can have your entire family there, you know, before the fall. Then I expect to go into a competition phase. Who are you? Where did you get this information? How do you know about my son? They might even get up and try to leave, right? They're showing me that they're actually curious about the information.

Try to leave, but they don't get to leave. Right. How do you keep them there? Like you don't have to keep them there. The information, the pitch, the coercion, that coercive element that you've put in there, you already know it's strong enough to get them to stay what about the 10 of people where it's not though the 10 of situations

where they walk out of there then they could just go like tell like yo i just got approached by a cia that's true you know what happens more more often than not in that 10 they come back to you they come back to you but in the meantime do you have to get out of the country because the heat might be on you? No, because you're not nervous. You've got that person... When you're going to approach somebody coercively, you have them on lockdown.

You're listening to their phone. You're watching their email address. You watch them walk into that location. You watch them when they leave that location. You've got them pinned down. The reason you're taking this level of effort is because it's worth it. You don't put yourself at this much risk unless that person is so worthwhile that you're willing to bring in, not just you, but you and your team and your

supervisors and everybody at Langley. They're all like, yes, this person is important enough that we're going to commit these kinds of resources, right? Is there a chance that someone's going to go to their boss and be like, I just got approached by CIA. Of course there's a, there's a chance of that. But then what happens to them once they tell their boss that. Well, if they're in the wrong country,

that could go the wrong way. I could go the wrong way quickly. So now all of a sudden the boss is like, how did CIA know about you? How'd they know about your son? Your vulnerability, your vulnerability. We need you out of this job. You just lost this you just lost your that so they don't want

to tell anybody about that so what we're doing is we're putting them in a double coercive vice there's our coercion where we're saying we know you have a problem we're your only option to fix it and then if they do have the usually it's not good sense usually it's some sort of panic reaction where they get up and they they shuffle their stuff all together and they leave the bar 10 minutes after they left then they have the real oh shit moment where they're like oh shit like what do i do i can't tell my boss i can't tell my wife i can't tell my son i can't look at myself in the mirror all i've got is hopefully the business card that we gave them right before they left.

If you change your mind, call this number. This is where I'm one of those cynics that thinks that anything I see in the movies, it's like, there's no way it's like that. I'll still ask the questions. Yeah. Because it's like, well, there has to be some truth somewhere. But you're talking about this from the situations, and I see you like picturing some of these in your head just like the way you're explaining it. Like you're reliving some of them, which is pretty wild.

But you're talking about these where you're the one going in there and telling them this stuff. But you work with other case officers at CIA. I've heard you talk about being a support on missions and things like that. Is it literally sometimes where someone walks out of that meeting and then another guy, let's say it's another case agent in there with him, and another guy like you shows up at his house and says, oh, it's a nice dog you got there. Does that happen? No, no, no, no question. Just like, that's a cute dog. And then walk away, like that kind of thing, like that type of intimidation. No, there's

no reason to intimidate so so you got to think about all this stuff through a lens of operational security also right because we're trying to protect the officer your average cia officer has gone through about 2.5 million dollars worth in training but there's still just a fleshy sack right a bullet a knife a car a bat is going to do real damage to your $2.5 million human asset, right? So we're always judging things through a lens of operational security. So when we know there's a target sitting in a bar and we know that we know more about the target than they know about us, that's a scenario that we call information superiority. So we can walk in there and we can launch a surprise attack and basically pitch them on a cold approach to solve their biggest problem. And we can anticipate that they're either going to have a conversation with us right there or they're not going to have a conversation.

They're just going to leave. Right. We also know roughly 75% of the time they're going to stay. 25% of the time they're going to stay. 25% of the time they're going to leave. So we know that we have to give them a card with a phone number or something so that if it's 25% of the time and they leave, when they have the oh shit moment 10 minutes later, they have a number they can call.

We also know that we should sit at the bar for 30 minutes. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes, yes. But once that 30 minutes is over and they've left and they haven't come back and the surveillance team outside has called in and been like hey that dude went straight to the police department where the surveillance team outside is like hey that dude called his wife right away and told her the whole story right away now we're like oh okay that that was a wash so now we should take some back off you know we should plan for for uh blowback yeah get you

out or something if if it gets to that yeah if there's like a police report or something like that or if we might look at getting somebody off the x is there retribution for people to do that is there retribution their son now dies well their son you guys make sure of it no there's no benefit there i have to ask there's no benefit because the benefit dude the benefit is that that dude sits there and watches his son i mean this is going to make me sound like a horrible person but this is what life looks like outside of the rules yes every day that guy faces his son every day he watches his son disintegrate more and more and every day he knew he knows he had the chance to fix it. And he didn't fix it. And that is where the coercive part of this sets in.

Because after doing that for 10, 15, 30 days, 60 days, two years, he's still going to keep that card. And when the day comes that he picks up that card and he makes a phone call to that number and he says, Hey, I had somebody talk to me about helping my son. Can I have that conversation again? Someone's going to say yes, right? That's what it's all about. If we're going to take the step, if we're going to put the effort into the cold approach at all, then you're going to have the effort to take the follow-up.

It's worth it. The risk is worth it because that person is so special. What happens in Hollywood, dude, is that out of a hundred percent of cases we'll cold approach maybe five percent ninety-five percent well i believe that yeah yeah but you know what hollywood doesn't like the ninety-five percent because then it just it's too boring like oh you become besties and you go out to dinner and then you start talking about families and then you start doing this and you start doing that and that's not sexy i don't think that's boring well a lot of times in hollywood it's hard to develop that story accurately so it's way more

it's way more entertaining when the guy walks into a smoky bar and he drops a suitcase of cash and he pulls a gun up underneath the table and he says hey you're going to talk to me you're not going to leave that just sounds more entertaining and exciting it's quick and it's over and it's one thing i actually think you're on to something here i think it's more entertaining like when you have someone where you think they're that guy Like if you're what if you're the viewer watching I'm just thinking about this and like you're watching two people become friends You have no idea one of them is like a spy and then suddenly like the day comes in where it's like, oh, sorry

I'm a spy. That's good TV right there and it actually draws it out. So maybe it's actually backwards guys this next episode I'm gonna be putting out is with my friend Ron James who is the director of the recent award-winning UFO documentary, Accidental Truth. So before we put out this podcast, I am putting the links to this documentary that you can rent or buy on Apple or Amazon down in the description below. Whether you're on YouTube or Spotify right now, you'll see it right there. I would recommend you watch it before the podcast just so you'll have all the context. And I promise you we did a very, very in-depth breakdown of everything within the documentary and even some things outside of it. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I hope you enjoy the documentary because it has a who's who of the UFO field over the past decade and more, but in particularly the last decade. And there

is a lot of great information in there. So great documentary. And I hope you guys are going to enjoy the podcast as well. See you next week. But like, you would also talk with me a bunch about the, I don't know what the official term is, but like, the way you guys did operations, like the way you were assigned to operations and and what you had said was you would have a main location wherever location x is and then you would get sent to other places so it's like you have a home base you do whatever espionage and spy shit work you do there and then you get a call or a morse code or however you people talk to each other and you get on a flight or a bus or whatever and you go to some other country. The way you were describing some of those stories about bringing in people from the cold or something like that or turning someone into a spy, you talk about, oh, we already have all their stuff tapped.

We have surveillance teams on the road, all that. It seemed like though – and maybe i'm just thinking of this the wrong way but it seemed like in the past when you talked about all the different places you were getting sent to sometimes very extremely dangerous places like countries where they don't even let americans in there how would we even have teams everywhere like how many other spies are like you and every single person has a team automatically on the spot so keep in mind that we're talking we're mixing and matching two different kinds of operations. If we're going to do a cold approach, then we're going to have tons of resources available to us.

That was what I was saying. A cold approach, you're going to have tons of resources. That's only 5% of all approaches. In the other 95% of approaches, you don't need the whole team because you have the relationship and you have all the time on target and you have all the benefits and you've been working with a person for like nine months, right? When you, when the first time you meet somebody is the time that you tell them that you want secrets, that's a cold approach. So it's two different things. So you weren't doing both when you'd get sent places? You can do both. Yeah, you can do both when you're sent places too. So here's how it works.

They're usually high value targets. So HVTs. HVT lives in some country in Europe. All right. That's where that HVT lives. That's what HVT does their business. There are teams of people who live in Europe or there are teams of people

that are sent to Europe to observe HVT. The surveillance teams surveil him, you know, drones or satellites or UAVs surveil him, cell phones are tapped, collected by NSA, whatever else. Teams of people already assigned to HVT, but nobody's assigned to approach HVT. They're just assigned to observe HVT. So then, third country, some case officer is contacted and says, hey, we need you to run a cold approach to an HVT. So then third country, some case officer is contacted and says, hey, we need you to run a cold approach to an HVT in their home country. So then that person gets on a plane and comes here, gets a full brief on HVT from the teams that have been observing HVT for

the last six months, and then plans their approach and does the approach. That's why even if HVT does go to the local police and is like, hey, I was approached by a shady person who says his name was Julian Dory. When the police go to look up Julian Dory, there is no Julian Dory. That was just a name that was given to the guy, given to the HVT in the meeting. The actual officer's name was something else, Alex Rodriguez. And Alex Rodriguez is the passport that takes him back to his home country, right? So there's no emergency evac, there's no nothing. This person has now met somebody named Julian

who he'll never see again. And he's got to decide whether or not he trusts his life and his family's life to Julian or whether he's going to take matters into his own hands. And then when he goes to try to turn in Julian to his boss, who he tells the whole story to, he's essentially imploding his own life Further making him even more vulnerable to when Julian finds him again in the next location where his boss sends him because he can't stay

here So I have questions popping into my head that I think are Some of them are on the line of like classified unclassified So just just shoot down what you can if we come up on something like that. I'm just warning you. But when you get sent to these countries, you had talked in the past about your wife was the targeter and you were the operator. So is it like literally a 50-50 type deal when CIA hires case officers, half of them are targeters, half of them are operators, and then the operators are the ones like you who are just called upon when they got to go somewhere all the time? No, it's not 50-50 at all. It's actually more like 90-10. Most of the people that CIA hires are operators. Got it. Very, very few are support because one support person can basically create enough targets for 10 or 15 operators. Right. So,

and you'll hear me say it. If you haven't heard me say it before, then it's, it's, I'm, I've been remiss not to mention it, but my wife was a superstar at CIA, very well regarded, very well respected, very successful in her career field. What made her great? She was able to take disparate information, incomplete information, and turn it into a meaningful targeting package with an, with a target that actually had real impact and real asset value. So she was able to do those for multiple people. I was just one of the beneficiaries. Can you explain like a broad example of like how that would go down?

So your wife gets – I'll help you with the beginning. Your wife gets information from langley or something that says you're in country x let me just put a name on the country you're in russia all right you're on a cover we need to get to this general in their military go is her skill then finding everything on him before the operator goes to make a full profile? Or can you define what it is she does that makes her that targeter genius? Yeah, absolutely. So the example that you gave, there's actually two approaches to the same thing.

So you were saying there's a general in Russia that they want to get access to. Go. That's not, yes, that is a type of tasking that a targeter can get. And when a targeter gets a tasking like that, they'll go through their own classified training systems to know how to essentially reverse engineer that general's life. Right? Because that general, if you think about it, is a human being. And what do we know about human beings? A lot of times they're married. Sometimes they have kids. They've got grocery stores, gyms, drivers. They've got vehicles, cell phones, computers. There's shows they like to watch. They live in an address.

There's all sorts of stuff. You can immediately start to research these different elements of any one person, whether they're a Russian general or whether they're, you know, the guy next door. So a good targeter knows how to break that information out and then independently research each of those different arms, those tentacles, and then look for ways to cross-reference so that our case officer can meet that general at a gym, at the general's gym even better, because that fits the general's normal pattern of life. But the second way to do it is that you can break down that general's entire life and then start to break down the people whose lives intersect with that general's

lives, right? So now the general has a child that goes to a school, and that child is best friends with Gus, and Gus has a mom and dad who do this other thing so let's get a case officer to talk to gus's mom and dad so your wife was good at finding these those kind of connections got it but where she really got to be super powerful the reason that she had the reputation she had was it won't take long to tell you neutrals ingredients vodka soda natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added?

Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Because Langley would tell tell her we need you to find this general well she would find a way to approach that general but then she would also find three or four other people who had the same kind of access that that general had and possibly an easier way to get to them and she's never the person going out and doing it she's just planning it because she's very different than me she she's an introvert, right? She doesn't like to be in front of people. She likes to be in a small, confined cubicle, working for long hours, being left alone,

until she has her eureka moment, and she's like, I found it, right? The missing link that connects this whole thing together. For me, I would fall asleep. You put me in a cubicle that's warm and cozy, and you tell me, come back when you have a eureka moment like i'm gonna fall asleep i'm not gonna have a eureka moment i'm gonna take a nap yeah you need action yeah i need to be doing something exactly right she's the person who finds something to do but you also this entire time and

this applies to your wife too but i'm just thinking from the operator's perspective more because you're in the middle of the field all the time you don't have diplomatic immunity or anything when you're doing this. You're deniable. You're this spy in the middle of these dangerous places. So you talked about a while ago, one of the very first things they teach you is we teach you how to break all the rules here. Of course, my mind goes to while we're breaking the rules of all other countries, because it's illegal to spy on other countries that's an obvious one but it sounds like it it's a lot more than that and i would imagine it's a lot more than that so you know do you outside of just like cultivating people that you're turning into spies how often were you

running into let's say life and death situations where you had to make decisions and get full autonomy and do whatever you had to do including you know goodbye when you're when you're doing espionage right life and death situations don't happen often so when you're undercover and you're undercover correctly right you've got the proper backstopping you're doing a good job protecting your cover You're living within your cover when you're doing all of that, right? Nobody thinks that you're anything other than who you say you are. So the life or death situation never finds its way to you. This is what the Bond movies do all wrong, right? Everywhere James Bond goes, he ends up driving fast cars and shooting out of windows and whatever else. Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. That means he's actually a bad spy because a good spy gets in, does whatever they need to do and gets out. And nobody even knows they were there. So for the vast majority of my career, life or death situations never really happened. I can count maybe two. And even with those two, I really don't, I really can't say that the situation I was in was a life or death situation. It was just hairy and had the potential to escalate to possible life or death. But I had the training and I had the experience and I had a plan for how to extricate myself from the situation before it got really hairy. Before it got so dangerous that it would meet that life or death scenario. Well, actually, before I ask this next question, then, did you change your name before the CIA or after CIA? At CIA.

At CIA. So like mid-career type deal. So, all right, then that's my question. Was that because of the things you've talked about in the past where you're like, there's countries I can never go back to again? No. So I changed my name, and the way i changed my name was fully legal right so i actually took my my wife's family name my so the bustamante name is my wife's birth name so when i changed my name what i did is i took my wife's name and i took my wife's name for a few different reasons

one because it buried me deeper. Because it's just, it's not something that people do in the West, especially not in the United States. Men don't take women's last names. So there was an element there where Andrew Gregg went into CIA, but Andrew Gregg never came out of CIA. Right?

Nobody knows where Andrew Gregg really went administratively, unless they follow birth records. Well, they do now. Yeah. Well, it's still out there. can find me through my from my academy days um but the thing is that that when i took my wife's last name it's one of the few ways that a man can legally change his name so i was able to legally change my name and then execute a whole different series of operations under a completely new name was that suggested to you to do that?

Or was that your idea? It was something I, so I wanted to change my name for a multitude of personal reasons, right? And I can, I can go into that, but I wanted to change my name for personal reasons. And I wondered if there was an operational utility in changing my name, because anything you do with your history, with your, um your um administrative background whether it's your licensure your certifications or your degrees or any of that whenever you do any of that inside cia you have to get permission you have to get approval because they've backstopped everything

yeah so if it doesn't have an operational benefit then a lot of times they will say no so i had to kind of fleet it up to see whether or not it would have an operational benefit and the operational benefit was essentially your all of your alias identities are also at some level tied to your true identity through yeah yep so now essentially any alias i have in a new name is tied to the new name not tied to the old name. Interesting. So it worked out well. So it worked out. Yeah, because that was – I caught you making that point on another podcast at some point. And I was like, I wonder if that's like a thing. Like if they go in there and like they have you do that right away. I mean this is where people go like, oh, once you're in the CIA, like you're gone from society to me that wouldn't make sense but it it does

make sense that once you're already actually operational if you want to like reset the deck that's that obviously is is something that that's pretty clear but it's like changing clothes inside of a changing room yes people might see you go in with the clothes but they see you come out wearing the clothes that you took in and they don but they see you come out wearing the clothes that you took in and they don't actually see what you took what you did behind the door so everything you do inside cia people don't see what you did inside cia so when you do this though we're i can't remember if you said this at the beginning so i just want to make sure i have this defined you were doing that to set up that new name in response to the things that had already

happened where you were in danger mode from certain countries no no no it was a benefit because my previous name had a footprint all its own and my new name had a chance to develop a new footprint all its own and while i'm telling you both names today nobody knew both names at the time does that make sense yeah so to the world the next day after i changed my name andrew bustamante was brand new right you could you could google search it if google google wasn't very powerful in 2010 but you know you could google search it if Google wasn't very powerful in 2010, but you could Google search it. You could take it to microfiche. You could run background checks.

You could do whatever you want to, and there would be a dead end, right? Similarly, somebody back then could search Andrew Gregg and do all the same research, and they would find it going up to a certain point and then drop it off. And then that's when I was in the changing room. Nobody sees what happens in the changing room. Champagne yeah so that's a better example but what what made you without revealing specific countries or details or places

what kind of situations got you into a point where now you have i don't know what the number is but you have three four countries or something on your list where it's like well i can never go there because i may die like what kinds of things cause that just operations of like they know oh he flipped this guy five years ago or was it something more serious um a lot of that's classified what ends up happening is you if you every remember we were talking about uh the cone of uncertainty yes the cone of uncertainty also works in reverse so when you do something in anonymity there's the fat end of the cone you can hide inside the fat end of the cone because you have anonymity but then as you continue doing similar things, you kind of work yourself into a place where you can hide in fewer and fewer places. So just as a generic example, if you do something operating against Russia, Russia may never find you. But then when you do your next round of operations and they're in Cuba, Cuba may never find you. But now Russia may find somebody who was both in Russia and in Cuba.

And then when you do your next round of operations and you're in Ecuador, China, or Belarus, right? Your cone is getting smaller and smaller. The places you can hide are fewer and fewer because the countries that you're working against are all sharing information. One country by themselves may never have enough information to pin you down, but when they share their information together, you start to run into a real problem. We live in a world where inside the United States,

as Jim and I have talked about, we don't like to share. The broken toys went to counterterrorism, an organization. Oh my God, the dude's not coming to work, he's not doing it.

You know what? Send him over to CT. In the meantime, we got basically memos saying, hey, there's dudes down in Arizona that just want to learn how to, they don't care about taking off or flying or landing. Yeah, 63 pages. So that was pre-9-11.

So then 9-11 happens. Everybody sees what happens at 9-11, right? And then when the 9-11 Commission report investigation starts, 9-11 Commission starts, now they start picking up the scrappings on, the scraps on the floor, and they start saying, hey, FBI said this,

CIA said this, they sent it to each other, neither side actually read it. CIA doesn't like to give our information to FBI. Nobody likes to give it to Secret Service. Nobody likes to give it to NSA. Outside of here, everybody,

all of our enemies, share their information on Americans. That's a really good point because I think that is where a lot of, you know, like there, there are conspiracies that are real. There's bad people in everything. Like it's just what it is, including the CIA. But I think a lot of the problems that we have run into in this country do come back to that basic human thing that a lot of us run into in our own relationships and stuff communication yeah you know because it's it's nice to hear you define it that way but like yeah when you read this stuff you read things like fsb and svr

entertain interchangeably you know i'm sure there's got to still be some human element there but like they're ordered by their dictatorial regime like yo you're fucking talking to each other whereas you know we just got to look at the build up to 9-11 and everything with the fbi and cia that could have been avoided if they were sharing information but they weren't i mean the director of cia is a presidential appointee right every time the president changes they appoint a new person yeah right doesn't matter how good or bad you are in your career at c, you're never going to become, most likely, you'll never become the director of CIA. If you do, you become an interim director of CIA before the president appoints one of their favorites. A lot of these people who are put in this position, though, now, like recently there was Mike Pompeo was in there.

He had, you know, he was a military guy before that, but he was he was a congressman you know like it's not like he was at CIA like when you were there 07 to 2014 you would have had Leon Panetta Petraeus General Hayden okay yeah so you had turnover but like Petraeus was high-level military so kind of outside but probably involved in a lot of things hayden was nsa like he had been around the block panetta had been around the block a bunch too he's a little bit of a political guy but still like was there a little bit of a veil among the rank and file the cia like oh they're not from here or for the guys who weren't that there's like it's almost like you're in that director chair but there's shit that's not being told to you because you're in that chair and because you're not one of us uh i wouldn't say it was like that

from the ground up no okay so from the ground up um because you got to keep in mind that the the people who advise the director are all senior intelligence service for the most part, and they want to continue having a very successful senior intelligence service job, right? So the last thing they want to do is try to hide something from the director. That doesn't mean the director understands what they're being told all the time, but that's why they have their advisors that they can lean on. I think what's, what's really challenging in my opinion is that when you start into a career where you already know that the highest you'll ever be able to get is not the highest seat right away, you're kind of disincentivized from the beginning.

And then even worse, when you know that it's a pyramid pyramid like they may bring in 600 case officers this year but you already know that there's only enough space for 300 of you 10 years from now to reach gs15 so that means we either expect 300 of you to quit or be fired or accept the fact that you're never going to get to mid-career right right? And it just keeps on going from there. Military has, some parts of the military, Coast Guard specifically, I think, has this policy of up or out, where you either, if you're an officer, you either climb in rank or you leave, right? And the agency doesn't have an up or out policy. So it really is about whether or not someone's going to achieve or live in mediocrity. Yeah.

The only thing though, the currency that's not being focused on enough there potentially when I hear it is like information. That's what these guys do. And I could say it's about nsa and fbi in a way too but like at cia senior spies who as you say want to hold those roles so they're not incentivized not to tell the director something i'm not so sure that would always be true because these guys have been like you may be getting a director who hasn't even been in some of these places right or has no fucking idea what's going on right and they do and they maybe they live with the weight of the world on their shoulders, these senior guys, because they actually know what's going down. To me, because you have someone who doesn't know sitting in that seat, you're the guy who knows.

You hold the cards. So you can decide, you know what? I'm going to show them the jack and the queen. I'm not going to show them the king today. Yeah, I mean, to a a certain extent you're not wrong there is a a bit of fiefdom building right where people are are manipulating the policy that they want to see happen and that backfires right you i mean that's there we didn't we didn't have a mess in afghanistan because we did everything right we didn't you you know that like sy Syria was just welcomed back into the Arab League. So that means in 2011, when the civil war started and the Arab League ousted Bashar al-Assad,

now it's 2023 and the Arab League is accepting and giving hugs to Bashar al-Assad as he comes back into the Arab League. That, you don't go through, what was that, 13 years, 12 years of conflict in Syria where chemical weapons were used and war criminals were discovered and war crimes were documented. That's not a victory. So, I mean, yeah, so whoever was kind of helping CIA navigate the ocean of Syria probably didn't do it right, right? Because Bashar – like the authoritative dictator has won the war in Syria at a time when the whole world is looking at authoritarian regimes and asking themselves, is authoritarian or democracy more powerful? I didn't know you were going to bring up Syria there, but this is perfect because I did want to go to this. This

is something we didn't get to last time and I want to get to a lot of foreign policy with you, so let's just take this opportunity and do it right now. So the way I've seen this from afar, I had Joby Warwick in here at one point who wrote Black Flags, which is like considered the Bible on the history of ISIS. Well, that's a bad way to put it. But he wrote the history of ISIS basically and it won a Pulitzer and obviously he did an amazing job with his reporting. The most fascinating terrorist figure I think I've ever come across. We're familiar with Bin Laden. Bin Laden and Zaw I think I've ever come across. We're familiar with Bin Laden. Bin Laden and Zawahiri, his number two guy, they were of a completely different type.

These were people who were professionals. Bin Laden was an engineer. His number two was a medical physician. So they're educated, sophisticated people. They have sort of a strategic vision of this terrorist organization they're trying to create. khali was none of that he was just a street tough but he also the next time he comes in here we're going to talk about his most recent book that he wrote on syria which was really really good and i think it was called red line and so to me syria has always looked like the center of a lot – I'm not going to say everything but of a lot of things because geographically, it's located basically right in between Europe and where it gets into mainland Asia. They're a port place. They have coast, right, there in the Middle East. Russia has had a very strategic relationship with them for a long time. Their dictator leader seems to be a homicidal maniac.

But he's also like Oxford educated or some shit. And his wife like speaks the kings. Very interesting to me. And in the middle of all this, you have a country. And please correct me where I'm wrong here. But you have a country where all of these, basically all these nations have undercover operations which i guess is par for the course but then all these different radical groups within the middle east specifically who don't fucking like each other like they're not like yay terrorists yay terrorists

like they're fighting each other too they're all fighting for these little teeny fiefdoms within the country displaced among it and in the middle of that you have you can talk about some of the chemical weapons i think you already hinted at that that he's used and stuff like that and you have these almost like a proxy war without there being a full-blown war where you have the united states watching this because of the strategic elements that that country possesses and you got like russia with vis-a-vis china on the other side of it all in the middle of this country that otherwise people maybe wouldn't give a fuck about yeah so you don't have like a proxy war you have a proxy war that's what syria was syria is probably the first major

proxy war example of the modern era if you recall we've talked about whether or not world war iii is coming or whether world war iii is starting. Yes. Right? I would argue that World War III is a proxy war, a proxy version of a world war, meaning multiple conflicts in multiple places that are largely being driven by two primary proxies, right? And those two primary proxies, for the most part, are Russia and the United States. And that's exactly what you had in syria right here you had a civil war that broke out because because western-backed rebel groups challenged the assad regime when you say western back can you just define that for some people united states nato yeah but how are they backing them are they are is it just weapons yeah weapons training basically

you had a rebel group that was trying to say that they wanted to oust their current dictator and then pursue some version of democracy. Right. And when that happens, a lot of times whenever an autocracy is being challenged by an internal guerrilla or internal rebel group, then democracies of the world come to their aid. And that's what happened in syria right it the narrative that many of us were given was that the asad regime was cruel and the asad regime was unjust and they were all this other stuff and maybe they were right and and yes they were by western standards what do you mean what do you mean by middle eastern standards cruel and vicious is very different kill a few kids with chemical weapons sarin gas no problem yeah have you ever heard of the term honor killing like in japan where they like split their fucking stomach open and no that's uh that's what is that called when the samurais do that uh key something harikari something like that anyways yeah that sounds familiar no honor killing honor killing is when oftentimes either an adult or a spouse kills a member of their family in order to bring honor

to the family name that's very common in the middle east okay that is completely something that is no we would never think about in the west sure Sure. It's culturally accepted in the Middle East. But what about just dumping a bunch of sarin gas on a bunch of families and civilians? What I'm saying is that we have completely different definitions of what is culturally acceptable behavior. Right? When it came to Assad using chemical weapons,

the West, the Obama administration, is the one that said that this is a red line topic. Yes. That if you do this, there will be no going back. And then he did it, and then there was no response. Right? So who should we be more surprised with? The guy who ran a dictatorial country in the Middle East where violence and criminal acts is the norm, or the West that said that this was a line that could never be violated and then let it happen anyways. Right? That's what I'm saying. What the bigger learning point in Syria, the most significant learning point in Syria is that the argument that authoritarian regimes are weaker than democracy has been proven

wrong. Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back into the Arab League, a league that is largely populated with allies to the United States, like UAE and Saudi Arabia. He now sits at an equal table with the same people who funded the rebel groups who tried to oust him starting as far back as 2011 what gave him the leverage to do that what gave him the leverage to win because his country is still infested with all kinds of rebel groups it's a shit show yeah it's that like he the way it sounds to me is that he basically lives in his palace he's got control over the the government that has control over like if you look at a map of syria i'll put it in the corner of the screen right now

i'm going to draw just like a little circle on there like an idiot and he has control of that little area and the rest of it is all just like mad max fury road right so how does he have the leverage to join the arab league that's what i don't understand like okay obama said red line in 2013 there's a whole backstory there too and didn't follow up by starting a war. Okay, there was no war, but like now he's just going to walk into the Arab League?

He was invited back. Not even walk back. He was invited back. But they didn't like him. Like you said, they were funding some of the rebel groups. So what does he have on them? It's not that he has anything on them. As much as it is that the powers of the world are being more judicious in where they put their energy and their efforts, right? Saudi Arabia recently opened or recently signed a peace agreement with Iran over the conflict in Yemen, which is another proxy war. We're going to talk about that.

Right? So then by getting out of Yemen, Saudi Arabia no longer has to be pouring resources into Yemen. Saudi Arabia no longer has to be pouring resources into Syria. Now Saudi Arabia can consolidate their resources and use them somewhere else. Same thing with UAE. So these other Arab wealthy nations can consolidate their resources and use them somewhere else. Similarly,

you have relationships that are being built between the Arab world and Israel being brokered by China. Being brokered by China? What is this shit? So what was it, four years ago? I'm sorry, two years ago? I think it was two years ago, possibly last year? No, it was two years ago. What is this shit? basically normalized diplomatic relations between these countries that otherwise never recognized israel right and this was big news and that was that was a peace agreement that was negotiated in large part by china and some of the other uh some smaller other uh emerging democracies or

emerging world powers right the world as we've known it for the last 20 years is starting to change. It's starting to rebalance and it's rebalancing because it's realizing the same thing that I hope you and I are starting to realize that some countries might be better off under authoritarian rule. That just because authoritarian and democracy stand diametrically opposed to each other doesn't mean democracy is always right or that authoritarianism is always wrong. And especially right now with a war raging in Europe between an authoritarian Russia and a, what we claim to be, democratic Ukraine, as that war rages on, the only real punchline, the only real media narrative that we have here is that authoritarian rulers are somehow inherently wrong and evil and illegitimate, except that Syria is now being run

by an authoritarian ruler who essentially just won. And China is reaching superpower status under an authoritarian ruler. The other argument for what you're saying is that democracy is a bit of a facade because in most countries you have two parties they all get fucking drinks together in the fucking capital and there's constant gridlock and it's kind of set up so they divide people right it's that really only exists in our country you don't think that exists in france in most countries, there's not just two parties. In most countries, in most democratic countries, there's multiple parties and they form coalitions. They all still get drunk and have fun together.

But it's really only in the United States that we create the facade of two parties. Fair. But they all still party together in Washington, D.C. Fair. Fair. I'm saying like it'll come out to the two majority parties that get more of the attention. I'm going to forget some of the names right now. But you'll also get like – imagine Bernie Sanders is an independent here.

But like he calls himself a democrat when he goes to run for office or something. Like he's going into that party. But like imagine he had his own party, which he kind of does. But like imagine he actually had one. A lot of the – the way I understand, a lot of the the way i understand a lot of these countries have like a bernie and hillary and then like when it comes election time whoever has more like they go with that person which also is not that much different here i guess i'm kind of making my point for myself but like there's kind of this facade that like oh democracy whatever

you know to me i think a lot of it still leans authoritarian, and the difference is the authoritarianism that you're talking about when people don't even have the facade of the people having a say. They can do more if they're a bad person, and most dictators obviously are they can do a lot more than you know the president here can do because there is you know these laws or whatever you know there's not that doesn't we're talking about honor killings and shit in other countries like it's not like that right so i'm not saying like i think you're right but it's kind of to me just to one one coins a little more discreet about it the other one side of the coin little more discreet about it. One side of the coin's more discreet about it. The other side is just like, oh, in your face, here's some sarin gas. So this is, I think, what we're getting at and what you're touching on is really human nature.

Right. Yes. There are true democracies, and there's all sorts of different types of democracies, right? There's representative republics, and there's presidential democracies, and there's monarch-based democracies. Like, there's all sorts of and there's monarch based democracies. Like there's all sorts of, there's, there's a thousand flavors of democracy, but to, to kind of get to the crux of it, it's about whether it's about how much voice the average person has. And in the United States, the average person has a voice, but their voice is really only as loud as they let it get to select their representatives, right? Their house person, their Congress person,

their Senate person. Outside of that, you really don't have a voice. Your voice really only pipes up every two years or so. We all think we matter, but all that really matters, the only way we're really represented in government is by our Congress person or by our Senator. There are other countries in the world

where every single decision of the state gets voted on by the people, right? I think Norway's like that. Sweden's like that. And then there's countries like China and Russia, where the whole voting process is kind of a sham because they already know who their Politburo member is. And the Politburo members are the only ones that get to vote

on who the head of the Politburo is. And that's all a matter of who's going to get elected and who's getting cultivated for when for what for where so it's not really at all like a democracy which is why we don't call it that so now either way though back to the middle east and the rise of authoritarianism or re-rise whatever you have all these different places like syria to me what like what is different about it today minus asad being eased back into the world stage i guess in some ways has there been any real change there in a decade or it's syria is a useless place man like syria syria was fucked up before the war yeah that's what led to a civil war and now it's Syria is a useless place, man. Like Syria, Syria was fucked up before the war. Yeah.

That's what led to a civil war. And now it's fucked up after the war has, I I'm calling it over. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who will say it's not over because there's still factions fighting. There are factions fighting before, but essentially they're ousted. Uh,

illegitimate leader has now been legitimized and brought back into the Arab kingdom or the Arab world, right? So call it whatever you want to call it, but it's no longer a civil war where the whole, where the whole world agrees that the leader should not be the leader. Now it's something different. What, what's important about Syria is not Syria. What's important about Syria is who was, who were the two countries that were most closely supporting Bashar al-Assad in his war against the rebels? Oh, Russia. And?

Saudi. Iran. Oh, Iran. Supporting Syria, supporting the Assad regime. Well, now that he's won, guess whose support he doesn't really need so much of anymore? Russia and Iran. So all those resources that Russia and Iran were putting into Syria, where are they going to go now? Don't say Ukraine. To support Russia's conflict in Ukraine, right? And not only that, but you also have the Middle

East, who has now welcomed the Assad regime, right? They're essentially trying to consolidate their resource and consolidate their power. So guess where you're not going to see a lot of support for Ukraine come from? The Middle East. And then you have the larger question of, does this make Russia and China feel like their authoritarian regimes are less legitimate or more legitimate now that they're seeing how the world is reacting to Syria. Well, now they know, at the very least, we're going to have rich oil money back us up as long as we're the strongest people, right? As long as we come out of this strong,

we can count on the Arab League to recognize that we're the legitimate rulers of our country, no matter what the United States has to say. Right. So they don't have any pull, essentially. Right. And the reason that all that's important is because we, you and I have sat here before

around this round table before, talking about whether or not the world is dividing into two different camps. A year ago when we had the conversation, I think it was kind of an open question. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. It could just be a transition. More and more, it looks like it really is dividing. And it's dividing between Western powers and centers of influence that are not Western in nature. So you've got Russia and China at the very least. Iran. You've got Iran, right?

All of them have common enemies in the United States. NATO, nobody hates NATO. Nobody hates Europe. I could find you a few. Commenters, let's see it. But what people do know is that NATO basically does what the United States tells them to do. Even though France and Germany, the two largest economies in NATO, are very, very closely aligned and very dependent on economic interests that they have in China. Yes.

Right? And they used to be very dependent on economic interests that they had through energy in Russia. Arguably, the only way that Germany was able to kind of weather the embargo on oil or the embargo on power that that Putin put in place was by breaking all of their own rules all of their own uh social environmentalist priorities right the nuclear energy yeah they had to turn all their nuclear

plants back on and start burning coal again fire them up baby let's go so you see like the world is absolutely taking sides it's deciding and the bigger question to me the thing that that is not being paid attention to is that we're talking about russia and china everybody's talking about russia and china there's a trade block that russia and china are part of and that trade block is called bricks yesS. Yes. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. When you look at all of those countries together and you look at their history of activity in the UN resolutions against Russia,

you start to see a very clear picture. Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa are all either abstaining from UN votes or openly supporting Russia. Add to that list now Iran and Syria, who are now all in the authoritarian camp. They have all got vested interests in strongman governments because that's what they have. That's in this corner. You have the BRICS and the developing authoritarian nations of the world and in this corner you have an inflationary conflicted torn united states along with nato who is also suffering from the same

kind of inflation and the same kind of political divide because they've modeled themselves in many ways off of the united states and these are the two kind of factions that are going to be moving forward in this potential World War III of proxy conflict. Yeah, the conflict to put a word on it, it feels like it culminates in a monetary conflict more than anything. It's a conflict

for cyber. It's a conflict for economic power. Because if you don't have economic power you can't have military power so as part of the reason like everyone gets real upset about the whole ukraine thing because there's a lot of money going in there and everything and we haven't technically put boots on the ground which i appreciate that part of it but you're never going to make everyone happy people are always going to

be complaining why can't we spend the money here and there's some validity to that for sure and you know the ukrainian government certainly has always had a lot of problems and that has not changed just because they're in a war so i get that but is there a case to say that having a financial interest in Ukraine, and I'll use this term, making them a client state in that part of the world, is really economically a long-term good decision for the United States. Is there a decent case for that? I wouldn't say that there's no case. I don't know that there's a strong case, because you have other NATO allies that are already essentially client

states, representatives of democracy in the region. So why is Ukraine special? Why is Ukraine special? Why is Ukraine different than Romania? Why is Ukraine different than Hungary? Right? In many ways, you see Hungary getting very upset about the conflict because they're suffering. They themselves, as a country, in NATO, as part of the, in the UN, they themselves are losing resources because of this conflict going on in ukraine but ukraine is is actually and obviously there are some other countries like this but from a size and gdp perspective ukraine is the largest country in that area that is attached to russia i think minus does germany touch russia no it doesn't there's poland between them right poland south yeah so so the get my i'll put the map in the car for people to follow but basically my point is ukraine's large yes so if russia took that they now have access to the black sea it increases their they're also closer to syria that increases more of their potential land grab because by the way we just highlighted how the whole middle east is leaning

authoritarian that's probably net good for russia right right so economically speaking just economically if that were to happen if you rolled over and let them do that and then form this whole new block forget the bricks even just like this new block of russia and countries in the middle east align we all know they got that oil money out there and everything that is an economic disaster for the west because you're lining up more countries who at least were forced to do business with us for a while and now they're not. Therefore, Ukraine is kind of like the tipping point. And so we're putting money into that to help push the Russians back to avoid that tipping point. There's a lot of if, what if speculation there, right? So I would say that at an extreme case, you could go with what you just laid out, but it would be a pretty extreme case.

Because more realistically, what happened here is that Russia understands that Ukraine is critical to their long-term survival. Like infrastructure, their oil infrastructure goes right through eastern Ukraine. And then the country, I mean, even before the invasion of Ukraine, 20% of Ukrainians thought of themselves as Russians. And they have a long history of being connected, right? So you've got all of that complicated effort going on there. Plus the migration of NATO closer and closer to Russian borders, which is also a threat to Russia. So Russia was seeing threats from two different places. They were seeing NATO coming closer to their borders and they were seeing their own infrastructure and investment that they had put into Ukraine during the Soviet Union years. investment and that economic viability drying up. Because if Ukraine became independent from Russia,

truly independent from Russia, Russia would now lose control of the infrastructure that it needed to deliver oil to its key client states, right? So there's all sorts of reasons why Russia got involved. Why the United States got involved, why NATO got involved was really because they saw an opportunity to deplete Russia. That's the strategic benefit for the West. And to be frank, it was the right call. It was the right call to support Ukraine. It was the right call because Ukraine has now been spending its own effort, its own resources, its own lives, fighting with a country that we used to be concerned was a global power competitor and they're winning on their own battlefield we're battle testing our own weapons

right we found we've had a reason is winning now well no ukraine on their own territory ukraine was able to hold back and and and control the russian advance russia still controls 17% of Ukraine, right? We've all been waiting for a big Ukrainian counteroffensive. Where's that Ukrainian counteroffensive coming from? It should come at some point, we all hope. But what we really see is the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, on a roadshow through Europe trying to drum up support.

Yes. And he's winning support, right? Four tanks here, four jets there, that kind of thing. Some. That's, that's that's i can understand why the counter-offensive hasn't happened yet because it's going to be very hard to launch a full-scale counter-offensive when it's when you have to basically beg borrow and steal to get some new hardware from somebody because a year because a year into this thing people are more worried about their own inflation in their country than they are about the war in ukraine so it's it's a sticky situation right but the point is the united states is benefiting from it we in the united states we in the west as much as we want to criticize the war in ukraine or as much as we

want to you know support ukrainians what we need to understand is that as long as the european conflict stays in ukraine we're better off that's what a proxy war is russia gets depleted china gets depleted through russia everybody's being depleted the only lives at stake are ukrainian lives right the thing that makes me nervous now if anything how's china depleted through russia because china's now china is actually sending their... China sends their weapons and their material, their munitions to Russia if that happens, if they start getting material support,

which still hasn't been confirmed, right? So now Chinese stockpiles are going to be used by Russia, just like American stockpiles are being used by Ukraine. So the problem has been for the last year that America has no stockpiles to defend America. We've been giving all of our stuff to Ukraine. Ukraine uses more ammunition in a month than peacetime America makes in a year.

Russia has been using a ton of munitions and it has needed to get new munitions because it can't create munitions fast enough either. That's why it's been working with South Africa and why it's been working with China. So the more that there's war in Ukraine, the more that we're reducing our top two military threats, Russia and China. Right? Because we have to figure out how to produce more. Because our long-term

defense interests aren't in Ukraine. They're in Asia, right? With the Asia pivot and the focus on Taiwan and everything else. Is a lot of the reason, like we all know the stories that circulate on the internet, some confirmed, a lot of them not but you know about international arms dealing and places like the cia being in the middle of it is a lot of the reason that they do that because all these other like i'm just thinking about this because all the conflicts you're bringing up at one time right now but all these other places have the no rules we talked about and don't mind funding conflicts and causing wars and killing people because they're totally hardened to it and they're all backed by intelligence like all the dudes who

are selling these things around the world and and forget ukraine like in yemen and other places like these are basically like other intelligence organizations backing wars therefore the cia like looking at from the american lens like well we have to play on this field because that's where everyone's playing that i mean that could be a big that could be part of what's happening i don't know from my own firsthand experience that any intelligence organization outside of perhaps the irgc is behind weapons smuggling or arms deals anywhere else in the world come on i. I don't know of any. Yeah.

Okay. What I'm saying is I don't know of any. Yeah. Right. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Yeah. And, and you're right.

If, if there was, if there were, if one of our critical enemies was supporting arms in Syria, for example, if somebody was selling arms to the Assad regime, then it would make sense for us to then go through our intelligence channels to make sure that we got weapons to the rebels, right?

And that is how the intelligence world works. You have to meet the enemy head on. You can't just sit back on some moral high ground and say, oh, you know, playing that way is so far beneath me, not if it's going to cost you a strategic victory. So for sure, those two things could be going on. But I mean, to talk about it on an arms dealer level, again, you're talking about threes

and fives, right? Five tanks here, three helicopters there. That's not what defines a war. You need to have like long-term, heavy-duty, logistical way, like method. Truck Month is on at Chevrolet. Get 0% financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500 Custom Blackout or Custom Trail Boss. With Custom Trail Bosses available, class-exclusive Duramax 3-liter diesel engine and Z71 off-road package with a 2-inch factory suspension lift, you get both on-road confidence and off-road capability.

Dirt road ahead? Let's go! Truck month is awesome! Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. It's built. But there are powerful guys like that Victor Bout guy that, you know, we traded, like he's in Russia now again, who, I i mean it was a lot more than three tanks here you know four bullets yeah the whole career yeah exactly yeah like there are the people

at adnan kashoggi that dude funded every goddamn war for i don't know how long a long time he's dead now thank god but you know someone else replaced him you know like i i think about this and i'm like it'd be so stressful for me to be in intelligence because i feel like a lot of these people they have to be working playing multiple sides of the coin. They're not loyal to shit. They're just international chaos dealers, right? And so then it's almost like this is one of those things that comes when it's in my head. It starts to make sense, but it's very hard to explain and like get it out into words.

It's like it's all a cycle where you either hop on the merry-go-round or you don't. But this is the shit and we're all swimming in it. And so these wars happen. And what fascinates me is we hear a lot allegedly about some, like Ukraine. We hear a little about Syria, a little. Most people I say, where's Syria? They go, fucking Africa? I don't know, right?

A lot of people don't know. But then you hear fucking nothing about like the war in Yemen. Right. And yet that is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Are there other people involved there though too? I mean, there were lots of people involved

until Iran and Syria, until Iran and Saudi Arabia reached their deal. Right. And so can you explain that whole conflict? Because whenever I bring this up to people, they're like, what is that? Like, no idea. Yeah. So I think what's important here is to understand that from the time that Ukraine launched, right, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 22, both Syria and Yemen were still war zone areas. They were still wars, active wars. So the world has been so focused on Ukraine that these two other conflict areas have mostly resolved themselves, right? They're not over, but they're not nearly as hot a conflict as they used

to be. And essentially, the key players who were really kind of competing in that proxy space have backed out of the conflict. So all of that has happened because the world's been paying attention to Ukraine. So we actually haven't seen or really understood the nature of proxy war in other countries. And we haven't yet recognized that Ukraine itself is just another version of a proxy war, or we're not acknowledging it, right? But you had in Yemen, you had a scenario where you had two,

you had the native government, the original government of Yemen, and then you had the Houthis who were this sector, this outcasted group who wanted to come back and basically take control of the country themselves because they had been marginalized and abused for so long. So they were a rebel group against the host nation government, very similar to what you saw in Syria. And then you saw the Saudis come in and support the original government. And then you saw the Iranians come in and support the Houthis. And you had UAE come in and support the original government and then you saw the iranians come in

and support the houthis and you had uae come in and you had america get involved and you had you know countries from all over the world get involved in yemen just like you had so many countries get involved in syria yet the same thing happened in libya people forgot about libya also right proxy warfare has been a defining character trait of global geopolitics since 2010 probably long before that before that too but definitely a defining characteristic since then uh the point and the point of all of it is when you look at how conflict was carried out in syria in libya and in yemen it's not that different from what you see happening in ukraine yeah it seems like the same fucking thing wealthy countries yes supporting the fight to deplete the local country

without depleting either of the major players right in some kind of a conflict to gain international influence because the country itself is not of economic viability nobody thinks that the future is in libya the future is in sy, the future is in Syria, the future is in Yemen. They have, like Libya has oil reserves, right? Syria has natural resources. Yemen has natural resources and it's in a fantastic location, you know, right on the corner of the Middle Eastern seas.

I'll stick that map in the corner for you. Yeah, so you've got all sorts of strategic benefits in yemen but not economic but it also it's kind of like a i don't want to like be too like middle school playground here but it's kind of like a show of might in these places when you do get a w or something like that. I mean, that shit exists. Symbolism's everything. That's what narratives are. That's how narratives drive everything.

So, you know, I would think if you have Saudi Arabia, who's a friend, like biggest air quotes of all time there, but allegedly like a friend over there fighting against someone who's definitely not a friend, in Iran, who we spent the last better part of say 15 20 years extremely priority one concerned about their ability to produce nuclear weapons right i would think that whether or not they're fighting over what was the term trump had for that shithole country or whatever whether they're fighting over which was like the worst thing ever to say but whether they're fighting over countries that you view that

way or not you should care i'm not even talking about the people right now like like me sitting in the seat i'm saying like the people in the government and it's not like there aren't people who don't care and aren't paying attention to yemen in the government i'm not saying that but i'm saying like the prioritization of it seems to be quite low right i would say that you're right in that people aren't paying attention to it and i would say that you're right in that people aren't paying attention to it and i would say that you're right that uh there are other priorities that the government is more invested in and part of that i think is also because we only know what the government's focused on in as much as it's shared with us through the media and then the media

itself is interested in certain regions because it gets more media attention white people not white people whatever it might be yeah right so so it's difficult it's really difficult to understand what is the true nature of the u.s's interest in these different proxy conflicts i think the the place where i find when people ask me why I watch and when people ask me why I pay attention, the reason I'm so interested is because what we're seeing is we're seeing these countries that have largely been characterized as poor, backwards and weak, we see them as banding together and actually making like global impact. Even if it is a negative impact, they're still making a global impact. But then we see these other countries as advanced and liberal and progressive, and we are somehow appearing weaker than we did in the past. So these backwards weak countries look stronger than they did in the past.

And us liberal progressive countries seem weaker than we did in the past. Why is that? Is that really what's happening? And if it's not really what's happening, why are we seeing it that way? Because when you count wins and losses, right, an authoritarian country has successfully invaded a sovereign country and owns 17 of their territory a authoritarian country is the number two wealthiest country in the planet right now and and has everybody kind of on edge everywhere an authoritarian

country that was deemed illegitimate in 2011, is now being recognized as legitimate again. But we also deem, like, this is so... It has to do with who's playing nice in the sandbox with us. Like, we didn't... There's some media rhetoric against Saudi Arabia and stuff, but that's about it. They've been a friend forever, because we love their fucking arms, baby. Like, that's what we're doing.

Well, they love our weapons. We love their oil. Yes, I'm sorry. I had that ass backwards, my bad. We love, we love yeah we love that and then when we need it now we have some friction there because we haven't we have been trying to take that holier than thou ground which on the surface i agree with but you're getting to a hard truth here which is that sometimes you got to play with the bad guy sometimes you got to play with the bad guys yeah that's really that's a tough one because you know ben salman over there's a psycho and if you piss him off monetarily they got a lot of power we know that locationally they

got a lot of power and you know the the 500 pound elephant in the room this whole time that's been coming up around all this is Iran. And, you know, we – obviously I mentioned their nuclear bomb a few minutes ago and that whole worry. But, you know, it does seem like over the past three, four years that has become like the main focus in there i think was it jim lawler who told he said china was his number one overall concern but iran is like his number one immediate concern and then there were a couple other there were a couple other like government people who've said like iran's the big problem and i think that it's a little bizarre what we've been seeing from there because we saw these protests happen in like September, October, something like that. And there's still some of that going on. But the regime that's been in power since 1979, which is a psycho, old-school, conservative, Islamic regime that doesn't have any type of first world interests i guess you could say

they still seem to be holding on to power just fine and committing atrocities now pretty openly with with respect to some of these people they've killed at these protests and all the while we remain seriously concerned that they're closer to a nuke and it doesn't sound like we have something up our sleeve at the moment like we did in like 2013 with that you know the hacking we did into their nuclear facilities but like what you know is is iran towards the top of your list too like is that like top three like something that you're concerned about and what's the worst case outside of like nukes what's the worst case scenario there yeah so one of the one of the reasons you're seeing so many former government types preach on about Iran is because of their old hats. Their old hats coming from the global war on terror. And Iran is a major player in the

global war on terror, right? So let's take a look at Iran right now. So Ayatollah Khamenei is aging. He's quite old and they're already planning his succession so when an ayatollah dies a new ayatollah has to be identified and the two people that have been identified for succession after kameni passes or when kameni retires if he retires uh are are two very different men one is like a former judicial type and academic with not a lot of seminary religious experience, but a lot of vested interest in Sharia law. So kind of a hardline sucky, right? The other one is a guy who came up in the IRGC. That also sucks.

He's a hardcore hawkish IRGC type. When you compare that or when you pair that information along with the fact that when you actually look at the governing body of Iran, the clerics that decide what happens in Iran, the vast majority of those clerics have gone from being religious scholars to being IRGC-backed politicians. So when you think of Iran, you have to think of a changing Iran that's going from Islamic law, Sharia law, to more and more extremist ideas

based in their background in the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shit or a fart. I mean, they're both bad. They're both bad. Yeah. Yeah, right? Both of these options are bad. One of them is more tactically dangerous. The other one is more ideologically dangerous. So no matter how you look at the future with Iran, it's going in one of these two directions.

Okay. The other side that people don't acknowledge is that Iran is only considered a rogue nation by the West. In the Middle East, everybody trades with Iran. Iran is like the breadbasket of the Middle East. When I lived in Abu Dhabi, some of my favorite food to buy was food that was grown in Iran. Excellent fruits and vegetables, right? And when you look on any kind of geopolitical map it'll show

you that the uae and iran are enemies but not in trade right same thing with saudi not in trade all these countries are trading with iran because iran is the nearest and richest location for agricultural goods that's why they're never really truly outcasted yeah we keep their lights on we those places are keeping their lights on. Correct, correct. So when you look at – when you ask me the question of what's my concern, what keeps me up at night about Iran, it's that Iran is really the last strong bastion of Islamic extremism, of radical Islam all over the world. They fund Hezbollah. They fund –

Can you explain that, funding Hezbollah? Yeah. So before we started seeing proxy wars, what we started seeing were proxy military militias. Militias that carried out certain operations in different parts of the world, but were supported financially by a third country. So weird. You had the Houthis in Yemen that were a separate fighting force, a proxy, you know, funded by Iran. And that's kind of how Iran works. They fund these extremist groups operating all over the world. And that's their kind of key to maintaining relevance and power becausean can sweep in periodically and choose to use their actual irgc forces or their military capability to support these operations depending on where they are so some people suspect that it was actually iran who launched the airstrikes against the power uh the power plant in saudi arabia back in 2001 i want to say it was so credit went to the houthis it was actually the Iranians

that did the dirty work, right? Yeah. So that's when you talk to old school global war on terrorism types, that's why they're so focused on Iran. Because Iran is tactical, clear and present danger. China is a future threat. So that's why you see them talk so much about the current concerns. When you talk to more strategic individuals, they talk more about China. Because we've learned over the last 20 years how to combat extremism and how to combat... Have we?

When was the last time you had a terrorist attack inside the United States? That's fair. That's very fair. Like, from a defensive standpoint, I won't disagree with you there. But like... When we went over there afghanistan's one thing i've defended that hardcore and i will defend that like had to happen but like after iraq and everything i mean you want to talk about a power vacuum you just talk about assad being led back into all these places like that's a direct result of a lot of our failures there.

And I'm talking militarily. Yeah. I'm not saying – we have to think that any military conflict has offensive and defensive sides. One of them is a priority over the other. Defense is always a priority. Right? We fucked up in Afghanistan. Like we left that place in shambles and now there's a power

vacuum the taliban stepped in they're partnering with china rare earth minerals are coming out of afghanistan that place is a mess right total disaster syria total disaster we were active in both places right so proxy active in syria not necessarily. We learned. I don't like that not. I didn't like that not at all. You were just like, yeah. Yeah. We learned in Afghanistan that interstate war, which is when you invade another country, is expensive and not always successful in the end. Yeah, we've learned that in a few of them for sure.

For sure. I mean, I think we've already talked about Afghanistan, I think, on this show. Maybe it was with Concrete, too, when we did the crossover, but I don't want to go to that right now. collegiate culture places islamic back type places then you have israel which is the jewish state they're in the middle of a bunch of countries that for a long time it was like all these countries hated them for who they were and now they've cultivated friendships you know it started with egypt back in what was that 80 or 79 or something and then some of the other like they have a good relationship with jordan and they're very you hear about them a lot because they have the total survival instinct there i mean let's call it what it is we're less than 80 years out from like all the ancestors of these people including some of them who are still alive were tempted to be exterminated so they have a worldview and an

understanding of like survival and worry about me that few other places around the world have, and I always're able to pull off how much of the things we're seeing in the middle east be it with more friendly countries like the uae saudi arabia for sure in this question i'm asking like how much of that do you think is driven by israel's success in leverage from an intelligence perspective and being able to formulate places not hating them over there and that also is like kind of an extension of our interests here so i wouldn't necessarily i mean israel is a very advanced intelligence infrastructure for sure um but i wouldn't necessarily say that their their increase in diplomatic uh clout is a reflection of their intelligence service really i think it's more just in a representation of their advanced diplomatic clout is a reflection of their intelligence service. Really? I think it's more just a representation of their advanced diplomatic clout.

So a lot of what you see Mossad do around the world is partner with other services, other intelligence services over common enemies like Iran. Yes. Right? So that's where most of their work is. They don't put a lot of necessary, they don't put a great deal of effort into trying to create covert influence campaigns that win support for the Jewish plight. That's not really what they do. They don't really need to because they have statesmen and politicians who are very effective at that on their own. Right?

And let's not forget that Israel is a very close partner to the United States. So the United States also wants to see Israel win friendships with other strategic allies in the region, especially in, in the world that we've seen for the last five to seven years. And for the world that we're going to continue to see for the next 10 to 20 years, where people have to pick sides, whether they pick sides like with true loyalty or whether they just pick sides out of convenience we don't really know so i think that's a lot of what you see going on in israel um israel is a fantastic example of how scrappy and resourceful a country can be when it really is facing an existential threat.

We talk about, you hear the word, excuse me, you hear the word existential threat thrown out a lot in American politics. You'll hear pundits get up on stage and talk about how existential threat to our democracy, existential threat to our future, existential threat to our success. We are not facing an existential threat. There is nothing out there that actually threatens the existence of the united states nothing can nothing that i know of can overnight destroy our political infrastructure or kill every known american just doesn't exist okay in israel they actually have to face existential i see what you're saying

okay overnight they could totally be obliterated. And that's a very real threat to them, right? So they have adopted a methodology there. The Mossad has adopted a methodology that is constantly combating that level of threat. When you say methodology? When it comes to physical attacks on individuals, when it comes to the risks that they take. Like what? uh, physical attacks on individuals when it comes to the risks that they take. Well, I mean, Mossad does some of the most daring raids. Uh, you've, we've, we've seen news reports about Mossad riding by on motorcycles and attaching sticky bombs to cabs, right? That is a brazen

type of operation. You really only do that when you're in a position of existential threat, right? The Israelis actually rescued, I want to say it was in the 90s. It may have been in the 80s. They actually rescued hundreds of Israelis from an area of known conflict with like a cruise ship or something.

And they took them to a resort to help them like to relocate them from one place to another. This hugely famous operation, I'm sure I'm getting totally wrong. Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one. Yeah, but they do some very, very daring things, not to mention the fact that they, you know,

they have no problem carrying out assassinations around the world if it keeps Israeli citizens alive. And that's what's so fascinating about how Mossad works, especially when you consider that against MI6 or CIA that have a very strict no-assassination policy that hasn't always been in effect, hasn't always been in effect, but has most certainly been in effect in modern history.

I'm not going to lie, I'd be very disappointed if the CIA didn't assassinate people, as in America. I'm just being honest. If America knew most of what CIA did, they would be very disappointed. I mean, The CIA is a government organization that's ruled by law.

As much as the movies and conspiracy theorists want you to think otherwise, it is. It's dictated by law. So that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying when you're going to the other places though, the whole point is to break the rules. You're an intelligence service. It's what you do. I get it. You're saying and there's people who are going to the other places though the whole point is to break the rules you're an intelligence service that's what you do i get it you're saying and there's people who are going

to run with that one in the comments hilarious but there's arguments to say that that has like when when i hear some of these guys usually in internet reddit forums and stuff like that list off every single thing that's where i kind of laugh because it's like all right well you think every single thing that's ever happened was perpetrated but okay no but like there's things that happen because they're in the middle of these situations and then yes you do have some bad people sometimes do bad things for sure and i'll call out the cia when they do that but like when you say that they're not doing things that we would be impressed with. I don't believe that.

I also, let me pull this back for a minute. Let's take it off the CIA for a second. Even just the little bit you're describing right there of Mossad, you started that out before that saying that it's mostly Israel's effective diplomacy and stuff that does things. That gains their international clout. That gains their influence. But it sounds like these are the exact type of things that would help gain that influence when you have talented individuals who are able to pull off this much brazen shit. You don't think, like, that they're doing that around the world to be able to protect

themselves in a very hostile environment that they live in? I'm sure that's why they're doing it. I don't know that it's going to gain the influence that you might think it's going to gain. Like, the world doesn't work like people think things work in Hollywood, right? A country's state government is not impressed when your covert intelligence arm

goes in and assassinates a threat to your future existence that does not help you win friends and influence people on the world stage one whole point is they don't know when you're israel and you do stuff brazenly through massad the whole world knows okay okay yes right that does not win friends and influence people because what that does is it sends a message to everybody we can do this to you if we want to also so that's why that's that speaks to just how talented their diplomats really are because their diplomats even in the face of brazen Mossad operations can still go up to a country and say we only did that to this country oftentimes it's Iran because of this specific threat that they posed against us and that person that we only did that to this country, oftentimes it's Iran, because of this specific threat that they posed against us and that person that we assassinated,

that bomb that we put on the car, you know, neutralized this individual on this day because of this specific thing, right? It's a much more complicated game than you would think. It's not like people just want to be friends with the tough kid on the street, because the tough kid can also beat you up too. So it's... I was getting the impression that what you were thinking is that both sides win

influence. They don't. It's, if anything, it's that much more of a testament to the fact that Israel can make friends with the UAE and with Saudi Arabia, with Oman, right? With Jordan, even in the face of them demonstrating its capabilities. Yeah, there was a lot of things on the table there. That was my bad. So at the beginning of what you're saying, I wasn't following you for a second, but I completely understand what you're talking about when you're literally like putting a symbol on it and saying, we did this. Fine. In order to win at the table, though, I don't think it's as simple as someone's just an expert negotiator who can go in there and make you their best friend and just be, you know somebody into thinking oh don't worry about that i think there has to be some level of talent that acquires things to get you in that room i think that's what the cia effectively does

for us here and like when i talk i joke about the assassination thing but like yeah there's some really bad people in the world and part of part of intelligence agencies around the world is like if they can get their hands on someone and take them out quietly who's awful, hopefully they're making the right judgment there. And like they actually are awful, and it's not just an abuse of power. But having a guy like Joe Tedai in here, like that's what he did. So my first deployment was to Iraq, and the first time that I actually pulled the trigger shooting at somebody was at a hotel that we were staying at. And our hotel got attacked in the middle of the night by a bunch of douchebags that showed up outside, shot RPGs at a hotel. And I ran up on the roof with a bunch of other dudes.

And they were across the street in an abandoned building. And you could see their muzzle flashes. It was like whack-a-mole. He was ground branch. He was the goodbye guy you go there we're not seeing them again not always sometimes it was capture but you know what i mean so you know you're saying israel does this much more above board sometimes as a symbol they gotta be doing it not above board though too you're talking about terrorists terrorists are completely different than world leaders or completely different than like – there's no ground branch guy who has sat at this table and told you that he killed world leaders or told you that he killed any kind of engineer or scientist.

Yes. Well, I don't know about the last – that's a more complicated one. But world leaders, yes. I understand what you're saying. Unless it's like... That's what assassination is. Neutralizing a terrorist cell is not considered assassination. Right? Assassination has to do with a certain level of power that the individual who is being neutralized carries. That's right. Shit. There's so much going on in my head right now. It's all good, man. That's the curse of being the host.

Some of these words are breaking my brain right now, but that's 100% right. Okay. So let me reset that then. So forget the word assassination for somewhere. You're told, okay, you're going to be the operator on this case. Here's all the information we've been getting here. We, the team that's been there, here's everything you need to know. You're the talent. You can go in there and close the deal and take care of business. How much of it though is like you are really an isolated cell at the CIA where you're just brought in and you're read in on the things you do, but you really don't know most of the stuff they're doing because you're not on a need to know basis. Even in a powerful position like yours, you're out in the field. You don't need to know about them working on

some general in Russia if you're doing some mission in Tanzania. Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it speaks to the fact that the idea that you think that someone in the field has power, I think that's where the whole thing starts to fall apart. Sure. When you're in the field, you have no power. It's all the people who are in the command offices or the command centers back in Langley who actually have the power. They're the ones who are read into multiple cases, multiple operations, and trying to de-conflict.

Generally speaking, when you're out in the field, you have the autonomy to do what you think is right and what you think is best, but you have a very narrow scope about what you're trying to execute. So going back to our initial conversation about the difference between the military and the agency, in the military, you have a very narrow scope and you have a very narrow set of your own decision-making capabilities because you have to operate within the confines of what your supervisor said and their supervisor said and their supervisor said, and you're being closely monitored in every aspect of your military job. Like pilots. Pilots have a thousand people watching them at all times. What's your altitude? What's your airspeed? What's your heading? And how much does it vary from the flight plan that you set? It's not a fun job when you're in the military.

The agency gave us much more flexibility than that but still just a very narrow scope we didn't know almost anything if I'm walking down the streets of any city in Africa or Asia or Latin America there's operations happening all around me I have no idea about sure there might even be people who don't know that I'm there because they don't have the need to know that I'm there in their city or in their country. And that's just kind of the nature of the beast. That's how we compartmentalize things to keep the individual officer secure, but also how we keep other operations secure. That's the word I was looking for, compartmentalization. It seems like there is, out of a necessity of the power of a secret and having the most limited number of people knowing it to avoid it getting out, there is significant compartmentalization at CIA.

Right. Yeah. And that's a core two-hour methodology. Uh, it's how you can... It's not only how you make the most out of every officer, because this way you can have a junior officer who might get experience in Latin America, and then in their mid-career, you can send them to Asia. And then in their senior career, you can send a junior officer who might get experience in latin america and then in their mid career you can send them to asia and then in their senior career you can send them to europe right because you can compartmentalize what they were exposed to and you can compartmentalize them from

each of the operations where they were participating so you get the benefit of all their skills and all their experience without having to share them or share their background or their operational history with everybody who works in all three locations. How often did you get to go on missions where you were working with other intelligence agencies? Surprisingly often, but I wasn't always the person that got to work with them directly. What do you mean? So whenever you, when you put an undercover intelligence officer from the United States with an intelligence officer from another country, you're basically outing the intelligence officer from the United States to that person, right?

So if you were an intelligence officer for say, Canada, and I'm an undercover officer for the United States, when we sit together and work together on a case now I'm no longer undercover to you which means you can go back to CSIS and you can be like hey here's the officer I sat with here's his name here's what he looks like here's when I'm meeting him with him again right so I'm no longer undercover so what they try to do is they try to separate undercover operators away from other intelligence officers there's a whole different set of officers who will work with foreign intelligence officers. So even with like, what's it called? The I-5?

Five Eyes. Five Eyes. Yeah. Fuck that one up too. But even with the Five Eyes, which I guess that's America, the UK, Australia, New Zealand. Who am I missing? Canada. Canada.

Canada. All right. So even with them, it seems like you never really, like you guys are friends, but you're the friends who are asking the bartender what he served you after you go to the bathroom type friends. Yeah. Right. There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.

That's a really good way. You got a lot of good ways of putting it. That's not my way. That's a quote that's been misquoted for a thousand years but it's still useful so you didn't it sounds like then based on that explanation of the buffer it's not like you really made a ton of even a strong word to use here but like relationships with people at these other agencies maybe mid-level right lower whatever right towards the end of my career is when I started getting to the place where I had to meet other intelligence officers. Now, why did that happen?

Because remember how we were talking about the cone of uncertainty? Yeah. When you're a junior officer, it's easy to hide in your anonymity. But the more operations you execute, the more places that you visit, the more exposure that you have, essentially your cover starts to, we call it, cover degrade. So all of a sudden, you might still say that you have, essentially your cover starts to, we call it cover degrade. So all of a sudden you might still say that you're not CIA, but the evidence is starting to pile up that you really are.

So for many officers in their mid career and later, that's when they start to have so much cover degradation that they become more useful in that liaison role working with other intelligence services. Did you get to, well, you had said in the past, they become more useful in that liaison role working with other intelligence services. Did you get to, well, who, who you had said in the past, like you were really impressed by the Japanese, I think. Are there other ones as well that you got to work with that something stood out like, well, these guys are good at X? I mean, intelligence officers from most of the world are

really good. Most of the world, right? Especially when you're talking about the first world G7 countries. The Brits are amazing. Mossad is excellent. The Japanese are excellent. The South Koreans are very good. Australians are really interesting. They're like, yeah. I don't know about that one.

They're really interesting. That wasn't good. They're the best ones to hang out with when you want a beer, for sure. But you've got some other first world countries out there that you're just kind of like, I can't believe you're an intelligence officer. Really? There are some countries out there where you meet people like that and you're just like, yeah. And I don't really want to call them out necessarily, but. You're going to tell me off camera.

I'll tell you off camera. Okay. They know who know who they are wow maybe you got a bad egg i hope for their psyche you got a bad i'm asking for us i guess but still yeah i i just i'm so fascinated by it because you know it seems like you know if you listen to like full-blown conspiracy theories you're like these people run the entire world at all times with all things i think it's more like they're forced to they're forced to play on the same fields at all times and yes some dirty shit happens sometimes and you hope it's not you doing it but you know you you've had such an opportunity to to just it it's not like you're experiencing culture so much as you're experiencing the forces that drive them and what you did.

And that, you know, I could never do that. The best I can do is go visit these places and take some fucking pictures and meet some people at the bar. There's not, you know. Well, I'm jealous of you now, man, because there's some places I can't do that anymore. It's not that many, right?

It's not that many, but some of the places that I've loved visiting the most are places I can't go back. Some places you lived. Some places I've lived, yeah. And that's hard. It's hard to say goodbye to that. One of my closest former agency peers right now

used to live in Ukraine. And, you know, it's heart-wrenching to hear his stories about what it was like for him and his family. He's got four kids and his wife. And they lived in Ukraine for almost two years. And their kids had friends there, and they played in schools,

and they visited historical sites, and they got to do some just, meet beautiful people and do beautiful things in a beautiful country. And then he left the agency. He went on and started building his own business and his own career. And then the invasion happened.

Yeah. And when the invasion happened, like, it just, it broke their heart. Like, you can see the tears in his and when the invasion happened like it just it broke their heart like you can see the tears in his and his wife's eyes because now their children who were children in ukraine you know four years ago five years ago now their children are much older right they're almost teenagers so you can imagine your five-year-old or six-year-old at the playground, and now that playground is a crater. Yes. Right?

And your child is 13. They used to be eight. It's a completely different world. So it's heart-wrenching to think about to be an officer who has lived somewhere and seen how beautiful it can be, and then to never be able to go back there again. It's something that not everybody experiences. It's a hard thing yeah and i think that does get lost in all this even if you have to have other skills that make it i may use this word but like cold to your environment at all times because you have to be paranoid you have to assume the worst in people and stuff like that you still people

are still human beings you know they still enjoy places to go. Our enemies are governments. Our enemies aren't people. Our enemies are governments. And the mission of the intelligence industry, the mission of intelligence is to collect secrets about governments that give your government a way of keeping your own people safe. And sometimes that means you're keeping your people safe from some sort of outside attack,

but sometimes you're keeping your people safe by giving them the best possible information on a trade, a trade or a negotiation tactic that your president can use. But in essence, your enemy is governments, not people. So even when you're on mission in a country where you hate their government, you can't help but fall in love with the people. right? They're just living. They're just scraping by. It's just you see their history. You see the culture. You see the colors. You see the art. You hear the music, right? You see people dancing in the streets. You see little girls and mothers and children

and husbands kissing wives and people dating. How do you not fall in love with humanity? You just hate the government that you have to work against i could dig into that because there's a lot of diametrical opposition to some of the earlier things you said but then we'll be here for like 45 minutes just on that and i want to make sure we point out that you're now like a fucking tv star on history channel we haven't talked about this we got to dig into this right now that about this. We've got to dig into this right now. That's true. I guess we've got to dig into this, huh? You're on... Well, tell people what you've been

doing, because this episode's going to come out shortly after this premieres, I guess, because it's premiering in... Two days. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, so not long in... Late in 2022, I got a phone call from an investigative team

in Utah that was carrying out investigations into what was defined as high strangeness. So high strangeness kind of encompasses everything from paranormal phenomenon all the way to UFO sightings and little green men and alien technology. But essentially documented instances of things that can't be defined by modern science. And this team reached out to me and they asked me if I would be willing to be part of an advanced team that was going to start a new series of investigations. Now, whenever I hear an invite like this, usually I'm pretty skeptical. And I'm like, I don't know if you're talking to the right guy. Right. My name is Andrew Bustamante. I'm a former covert intelligence officer. I'm not a alien investigator.

And I tried to give them that pushback and they basically said, yeah, that's exactly why we're talking to you. So I went on to have a few more conversations and it turns out

that this investigation, which came to be known as the Beyond Skinwalker Ranch investigation, was a part of a documentary effort by History Channel to document a scientific investigation into these reported areas of high strangeness all over the United States. And it was an extension of an experiment that has been carried out at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah,

dating back three years, with just incredible amounts of data collected by the lead investigator out there named Eric Bard, and an assigned astrophysicist named Dr. Travis Taylor. For people out there who aren't familiar with Skinwalker Ranch, and what's going on, can you just give a basic history of that, and some of the things that have been claimed over the years, and who owns it today? Yeah, you know, it's hard to give a quick summary for a place like skinwalker ranch so we got time in the 1970s and 80s it really started to identify itself as a hot spot if not potentially ground zero for compounding high strangeness cryptid sightings for those of you don't know what a cryptid is,

a cryptid is a pandimensional creature, something that does not look like it's from the Earth, but nobody really knows where it is from. So they had reportings of cryptids at this ranch. They had reportings of energy orbs or glowing balls of energy at multiple different altitudes, some right against the ground, some up high in the sky, ranging in size from the size of a basketball

to the size of a Volkswagen. They had UFO sightings. They had UFO sightings in the sky, but they also had UFO sightings near Earth or near the ground level. And then they had just all sorts of strange energy and energetic kinds of activities, batteries that would drain faster than normal,

cars that would just spontaneously combust, all sorts of strangeness. Just in this place. Just in this ranch. And that ranch had turned over ownership multiple times. And one of the previous owners was a gentleman named Bigelow, Robert Bigelow. And Bigelow was part of a team

that was a contractor for the U.S. federal government and supposedly investigating alien technology. So where Robert Bigelow goes, there's suspected alien technology. So when Bigelow was on Skinwalker Ranch and these various types of strange sightings also happened at Skinwalker Ranch, that's when this facility, this location, caught the attention of a gentleman named Brandon Fugel,

who's a very successful real estate entrepreneur and businessman in Utah. So he decided to come in and purchase Skinwalker Ranch and then hire himself out of pocket, a full-time research team, to try to dig into what explains the strangeness at this ranch and is there any evidence to support that Robert Bigelow found something here now you've talked about this on the past with Danny Jones over at concrete about UFOs specifically and I guess like your stance is there or thoughts just for people listening though can you outline what your thought is on life beyond earth i actually love the way you put this and and i've used it myself sometimes but can you explain to people how how you feel about that yeah absolutely so i i believe that there is other intelligent life in

the universe but i don't believe it because i think we've seen it i believe it because i think it is statistically impossible to rule out that there could be other intelligent life in the universe. Just the fact that we exist make it too statistically probable that another intelligent life form exists. And if you just look on our planet, we have other intelligent life on our planet, right? You have monkeys, you have dolphins, you have different creatures that would classify as intelligent life. So to think that there is an other intelligent life in the universe is just statistically improbable. There must be. Now, whether that

means that we've seen them or that they visited us in UFOs or that they look like little green men, I can't say that that's true or false, but I do believe that there must be intelligent life out there. That position that I have is one of the reasons that when I was invited to be part of this investigation, I was very eager to say yes, because if I, if I get a chance to participate in the investigation firsthand, then I know I can trust my own data more than I have to trust anything somebody else tells me in the future. Yeah. So you're not, point being, you want to see things that are definitive and you tend to think that a lot of, a lot of the folklore stories we've gotten kind of aren't it because they, there's holes in the story, they don't make sense, whatever. And so now when these guys

approached you, they're like well we want you to come poke the holes in those stories and see if there's actually something legit so first of all how long were you filming this so we were on the road actively investigating for three months when so on the road you guys were going a bunch of other places correct correct so our mission was to do two things first First, to research and identify hotspots around the United States that had similar histories, similar reportings, similar suspicion to Skinwalker Ranch. That was part one of the mission.

Mission number two was to actually visit these locations and execute some of the same scientific studies that had been done at Skinwalker Ranch to see if we could replicate similar, if not the same results at these other locations so now we're trying to both find locations of strangeness and then also execute uh like demonstrative scientific method experiments to see if we can collect hard data measurable data that that is corroborates what they've done at Skinwalker Ranch. It's very different. You're exactly right.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't like listening to stories and hearing tales about firsthand accounts and what people have seen. Do I believe that they believe that? Sure. But that doesn't mean that it actually happened. I am a much bigger fan of some kind of scientific effort that can be recreated.

So if I go somewhere and I take the temperature and the temperature says 87 degrees, when I come to you, I can say, Julian, it's 87 degrees down the street, two left-hand turns and stand at the intersection

of Wasatch and Maine, right? And then you can take the same thermostat or the same thermometer and you can go down there right now and you can test it for yourself. And you can come back and say, well, actually I got 86 degrees, Andy, but we're pretty close. I'm a much bigger fan of hard data rather than I come back from the street and say, Hey, Julian, it's hot as balls out there. And you go out there and you're like, well, I didn't think it was too uncomfortable. Right.

And that's what was so exciting about this opportunity. We're carrying out investigative experiments. We're using radiation detectors. We're using tools that measure radio signals in the atmosphere. We're using tools that are measuring energy in the soil, energy in the sky. We're listening to different wavelengths. We're launching rockets. We're setting off explosions. We're digging in the sky we're listening to different wavelengths we're we're launching rockets we're setting off explosions we're digging in the ground like we're doing active investigations to try to collect data to see if the data we collect matches what they have on skinwalker ranch is this like the thing that surprised me about you jumping right into this obviously like it had your you were like okay this is legit but like you know where a lot of our heads go on this stuff when we hear history channels doing a doing a fucking reality show on skinwalker ranch like it seems like oh it's gonna be all scripted like oh my god look we found a thing oh look at that dot on the screen but it sounds like in talking with you off air about this it was very very much, no, we're just doing these investigations

and the cameras are rolling. So they weren't like telling you what to say, you're telling me and things like that. That was legit. Cause I had a chance to watch the first episode. It was really good. But my head's like, is this scripted?

Like it still goes there. And I know a lot of people have it go there. So I wasn't sold. I say I was eager. What that means is I was super interested when they, when I first got the phone call, I thought it was make-believe. And then when I started talking to some of the casting executives and the different people at History Channel and the production company making it, they started talking to me and I was like, okay, this sounds like you guys

might be trying to do this right. But I took a trip to Miami to actually sit with the showrunner and the lead producer, as well as my co-host. And my co-host is a gentleman named Paul Bieben. And Paul is an Emmy award winning journalist who's reported for Al Jazeera and reported for multiple PBS and other news stations here in the United States. So very well respected journalist. And I had two days to sit with these two gentlemen. And all we did was talk about exactly what you just said, right? Because Paul didn't want to be part of a project that was going to be fiction. And I didn't want to be part of a project that was going to be a waste of my time. Like I want to find real answers to real questions and have a real adventure.

If I'm just going to go from like holiday into holiday in and like wave my hands in the sky and have to do that and get paid pennies to do it. That doesn't sound like fun to me. Yeah. And it was sitting with that producer. His name is David Carr sitting with David. David made it very clear. He was like, this is, this is how this is going to work, guys. We're going to turn the cameras on. We're going to have like five cameramen. We're going to document everything you do. And then we're going to turn the cameras on we're going to have like five cameramen we're going to document everything you do and then we're going to turn the cameras off when the time when the union tells us it's time to turn everything off right and whatever happens during that time is what happens so there's not a guy coming out going i need more drama i need i need more zest and how you said that more there's this there's not enough yeah no

no french berets, no cut marks. Yeah, exactly. Do we know where James Fox was from November to December? November to February. November to February. Well, James is a documentary guy. He'd probably have a heart attack at this shit because he'd definitely think, like,

oh, there's a director out there doing that. But so what are you allowed to say specifically some of the places you went? Yeah, so we are. Because I know it the places you went? Yeah, so we are. Because I know it's still coming out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I said allowed. So for the episode that you got to see, we were in a place called, we were in Arizona.

And then I think that there's an episode that's going to be coming out very shortly after you release this, interviews together. And I want to say that that location is actually in Colorado or Nevada. So we spent quite a bit of time in the Southwest because that's where a lot of areas of strangeness exist. But we actually specifically, Paul and I, wanted to find areas outside of the Southwest because nobody ever talks about areas outside of the Southwest. And what would be really interesting to us is if we could find results in the Northeast that replicate results in the northeast that replicate results in the southwest that's really something interesting because you got completely different

populations completely different histories completely different geological uh foundations so we actually took the investigation to places like massachusetts north carolina to try to see if we can't replicate some of the results so we've been all over the united states should go outside the country, too? Not on this trip, no. Not on this one. Not on this trip. And again, that was a rather uncomfortable conversation

with History Channel. I was like, look, guys. Certain places I can't go. Certain places I can't go. Not unless you want the entire camera crew in jail with me. All right, so future seasons, we're going to be like, ah, we lost Andy Bustamante. I'll zoom in.

I'll zoom in. That's how it's going to work. OK, there we go what'd you find we found some awesome stuff dude so for people who have seen the secret of skinwalker ranch the original documentary effort that has been going on at skinwalker ranch um we were able to replicate a number of the same events that they found there strange radio signals strange radiation readings uh strange energy readings but i would say even more interesting is that i saw things that i have never seen before i had a chance to tell sean about some of this actually i actually saw glowing orbs like orbs of light just round basketballs of light floating in the sky, floating at treetop level,

floating at ground level. I'd never seen that before. And I don't know what they were. I ran them against a satellite tracker. I ran them against an FAA airline tracker. We ran them against actual maps to see if we were close to any kind of military base or any kind of civilian air base. And there's no explanation, none that we had. We saw them appear. We saw them change direction. We saw them stay in one direction. We saw them stop moving. Just amazing, amazing things. And that was just one of the things we saw. I watched a man wear an EKG and I actually saw parts of his brain transform as he was having experiences that he believed were tied to some kind of some kind of uh paranormal or or a pan-dimensional phenomenon like I saw this stuff with my own eyes as part of this documentary effort. I have Michio Kaku in here recently who blew my mind.

Do you believe in God? Well, I believe in the God of Einstein. He believed in God, but not the God that intervenes in human affairs. It was the God of order, the God of simplicity and elegance. Einstein was asked the question, did the universe have a choice? Is it unique? So universes, you can create universes in an afternoon, but most of them are unstable. Most of them fall apart. Most of them don't work. Our universe is stable. It works. Everything fits together. And then the question is, what set off the bang? That's what we do for

a living. We have the big bang theory up to the point where the universe is going to explode why did it explode we think it was a quantum event and we are here because we are in the universe which decided to explode so einstein said was it all an accident and he thought no it could not have been an accident just when you start thinking about the stuff that that he does and the possibilities that there are and he's a data guy but also like he's a theoretical physicist so he has to he has to think before data on stuff and then try to see if there's data to support it right so you have all different types of ideas that he's found evidence for on much of it over the years. And one of the things that absolutely blows my mind is the multiverse idea.

And it's not like he's the guy who came up with that. It's been something that's been discussed and everything. But he explains it so well by kind of likening these types of universes to like a finely tuned radio meaning like the ray the reality we're in right now it's tuned just to the right spot that we're here and you and i are are right interacting with this table even if it's some sort of simulation or something like we are in existence together but all around us you know there's a dinosaur right there there's fucking animals right there. There's another version of us right here.

Like he always says, for example, I always assume there's like a thousand of me walking in the same room or some unlimited number of me, versions of me walking in that room. I am not the only thing there. experience like that do you think part of that is what they talk about with some of these people who have they're just off kilter enough like something they have something lucky in their brain that allows them to ever so slightly tap into another universe to see something that we can't yeah so here's here's what i learned right as part of this investigation in my own experience is that i always knew that energy was something we can measure. We can, we can measure light energy,

heat energy, sound energy, like electrical energy impulses. That's always been something we can measure. But what I never thought of that this investigation showed me is that energy changes just by who you put together. I myself am my own dynamo, my own battery, my own source of energy. You are also your own dynamo. But when we put our two dynamos within physical proximity of each

other, there's actually energy that gets shared. That's part of the shared reality that we have, right? Layer on top of that the fact that our brains are quantum computers. Your quantum computer is running off of your dynamo and creating energy that it puts out into the world around it, just like a battery puts out energy passively, right? My quantum computer is doing the same thing. So then we actually have quantum energy that's commingling as well. So one of the things that's been long theorized is that individuals have different experiences, even in the everyday world, because their dynamo and their quantum computer are different. And then when you put two people together, the experience they have together is different than the experience they would have by themselves. I think you've probably experienced that yourself.

If you've ever gone to the beach by yourself, it's a completely different experience than if you go to the beach with your friend or if you go to the beach with a girlfriend, if you go to the beach with your parents, right? But now there's actually like an energetic explanation for it. Now, instead of the beach, imagine what you're actually experiencing is some strange phenomenon. Whether you think you're seeing a UFO in the sky, or whether you're standing over some sort of energy vortex in the ground, whatever it might be that energy source that experience is then transformed by the fact that your quantum energy and your dynamo are combined with somebody else's and that idea that everybody has their own relationship with the phenomenon is a it's a theory that's been difficult to nail down and difficult to measure. What I was able to do as part of this investigation series with my co-host Paul and with Dr. Taylor and with Eric Bard is actually create a series of experiments that measured exactly that.

That measured, here's the energy of the phenomenon at this point in time with these people present. I'm getting a little confused though like are you saying that are you saying that this energy is is something that these specific people you're measuring can interact with and it's actually it relates back to like a ufo or are you saying it's some sort of otherworldly or not from this, you know, to go back to the multiverse thing, this reality that we know that we can at least see it on this chart right here and that's it? What we know is we know what the energy is of the reality as it exists right now, right? So for example, I went to a place in Arizona. I stood in a specific place that was a place that the Navajo Indians had long suspected was an area of a cursed area. Right.

So I stood on that precipice with my Navajo host and took three measurements. And I got three pieces of data, three different standalone pieces of data. That's what we would call a baseline. What were the measurements? One was UHF-VHF radio signal. One was organic radiation, and one was Geiger counter radiation. So non...

I know what all that is. Uranium-based radiation, right? Okay. So we got three baseline readings. I then left that location. i came back to the same location with my native american host again and my co-host for the for the investigation and two other investigators five people same location completely different readings on all three devices right not because anything had changed except for two hours had passed and more people were present

on an area that was known to be a cursed area by the local Navajo Indian tribes, right? When you can measure variations in energy like that, you have to ask the question, why? Why is that happening here? We don't know. We're not saying that it's related to UFOs. We're not saying that it's related to government experimentation. We're not saying it's related to solar flares. But what we are saying is we know for a fact that we can document anomalous behavior. Something is different at this location. We take those measurements all over the place, and four out of five places, they're the same, whether there's two people there or five people there.

But in this location, they're different. So you did go to places where there was nothing to see, but then some of them there was. Absolutely. And we have all the video footage of nothing happening at all that you could possibly ever want to see, right? And I got to give that credit to our producer, David Carr, because he wanted to make sure. He's like, we're going to catch everything every boring you know disappointing moment as well as any moments that are hopefully the opposite of boring and disappointing why do you think there's such a change in the narrative and a push you might say since, since 2017, since that New York Times report came out.

Because I do, I will say, I don't have access to the secrets of whoever does, if that even is the CIA or whatever it is, right? I don't have the access that places around the world have. But if I had access to things that I knew the public couldn't handle, and it's provable, you know, simulated the whole bit, they can't handle this. And then I had access to things that I knew they could that are very interesting, that have a lot of truth to them or all truth to them. I mean, this is how you define a limited hangout right here.

That's what I'm defining. Like, I could see why that is a very useful tool to use so my mind goes towards yes i do believe in the phenomenon that doesn't mean i believe every story there's a lot i poke holes in correct right but i i do think we're not alone i do think they've probably been here that's one place where i'm a little more i guess like extreme like i think they have but what we're being told and these guys like lou elizondo and christopher millen and stuff they're a part of a quote-unquote you know roll out the stuff people can handle and oh yeah look at this shiny object but let's not tell them about that do you think that's accurate um i would say that there is there is absolutely justifiable classified information

in multiple ways of of defining classified information government issue like government secrets military secrets alien secrets whatever right? When you talk about classified information, a big part of what makes it classified is that it cannot be released to the public, either because of how the public will react or because of how your enemies or how your enemies, for lack of a better word, would be able to, what they'd be able to learn from you from that information, right? So there's two reasons why you don't release

that information. You don't know how the public's going to react and you also don't want any of your enemies to get access to the information that you have. I think the big turning point happened, at least it happened for me, in 2021, when the Office of the director of national intelligence had to create an assessment on uaps and ufos for the congress but prior to that like it always

been a big question mark did cia ever actually participate in any of this stuff right it was a question nobody knew it's them yeah well, then after that report was released, after that assessment was released to Congress, there were tranches of documents that were declassified that were previously classified. Why were they classified? Either because of what the public would do with them or with what our enemies would do with them, right? That's why they were classified before. Now they're declassified.

And they're clearly CIA documents, DOD documents, FBI documents, NSA documents going back as far as the 1970s and before talking about collection efforts from China and from Russia and from all over Europe, French and German collection looking into UAPs and UFOs. That means the governments were spending real money to collect these secrets. Our government was spending real money collecting and classifying these secrets. And that all was released to the public in 2021 through that first tranche of reporting for the UAP task force. And now there's only more of an appetite from Congress to continue to dig into that. They're concerned because they want to make sure the skies above our country are safe, safe for commercial commercial airlines safe for national security reasons, etc Etc, but that doesn't negate the fact that there was real classified information about research into these topics that we were never made privy to I

Understand how significant something has to be to classify it and keep it a secret so the fact that that money and time and trained officers went into that collection effort for 50 years makes me that much more interested in being one of those officers that gets a chance to research it and collect it now. In your career, did you ever have access to, let's say, government secrets that were so big that humanity could never find out about it? Humanity is too big of a word. So I would say I have never had access to anything that would impact humanity.

I have absolutely had access to secrets that would impact how the American public would respond. What do you mean by that? Meaning the roles that I filled, the operations that I participated in, were operations that were relevant and impactful to Americans. They were relevant and impactful to other countries as well, but never humanity as a whole. Right. Meaning it could change the narrative on how Americans view certain foreign conflicts in the world if they found out about it. Correct. So as an example, Henry Kissinger, who was a famous politician under Nixon, the man who kind of brokered diplomacy between the United States and China, communist China, after Mao

Zedong took over. Yeah, how's that working out? Yeah. But Henry Kissinger is still alive. He's like 101 years old, I think, this year. Fucking guy won't die. And he just did an interview for The Economist, a UK-based newspaper, a UK-based news source.

And in that news report, in that interview that he did, he very openly discussed how the best path forward for the United States and China is for both countries to start a systematic approach of lying to their people. He said this publicly. what should happen is the United States and China should create secret advisory panels that coordinate with each other to de-conflict and de-escalate the conflict. But at the same time, public facing advisors should continue the same narrative and tell the people whatever they have been telling them for the last, you know, 15 years, so that you could essentially keep, you could protect and insulate the governments from looking like they're changing their approach to each other. So then public

outrage doesn't happen, but you also have a way of avoiding immediate conflict. The reason I say this is not because I think Henry Kissinger is wrong or I don't think he's evil, but I do think that what happened is in a moment of unique transparency, a, that's one way to put it. A trained diplomat has now told publicly, even though it was just in one article and in one news source, you know, but it's cited to Henry Kissinger.

He's basically shared that that is how governments work. They will lie to their people. There is strategic value in governments lying to their people because they want to keep the people calm. They want to keep the people controlled. They want to keep the people controlled. They want to keep the people satisfied, even though they know that they have to find a way to get real answers and real progress made

in, in issues of conflict. What he's talking about right there, at least the way I, the way I hear that is that whole keeping the public on a certain narrative i think you use the words so that they don't there's you might have not said uprise but they don't freak out or something like that it implies that this is a way to make sure that powerful politicians are able to keep their roles correct just like your friend the congress lady who said i'm not gonna go and talk about talk about term limits up there i don't want to do that and you're like what you just asked me what i want you to do like if people didn't hear that story but like that's what happens and it seems like a guy i mean that guy's a fucking living fossil and he's still you know relevant as hell if that doesn't show you that people hold on to powerful positions and

you know staying power over maybe even the overall good because like what he's saying is he's trying to like to give him some credit here he's trying to promote like hey let's not actually like let's chill let's not right fight right but the way he's doing it is not the simple way of just coming out and saying yo guys let's not fight and not worry about how the voters then vote he's doing fight and not worry about how the voters then vote. He's doing it by trying to protect how the voters then vote. So he's doing it underhanded. And how Chinese nationals

interpret their relationship with Xi Jinping as well. Because he's saying both countries should maintain the status quo and maintain the public narrative that they've set forth so that neither country looks like it's backing down from the other country.

He wants both China and the United States to continue looking strong in the eyes of their own people. But that's just the public facing narrative. In actuality, they would have secret advisory boards that work together, similar to what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis, to deescalate and avoid future conflict. This is wise diplomacy. Excuse me. You good? Need some water? We're making him sweat over there. Making the spy sweat.

Too much talking. It's okay. It's what you're here for. This is wise diplomacy, but it's not what people are used to anticipating or what people, it's a validation of the suspicion that people have about the way government controls information. Yeah, because you had said that before

when we had talked, like talking about why you left the CIA and stuff. I think it had something to do with they lie because they have to. And you were like, that's why I left. But at the same time, to be honest, what did you expect? I didn't leave because CIA lied. I left for personal reasons.

I left because they wanted me essentially to choose my service with CIA above my family. Yes, there was that. But there was the other side to it that you had CIA above my family. Yes, there was that, but there was the other side to it that you had talked about. Right, and then when I got out, I realized that the same techniques they taught us to manipulate our targets and our assets was the same technique

that they were using to motivate us through our career as well. There it is. Okay. Right, and then I realized I was being lied to and I was being manipulated just like I was trained to lie to and manipulate assets.

And that didn't feel good. Regardless, that was just validation after I left that it was a good idea to leave. Gotcha. But the point is still the same, right?

There are huge, huge groups of people in the United States that believe the government is actively lying to them. That believe information is intentionally being withheld from them, and that believe that they should be told in full transparency what's happening. And that's where they're wrong. I understand that. Correct. And that's where they're wrong, right? The fact that we have individual rights to privacy, right? Every American has a right to privacy means you have a

right to keep your secrets. We have to understand that the government has the right to keep its own secrets too. Just because you are an American doesn't mean the government has to be honest or open or transparent with you, right? Part of the trade-off in this relationship is that you trust the government and they protect you. That's kind of how it works. And that's frankly how it should work because the last thing I want is to have my government paralyzed because the 180 million adults in the United States can't reach a consensus on what they want the government to do. I kind of like the fact that we're a representative republic, even though for all the flaws and for all the challenges that we have,

we're way better off than some of the authoritarian countries out there. Which is what it comes back to. I mean, that's, you know, sometimes I feel like we get so lost in the muck and I'm guilty of it too. I mean, let's call it what it is. I have a podcast, like we talk about this shit right but you know even when when things get annoying in society with social media doesn't help with that at all you know we do still i truly believe we are still so much better off than other places and like we got to keep that rolling and if they're look if there's things that can bring us together that's what we got to do right and part of me does wonder if like part like part of finally rolling out at least some of the information with UFOs is kind of like, okay.

Some people will call this crazy. You're always going to have people like that. But like let's hop on the same team about something. I know James Fox has talked about that a bunch. This is a unifying type thing. I love that. And it could be – he talks about it from the lens of it's beyond just like unifying americans this can unify people around the world but you know i i think there has to be that other angle and and i of course i'd love to know the

secret and what it is and whatever but i understand if there are some things that again they've simulated behind the scenes that they're like i'm not talking about foreign policy right now i'm talking about like extraterrestrial shit where they're like humanity can't know this like humanity because this will this you know it'll be an existential question to people you know and that's where it gets like well who gets to make that decision you know so it gets stressful but you know you had a unique seat to you know not doing a tv show on some of this stuff and at the end of it without you know revealing some of the things that happened on the show have you that initial stance you gave explain like where you stood on

there actually being life out there do you think there is serious credibility to the fact that we have been visited now that's not where i am yet no what i will say is that i have now seen with my own eyes strange phenomenon that i had never seen before and i have seen just incredible data results that don't make sense for what should be there but what i don't know is whether the energy anomalies the the strange phenomena that i've seen were they there from the beginning like the beginning of the planet and we just only recently found them or did something happen of a like a global or meteorological event did something happen that changed the makeup of the ground that a meteor strike and with that meteor it brought with it some kind of some kind of uh material or chemical or something from some other part of the universe

and then the phenomenon started or was there some sort of visit from some other being that came and left some residue behind or even is that is that being or is that vehicle still here and that's what's causing the phenomenon those are questions i want to continue researching right because they're natural logical follow-up questions but the the mission for this first investigation was just to go out and see are are there more locations? And do those locations have commonality with Skinwalker Ranch? And we went to eight different locations over the course of our three-month investigation. And we found multiple of them that were very clear correlative data to what they had at Skinwalker Ranch.

So much so that the Skinwalker Ranch team wants to continue investigating in those advanced locations. So the question becomes whether or not Brandon and whether or not kind of the, the people who watch the show, whether or not the feedback from all parties is that we should continue the investigation. Hmm. To be determined.

TBD. And so that's on history channel is that what night of the investigation. To be determined. TBD. And so that's on History Channel. What night of the week is that air? A new episode will drop every Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Central. You have 10, 12 episodes? Nine total episodes, yeah. Okay.

And then we'll figure out if you're doing more after that. Yeah, we should find out relatively quickly because I know Brandon is very eager to go, but there's more than one donor when it comes to running large investigations like this. So Brandon's the most public, but there are other people who have to decide whether or not money is going to get put into the continuing investigations. Very interesting. Yeah, I'm curious to see what that is. And again, I saw the first episode, like you're really good at it. You're born to do this for sure.

Like if this evidence does really go somewhere and you continue to track it around the world, maybe in places you actually can go, I know that's something we'll talk about on here for sure. Yeah, that would be badass, man. But I appreciate the constant support and I absolutely appreciate the fact that you've been encouraging from the beginning, man.

And I love coming back here. I love seeing you grow, and I love watching the Julian Dory podcast grow. That's been super exciting. I appreciate that, man. It's definitely getting there. It's been, I think the first time you were here, we were in the kitchen downstairs afterwards,

and I joked, I'm like, you ready to be the biggest spy in the world? And then it kind of, you know, those clips, it kind of started to happen. So it wasn't surprising to me to see you finally get your way around there to spread the good word of the CIA on the public platforms that everyone now reads into six ways to Sunday. Well, there's plenty of bad things to say about CIA too, but there's no reason to short them on the good stuff they do. And that's the thing. People don't hear, a lot of people, they have a predisposed, like they either love you or they hate you.

I've been like that my whole life. You know what? That's what it's like for all of us everybody you meet either loves you or hates you yeah yeah but i think it's on a whole nother level when you had access to secrets and things people are just gonna think what they're gonna think but if people actually listen to the episodes we've done and all the other podcasts you've done now be it continuing on concrete lex friedman tom bill you who else have you been man sean ryan oh of course sean shout out sean yeah uh i mean there's there's there's some great episodes i've been able to participate with what i'm saying is the commonality is that you are unafraid to inject your opinions which don't always fly in the in the realm of like oh we're doing great work over there and i think people should hear that more

because it's not just as straightforward as like, hey, yay, CIA. I joke about it. It is kind of funny when you talk about some things like privacy and things like that. But, you know, we won't go there right now.

I think we're already close. It's bad boy up. But Andy, I appreciate you coming up here. As always, can't wait to do it again. Hopefully we'll be in the New York studio next time we do it. You got it, brother. Thanks again.

Oh, Leslie, thanks for being here too. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to do it again. Hopefully we'll be in the New York studio next time we do it. You got it, brother. Thanks again. Oh, Leslie, thanks for being here too. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.