Julian Dorey Podcast - 😳 [VIDEO] - CIA Undercover Spy EXPOSES How The Agency (Really) Works • Andrew Bustamante • 97

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

(***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 Government. 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. Guy’s life is a movie and his hair is also real. You can check out Andy’s Podcast, Everyday Espionage, here: http https://everydayspy.com/podcast   And His YouTube Here: https://youtube.com/c/EverydaySpy   Also, Take His Spy Skills Quiz Here: https://everydayspy.com/quiz ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Paramilitary; CIA Theory on 3 Types of People in the World; Good vs Bad; Maslow’s Hierarchy; Information Warfare 30:45 - Andy’s Work At CIA; “Real Spies”; Dark Thoughts; Types of Traits CIA wants in recruits; Undercover Agents in US; Rigging the game 52:32 - Where Andy went undercover; How CIA Agents approach Spying; How Andy cultivated assets; How Spies assess people; Tech & Intelligence 1:10:56 - Spotting mistakes to catch spies;false flags; The Girl In Red; Inglourious Basterds & The CIA 1:22:42 - The Story of How The CIA Recruited Andy; The CIA’s Testing Procedures; CIA Agents are above the law; Never staying where you’re targeting; Andy’s undercover experience with his wife; Reverse Psychology 1:40:11 - Andy tells the story about the time his cover was blown; Why The CIA never wants to lose an officer; The 3 different types of surveillance; Julian and Andy debate CIA Torture 1:55:15 - Other countries using the United States’ freedom of democracy against it; Andy explains why the Pilgrims are a myth; Andy reveals CIA’s opinion on voting rights; Nobody ever hears about the W’s 2:10:16 - Julian and Andy have an intense debate on privacy rights, Snowden / Stellar Wind, and everything in between; Andy explains why it might be time to leave America; The CIA, groupthink, and why they pick very specific people; Military Industrial Complex discussion 2:47:28 - Why Andy is closely watching Russian Debt right now; Andy breaks down the Russia Ukraine War and where Putin’s initial objectives stand; Why Andy thinks Nuclear Bombs aren’t off the table; Can you stop a nuke? 3:05:54 - Andy provides intel on Taiwan and their impending China problem; Why CIA loves anxiety; Andy’s opinion of the CIA today ~ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're a nation of immigrants. That same population of immigrants has built the country that's here now. Yes. We've built a country that gives our executive power the right to do what they do, and our judicial power the power to do whatever they do. But if you keep giving it more and more and more, you eventually become what you came from. Which means that it's probably time to immigrate again. Oh, fuck. What's cooking, everybody?

If you are on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button. Hit that like button on the video. And as always, would love to hear from you down in the video comments section as well. To everyone who has been sharing around the links to these episodes and just the show in general with friends and on social media, thank you so much. That word-of-mouth marketing is the best thing we can get, so let's keep that rolling. To everyone who is listening on Apple or Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, be sure to hit the follow button on either one of those platforms and leave a five-star review if you have a second. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. Now, I am joined in the bunker today by a real-life former undercover CIA spy

who has seen some shit, and his name is Andrew Bustamante. I've been very much looking forward to talking with Andrew. He has been on my friend Danny Jones' podcast, Concrete, Concrete with a K, three times before. I've listened to all those episodes and man, is he a great guest. This guy is willing to stamp his name behind things that are unpopular, things that might be popular and everything in between. And that is really all you can ask for talking to someone who did such a high level sensitive job with the government

in the past that usually doesn't have a lot of transparency around it. So I really, really appreciated this conversation. He will be back in a few months when he's in town again. I'm looking forward to that one, but we got to a lot today. So buckle up and enjoy. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendfire. fire. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where's the news? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.

I don't know, some kind of crazy fly wave. No, no, you look good. You got like the whole, like, what is this? What was the term you used for that? Lion mane. The lion mane. Yeah, my kids call it an owl nest. An owl nest. I just call it like Jesus.

I don't know if that's a compliment, the owl nest. The lion mane's a lot better. That's why I call it the lion mane, man. It's my kids, they're nine and five. You know know i'm the coolest person in the world to everybody but them and that's not even true because you know kids always think you're the coolest person in the world but did they know what you did yeah my son my son knows what my wife and i did and he thinks it's super cool um but he doesn't think you're cool right he thinks it's cool and we could have been

cool if we would have kept doing it and so that that's the nine-year-old then i take it yeah so the five-year-old doesn't have any concept of that yeah she doesn't i mean she understands enough to know that like you know spies she wants to play spy all the time she's the one that's got the chance like if my son goes into this kind of work he'll be the guy making the disguises he's super artistic if my daughter goes into this work she she's gonna be the one, you know We're in the disguise and and speed roping down from like a helicopter, right? That's what she's gonna do. She's badass and that was you That was me but not nearly as badass as that a lot of that's paramilitary, right?

What do people mean when they say that people throw around that term paramilitary within the context of the cia when we say like paramilitary what does that refer to so it it means people who are highly trained elite military are then also uh given elite intelligence capabilities which allows them to now work independently from the military right that's what the paramilitary means so like in afghanistan after the towers went down in 0102 when they say oh paramilitary operation that was a bunch of agents then on the ground technically so a paramilitary can be can be intelligence it can be military it can be private sector like mercenaries it basically means individuals who use military skills outside of the military in small groups with no military support. That's essentially what it takes to be paramilitary.

So military-style shooting, military weapons, military tactics, military skills without the support of the U.S. military behind it or any formal national military behind it see when you start explaining that my mind's racing a little bit because you and i were talking for a while before this like in the car after you got in from the airport about the whole private versus public sector of intelligence and at some point today like i'm sure that'll come up where it's relevant but i don't want to i don't want to bury the lead here with who you are and what's going on so first of all thank you for being here very excited for this yeah i know dude i'm excited to be here and secondly i obviously heard you on danny's podcast concrete which is a great podcast people should check that out and i will say you've been on there three times right yeah three times it's amazing to see too how how he's grown the mess of my hair along with danny's subscribers i would love to

say that there's some kind of correlation there but there might you might not be able to cut it i never thought of that but that might be a thing though but the last podcast you did with him was one of the best podcasts i've ever heard that's awesome and i was explaining to you that the reason for that was you have a way of first of all not just giving some bullshit top line bureaucratic answer to stuff you give very well reasoned thought out answers and most importantly you make and this isn't the perfect way to put it but i'm trying to say it right you make people choose a pill right with every decision it's like well you are it's never going to be all good yeah and most

of the time it's not gonna be all bad either right which one is less bad less bad yeah the lesser of two evils thing is a very intelligence tactic because you got to think even the even espionage in any form and I'm I'm former CIA so one of the things that I've always valued is the idea that when you have to do the right thing, it's never the right thing for everybody. You have to prioritize. You have to prioritize who is the one that you care about right now.

Doesn't matter what it is, man. You know, two people die or two people are in a car accident, you gotta prioritize which one gets out first, right? Two people are stuck in a fire, you got to prioritize which one gets out first, right? Two people are stuck in a fire, you got to prioritize which one you get out first. There is the idea of equality that we throw around so much is patently false. Equality is not achievable. What people want is fairness and equity, but equality is beyond anybody's reach ever yeah sometimes i feel like

we get a little caught up in the terminology with that but people also like to put hard top line answers black and white on everything and frankly most things in life literally most of them that's not the case like should you do heroin or not okay yeah that's probably like yeah don't do that there there's some things but you know you look at god damn i mean fuck you look at geopolitical issues and you start to get to things like that and it's like well nothing's ever a simple answer it's it's always what is not to go right to the negative but what is the damage control in this situation yeah you know that the truth is that human beings want a simple answer there's a there's a cognitive loop that plays in your head where it demands closure if you don't have closure to that loop it leaves you continuing to ask questions that goes back to like caveman days fight or flight cavemen were constantly like our ancestors and even us we have not evolved past

our what's known as a paleo mammalian brain a cortex that connects to our spine that's constantly making us ask the question do i run or do i fight like do i stay or do I go? So and because of that people hunger cognitively independent of creed religion age education level whatever what people want is closure and When they get a simple answer it satisfies that cognitive hunger for Closure and that's why they don't question it. They just run with it You think they also want the chase though to some people want the chase, right? cognitive hunger for closure. And that's why they don't question it. They just run with it. You think they also want the chase though too.

Some people want the chase, right? Like I, I try to teach people that there's three kinds of people. There's, there's sheep, there's wolves, and then there's wolves that eat wolves, right?

Sheep eat grass, wolves eat sheep. But then there's also a special kind of wolf that eats wolves. It's that third person is a person who's in it for kind of wolf that eats wolves it's that third person is a person who's in it for the chase there's an example of that so spies i would say are an example of that and then you also have criminals out there who are an example of that you've got depending on the crime i guess or yeah what they do yeah right depending on the target sheep are an easy target right so if you got someone who chases sheep like what's the challenge in that that's just a hungry wolf those are the

wolves that end up fat and bloated and right they sleep half the week right you got business owners some business owners are wolves some business owners are wolves that eat wolves man like what i have found is that the population of that third category is so small that when you find them if if you're one of them then you've made like a friend for life because they can be good good because they recognize that good or bad is irrelevant they recognize that it's all about the chase right it's all about not choosing the easy option you know matt cox matt cox and i met and became pretty fast friends not because of anything other than the fact that he was a freaking criminal yeah and i was a criminal

legalized by a code in the united states a hold on a second yeah you were a criminal legalized by a code in the united states what do you mean by that that's what a spy is dude a spy is given the ability to do criminal acts for in the best interest of national security which you're not purposely calling good or bad because you don't know what is well not because i don't know because i know that if you look at it through one lens it's good if you look at it through a different lens it's bad it's three dimensions your 3d your 3d goggles right you got the red lens and the blue lens close one eye you just see red you miss half the picture right close the other eye and you see blue you

miss half the picture you got to look through it through both eyes to have the 3d vision there's some things in life that are obvious where you can say okay well that's bad you know you look at the most extreme examples of the worst of humanity you see like genocide and stuff like that okay that's bad but i do often think about how we interpret things or message them because it's like oh we're the beacon of democracy we're america and all that i believe in that i agree that democracy is the the best system and that, but is that our own bias going into that versus are there – I would argue there aren't a lot of people who have ever been happy in communism or something. But let's pick some other type of system, some democratic socialism or something like that. Could that be better just based on how they see it, where they are? Maybe someone is living an average of 70 years

as opposed to 77 here but they're happier i don't know you know it's all relative yeah it's funny the the biggest uh idea that i'm against is the idea of absolutism the idea that there's any best any worst even the like better and and less better or better and less good are relative. Everything is relative. So when you, when people come to the table, arguing some kind of absolute outcome, one of my favorites is that America is the best. America is the best. Democracy is the best. Our democracy is the best. Our system's the best. It's just not true. That's, that's an absolute statement. And if you look's an absolute statement and if you look at that absolute statement through the context of history what you've seen is we've lost

influence we've lost wealth we've lost power we've lost status we're we're one of three uh global power competitors right now fair i agree just as a clarification do you mean you said that's not true would it be better to say you can't prove that that's true versus the absolute and i may be twisting your words if i am i apologize but like versus the absolute they're like oh it's not true so the apps so yeah what i'm saying is you can't prove That america is the best. Okay, what you can prove is that america has the largest economy You can prove that america has the newest model fighter jet Right, but you can't actually prove that america is the happiest you can't prove that china is the happiest even though they claim to be The happiest right? Yeah, it's it there's we've got to remember that

Human nature drives all things and what is the american democratic system at its at its highest echelons it's just a group of human beings and those human beings had a process that they went through to get there so that means the national interest the best interest of the united states what is the united states here to preserve it's here to preserve itself right that's just a giant human being right self-preservation rules and that gets into groupthink ideology with anything right including what you may perceive as good we're getting complicated i like that though like this this is what i mean like you make you make people's fry, but it's searing in the pan, and it needs to happen. And I'm not talking about philosophy, right?

I am one of the people that you will hear lambast philosophy. I think philosophy is pretty useless. What's the purpose of talking about the purpose? There's no purpose. It's just wasted oxygen, right? So what's the difference here? So when you philosophize, you intentionally drive towards no conclusion.

I'm driving to a conclusion. And what's your conclusion? My conclusion is that if you believe in absolutes, you probably need to look at yourself and ask yourself if you yourself are absolutely wrong by driving for absolutes, right? That's fair. Instead, look at yourself and say,

what is rigid true what is rigid and what is flexible and then if you can make use of the flexible thing then it's yours to make use of if the rigid thing is in your way use the flexible thing to get around the rigid thing i i think it's also to speak about absol, I think it's also the lens through which you're looking at philosophy. Are you looking at it through the modern-day American college system of philosophy, or are you looking at it through, like, Socrates or something like that? That's true. And again, that's a big throwback, obviously. Shout out to Socrates.

But, you know, there is a difference there even. But I see what you're saying. We do, and, like, i struggle with that sometimes here when i'm talking with people because what do we do we i talk with people from across culture we're pointing things out we're discussing things that are happening and i often say i don't have a solution for a lot of this stuff sometimes i do feel like we all fall into the trap of just like pointing out problems yep but from your career seat being in the cia and we're going to get in a second to what you did i want to hear about that but like your job was to was to have a final

report on something and be able to say hey this based on the information here's the probability here's what the data suggests and then again it doesn't have to get into well what's good versus bad that's a different conversation but the actual element of completing what the job or mission is is that's what's paramount right yeah so the solution just like you were saying right we all had a solution that we had to achieve an objective that we had to provide and that's that is the thing that gets people derailed there is no value in identifying the problem not unless the objective is to solve the problem if the objective is just to identify the problem then nothing happens there's no there's no productive outcome there you've got to work towards solving the problem that you find and the the person who does that, we've also been talking through the morning about value.

The person who can actually solve the problem, that's a person that brings value to the table. The person who identifies the problem didn't really bring any value to the table. I don't disagree in the sense that, like when we talk about like problem solvers, what's a prime example in culture? Silicon Valley. what did a lot

of these for better or worse depending on the person or situation looking at what did these people do they went and found the issue and then created the thing that could plug the issue up right so if they just went and said oh you know in 1985 we shouldn't be typing on a typewriter anymore that's really inconvenient. All the buttons, they're like hard to press down. You got to replace the ink when you fuck up a word. If they had just done that and not created Microsoft Word at the time, then what did you really do?

You did nothing. Well, there's 10,000 people working on a typewriter at the time that were doing that every day. Every day they'd go to work. These things are so stupid. Oh, why can't this be fixed? Why can't somebody find a better way? Somebody gonna make a bunch of money someday how many times have you heard even yourself say someone's gonna make a bunch of money someday if they just figure this

out instead of just dedicating yourself to becoming the person who makes a bunch of money yeah figuring the thing out which you can't do on everything but yes like if it's something that's near and dear to you the best way to do is scratch and itch you know the the best way to build yourself and unlock your potential is to scratch the itch that you're itching yourself every day right you know and and there's nothing that like even from your end i'm sure if we got into like the private contractor talk and stuff like that and and the things you see now which i was blown away by some of the stuff you were telling me with the government and how they operate like yeah guys who leave the government who were spies or

government con they're becoming government contractors but did certain important high level government shit now they want to profit off of it and they can because they have a rare skill and so they realize like oh i was on the other side of the fence i know that the government doesn't always have the best resources on X or Y. So I actually know how to do that and I can get a bunch of people together and train them how to do that. So now we're going to plug that hole and do that. Right. Yeah, exactly right, man.

It's all about realizing that when you have a solution, you can profit off that solution. And the profit itself isn't bad because when you profit off that solution and the profit itself isn't bad because when you profit off a solution what you're doing is you're actually funding future solutions it really drives me crazy when people think that things should be done for no profit or there's something wrong with maximizing profit always you wish I if you don't maximize profit then what are you gonna use to invest in making more solutions right if you don't maximize profit then what are you gonna if you don't make a profit then how are you going to use to invest in making more solutions right if you don't maximize profit then what are you going if you don't make a profit then how are you going to continue serving the

population that you're serving the idea that everything should be free or the idea that everything should be discounted to the lowest possible level or you make the minimum profit those arguments are just they're short-sighted because no one's considering the fact that predominantly people point out problems instead of fixing them and it also can have variance to it because like this is where a positive of capitalism comes into play so let's say that there were i'm just going to make some up right now let's say that there were some sort of disease that for whatever reason only attacked people who made no money, right? And they're poor. And it was attacking a lot of people.

And it was killing them. Versus all the other diseases that happen that attack anyone, right? And that may be covered by insurance versus the first one that's not. If you could find a way to make sure you profit minimally to, you know, just enough to keep the lights on to get the innovation and the top line medical doctors in there to do what they have to do to create some sort of drug or some sort of thing that could prevent the initial disease the one i was talking about that all the poor people got and then profit more off of the one where you have representation of people who can pay for things right so therefore increase the profit margin on i don't know a diabetes drug or something like that well then you should be able to do it but

if you then if you said oh no we're going to try to not profit off either one then you're not going to have a sustainable system because where does the money even come in how do you incentivize those doctors to come in if they're not even getting paid because there's no money to pay them right so i think that your your point is sound i would also say that the thing that capitalism does right is that it's that's already in capitalism right the people who can pay more this is the problem that people have with capitalism the people who can pay more will pay more that's just the way it is yes but so it's not about who can afford it it's about the business itself and who they're targeting with their product line right so if in your example if

you create a drug and the drug can fix you name it whatever let's say it's a drug let's say there's a pill a real pill not like a promised pill not a marketed pill but a real pill that can take away obesity right a real pill that when you take that pill immediately your body returns boom to your perfect bmi perfect health levels right exactly the right combination for your genetic code so you have exactly the right amount of body fat and muscle and mass and everything else right if that could be created who would it be marketed to i'm guessing wealthier people exactly right so they have the ability to have vanity and they have choice but everybody has vanity everybody would buy that pill if that pill went out on the market for two dollars everybody would buy it but if you were to call if you were to make that pill a thousand dollars

instead and only one percent of people bought it now you have one million what is that nine one one hundred thousand people who buy a thousand dollar pill instead of instead of 15 million who buy a two dollar pill right and then you see what happens what if you double that price again make a ten thousand right that same one percent would still buy it people who had 10 000 dollars in money it's markets yeah no it's you're right i mean there's there's certain inherent truths supply and demand is one of those truths it just it is but nobody wants to look at it that way that's that's what's frustrating is so many of the arguments out there aren't considering aren't considering the human nature of thriving versus surviving just like nobody nobody is out there saying i

just want to survive man that's not what they're saying they if they're not surviving right now then they're saying i just want to survive as soon as they hit survival what they're thinking is i want to thrive how do i get more it changes that's my that's something i should have said in there it changes their threshold right so when you are when when i made the vanity point when you're very very poor you're literally focused on like where's my next meal coming from how do i how do i survive maybe you're not saying it like that but that's what you're doing so you're less concerned about well does does my face look great or whatever you you literally you're at the bare minimum standard whereas like you live in a decent house you got a family you work a nine to five you know you're off at five

you're chilling you got a little discretionary income to spend oh you know what i don't like that that blotch on my face there's a way to fix that right yeah let's spend some money and do it and that's why you know you see instagram culture and everything everyone's competing with each other over that because we got our society long before instagram in fairness but like we've gotten our society to a point of comfort for a very very long time now you know we've always had wars and stuff around the world but we haven't had one here we've been all a world power since at least world war ii definitely before that but like the preeminent considered since then and so we've had three generations four generations grow up in that and so the idea that

like you know like what you see in ukraine or something right now that's that's foreign to us we're like what the fuck like that would never happen here and so that affects every bit of psychology in our every day including like what we decide to prioritize is like life or death yeah we call it in our world we call them first world problems it's they call it that in this world too it's it's funny it's funny but that's exactly what a first world problem is right it's a problem that's in this world too it's it's funny it's funny but that's exactly what a first world problem is right it's a problem that's not there's a there's maslow's hierarchy you've heard of maslow's heart hierarchy right remind me i have heard of that so so maslow was a sociologist i want to say he was a sociologist he may have been a psychiatrist but this old

brilliant psychologist or sociologist whatever he he was, created this pyramid, this hierarchy of needs. Pyramids, triangles are a really powerful visual tool. So you've probably heard me refer to triangles multiple times. I know in concrete I refer to a triangle. So in Maslow's hierarchy, every level of the triangle, and I think there's five levels of the triangle, have to do with human need. A human need that you can only achieve if you achieve whatever's on the lowest level so the bottom level of maslow's hierarchy

is uh is basic human needs food shelter water yes okay the next one above that what if i told you i could add two hours to your day every day for the rest of your natural life so long as that may be is that something you might be interested in? I'd be very interested in that. Well, listen up. Get the 8 Sleep Pod Pro Cover, and I'm going to add two hours to your day becauseizes your sleep stages throughout the night around you and make sure that you wake up after the deepest, best sleep possible with the most energy possible to attack the day. So if you use the link in my description, along with the code TRENDIFYER

at checkout, it's very, very important. Use that promo code T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. You will get $150 off your own Eight Sleep Pod Pro cover today. And welcome to the rest of your life where you have two extra hours on every single day. You're welcome. Is some kind of relationship, right? So if you have food, water, and whatever else, then the next thing you're looking for is some kind of relationship, something that's a community or a peer or a lover,

something that creates a community of people, increases resources, gives you increased security it fulfills a need that's not as important as basic needs but still a viable human need so bottom and this just me interpreting bottom is survival yep middle is meaning not middle the next second sorry second is more like connection which is a part of the meaning of life correct so basically everything everything this is exactly what we're talking about first world problems right after you get past the first to the first uh base of the triangle everything is a first world problem right who i'm connected with that's a first world problem do i do i trust my neighbor is my doctor being honest with me

right like whatever is my boss does my boss really he should my boss be paying me more money first world problems buddy let me make this a facebook status there are there are billions of people who don't have the bottom rung of that triangle yeah and we don't think about them when do we think about them we think about them when we're told to think about them we were talking about ukraine earlier right and i the only have you heard people talk about how i'm tired of ukraine i'm fed up with ukraine like everything's russian news it's all this it's all that it's overdone it's it's over of course yeah it's been what seven weeks seven weeks? Yeah, I know. That's first world problems right there.

Do you know what I mean? Unbelievable. There are entire cities. I think I read that the estimated damage to rebuild in Ukraine today, today, and their war is far from over, is $65 billion. That sounds low, even. And that's because it sounds- And that's a lot. And that's a lot but that's a lot right and we and you don't

ever hear people really talking about the fact that that ukrainians have been dying and fighting with russians and russians have been dying too absolutely since 2014. yeah right everybody's focused on february 24th i didn't even by the way when i had david saturn here he told me about that i knew about the after what's it called yeah after Maidan thing, when they did Crimea, that was a bulletless takeover. They basically walked in the building and said, this is ours now. Yes. But the whole Donbass and Lugansk, I always get that. Is it Lugansk or Lugansk?

Luhansk, I think. That's like a dyslexia thing in my head with that word. I don't know what it is. But he was telling me that, I think, over the year period after that, like 14,000 people died. Like there were real battles going that you didn't hear about that here. Nobody. Yeah. Because it's not interesting to us here for all like unless somebody tells you it's interesting.

So what ends up happening in the United States is like media got onto this thing. People gleaned onto this, you know, the president was releasing intelligence reports. President does not release intelligence reports. If you believe that intelligence reports are being released to the public, you're falling for something called information warfare because what the United States government is doing is waging an information war against Russia.

If you speak English, which many educated Russians do, they want a very unified message to go across English... English language airwaves, so that the people inside Russia are getting that message, hearing that news, being demoralized by the fact that they're losing 14 to 1 trained Russian troops to Ukrainian troops. Right? Like, you cannot trust English language media from almost any outlet right now, because the entire narrative is being

controlled between NATO and the United States, all English level, all English language right now, that entire narrative is being controlled by one unified body. So there is no independent news source coming out right now. Does that make sense? Yes. And I could dig all the way into that, but this is a good segue to give people some context here. So they're like, wait, I know this guy's a CIA agent,

but what the hell do you know? So when I hear you give an answer like that, my head immediately goes to, and you were a part of that system in a way, right? So you know what this is. And also, by the way, you know what this is and also by the way you know trade-offs too i think about that because i can't know that i didn't work in intelligence i gotta talk to guys like you and hope you're telling me the truth right but like

you know for example that like if you're on the other side and you're working some sort of geopolitical case going on around the world you know where you may find it in your best interest to complete that mission you talked about to deflect or defer from the actual issue at hand to gain an upper hand advantage in the informational warfare and by the way i understand and accept the fact that that has to be a part of how governments do their job, especially I have to root for the one that I'm living in. Exactly. So I'm a realist in that I do want spying to happen. I do want the CIA to be able to do things.

I try to balance that with, well, all right, how far are we going here? And that's where I'll criticize because I also want to hold it to a high standard. But if you wouldn't mind, can you tell me about your CIA career and tell people – I mean first of all, did you always want to join the CIA? Yeah. So I was an NCS, which is – that was called at the time the National Clandestine Service. The NCS fell under CIA. There's multiple different directorates under CIA. Is that like Jose Rodriguez? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yep. So NCS is sometimes called the DO.

I think right now it's called the DO, the Directorate of Operations. Name changes, whatever it is. Either way, we're operations focused, which means we're the group that creates and executes all the field operations controlled by CIA. And CIA is the primary central, the primary intelligence organization for the United States in prosecuting and collecting foreign intelligence. That's the mission of the CIA is to go. You used the word prosecuting. What do you mean by that? Like collecting, going out and making it happen because that's what i think more like you're you're trying to gather all the information so that you can make informed diplomatic decisions at the government level correct so there's two ways of collecting right there's a person who goes out and like you pick up

like the acorns that have fallen from the trees you go up and you pick up and then there's a person who goes out there and shakes the tree right when you go out there and shake the tree to make the apples fall so you can collect them that's that's where i think of the word prosecution you go out there and you take active active measures it's using to use an old kgb term right active measures so uh so yeah i was an ncs field officer or an ncs operations officer that worked in the field to collect intelligence. And you were a real spy. We're all real spies.

That's the thing, right? Hollywood makes you think that only the field operative who's undercover, deep undercover, that's the only spy. Spies are, they come in all shapes and sizes

and all varieties. From linguists to logistics people. We even have couriers, right? There's people who live and work undercover who just analyze information, right? They're all spies. They're all living a life where they have to lie, not just to their closest friends and family, but they're actually given government authorization to lie to everybody. They lie to the IRS. IRS doesn't know when you're a CIA officer. IRS thinks that you're whatever you say you are. What did they think you were? I can't. Was your cover? You can't say that. Okay, fair.

That's one of those areas where we don't ever get a divorce. Hey, anytime, anytime, I'm going to ask the question. So you just tell me today, like, no, no, no. Fair enough. Either that or, yeah, that's just the best answer that I can make. Because FBI and CIA will watch this interview if you didn't already know that i i kind of assume i assume that everything i've ever done as someone who creates content is pretty much fair game it's fair game yeah exactly including things that aren't public so exactly so one of the things that we're taught to do in that operations world is is

become or rather to embrace because they hire us because we already have it something known as moral flexibility ethical flexibility what a word it's it's not something that makes people comfortable and that's totally fine i was telling you earlier like when i talk about this stuff and it makes people uncomfortable they're not my people like you have you can click you can click next you can stop this youtube interview you don't have to listen i hope they keep following you but they don't listen to me it's totally fine with me right there's plenty of cynics out there it's always going to be the case yeah i'm not worried about it they still listen they don't they want a minute they still they'll say that guy

afterwards but they're tuned in there we go so once you learn once once you learn the phrase for what you've always had which is moral flexibility or ethical flexibility, right? When you're that kind of person, a person like me that grows up always thinking like, well, I could do that bad thing under this context. Maybe it's not too terrible if I think about this. All those people have dark thoughts and we never feel comfortable admitting our dark thoughts to other people. Everyone has that. Everyone has that, but not to the same degree sure threshold yeah exactly yes we call it baseline right some people have a baseline where there's where they think negatively a lot negative thoughts

about themselves negative thoughts about the world that's cool that's very typical not a lot of people have dark thoughts dark and negative are not the same thing, right? Negative means, oh, I'm stupid. Oh, I'm ugly. Oh, I should have said this or I should have said that, right? Embarrassment. That's all negative stuff. Dark stuff is like, how would I go about actually killing a person and not getting caught?

Right? What would I have done differently if I was a person robbing that bank? Right? I think when people see these stories, though, those thoughts go through their head like, damn, like, how do you even be a serial killer? Like, I've looked at stories like that. Like, I wonder how that would go. And I guess that's a dark thought. But it's human nature. Once you react to something, you want to you want to understand the experience. No, no, No, I don't disagree with you. I think there's lots of people who just stay away from it. Right? Like, I bet somebody who's been raised in the church, who's a very hard-charging, like, you know, conservative church person, they would feel guilty even thinking about the fact

that they have the dark thought, and they might immediately turn to, like, prayer and self-ridicule. They might go immediately to negative thoughts, just by virtue of the fact they had a dark thought even enter their mind. Then there's the people like you and me who explore the dark thoughts yeah lean into the dark definitely find the few friends that were like have you ever thought about what you would do and then we turn it into coffee coffee shop conversation yeah right that's a

different breed of person so cia finds you the the whole purpose of their psychological battery is not to find out how intelligent you are. It's how high-function for you to explain it So that other people could think about it as well is the concept The misconception as you say that the cia only hires the smartest people and when we say smartest people It's a relative term, but we don't think of it that way enough because we think of smart as like Oh got a 1600 on the sat or something like that And as I told you some of the dumbest people I know got a 1600 on the SAT or something like that. And as I told you, some of the dumbest people I know got a 1600 on the SAT because they can't understand their fellow human. They can't pick up on social cues. They can't, they don't, they have poor interpersonal interactions

so they can't ever rise up in certain places. You know what I mean? So when I've always thought as smart, I've never looked at it that way. Some of the smartest people I know probably looked at the SAT and said, I'm not even fucking doing this. know what i mean yeah so for you to to explain that as far as like the cia what they're looking for you know what do you think the order of ranking is like are they is there still an element where they're looking to have at least some good intellect in there i assume that has to be at least a part of it so keep in mind too the cia is not just one

skill set it's multiple skillsets. Like I was telling you, analysts, linguists, operators, targeters, you name it. There's a whole slew of different people now. So each person, if you were in charge of CIA and you knew that you needed 12 different kinds of people, you would create a custom kind of recipe or a playbook for each of those 12 types. And then you would push that out to your hiring managers and your hiring managers would push that out. So that's how it works. So it's not like there's one priority that all 12 different varieties are looking for. So if we focus just on people who have to execute operations in the field, so let's take off the other 11 types and talk about just my skill set

just and this would be what you corrected earlier as people saying this is the only type of spy this is your traditional james bond your traditional uh uh who was the lady from alias uh sydney bristow this is your james bond your sydney bristow your this is your super jack preacher yeah yeah yeah right tom cruise people look at that person and they assume they've got to be good looking they assume they've got to be super smart and they assume if you're good looking and super smart then you know that's the that's the core foundation for you to become a cia operative and what i'm saying is that's that's not how it works at all so if anything cia does not want you to be good looking when you walk look at me i'm not i'm not good looking if you

think i'm good looking i appreciate it that's good you're not bad looking guy but but i'm forgettable looking that's what makes it good aside from the hair right now the hair makes it not forgettable right but everything else is fairly forgettable right right? That's what CIA wants in a physical person. Somebody who can walk in and walk out of a room and be utterly forgotten. Even me, I am growing my hair. I like my hair for my own reasons. It's my own personal form of rebellion against years of working for the man.

But even with this hair- You didn't have this in the CIA? Even with this hair, I can still be totally forgettable, right? I embrace and enjoy anonymity. A lot of us appreciate anonymity, even with this hair i can still be totally forgettable right like like it's i i embrace and enjoy a non-anonymity like a lot of us a lot of us appreciate anonymity even though we secretly hope that we'll one day be famous but cia wants people who are forgettable and then do they want people who are intelligent absolutely do they want people of above average intelligence absolutely

is that their primary concern for a field officer? No. Because a super smart person is going to know when they're up against odds that are impossible. And when you put someone who's so smart that they know the odds are impossible, they don't do it. They don't do the work. So we always joke that we're looking for somebody who's just dumb enough to try. That's what CIA is looking for. Someone who's just dumb enough that they're going to look at the situation and be like, that's pretty dire dire so then it's not impossible technically right there they think to themselves if i mean someone's got to try it like right maybe i could pull it off maybe if i do it this way i'll pull it off and there's been plenty of there are plenty of stars on the wall at CIA of people who went into harm's way thinking, maybe, maybe I'll

be able to pull this off. Right. And we honor them and they should be honored because they were the, they were brave and they were dedicated and they were committed to national security. Yeah. It sounds like you're talking a lot about courage. Yeah. Well, that's, that's the thing that, that is often misunderstood, right? Courage isn't being fearless. Cour courage is being afraid and doing it anyways yes right and that's that's what makes people really really special there's plenty of people who are too dumb to know when they're facing off in a scary situation and then there's plenty of people out there whose egos are so big that they'll never admit fear but when you got

someone who's willing to be like yeah i'm terrified but fuck it like if anybody can pull it off i think it might be me even worse i know people who talk each other into it where we're like i think i could pull this off if you come with me right and that's a that's a great conversation to have if you're in that conversation but it's terrifying as hell because then you're sitting there and you're like man i i don't have the same confidence that you have so which one of us is going to be right here? Are we going in and doing this thing? Or are you going to let me talk you out of not doing this thing? And then, you know, is it right or wrong to use the right or wrong term for us to be even thinking about not doing it and preserving ourselves over national security? It's heavy stuff sometimes, man.

And you're also, you're in a lot of positions i'm sure especially in a clandestine service where the government builds into the fact that you're going to be making your own calls on stuff this isn't like let me call up let me call a base and make a choice when there's six guns in your face you know what i mean so they have to as much as they want to be able to control all situations they reckon they build in the probability that they're going to have plenty of situations out of their control. So who's going to deal with that the best? Right. So let's go back to your original question. We're making this recipe.

We're making this menu of who the ideal field officer is, right? Someone who's decisive. Someone who takes risks. Someone who can operate without a lot of a lot of supervision all of those things come resourceful before we talk about intelligence yeah right before we actually talk about what's their SAT score what's their university I had a 2.3 GPA coming out of the Air Force Academy you just didn't give a shit I did but I gave a shit about all the

wrong stuff I spent four years just trying to get away with not having to shine my shoes not having to shave twice a day and trying to get laid that's how I spent my college years point yeah right I mean I just didn't I didn't spend my college years trying to be the best aeronautical engineer that was there I just tried to graduate I had friends who were trying to be the best aeronautical engineers and some of them have qualified for test pilot and some of them have gone on to be like you know qualify for the nasa astronaut program and i'm that's awesome for them that's that's not what i wanted to do your point though was like for you

what i'm trying to get at is that it wasn't an ability thing it was a priority thing and that's how cia works too yes it's a priority thing. And that's how CIA works, too. Yes. It's a priority thing. Okay. That makes sense. It makes sense when you think about it, but that's not how Hollywood portrays it.

And because that's not how Hollywood portrays it, that's not what the average person thinks. I often joke that you've probably actually met undercover officers and never known it. Oh, for sure. In your everyday life. Just walking through the grocery store

or the mall or whatever else. There's so... They's a, they estimate there are 100,000 undercover officers inside the United States at any given time. Well, that would include foreign government services, obviously. Right. So... That almost seems low.

Almost. It's also the unclassified number, right? So, I mean, that's, that's not, that's... The odds of you crossing paths with one of them at some point is scarily high right whether you're standing in line at target or walmart because guess where they shop right yeah whether you're visiting a national park and they're taking the picture right beside you or whatever it might be you're going on a cruise and they're on the cruise ship with their family too it's just amazing how close it's been and that's not even counting

all the people out there who have stories about grandparents and aunts and uncles who nobody really knows what they did and maybe they did this or that it's fascinating how we're all just a few steps removed from truly undercover work i do know someone in the cia they don't know that i'm in this that i know they're in the cia but i know they're in this and it's like it made me think when i figured that out and i me think, when I figured that out, and I'm 99% sure. When I figured that out, I was like, huh, I wonder how many times, not just CIA, but how many times I have been around someone who was complete undercover with something. And I was doing, I try to do like math in my head sometimes with that.

And then I get tired, but I'm like, it's not two people. It's probably more. Even if it's just a quick, you have a conversation with someone in the coffee store. I'm not talking about people that you're friends with. Obviously, then the probabilities are a lot lower, but not zero. Right. And what's crazy is that 1%, you said you're 99% sure, that 1% means that they're winning. That's where plausible liability Diability comes from 1% if there's point one person 99% sure

99.9% sure that person's an undercover CIA officer, but you're not a hundred percent sure which means their covers working their cover is holding That's what covers supposed to do that good enough. It's not ideal, but in many places it's good enough You know what you can't do with somebody who's 99.9 sure you can't arrest them you can't wrap them up right that's a term that we use is wrapping up if you're if you don't in the united states if you don't have a rock solid case then they're not gonna the the swat team's not gonna wrap you up the prosecutor's not gonna press charges they're not gonna go after you unless they have a rock-solid case, 100% case. But then what about the people who get convicted who didn't do it? Well, that's a different story.

That's people who actually are brought into the court system, and then the court system fails them. Because they didn't do it, but somehow they were proven to have done it by a panel of peers who were supposed to be assuming innocence until proven guilty. Goddamn, you look at a lot of nuance. I love it. I love it. I think like you, I just don't have the life experiences to get as honed in on things that I don't know about, obviously. But I appreciate people who think like you because, as I said at the outset of our conversation, it makes this complex life a reminder that it is in fact complex and things are not perfect. But I could nitpick going into like percentages of the plausible deniability thing there. I understand what your point was and I think people out there will too. It's just – it's a wild concept for people to have to try to figure that out and then wonder what it means if they do.

So like with the person I'm thinking of, my life went on the next day when I figured that out. But then once in a while when it comes up in my head, I'm like, I wonder if he's killing people. I wonder if like he's been locked up in a jail cell in Somalia one time and stuff like this. And it kind of creates the whole almost like meaning of life question because you then think about it in context and you're like, well, he's just one person. You said there's 100,000 at a given time that we know of or that we think we know of in the United States undercover. Well, they're all just one little piece of the whole thing. They all have to operate in this world of seven and a half billion people on top of each other to let the chips fall where they eventually do in groups of people and therefore by groups I mean countries and power structures and stuff. But when you're the CIA or you're the FSB or some sort of government organization, the Mossad. You're trying to make sure that where your chips fall are going to end up being at the highest part of the pyramid. So I don't know if

we talked about this in the car or on the podcast, but like your example with hiring in corporate structures, they hire 10, they expect seven to be average or better, three to be disasters. It's like, well, how do we get seven and a half? It's like a game of inches in life and the state the stakes are never higher than when you're talking about governments and the people who work in them so yeah to one step back from what you just said i would say that we don't we don't play in a world where chips fall we place in a world we live in a world where we place chips right we place bets but we bet on ourselves and that to me coming out of CIA, that's been the biggest lesson. There's a lot of people out there who just let chips fall.

They gamble all the time, but they never try to rig the game. The intelligence is all about rigging the game. If the chips aren't gonna fall where we want them to fall, then we're gonna find a way to break the game so that the chips fall where we want them to fall. We don't gamble. There's no value in gamble. Gambling is something that's designed to... where the odds are against you. We wanna make the odds in our favor.

Right? And that's... That's what a good businessman does too. Right. So even when we talk about hiring and firing, we can talk about it in detail whenever you want. But you don't want... the numbers game is what is what companies have to play because there's so much regulation that prevents them from rigging the system right so just going back to our whole quality our conversation about equality and fairness the reason that that equality can't be reached

is because not everybody has equal opportunity to education, healthy food, whatever else it might be, life experience. And that's never gonna change. And that's never gonna change. It's never gonna be perfect. So then what ends up happening is in a government like ours that tries to force equality to happen,

it creates regulation that cuts off opportunities from other people who have them so now things ideas like like equal opportunity right that came up in the 80s now we're basically saying well you know predominantly this group of people has more opportunities and predominantly this group has less opportunities so we're going to say out of 10 opportunities seven of them have to go to this group and three of them have to go to this other group. We're gonna manually take opportunity away from the group that has more opportunity

to make it fair. Right. Redistribution, pretty much. So we explore those ideas in pursuit of trying to understand our own democracy, which is one of the youngest governments in the world. Yes yes right so as we're trying to pursue this idea we make mistakes too so that's that is the whole idea of taking opportunity away we in the agency we operate outside of that world because the agency's the cia's job is to collect intelligence that supports national security from outside of U.S. borders.

That's the mission. Yes. So we don't really care what anybody else thinks. There is no equal opportunity. If racism exists outside the United States, we play to racism. If child abuse and human trafficking is part of what's happening outside the United States. That's an active tool that we can use. Whoa, baby. To do whatever we got to do, right?

If a country says that it's illegal to have alcohol, but the person that we want to talk to wants or likes alcohol, guess what we're doing? Smuggling in some alcohol. See, when you say that, it's honest, and I appreciate it. But you know where people's heads go right away. People go to the darkest place they can go. Yeah. Like you say, human say human trafficking is happening. Jeff Epstein,

you're up baby. Like that's what people in public think. And I appreciate what people in public think, right? Human trafficking is a problem in the United States too. Sure. Sure. Yeah.

I'm not discounting that. And how much do we value it? How much do we, how much of our budget do we dedicate against it? How much of our police force is dedicated against it? How much of our police force is dedicated against it? How much of our FBI time and effort goes into it? Almost none, man. Because even inside our own country, we would rather turn our blind eye and be like, well, it doesn't happen that much.

Or it doesn't happen at all. Or human trafficking. You know what the number one human trafficked, you know what nationality is the number one most human trafficked nationality inside the united states can i guess hispanic american wait but there's no americans are the top trafficked nationality inside the united states but that's all the same i would have said that answer but we're all from somewhere. You know what I mean? So what's fascinating is like you think of the whole world.

Yeah. Right? It's not like, it's not Indian people who are being trafficked into the United States to be prostitutes. It's not like it's Mexicans or Colombians. Sure, yes, yes. Right? Like that's usually what we think of. In the world of human trafficking, what it usually means is somebody is being trafficked from one country into another into another country i wouldn't have told to be honest with you i maybe

i've looked at this a little more i don't know i don't think i looked at it enough but like i would have still thought that plenty of it happens within the confines of someone who's a citizen here don't get me wrong of course i think some foreign stuff happens as well i know it does but i'm saying like it doesn't surprise me when you say, like, the term American. And when I found out about that, it surprised me. And maybe, and honestly, it may be because I spent so much of my time outside the United States seeing how human trafficking works outside the United States, right? Watching Thai people be trafficked in Vietnam and watching Korean people be trafficked in China and watching Brazilians be trafficked in Argentina, right?

Seeing it outside the United States when I came here and then found out about our problems here and then found out that it's all Americans. Like, that's amazing to me. That means American children, American women are being lured by other Americans, captured, enslaved, and then transported to another part of the United States. Like, that's amazing to me. That's, that is a high risk, operationally speaking, that is a high risk operation, because their ID, their passports, their driver's license, their everything, their language, right? It all stays within the confines of a country where they could

be tracked. So what actually happens is the reason that those human smugglers, those human traffickers are successful, is because of the privacy laws inside the United States that make it so that places like local police forces can't share information without just cause on two different cases. So the lady who's caught prostituting in Kansas

can't be, her information isn't really accessible to the police department in Connecticut looking for a missing person. And that goes to like constitutional issues. So before, before I, before I go to that, to roll back on, on the actual career though, before we got sidetracked on that, just so that people know what, what year approximately did you join the cia 2007 and you were in for seven years correct and the entire time as you've explained you were what we view as a traditional spy but as you said everyone in some form is a spy there so don't talk about anything you're not allowed to talk about obviously but from what you can tell us what did

your job consist of is there a specific area in the world where you were were you all over the place what were you doing minus exact missions like what types of work so i special yeah i specialized in asia so and that's about as specific as i can be publicly right now and um i spoke chinese coming out of college. And then I picked up Japanese and I picked up Thai and, you know, Japanese and Thai while I was at the agency to help expand my capabilities throughout that whole region. Because those are all strong, important languages to have throughout the Asian region. And wherever you... Wherever I was... You were somewhere.

You weren't here. Correct. Wherever I was, my objective was always focused on Asia. Because, I mean, especially with countries like China and with businesses out of Japan and with...

Thai is much more focused on the region of Southeast Asia. But you'll find Japanese people and Chinese people and you'll find Asians in general all over the world doing all sorts of things. So oftentimes the way just like you wouldn't go in the front door to break into someone's house. Usually you go in a window or a side door or you break into the garage. It's the same the same approach and intelligence. You don't like if you want to collect intelligence against you name a country, Russia, yes, you could go into Russia and take your chances in Moscow, or you go through a different way. You go to Belarus, right? You go to Moldova, you go to... Crete. Yeah. You go somewhere else where they're not paying so much attention,

where the alarm isn't quite so loud or where the door might be left open. Where you can find targets, where you can find relevant targets. Because it's not like all Russian people stay in Russia. Yeah, exactly right. Even more important, you're going to the place where you can find a target that has access and a vulnerability that you can exploit. Somebody who has access but no vulnerabilities, never going to give you secrets. Somebody who has access and some kind of vulnerability, now you've got the one-two punch that you need to have a chance, a higher probability of collecting intelligence from a future, what we would call a future recruited asset. So a main part of your job was recruiting assets. That is the job. The job is collecting intelligence, but you can't collect direct, high value, high quality intelligence unless you're recruiting a source that understands their purpose is to provide secrets of a certain caliber so everything before that is secrets of

a lesser caliber is there like a schedule that goes into this like at all are you waking up like all right at 9 a.m i'm gonna go to the coffee shop and i'm gonna exploit that person i've been looking at for a week or is this just more you are trained viciously by the cia to be able to do all these things before you actually go out to do it and then you're on your own and figure it out no there's you are trained rigorously to follow a schedule that's the schedule is if you if you if you want to look up the skirt and be totally like what a spoiler alert let's look up right if you want to if you want to see how hairy the bush is under the skirt the schedule is about nine months it usually takes about nine months for a valid target to go from stranger who you never talked to before to providing secrets to you in exchange for something of value to them but

how often is it you identifying who that target is? Cause you're on the ground versus being told ahead of going there. Like, Oh, we see this guy, that guy, that girl, whatever. Yeah. So that's, that's a trickier question. It's probably two out of three where you, you just live your life actively and you find the people yourself through the good old-fashioned networking handshaking high-fiving kind of lifestyle can i paint a scenario here yeah and see if you can

fill this out all right so i send you agent boostamante to let's say i send you to paris france to the big city. So this is easier because you know there's a lot of people there, big population, international city. And your overall mission is you need to cultivate assets for the United States to have further intelligence on the influence of – let's go with a present-day kind of thing. Russian politics in the European spectrum outside of Russia okay your plane lands you get there you're given funding for staying somewhere and all that but what happens next so most likely before I ever before I ever took off in a plane somebody gave me two or three dossiers right so somebody gave me places to start um politicians local businessmen whatever but the problem is i don't like what am i gonna go knock on the door and say hey i got

your dossier my name's andy you know or andres or antonio or whatever my name is right so that that's the problem so that's that's where movies get it wrong So what ends up having to happen is you actually do have to cultivate from the ground up So if I know that my dossier my dossier gives me somebody with access and a vulnerability So I know that there is one whatever German guy in Paris that has both access and a vulnerability But I gotta find my way to him and what could his vulnerability be? Maybe he's got a sick kid, a kid that, that is very, has an illness that's rare, very expensive to treat. And that's why he's in France because France is one of only three countries in the world that might be able to treat it. Or maybe the guy's

an alcoholic. And if his alcoholism becomes known by his business or by the company he works for, he's going to get fired because Germans don't like it when people have substance abuse issues. He gets a Dewey. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever yeah whatever it might be right so they have some kind of vulnerability that we can leverage to find that person you have to cultivate them in the exact same social way that we used to cultivate friendships and get dates and everything else right you go to interesting places talk to interesting people do interesting things that's 90% of a spies life is just going out doing cool stuff with cool people in cool places trying to find other interesting people doing the same thing putting

yourself in the situation basically saying alright let's go and then immediately assessing every person that you meet like that's that's the the true magic power of espionage is being able to essentially in real time manage or manipulate, but we call it managing, man, manage a relationship by knowing this person likes X, Y, Z, their high energy, their low energy, hot probabilities of what their personal life looks like, what their romantic life looks like, probabilities of whatever else it might be, right? That from substance abuse to porn addictions to liking to go out and play sports. And then as you assess these people in real time, you're also assessing what is the capacity that they have for an interesting network? What are the chances that this cab driver actually has somebody in their immediate network friends college graduate friends whatever else who might be of interest and then as you find people who have high probabilities you manage those relationships with a little bit more time and

effort to expand on that network and leverage the network to build your way like a ladder to get to that german guy but you all the time hoping and being open to the idea that on your climb to get to that german target you're going to find three or five sure sure absolutely but there's a time schedule with it you know like you're there to do the job you can't be like oh i haven't found anyone right so you're putting yourself as a normal person or trying to be passed as a normal person in social situations but you're also i mean like you said you have a dossier you have information going into it but you're also need to hit get on base right you know this isn't like oh well it'll develop eventually it's like well all right this hasn't worked the first week i'm not going

to the right places where do i go now cool i need to find someone like what happens when you run into a wall and you can't find people so that's a lot of that comes down to experimentation and then experience so when you're you have to be willing to work a lot your undercover job is a real job so for eight hours a day it's you got you're lost doing the thing that you're supposed to be in paris france doing so if you're in france because you're supposed to be selling hardwood floor you got to do that for eight hours a day you've got a look feel smell like a hardwood floor salesman gotta keep your cover right that's what you have to do every chance you get you're trying to use that as a segue to get into something, right? What can I use my salesmanship for? Salesmen's associations, local chambers of commerce, partnerships with larger flooring

companies, partnership with contractors. Maybe I want to talk to the contractors who are working on government buildings and I'll use my cover to say, hey, you ever think about having hardwood floors in those government buildings? I can cut you a good deal. Whatever it is, you're trying to use your cover to help you get to the end objective. After that eight-hour day, then your real clock starts. Now you're out going to... It's a ton, dude. And then after, if you're successful,

if you're successful, you get a call with a government contractor during your regular workday. And then after your regular workday, you go do happy hour at a salesman association and you connect with somebody else that's of interest or whatever, right? So now you've got two or three people that are in your sphere of interest and you're working against that clock. So you have to go back after your happy hour, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock at night. You go back and get on your secret communication system, wherever that is, and you start writing up the reports. Here's who I met. Here's what they do. Here's where I think they're of interest. And that's what buys you the time to go through the next two, three, seven, however many weeks of cultivating those existing contacts. And you have obviously home base of that

helping evaluate, you know, what is worth it or where they can find loose ties to someone you just found correct i mean the one thing about the needle in the haystack concept i would say in even like let's say the post 9 11 world where we've had legit technology like crazy computer systems and stuff like that is that there's so much available data, little trinkets that any government can pick up on anyone, anywhere just through like back doors to private organizations and stuff like that. That the data repository and connecting the dots on the smallest things, all it does really take today versus let's say a spy 50 years ago is the the smallest little flick of a rock in the water and as long as you feel like that pebble's got enough to bounce a couple more times you put that into your system you have your people run it you can find that oh their cousins friends dogs neighbor whatever knows this dude so you can head to this guy's house tomorrow and maybe you'll

have an excuse to actually be there and then end up at the final you know what i mean i do it's convoluted way of looking at it yeah well it's also it's it's another misnomer that people think that technology is a net benefit to intelligence in fact technology is a net disadvantage how so because let's say every let's say you uh seven billion people in the world right so when you look at it and you say there's 7 billion people in the world, that's 7 billion potential intelligence targets. Now, if we look at the technology of that and we look at, well, of those 7 billion people, they all have a cell phone. Let's just assume they all have a cell phone. If they have a cell phone, they have a social media profile, they have a contacts list, whatever else. If you look at them now as needles and haystacks seven billion needles or haystacks or whatever seven billion pieces of hay somewhere in there

is a needle now that we look at their cell phones every cell phone is another 7 000 pieces of hay so now you've got seven billion people each with their own 7 000 pieces of hay now your hay pile just expanded significantly but you also have correlation now, too. You only have correlation if you have the technology that can correlate across all the different operating systems, all the different metadata styles, all the different data types. If you can have access to all the servers, it becomes much, much more difficult.

And you have to have the algorithm that automates it. Otherwise, you have a literal human being who's searching through all the data you have to have the algorithm that automates it. Otherwise, you have a literal human being who's searching through all the data to try to make the connections. The reason I say it is because technology as a starting point, technology is not an advantage in intelligence. As a tool, after you have a target in mind, that's where you start to increase its utility. So you have to meet the person first, which's where you start to increase its utility. So you have to meet the person first, which is what your example was a good example.

I meet so-and-so and then I take it back. And I'm like, hey guys, I met so-and-so. And that's actually, now I understand. That's fair. Like you met someone. Point is, you can like meet someone that might just, the smallest little thing, like it might, they may be the nobody right but they live there right they know someone so now hi i'm andy andres whatever suddenly like you talk

for 15 minutes got one now i have my starting point and here's where the technology comes in because now it's like well you can run data points on likes the color green, also listens to Rihanna music and, you know, happen to live in two places like this, this and this. Right. It's not. It allows you to then suck up all the needles with a magnet. You can try. Yeah, it's it's a fair it's a fair assumption. But there's plenty of people who. So, for example, we were just talking about how everybody is probably two or three steps removed from a real life intelligence officer like a real covert officer i'd say they're all one step in a way so let's say they're all one step away by finding one person you don't find that intelligence officer the magnet doesn't suck up all those needles agreed agreed you have

to do quite a bit of digging yes right so what what what we actually dig for in the intelligence world is we dig for mistakes we assume that That perfect people who are trying to stay hidden. There's a recipe for how you don't get discovered So we look for derivations from that recipe The way that most people live they want to be discovered most people live a very like out and out life they take the exact same route to the grocery store the same grocery store on the same day of the week or the same time of the day they go to the same school they have it watch the same shows exactly it's called pattern of life pol most people have a pattern to their life

it doesn't matter if they're in in like nigeria or if they're in switzerland doesn't matter what their age what their nationality or what their income bracket is people build a pattern of life but professional intelligence officers don't they break the pattern because breaking the pattern is what allows them to see if somebody's trying to observe their pattern or what if they're reverse psychology trying to do the opposite they can try to see if somebody's trying to observe their pattern or what if they're reverse psychology trying to do the opposite they can try to see the problem is it's easier to hide inside of someone's pattern of life than it is to hide if someone breaks their pattern of life for example to use your right if you're the intelligence officer and i'm trying to watch you every day, to and from your favorite grocery store.

There's lots of different ways I can watch you every day. But the easiest way is to just set up two cameras. A camera that watches you leave the house, and a camera that watches you go into the grocery store. Mm-hmm. How are you ever going to stay inside your pattern of life and find those cameras? Right? Those cameras might be hidden in a tree,

they might be on a bank somewhere, cameras might be hidden in a tree they might be on a bank somewhere they might be hijacked they might have been purchased like we may have bought an agreement with the local police force to have the camera that watches the grocery store i'm saying couldn't a spy on the other end try to do that and give away basically set up false flags to give away that's what i'm saying. Like, you know what? To make them look like they're every day. Spies wouldn't go to the same grocery store every day. I'm going to go to the same fucking grocery store every day.

I'm going to let that. Oh, I won't even wave to the camera. We're not going to flaunt it because we don't want them to know. But I know there's a camera somewhere. It's there, there, whatever. So what ends up happening is that they are creating a pattern of life in their grocery store habit that does not fit their pattern of life in collecting intelligence. So that's the mistake that we're looking for. The average-

Say that again. Yeah, yeah. The average person creates a pattern of life in their entire life. When they watch TV, what night they go out, maybe they even have lasagna night once a week, right? They have a very rigid pattern. And periodically they'll break the pattern or Or they might move into a new phase of the pattern. Six months of lasagna night, I'm tired of lasagna night. Six months of rotisserie chicken night, whatever. But it's holistic with their entire life. Their work schedule, their family schedule, their personal schedule, it all meshes and it all stays very consistent.

You're saying with a spy that's not possible. Correct. Because what is a spy? A spy has to build at least the espionage portion of their life around their target. The target decides that they're going to go drinking at glory days. So where are you going to go? Glory days. Well, if glory days isn't part of your normal routine,

you just broke routine. It doesn't matter if you go to the grocery store every day. Now, that's exactly what we're looking for. But I get invited to Go to a bar all the time with people that i've never been to Does that make me a spy? No, but it increases the opportunity that if somebody had a reason to look at you They would say that this is a break in your pattern of routine. Mm, right. They're looking for enough of them. They're looking You can imagine have you seen schindler's list the movie?

Of course. So it's all black and white, except for what? The little girl, right? In the red coat. Yeah. What we're looking for is the red coat. We're not looking to get distracted by the black and white. That's what's so valuable about this.

The seven, the six and a half billion people who do the same routine every day or change from phase to phase phase they turn into black and white screen and that just makes it that much easier for us to focus our resources on the half billion people that might be of interest so a layer away from the spy though because like the spy or the undercover person whoever it is if they're not officially like a government spy but they're doing work or something like that or some sort of objective even if they exist there are the people who knowingly exist at least on some level so like the guy who is the foreign ambassador to france from russia we know he does that job right maybe he does other things that we don't know about but

he's listed as the foreign ambassador of fr, so you know who that person is. Right. So as an agent, if you could find a way to get near that person, it's a little riskier because they're on the lookout for that kind of thing. But you probably know that anyone who's – not anyone, but certain people who are undercover or not known may in some way have to cross paths with them right so when you go to identify a new area you're going to go back to the initial example of paris france if you go find not even someone that big some sort of some secretary yeah that works for the russian ambassador or something you know that there's a chance that that person has a much higher probability of crossing paths with someone who could be a target so when the guy comes in to deliver the dhl every day and it's the same, maybe he's got a lion's mane worth of hair, and he's listening to Bob Marley and

smoking a joint, you're like, I think that guy's in the KGB, right? It could be something like that. It could be. Yeah, it could be something like that. But more importantly, we would want to focus on the secretary, the person who's the DHL guy coming in and out. we now have a face and we know that they come in and out Every Tuesday, that's a routine peg it stick a pin in it right use technology to help you track that person However, you do that right but now let's focus on the secretary because the DHL guy went to the secretary So who's the center of the node? Who's the center of the wheel? So you didn't but my point is you didn't have to figure out who she was. She's known she's a known asset she's an well she's a high probability what's known as a super connector she's a high probability super connector meaning multiple foreign assets or agents will probably have to

in some way shape or form connect with her to get to where they're going next that's a connector also sometimes known as an access agent access i like all the terms so it's a strategic hub of intelligence right but you're also basing a lot of this on assumptions right assuming that the right the foreign minister assuming that their secretary and all this other stuff that you may be right you may be wrong it's always worth the effort to try. It's one of those things that we kind of always keep in our, in our world, but you're also right when you say that it's riskier. So then there's a risk benefit scenario that you have to measure as well.

If I, as an American walk up to the, you know, foreign political first secretary of the Russian embassy in France, and I introduce myself myself right? Hey, how you doing? Red alarms go off Yeah You can almost guarantee that that person has an established protocol or if they are if they come in contact with an American in France They're gonna go right back to the office afterwards write your name your phone number describe you physically yeah Yeah, yeah Yeah

Whatever they've got about you and send it back to Moscow so that Moscow can do their Due diligence to come back and say whether or not that's an actual person or an undercover person. All right. I need to ask a very specific question now. Okay. I don't know how much it's a black and white answer, but we'll try. So when someone learns a new language that they didn't learn when they were four years old right so they learn it at even 13 or 14 or older they're generally always going to speak with some sort of accent even if it fades over time there's a small syllable somewhere that's going to change how capable

are agencies like the cia in training people to not have those syllables so do you do you want a simple answer or do you want me to make it a more interesting answer always here for the more interesting answer if you were the CIA and you wanted an officer to collect intelligence undercover as whatever would you want them to have fluency in the native language of the person that they're targeting or would you want them to have a shared language that's not as fluent I maybe I'm overthinking it I would say the latter due to the cultural thing like think of the inglorious bastards

example three fingers instead of three right he's now he spoke with a funny accent too but he could pass for a certain i'm talking about the general in the bar for people haven't seen the movie he could the british undercover agent posing as a german could pose for oh i'm from this weird region of germany so my accent's a little weird but he was discovered by the german the nazi soldier in there because when he ordered drinks he used three fingers like the middle three fingers on your hand and not the thumb index finger and middle finger which was a cultural symbol that germans used so the german was able to say oh not a real german that was the mistake yeah so are you is that did i give the right answer you

gave the right answer exactly right right to to minimize the opportunities for mistakes to happen cia doesn't want its officers to have perfect fluency they don't want them to sound like they're native born from galicia spain instead they want them to sound like they learned spanish later in life even better if they don't have fluent spanish but they have enough social Spanish that they can have a social interaction that moves the person into another language where the intelligence officer has superior language skills. Hiding in plain sight more.

Hiding in plain sight. Making more space for small accidents to happen because you're taking the target out of their dominant cultural area and moving them into a less dominant cultural area. Everything in espionage is about information superiority. Now, that's another inside term. Air superiority, ground superiority, littoral superiority. These are all military terms. What was that one?

Littoral. It means ocean or naval superiority. Right? These are all areas where tactically, on the field, you want to have that superiority. Maybe you've heard about it in Zelensky's conversations with NATO. He's like, we want NATO to have air superiority. Yes. Right? That means predominance of power in that area. Information superiority is what intelligence officers specialize in.

Because if you have the predominance of information, you have the battlefield advantage. are in that area. Information superiority is what intelligence officers specialize in. Because if you have the predominance of information, you have the battlefield advantage. As long as you're trying to pretend to be a culture you're not, and a culture that your target is, they have information superiority. So you have to take them out of that and move them into a culture, move them into a place

where your information superiority is better. Take them out of German, put them into English. Move them out of Spanish, move them into a place where your information superiority is better. Take them out of German, put them into English, move them out of Spanish, put them into French. And in the process, give away some potential red flags that could make them look at you harder and hope that you have enough covered on the back end to prevent them from saying spy. Correct. Because what happens is if you can cultivate the relationship far enough, you don't need to be the one that speaks fluent german you just bring in a german linguist to sit with you to speak fluent german with them so that you don't have to you always retain that 99 plausibility right they're never really sure whether or not you're a spy so they'll keep meeting with you so you have that preponderance of of manipulative relational leverage when you

first came in to the cia and i think you had said this but you were coming from the air force correct did you say whether or not you wanted to be a cia agent growing up i don't know if you answered that question i mean to a certain extent i'm the kind of person that wonders who doesn't want to be a cia officer growing up i feel like every little boy or every little girl at some point is like, I'd love to be a spy. But that could just be my own personal flaw. So you were then at the Air Force and at some point, was it a recruiter that got in touch with you or how did it work? and trying to get into the Peace Corps. Because remember, my priorities hadn't changed much. I wanted to see the world and I wanted to get laid. And I was like, Peace Corps has got to be the next. Spread some peace, baby. It's got to be the next best option besides the Air Force, right?

So I was on my way there going through that application process and I was intercepted during that application process. Why were you intercepted? All of my bits and bytes were all really well known to the federal government, right? I, I had gone to a military school. I had been a US Air Force officer. I mean, from the time I was 18, I've been the property of the peace corps saw an applicant go through their database what i what i actually saw was a screen that popped up during my application process that said we recommend you pause this application for 72 hours because you may qualify for other jobs in the federal government i mean you could also pass as like 12 different races too that helps i gotta think but when you're 27 years old like i was what 27 year old single guy isn't always open to the next best thing sure yeah so that's so that's what i

did perfect pause and then i went home and i was like i wonder what's going to happen and then 24 hours later i got a phone call from an unlisted number in mclean virginia saying we think you might have utility and national security. Would you be interested? They didn't say CIA. They just said national security. I didn't think they were even real, right? I thought it was a scam. Until I got a plane ticket in the mail

that actually took me to a place where there was a legitimate rental car waiting for me and a legitimate hotel reservation waiting for me. And that's how it goes. And you just walked in. Did you walk into Langley? No, you walk into some outbuilding somewhere. They don't take you to base.

That's insane. So then when you get in the room, is that where they tell you? Yeah. Where with the CIA? Yeah. You're being considered for a position with this organization. They never say, I'm with that organization. They say, you're being considered for this position with an organization.

Right? And if you want to continue this process you have to agree to these five or seven things right you can never say this organization you can never tell anybody that you're in the application process you can't do this can't do that you can't do this if you agree to these things then you can come back tomorrow and we'll start your application processing and then what's what's the next steps like then it's just test after test. What kinds of tests? Psychological tests, role-playing tests, tests to test your integrity, puzzles, writing tests, actual current events. I felt like I was doing book reports again, like back in college, because they're assessing you, just like I told you.

What your skill set is. We're trained to assess people. So it's less about finding out what your skill set is. They already think they know what your skill set is. That's why they're looking at you. They were looking at me because on my little profile, I had Chinese language and nuclear missiles. And a top secret.

Why did you have nuclear missiles on you? Because that's what I did for the Air Force. I was a nuclear missile officer. And what does that consist of? Hiding out underground in a bunker and controlling the nuclear missile officer. And what does that consist of? Hiding out underground in a bunker and controlling the nuclear missile codes that you use to target whoever the American government is targeting at the time with nuclear missiles. And it's the highest clearance available to a military officer also. So you had been in there?

Right. So that's what I did. And did you have an expertise in like through that or before that in nuclear science or no no i i had an expertise in controlling nuclear missiles because that's what the big red button yeah that's well turning a key but yeah that's what the air force taught me the reason the air force taught me how to do that thing was because i had graduated from a military academy and because they had a preponderance of evidence that I could keep a secret,

be relied on to sit underground and not fall asleep, right, that kind of stuff. All basic needs, man. It's amazing how it works, but that's really what it is. So at the time, 2007, 2006, when they found me, I had a high clearance. I had a strategic language. Chinese is considered one of five strategic languages. I had a strategic language. And then I had a history of proven performance with the US military that I was a decent to above average performing officer.

And they knew generally things you were good and bad at. And if I'm interested in going to the Peace Corps, right, now they know more data about me. Well, he wants to travel the world. Yeah. He wants to get – Willing to take on risk, willing to be resourceful, willing to be independent. Let's see if he's any good in an interview. So when you're doing all these tests though, like the writing, the solving a puzzle, stuff like that, is that pretty much on their end they're looking at it like a pass fail to see if you'll be able to fit versus where you fit they you're saying if i'm picking up on this correctly they kind of already knew things that could fit you as far as like if you were good enough what types of roles

you could do but what they were trying to figure out more instead was is this guy good enough to do this correct yeah you when you come in they already know what they want you to do they've they've got it figured out that if that you have high probabilities of being good for one of these three of 12 roles let's just say and then you come in and you go through that interview where you're like yes I yes I'm willing to keep these three secrets and do whatever else and then you get like your first little quiz and they're like hey what do you know about CIA what books have you read you know how do you feel about these different roles or let's do a role play and let's talk through a day in the life of these roles whichever role

you'd like seem through their assessment you're most comfortable with they're most readily able to adapt to boom you just got like they just got a data point this person's going to be a good analyst potentially this person could be a good field, they just got a data point. This person is going to be a good analyst. Potentially, this person could be a good field officer. They could be a good linguist. They could be a good science officer. They could be good, whatever. Then you go home and they set up the next round of testing. Maybe you have a field test that they have to, that you have to do before you come back to prove that you're ready for the next round. You come back and now they have the whole thing kind of orchestrated for the next level of testing in that high probability field so how long was the testing from day one to higher for me it was about nine months

okay for the average person it's between a year and a half and two years why was yours faster because i had the clearance already i had the clearance already i had the strategic language already and you're 27 you're not 20. they knew more about me. That's what made it so much faster for me. I'm curious how they... Like, yours makes a lot of sense based on your resume and places you had been already and the data points they had on you, but I'm always curious how they pick randos.

So, yeah, everybody has a very personal story about how CIA finds them. So remember, I'm only talking about the covert side of CIA. Only about 10% of all employees at CIA are undercover. The other 90%, they work for CIA. And they're allowed to say that on their IRS statement. Paycheck comes from CIA. They paid taxes. Their tax statement says CIA. Their mortgage statement says they work for CIA. Their bank account says they work for CIA. All of their health, Medicare, whatever benefits are all tied back to, hey, I'm an employee at CIA.

It's only that 10% of people who are covert, who are undercover, that have all the noise and all the abilities or the authorities to break laws in the name of national security and get away with it without being prosecuted like i was telling you did 90 don't 90 don't 90 are stuck they have the secrecy agreements in terms of not talking to the press and the media um but they don't have the ability to tell the irs that they're really a hardwood floor salesman they have to be from cia they're an overt that's called overt. Oh, okay. Okay. All right. That makes more sense because I'm saying like they're still – they're involved in work that technically would break laws every day of their career.

But they're not breaking the law. Right, because they're above the law. I mean that in a literal context, not an accusatory context like they are they are required to have to do things as an arm of the law to therefore break what would be a law for a normal citizen who doesn't have these responsibilities close they are a if you are looking to search the web privately and not have all these websites track you when you leave check out my friends over at privato vpn privato is the vpn company that gives you full privacy while losing you no speed. And it allows you to use the VPN on up to 10 different

devices at a time. I have two, you may have 10, you can use it on 10. We love that. So check out the link in my description and you will see my landing page with the company. And there will be a plan on there for $4.99 a month. That is the same PrivadoVPN plan I use. You're going to love it. So check it out. They are a processing step after the law has been broken. Make sense? If I go into a 7-Eleven and I shoplift a payday candy bar, and then I come home and I give the payday to my kid who eats the candy bar, right?

I'm the criminal, not the kid. I broke the law to get the payday to my kid who eats the candy bar, right? I'm the criminal, not the kid. I broke the law to get the payday. He just ate the payday. It's the same thing at CIA. 10% of people go out there and break international laws to collect information to then turn it over to 90% of people who can process it and do what they need to do to turn it into something useful for the US president. Maybe the candy bar example would be a little too simple to push back on this but if you steal a car and you give it to me and i know you stole the car and it's provable that i know you stole the car and i go and use it that isn't it that is a criminal offense so you're you're coming from the place where, first of all, no law.

Like, you're talking about under one legal system. If I steal a car from China, bring it into the United States, give it to you, and I'm like, hey, dude, here's a Porsche. I stole it in Beijing. Yeah. Now you're not culpable for that crime, even if you know it's stolen. The Chinese government cannot come after you as the person who drove that car. I'm the one that broke the international law, right? So they would come after me.

They might come after you in the way of getting to me and find some secondary reason or whatever to challenge you. And I'm protected by the borders of my own laws and the people who make them. And whether or not they decide that they like that I broke that law or don't really give a fuck and say yeah take them yeah exactly right huh that's how it works because we're not talking about American laws in America judicial systems and American goods right not American secrets foreign secrets brought to the United States so you go through your nine months and then you spend call it seven years out in the field where you can't say where that was but as you've already highlighted you were cultivating assets and everything

one main question i'd have because as you already explained you're on the clock 24 7 you're doing your cover work and then you're doing your real work and then you're typing it up and you're sleeping for an hour or two and doing it all over again. Did it feel like seven years to you or did it feel like 70 years? No, dude, it felt really fast. Really? Really, really fast. So if, uh, if anybody listening has been in the military, then you know that the military, the most fun you're going to have in the military is in the first 10 years of your career. That's it. After that you become an administrator

and then you become like a leader and then you become a whatever right the senior leadership role all the fun happens in your youth because you have the energy to do that in your youth it's the same thing with parents parents who had kids when they were 20 get to grow up with their kids they have tons of energy the whole time their kids are young people who have kids in their 30s or 40s are like oh my gosh where's the kid gets all so it's the same way with us yeah they stick you out there you're out there on your first four or five seven tours when you're young because by the time you hit your mid to late 30s they want to bring you in house and use you to

start cultivating the next generation that's going to go spend their youth collecting everything so no no kids single i met my wife at cia but we were dating for two years and engaged for one year we were operating as single people until we got married and then we were operating as what's known as a tandem couple married undercover under the same on the same mission oh you shared missions after you were married correct they let that's kind of cool they let you do that because like oh they're actually married yeah well it's it's cool it wasn't a planned thing no it wasn't a planned thing it's cool that they let us do it but it's also a big benefit to them because now it's like we have a couple we have a couple we have twice as many resources jammed together committed equally

to keeping each other safe like that's less drain on our resources because they're gonna they're gonna they have incentive to make themselves safer sharper better more efficient whatever just leave them be so when they dropped you where they did like i don't know if you're allowed to say this but like did you move around a lot or did you spend a lot of time in one or two places so offices i should say we moved around a lot most of us move around a lot because the way that the most secure operation goes, you don't drop somebody. You know how you've heard animals don't, they don't shit where they sleep. Yeah. It's the same way with us.

If you drop somebody in Moscow, you don't want them operating in Moscow. They're shitting where they sleep. So you send them around to the other places, right? So then Moscow becomes their safe haven, but they're operating in other places. You drop someone in Guatemala City, you don't really want them operating in Guatemala city. You want them operating in other places and that's their safe zone, right? So no matter where we were, the reason we traveled a lot is because we had to travel from that place to someplace else. First of all, your travel profile looks very different. When you travel from Miami all the

time to go someplace else, you look kind of suspicious. You're definitely American traveling out of Miami to go someplace else. But when you're an American living in Panama city, Panama traveling all the time to go to Rio de Janeiro or Guatemala city or, you know, Costa Rica, whatever. Now it's not crystal clear that you're even American because you're flying out of Panama. You could be Panamanian. You could be anything, especially if you have an as you point out try to figure out the probabilities of stuff and that can at least whittle it down but you know someone can be operating in plain sight at all times right next to you that's maybe they did and you don't even know it and that's the advantage right you'll we were talking about one of your previous guests that would if that was fbi

you compare fbi to cia There's a couple of big comparisons. He was a few different. Yeah, he was a lot there. Right. But you can compare traditional CIA officer to traditional FBI officer. FBI operate in teams, at least teams of two, usually teams of larger than two. CIA operates alone. Their team is remotely somewhere else. They send messages back to their team that sits in Langley, Virginia, and then they've got like 100 people there that do whatever they do, right? When you have a team, like a team of five, let's say, for FBI,

everything is very complicated. The team has to communicate across all five people, five schedules, five personalities, whatever else, five different sets of life problems, right? Person one, two, and three have kids. Four and five don't have kids. What do you do when person one has a young kid that, you know, splits their lip and has to go to the urgent care?

It becomes very complicated. Right. Solo operator, very simple. They don't have to communicate with anybody. They don't have to ask permission from anybody. They have their authorities before they walk in. They're just, they operate independently. Nobody can move as fast as an independent operator can move.

No team, especially. So what ends up happening is when you go somewhere as an independent operator, you don't worry about all of the reverse psychology upon reverse psychology upon reverse psychology. You just do what you know you can do because the team that's following you they're the ones that get stuck in all of the noise what are they thinking why are they doing that what's going on oh by the way what do you mean your wife is leaving you or what do you mean that you know your kid got in a car accident get your head in the game and all that other stuff that that's the difference between the two so we

always have superiority of movement superiority of information because we're the solo operator they're the offensive coordinator and the offensive staff up in the skybox looking down at the field and you're just on there making the best decisions play to play you can exactly based on what they give you exactly right you've got the defensive team is all like what are they going to do next what's the next play what does it move if they move this lateral direction then there's a chance they're going to do this only the the only person who actually knows what they're going to do is the person with the ball whether they're going to throw the ball past the ball run with the ball that's it and when the ball changes hands so does the control of the ball did you ever get burned

and know it no i never got burned and knew it there were a a few times when I found myself in positions where I had higher confidence that I was known with my direct affiliation to CIA. And then whenever those things happen, we have protocols and processes that we follow to secure the officer first and then reverse engineer the circumstances that led to that suspicion so the most important thing is keeping an officer safe this is also something that's very different between us and the military cia does not want to lose an officer an officer is millions of dollars in training an officer is like decades of intelligence you lose one trained officer and then you lose all the intelligence that officer could ever produce over the entirety of their career. So as soon as they're at risk, they get

pulled back and they get secured in some other way. Are you allowed to talk about what a protocol might've been? Sure. So we have what's known as exfiltrations. So exfiltrations are when a team of people come to exfiltrate a priority asset out of a dangerous situation and it's not a bunch of guys in suits going go go go go go it's it's like you know some dudes in a hotel like yeah yeah it's much smoother than that sometimes it's really like sometimes it's it's like cargo no kidding you box somebody up into a wooden crate give them fake oxygen or give them real oxygen but they're sitting in a crate bound up for the next 48 hours or so eating mres and living off of canned oxygen

to make sure that they can get where they got to get right without being detected so it's not always sexy it's not at all like in the movies you also rarely will you have the situation where a ca officer is captured taken to like a hotel room beaten tortured and interrogated and then like a delta team comes in and extracts them that's not really how it works either it's more like the officer comes into a situation where they feel like they're at high risk they they send some kind of trigger warning that says that they're at high risk and they will try to self exfil self evac self-rescue so then we'll go through our own process maybe we have a second a secondary passport just for that situation right or maybe we have a weak spot in the uh in the border that we know we would be able to exploit where we can walk illegally between whatever

germany and poland and just cross the border and then we're in a different country and we're outside of reach whatever it might be whatever right so we have these different exfil plans or evacuation plans and we try to self-rescue only in the event that we're like we can't self-rescue or self our self-rescue options we believe to be um obe overcome by events then there's actual teams that would come in and help exfiltrate us out sometimes those those teams are our own sometimes those teams might be from an allied nation you might have French troops that actually help evac you out of Paris because there's there's interoperability yeah I'm I I think that's not a stretch for us in the private side of things to like realize that governments help

each other out you know yeah i'm not shared information is good yeah i'm not here to stretch anybody i'm also i'm i legally can't share secrets right so what's fascinating to me is that this world works and it works very well because of how much realistic consideration goes into it it's just good practice it's like playing a game of chess. The person who wins in a game of chess is rarely the person who makes the best moves. It's the person who makes the least mistakes. That's exactly what we're operating against.

How do we make the least mistakes? That's the defense versus offense argument too. Game planning. Yeah. Which, you know, you can make arguments. That's a little bit of philosophy too you can make arguments anyway but i think the concept of a mistake is you take something that's in your control and put it out of your control and so if you're looking at like

base case for anything in life what do you want to do control all the controllable because the rest of it is the risk that you can't totally have your fingers on yeah and even more so i would say you want to limit the uncontrollable to maximize your nexus of control on that can you paint me the scenario where you without going into details to reveal stuff where you felt like you might be burned and then decided to get out yeah so one of the skills that we teach through my company and one of the skills that is a very popular skill among corporate executives that hire us is we teach them how to detect surveillance um not how to detect like rudimentary thug style surveillance but how to detect rudimentary thug-style surveillance, but how to detect professional surveillance teams.

And that's because your chief, your principal officers for any Fortune 10 company, when they travel internationally, they have to worry about room break-ins, scanning your phone, scanning your laptop, trying to steal industry secrets. Jim does a lot of this stuff. Whatever it might be, right?

So we will teach them how to detect surveillance. We'll teach their security details how to detect surveillance. So when an advanced team goes to Mumbai to prepare the way for one of their future principles, that security team has the ability to detect surveillance on them as an indicator that their principle will also then be a target when they come in. So detecting surveillance is a super powerful tool for us in the field because you have control over your schedule and your movements during a surveillance detection route, an SDR. During that SDR, it's the one against five argument that I was just telling you. I know

where I'm going, where I'm turning, what I'm visiting, what I'm buying, how long it's going to take me. I know all of those details in advance because I'm prepared. I planned the five people following me. They have no idea what I planned. So then I build my plan in an intentional way so that they make mistakes that I see. So I'm like, oh, there's one. There's one. There's two. There's the third one, right? Whatever it might be. That tells me I'm under surveillance and I'm good to go.

In my specific situation, I was in a country where the surveillance teams were very obvious. How so? Because sometimes you want people to know so there's there's different kinds of surveillance there's something called close surveillance discrete to lose surveillance and then discrete not to lose surveillance discrete to lose surveillance is a surveillance that you're used to seeing in the movies like the person that stays five car lengths away and you'd barely even know they're there uh discrete not to lose is the person who stays three car lengths away and you'd barely even know they're there uh discreet not to lose is the person who

stays three car lengths away but if you turn left on a red light they're gonna turn left on a red light too they're not gonna lose you in discreet to lose if you do an illegal turn they're not gonna follow you through the illegal they don't want to be blown exactly right then the third type is called close close surveillance is when the car is on your bumper and another car is on your front bumper. We got you, motherfucker. All the time. It's like tapping you on the forehead. You go anywhere you want to go, you're taking us with you.

Yeah. Right? Like the FBI on the mob kind of a lot of times. Lots of countries like to use close surveillance because it doesn't take a lot of training, doesn't take a lot of skill, and it sends a very clear message. Right? But they don't necessarily use it on just intelligence officers. is a kinder way of saying it too it's like we know you're here get the fuck out right right instead of we're gonna kill you so if you come in and you're like an american engineer an american scientist american business person and they just

don't like americans close surveillance everywhere you go right you got a watcher or a minder if anybody's ever been in this situation they they know what a minder looks like. It's this random person who just follows you everywhere. They're always there. They're always in your hair. You can yell at them. You can scream at them, whatever. But they're there to mind you and watch everywhere you go. Are there places, though, where that's a built-in expectation, no matter who you are, if you're American, if you go?

So therefore, if you're an agent, you should already expect that? Correct. Exactly right. I was in one of those countries where I expected a minder yeah right so i've got a minder how do i feel when i have a minder totally comfortable yeah because i'm in a country i'm an american i expect a minder but what happens when that minder goes away now you're like uh-oh uh-oh right so then my first assumption is my close surveillance has gone away so i would anticipate that the next thing that's going to happen is they're going to move to discrete surveillance

not to lose i mean they're going to make that left turn yep so then i go out there and i run my sdr intentionally preparing to watch people make the left turn make the not to lose decisions and there they are making the not to lose decisions so now i'm sitting there and i'm like i just got graduated up the level of surveillance awareness up the level of of operational interest but why what did the minder see me do something did some other piece of information come across that that brought me to their attention why am i being graduated up in terms of sophistication then after a few days of seeing discrete not to lose i would anticipate seeing discrete to lose which i can still identify because i'm in control and that's exactly what i saw so i'm seeing

resources graduated over graduating up the chain of operational interest they're pouring more time more interest more training more people into me and i don't know why that's a clear indicator right there of like the next step after discreet not to lose is someone comes in and breaks into your hotel room and wraps you up and you're in you're in a local police precinct asking or answering questions within the confines of their law like one step away from espionage charges. So that's, you pull the red chute and you say, hey, self-rescue option A, you know, whatever, border crossing option B.

So you did that, whatever that was, and you got the fuck out. Right. Not to go back. So my wife and I have a handful of countries in this world that we'll never be able to visit again. Hmm. Not unless there's some kind of major, like, My wife and I have a handful of countries in this world that we'll never be able to visit again. Not unless there's some kind of major change in administration or change in fundamental culture. I.e. the USSR fell and became Russia.

Some people – okay, got it. Right. How much does the CIA train you for that situation though? And how good can even training be like and i'm talking about when you're in the room with the bag pulled from over your head and you can't tell them you were a spy that's the training that's there's no good enough training for that yeah the best you can do is resist but they build in the assumption that you will break because when when your entire environment is controlled by a hostile threat they have time they have all the superiorities that they can have time dietary physical ability

cognitive they can break you down by not letting you sleep not letting you eat not letting you there's there are cells in the world i'm sure you already knew this that are made intentionally too short and too narrow for a human being to stand at their full height so if you can imagine how many days in a partial squat could you exist before you're just like i'll tell you whatever you want to know just let me stand up straight now the question becomes though and this gets to like the whole like torture versus effectiveness argument how much of that then becomes they're telling you what you want to hear the torture versus effectiveness argument only exists in the United States that's a first world problem the rest of the world doesn't care about torturing people yes I'm aware of that yeah because because they know that enough torture will either turn into people whose every babbled word is worthless, or it will turn into somebody, at some point, they will tell the truth on their way to babbling madness.

How do we know which is which? We don't. In the United States, because of our ethical guidelines, we don't experiment with that. In the rest of the world, they don't experiment with that in the rest of the world they don't care about that they're collecting everything and they're just and then they use cross-reference techniques vetting techniques to find out well what which of these things between outright lies and babbling madness which of these correspond or corroborate with anything else that we've heard and then can we prove that that there that piece of information is then likely to be the truth yeah so like reasonable to assume though i don't even know if assume i don't have the documents in front of me so i'm going to be careful with my language and let's use assume could be reasonable to assume that the techniques

that were used with our first world problems here in this argument let's say during the war on terror by the cia and other organizations too but the cia is the one we pay attention to with it it's reasonable to assume that they went past what was listed on the paper and went to we have some evidence that they went to some severe things and we also have seen like a famous guy who speaks out against this is agent ali soufan from the fbi who was a brilliant interrogator on his end and we know got a lot of amazing information that they were able to act on and prevent things so he talks about how so much of the data that was achieved through the various torture methods including the i mean the basic

ones right like the waterboarding and stuff like that didn't yield information that we were able to effectively use what i'm saying is the stuff that we don't know about that's off the record that went beyond that we also at least don't have public data that says that we were able to use things where i the cynic in me comes out says all right there's things we don't know about that they prevented that they probably got through that. I don't know if that assumption is too far, though. It sounds like based on what you're saying, it's not because you've seen this stuff work in other places. Right.

So, and I think that's a valid point. The concern that we have in the United States isn't whether or not torture works. It's whether or not torture is ethical. That's the true argument, right? All the other stuff is secondary to that argument to prove or refute that argument, right? Oh, well, you don't get meaningful intelligence. Oh, well, you do get meaningful intelligence. Oh, well, you can't rely on the intelligence. Oh, but you can't rely on the intelligence. All of that stuff is secondary to the core argument of torture is bad or torture is okay so it's what i'm saying is that all those secondary points are are not there's no evidence that's ever going to change

the ethical debate that we have it's it's just it's like roe versus wade it's an ethical argument it doesn't matter how much logical information supports one side or the other. It strikes us on an emotional level. Once you have an emotional argument, it's never going to be resolved with information. It's only going to be resolved with either compromise or regulation, which is what we've seen happen in the United States over and over again. If we're going to talk about things like the torture stuff, this is actually a really good opportunity to ask you about something I think about all the time. And you're a guy who lived within the machine that is at the core of this question. So we'd love to bring it up with you. But I think about a lot how our government and our country is a democracy, which provides beautiful things in the sense that we have a constitution. Citizens have rights that, frankly, are better than – we talk about the better best argument.

But as far as individual freedoms, statistically, we're probably the best at that from around the world, or at least we're at the top of the list and when i look at other world powers who don't afford their citizens those rights let's just call it out what it is china russia places like that where someone speaks out against the government they can be put in jail forever or never heard from again things like that that i would call evil i guess but you look at that stuff and you realize that these countries who are who have been coming after us in a way as far as the world pecking order goes because we were the top dog at some point there like they don't have to play by the rules we do so if they want to torture someone as you said said, fuck it. We're going to torture some people. They know, though, that we have to adhere to those rules, and they can do – they can play ourselves against ourselves by appealing to that morality in an effort to advance their own ability to deflect from things they're doing to gain power around the world so if china doesn't like that you know they can't get economic interest in certain places maybe they'd be incentivized to influence to point out the fact

that we torture people here and you should never do that and deflect from the fact that they're doing it every single day you see this is a convoluted way of putting it but you see what i'm saying yeah so what what you're talking about is what's known as a cognitive uh a cognitive distortion or a cognitive um uh it's a bias there's multiple types of biases but essentially uh there's like two two things come to mind with what you're talking about there's the the cognitive response to information biases distortions dissonance and then there's the uh influence campaign the strategic influence campaign that you're talking about. So let's focus first on the cognitive one, because one of the things I am always careful

to do is make sure that I don't ever get on a high horse and talk about America being the best of anything. I am the first person to tell you, I don't think America is the best at anything. I think what makes america great is that we're always trying to improve sometimes we improve in a way it's a bad call a lot of stuff that happened during covid a lot of stuff that happened during the elections in 2016 and the elections in 2020 a lot of that stuff was just bad call right we are we looked and continue to look on certain issues like it's like a big fat bucket of idiots.

Right. Right? But we're always trying. So many other countries are wrapped up in not looking like a big bucket of idiots that they're totally happy to just not even be recognized as an international power. They're just a forgotten bookmark somewhere on the catalog of 165 countries or 167 countries, right?

We only ever pay attention to the first, the top five or so. Does anybody know anything about Paraguay? No. Exactly. We're talking about the top dogs here. Exactly, right? The top dogs are always trying to do something. For us, we're always trying to innovate.

It's what makes America, it's our distinct comparative advantage over any other country. We were born out of experimentation. Who thought that the American Revolution would work? Right? Yeah, no. Do you know that the Pilgrims came to the United States? Do you know why they came to the United States? It wasn't to escape persecution.

That's a propaganda garbage, like, pill that we feed kids. We came from the United Kingdom because we were contractors. We were contracted. Our Pilgrims made a deal with corporations in the UK. Come on. Yep. That they were going to travel across the ocean,

come to this unknown world, and then create a center of commerce so they could ship goods back to the UK to make the companies rich. So the trade was, we'll give you land in the new world in exchange for you to work that land cultivate it and send us goods that we can use to trade on the open market inside the uk it's from the beginning we've been capitalist we've been innovative we've been daring that's

what made us and continues to make us uniquely uh uniquely competitive in the in the world but we're not always the best so when you talk about this um people using our democracy against us uh and using our cultural flaws against us first of all that's something that we all do i was going to say i do i absolutely just so that you know yes i know we've basically like set up governments in South America. I know we do this stuff, but I'm saying from the sense of totalitarian type regimes towards what's a democracy, using the rights of the people, the emotion of the people against them in ways that they don't have to adhere to themselves. One of my favorite examples from American history is the Mitt Romney-Barack Obama debates in 2012. Yeah. Was it 12? So, anybody listening, make a note. Uh, I would encourage you to make a note if you want to too, man.

Just go back and watch those debates, because what you see happen in those debates is exactly what happens at the authoritarian level in countries. Barack Obama challenged Mitt Romney with things that Romney had done and said, and on public television during the debates,ney's argument was just that didn't happen That didn't happen

Over and over again. That didn't happen that just outright straight up denying that something provable Actually happened and they do that because they're trained as politicians. They're trained professional debaters in debate class and debate club. They're trained that you can win a debate by having people who are listening to the debate just not know for sure. Right? It's a tactic. or it feeds a bias that's already in someone's head. That's how we do it inside the United States. So for sure, countries use the same biases against us. So when you go and you're like, hey, China, you're still breaking, you know, child employment guarantees or green energy, you know, sustainable practices, promises that you've made,

or why are you part of the World Health Organization, or, you know, sustainable practices promises that you've made or why are you part of the world health organization or you know why are you why do you have a decision on on the seat at the un right they they don't they don't hold up to their promise russia doesn't hold up to their promise well they're also remember this too i should have said this but they're also over there correct we're here they control the information that comes into their system. Correct. Here, even if there's some of that, there's a lot that gets in no matter what. Correct.

Right. So what you see is that they can use our openness. They can use our freedom to choose a democratic party. They use the fact that we have democratically elected officials. They can manipulate and exploit all of that, right? And that does create a soft underbelly to our system, for sure. Now, that is a part of the reason why you see us combat that soft underbelly with the tools that we use to combat it. What do you mean? Not everybody gets to vote, right? It's very hard.

As much as you hear people talk about how everybody should have a right to vote and how it should be easy and equal and everything else, part of the way that the government can prevent from ignorant, uninformed, misled masses from also having equal opportunity to vote is by making it a very bureaucratic process to get to vote, right? Because they know, statistically speaking, they know that if you have to go through a certain bureaucratic process to earn your card to vote, then you have the ability to reason and understand responsibility and, you know, whatever else,

to go through all those loops to get that freedom. You have the right, but to get the access, you have to go through all those loops to get that freedom you have the right but to get the access you have to go through certain hoops one tool that they use to control that counteract that sort of influence that gap if everybody actually could vote on whatever they wanted to vote on at any time without any kind of hurdle then essentially we would literally be at the at the behest of the masses inside the united states there would be it would literally be at the at the behest of the masses inside of the united states there would be it would literally be a numbers game you're saying the quiet part out loud now but it's but it's also it's blatantly obvious you know like there's statistical probability reasoning that says that this percentage of society will be willing to go

past this point past that and even if these are simple checkpoints you know people have their lives they have shit that they prioritize shit that they don't at the end of the day when when someone who's been at every campaign rally clicks you know the check mark on the ballot for candidate x the person behind them that was just texting in line and forgot they were even there to vote clicks the same check accounts for the same thing. Correct. Right? Even if the one is informed through practice and discipline, and the other one was informed by advertising through Instagram. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Yeah. Or even that. Exactly. Right? And that's the problem with our system. Everybody has the right. So the way that they make sure that not everybody exercises

that right is by putting hurdles in place that demonstrate your capacity, your prioritization, whatever else. Whether that's fair or unfair, you know, it's kind of beyond my pay grade. But what I'm saying is it is a useful tool that our government can use to counteract foreign influence. Similarly, we use the same thing against foreign governments. We know that information is controlled inside China. We know that information is controlled inside Russia. We just talked about what was happening, what has happened in Ukraine, what is still happening inside Ukraine. for us to be feeding extreme like uh feeding extremes uh narratives into those channels that we know are getting in because now we're planting a seed planting a seed of doubt inside of a government or inside of a population that already knows they're not being told the full truth so it's that much easier to lie to them because they don't know what the truth is so we can tell them

some excessive version of the truth and have reasonable confidence that it's going to affect them. Damn. That's information warfare. It's the same thing that Putin and Xi Jinping use against us. So your implication, if I'm taking this away, simply is that they may do it in the way that takes advantage of our democracy, but we also do it in ways that take advantage of their lack of democracy. Bingo. Bingo.

And you think it's an even trade right now? I don't know that it's an even trade. Close to even. I think that it's the best that we can make it in the current environment, because what the other thing that... The thing that is difficult for foreign powers that exist with a democracy that isn't so difficult for us operating against an authoritarian regime

is consistency. We are heavily polarized right now. Very, very heavily polarized. No. But we weren't 50 years ago. So all... Not even 30 years ago. 20 years ago, we were less polarized than we are right now, but

That means that the foreign foreign enemies working against us have to constantly adapt to whatever the current trend is inside the United States Could you imagine trying to keep up with whatever the current trend is in Instagram or the current trend in Twitter? That's what they have to do to influence our masses and when they get to where we are now They really have to pick which side they're gonna influence the the most because it's a pretty fair 50 50 split right now extreme polarized democrats they influence both they try to they try to influence both but they're obviously going to be able to influence one more than the other right because they're the tools that they have they still have to split their they still have to split their budget they still have to come up with two different messages they still have to basically battle on two fronts instead of just one front like we do in authoritarian regimes.

In a perfect utopia of information and time spent on it, if they're spending 50-50 on each side, they can expect that there's a chance they could equally influence both. Yeah, in a perfect information utopia, like you said. And it's never absolutely perfect, but it can be pretty close. It can be 55-45 on a given day. I agree, but I would also make the point that efficiency-wise, pretty much everybody knows that bringing together resources against one problem is always going to be, or has a higher probability of success than splitting

resources to solve two different problems that's the that's the benefit that we have authoritarian regimes are consistent since 1949 the chinese communist party has been the chinese communist party controlled by a small handful of few even now the chinese communist party are just the descendants of the original chinese communist party like They're all princelings. They're all from the same family lines and That gives us an advantage because our interest come our Expertise compounds over time we become better. Oh right at influencing the Chinese we become better at influencing Russian politics right sometimes it doesn't feel that way though. Well, it's because you don't ever get to hear about the biggest wins Now that's true. it's because you don't ever get to hear about the biggest wins now that's true there's another important point it's very easy to sit

in a chair like this and monday morning quarterback all the failures we see right because we hear about them because they're failures what happens with a lot of failures somebody dies or people die and there's a tragedy and you can't hide it from tv yep there are some that i'm sure they're able to hide but you know certain things happen it's public we don't get to see it's not a news story when they prevent things from happening now have we seen confidential what's it called declassified information over time for certain subject matters that shows like okay well nothing really happened here or there yes but on everything absolutely not right there's a lot frankly most of the stuff is secret and this is the great balance too i'm cool with that there's a lot of people out there who like to sit around be like

yo man the cia has been setting up governments around the world for like 60 years we deserve to know all this it's the most corrupt conspiracy in Oregon. I'm not like that. But are there other things that to an extent I'm like, well, we do kind of know this and maybe at this point it wouldn't hurt. But then the other part of me says it would, like the most common being like the JFK assassination. There's a lot of reasonable evidence there that there were certain figures in the government involved like yes but i go back and forth with it where i draw the line and where i start to go whoa there cowboy is when we because the cia is a government arm right and it's not just the cia it's the nsa it's the fbi it's any of the agencies it's all of them when they start taking powers for good right like we're trying to do good here thank us it'll be later you know you are still putting that in the hands of an imperfect body of people correct so i'm gonna make up numbers because we don't really know but you said something about like in this country there's a hundred thousand undercover people at a given time so that's including all countries and

everything but let's say at the cia there's a hundred thousand people that work there right including spies that we don't know about if 99,500 of them are great people that's awesome love that that means there's still 500 people who are kind of evil or not good people or people who are motivated by the wrong things or people who are compromised things like. When you give them the power of something like stellar wind, which is the separate issue, like what he exposed was provably a violation of the Constitution. And by the way, we like to just point at the CIA with it. That directive came from not the CIA. That directive came from the executive branch. So the highest people in the land, in this case Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be the man responsible, are the people who said, no, we're going to shift that around. You're going to do this now. So the point being, like it goes to prove like the groupthink ideology goes to, oh, well, Vice President said we're doing this. I guess we're doing this. You're just doing your job.

Right. But then it continues for years and years and years and years and hasn't changed. And when I see stuff like that, I go, that's the slippery slope with cresco oil on it so i would go i would i would argue with that because i would say that the slippery slope is the constitution the constitution is not an absolute document it is a document that was intentionally created to be open to interpretation so remember that everything snowden exposed was approved by a court by a secret court but a court that was given the right and capacity to make jurisdictions inside of the confines of secret information. So can I push back with one thing real fast?

It took multiple arms of government. We have three arms of government. It took two arms of government to agree on that specific case. But yeah, you can of course push back. So on that very specific thing you brought up the secret courts this is another thing there was a data point from 2005 to 2012 and if i'm slightly off on the number please check this but one of those secret courts on a i guess lesser importance in this case because it was domestic crime is to evaluate like when the fbi or i guess even the nsa and cia where it's relevant domestically brings wiretap requests and it's section i forget the number of the section but there's some sections some law they have to basically fill an application and explain well checks this box this box that box there were 20 000 roughly requests between 2005 and 2012 for wiretaps and only six

were denied okay now you and i know probabilities you're telling me the 20 000 applications 19 994 of them were filled out completely right it's not an argument about applications man this is what i'm saying it's an argument about whether or not the right to privacy exceeds the right to security. That's what the whole, that's what the whole issue is. Right? I, I am a fan of the fact that we have the right to privacy. I love the fact that America has that right. If there's a threat in my neighborhood, if there's a potential terrorist living next door, guess how much I care about my right to privacy? Zero. Check me out, guys. Like, whatever you want to know. You want to know what my favorite, uh, want to know what my favorite genre on Pornhub is? Come check it out. I've got nothing to hide. I'm not a terrorist. So I don't, I am happy to disband my right to privacy want to see how many guns i have want to know how often i make love to my wife want to know what my favorite coffee is want to see

what happens when i drink too much milk come on in like i'm an open book i want you to find the bad guy who's hiding among people like me taking advantage of my right to privacy that's what i want you to do mr police officer what happened with snowden is we had this, the Patriot Act, all of these things were born from the realm of we need to find the enemy within us. Because that enemy within us is taking advantage of the American right to privacy. They're manipulating it. There's no way that we're going to be able to find them if we continue to enforce the same right the same way. So are we going to do it perfectly the first time nope but are we going to try to experiment with something yes right and then the and then when it was

exposed to a larger court exposed to a larger audience of course people got upset with it because what did they all think they all thought well how much of my private information has been violated because that there was never the thought of how many wolves hiding among you, wolves that eat wolves. How many of them have been caught and exposed? Because, you know, yes, even if you're in your example of 20,000 people and six that were approved, even if 19... Not approved. were approved even if 19 approved yes right even if 19 992 were were approved without anybody giving it any just review if they caught one bad guy that would have killed 10 americans was it worth it i am pragmatic i say yes i'm glad you put a visual on that on the end because here's where it gets really cloudy to me.

And look, I don't know if I'm right about anything or wrong about anything. This is actually a little bit of philosophy in some ways because to your point, there's A or B, right? And there's good and bad that comes with it. But I look at that and you say could have saved 10 americans yeah no one wants to see 10 americans die but also what if the precedent that is set through allowing these things to occur then ensures that 5 million americans live without freedom over the next 10 years and of those 5 million maybe maybe a thousand of them killed themselves because of it whatever it is so living without

was it worth it well living without freedom is a pretty generalized statement right living without the right the reasonable access to their own privacy if that's what you're arguing not necessarily because freedom is a much larger thing than whether or not the police can expedite a wiretap against you without it getting proper vetting let me expand upon that then i'm glad you bring that up you could like let's put on let's put on the hat for a second of the you know like conspiracy theorists who think that everything's an inside job which you and i have already highlighted that i don't think that at all right i think

things have a reasonable explanation i don't know if we talked about that on the potter before so maybe that'll come up but like for those people one place where they could have an argument in the grand scheme of things not necessarily all these things that they claim are automatically set up by all these evil people who are lizard people no matter what not that but when they talk about they will come to you like like dick cheney with a rack goes to george bush brilliant argument gotta tell you and he says mr president what if there was a one percent chance that saddam hussein had WMDs? Wouldn't you want to make sure it was zero? Wouldn't that be enough to go in there?

And he psychologically puts the president who the buck stops with him in a position where he goes, well, I don't want to be the guy who ignored that 1%. Fuck it. We're going to go in. Let's get him. Right? Right. And he was already incentivized to do it when you use psychology like that like but with covid if if if it can save but one life we must do it to everyone right that's where i get nervous because it's the same thing to me unless i'm interpreting it wrong based on what you're

trying to say so correct me if i'm wrong from what you were getting at but it's the same thing as when you say but if this could have saved 10 amer, it was worth it to me. Yeah. So the way that it's different is because you're talking about an, a active step that Americans, uh, have to take action on themselves, right? So with COVID, for example, we're being forced to put a foreign substance into your system, right? You're being forced to take a vaccine. If you don't take the vaccine, then you are forced not to eat at the restaurants, you're forced not to go in the library, you're forced not to be able to ride public transit, whatever it might be.

If you don't wear a mask, you're forced to change your life in some major way. Right. So now that is essentially the government imposing its will on your everyday practices. Yes. It's completely different than what we're talking about with information, where you continue your daily practices.

What actually changes is just your... the interpretation of who gets what rights supported at what time. So now, for example, why wasn't every American part of the collection effort? Because many of them, like with the collection effort that, uh, that project, Solar, not Solar, Stellar Wind. Stellar Wind, yeah. Why didn't they just wiretap every American phone?

Because they had a prioritization. We're looking for phones... They technically did. Technically. So what they did is they tapped into metadata... Yes....that's collected by everybody, which has never been claimed to be protected data at all. looking for phones they technically did technically so so what they did is they tapped into metadata yes that's collected by everybody which has never been claimed to be protected data at all metadata is actually data that belongs to the system that enabled the data exchange but they could also look

into anything at any time after they had the metadata to dig into it further correct but Correct. But the prioritization of privacy violation, that went to a very specific few who fit the profile of a potential threat or who fits the profile of what we think might be a potential threat. It takes whatever, five hours of analysis before you're like, oh, this wasn't, this is a dead lead ignore it de-prioritize it we'll listen to somebody else instead i for me it's not that i have to do something to save someone else that's not that's that's the argument with why you should get a vaccine right you should get a vaccine so that you don't accidentally pass the virus to somebody else or so you don't pass the virus to somebody who passes the virus to somebody else. Whatever that is, right? Now you're just... you're just infringing on my ability to carry out my own life.

When behind the scenes, somebody looks at your metadata, and they say that based on your metadata, it looks like you're having calls with somebody in Saudi Arabia, and then they look at your metadata and they're like, oh, it was one call from a spam account in Saudi Arabia trying to sell this person insurance they're no longer of priority so then they deprioritize you and move on in my in my case if that process of finding the person who's in constant contact with a suspicious

number in saudi arabia if that's what they're looking for look all day long because i want you to find that person because there's nothing i have to do to save anybody like it's happening behind the scenes anyways so it doesn't violate my ability it doesn't violate my freedom of choice when they're using this this is the pushback on this argument and again like there's drawbacks even even if if my vision were the one that were then carried out there's drawbacks to it because guess what like those 10 americans die things like that you know so i recognize that it's not like a one plus one equals two scenario this is very much a which part of the 50 are you putting the balance on but like the concept is that when they are then allowed to do that and you accept them doing that

where do they stop so here's my bigger question what privacy is so important to you that you want to protect it at the cost of your american citizenship at what point would you leave america and go become french at what point would you leave america and go become canadian at what point is your privacy violated so excessively that it's not worth the security and the benefits that come from the state of the United States? That's the question I want to ask everybody who argues about privacy. Because the truth is, we're very much in a first world problem right now. Anywhere else in the world that you go, you have no right to privacy. Inside the United States, you have a great deal of right to privacy. And will still the courts and the constitution have

given the freedom to the government to explore to technically go into your right of privacy through a court approved system if they think that it will bring enhanced security to the or to the state that they have created so for all the people out there who are like nobody should violate my right to privacy you have the right to leave the united states so when would you actually choose to leave what is the thing that you're so worried about the government finding out that you would ever actually abandon your home in the united states and go somewhere else if the government could use some i think for a lot of people it's a hypothetical i'll speak for myself there like there's nothing i'd worry about right now right but what if in the future i were running a company or something and like there were some there were lives's nothing i'd worry about right now right but what if in the future i were running

a company or something and like there were some there were lives at stake i i don't know i like it's hard for me to cook up a scenario but there are plenty of scenarios of people a lot more powerful than me who do have to actively think about this the connotation right there and i'm making some leaps here so it doesn't necessarily mean you meant this but the connotation is that if you don't like it go somewhere else and you won't like it. You'll like it less because it's worse. Well, we're a nation of immigrants that was formed on people coming here to get the fuck away from places like that. To come here for those types of rights, for the things where governments live in a happy medium with their people instead of in control of their people.

That same population of immigrants has built the country that's here now yes we've built a country that gives our executive power the right to do what they do and our judicial power the power to do whatever they do but if you keep giving it more and more and more you eventually become what you came from which means that it's probably time to immigrate again oh fuck so you're not okay i'm not saying that you have to like our country i'm just saying stop trying to fix a country you can't control if you don't like it here happy hunting but that's the point you're i'm gonna give you credit i didn't give you there then when i just said that my connotation was that you were saying well everywhere else is worse what you seem to be thinking is that potentially somewhere could be better eventually for you it could be better for

you right now for example romania is a fantastic country not because of its freedoms but because fifteen dollars will pretty much get you anything you want so if you are struggling here to feed a family on a two thousand dollar a year salary right but you have six thousand dollars in savings go to romania spend six months there you're going to live very well and be able to never struggle with taking care of your kids for at least six months how much land is there though who cares i thought you're the the priority and demand like a more if a bunch of people, just a bunch of Americans decided to go to Romania at some point. Then they get to,

then at least you have a land border with Georgia and with Moldova and, you know, with Serbia. You can start, you can start leaving again. Right?

The, my wife and I go back and forth on this a lot too. Now my wife is also CIA, former CIA like me, right? And she came in a very different way.

I came from the military. She came from the world of social services. Social services. So she was working with refugees from Serbia who were coming to the United States and had to be resettled and reacclimated and acculturated to the United States. What years?

Hmm, 2004 to 2007? This is like right after Milosevic fell and everything. So big deal. Atrocious crimes being held against these people. And she's trying to take them into a new country after they've also been granted refugee status. They've been living in camps. Their life has been just atrocious.

And she needs to help them acculturate quickly to the United States so they can live in Minnesota or Florida or Michigan, wherever they're being moved to, right? Not an easy job. CIA plucked her out of that world. So she came into CIA very much in a different headspace than me. I was all nuclear missiles and war and eradication and, you know, whatever else.

She was people and culture. She was people and culture and, you know, everybody deserves a right to a better life and whatever else. So when we first met, one of our big arguments was always about and culture and you know everybody deserves a right to a better life and whatever else so when we first met one of our big arguments was always about people living in the state where they don't like living in the state that they're living in inside the united states alabama is a poor state people should be allowed to live the life they want in alabama that was her argument mine was alabama's a poor state get Get the fuck out of Alabama. Right?

You choose north, south, or north, east. I think south actually might work too. You got four different states on four different borders. Have at it. And she's like, oh, well, that's an unfair expectation to think that people could leave their state. I was like, there's nothing unfair about it. You get in a car, you buy a bus ticket, you get out in the next state over.

You start again. You don't like the taxes you're paying in Pennsylvania? Go to Florida. Go to Tennessee. Different tax, different state. Oh, well, then opportunities aren't the same, and this isn't the same, and this isn't... I don't care about any of those. If your problem is with where you are, change the environment first. Everything else is a secondary problem. So if people don't like the way life is in the United States, they have the right, because we're the United States, to leave. You know what happens if you don't like the way life is in the united states, they have the right because we're the united states to leave You know what happens if you don't like the way life is in china? You're fucked

You're in china You're not going to get approval to leave china even inside cities They're not allowed to leave their city without getting approval from their district commissioner. Jesus christ. Yeah, I mean come on if my uh, The the uber wealthy a big part of my business is supporting the ultra rich. That wasn't by design. It was just because what we teach. It's your expertise, man.

Appeals to the ultra rich. Almost all of the ultra rich out there have more than one passport. They have more than one nationality. Right? Because if you buy $250,000 worth of land in St. Croix. Citizen, baby. You're a citizen. Right? Panama. The Bah $250,000 worth of land in St. Croix... Citizen, baby. You're a citizen. Right? Panama, the Bahamas... No, Panama, come on.

So you have options, people. Every single one of us has options. Now we start to complain that the ultra-rich can afford it, and we can't. Just get off your ass and go to St. Croix. Go to the Bahamas. You'll be able to do the exact same thing. And get your citizenship in about two years or six months or whatever it is for that country. And then you don't have to be an American citizen anymore. Problem solved. I'm of the opinion. And what do you think my plan is, dude? Our plan is to buy property in Costa Rica or Spain, live there for two years, become European

citizens or Latin American citizens and have two passports. Why? Because I love my country. But I also love having options. It's a little scary. Well, I try to get a feel for how you look at things. And when i've heard you before you're you're incredibly analytical and you place things as simply as possible but they also come out therefore in a blunt way and when you add to the fact who you are where you've been and what you've done it adds a lot more to it i could have someone you know from town in here sit here and tell me things like this that blow my mind, but just some guy working as a plumber or whatever. It's like, no, no, you were in this and you did this. So it has an extra effect, obviously, to people listening and to me. But you seem a little resigned to – I don't want to oversimplify it, but you just seem very resigned to change.

It's just going to happen. It's the only constant that you have. You know, it's funny. When you first said that I seem resigned, that's a trigger word for me. Because resignation, that feeling of resignation, that is a key giveaway. We look for it in every asset. Every potential recruited asset has to have a point where they are resigned to something. It's a very similar process to how you create a terrorist terrorists have to come to a the way that you fundamentalize a person is you find the point where they resign and then that's your anchor

point to keep moving right and there's a whole ladder that supports that in the counterterrorism world and in the asset development world so as soon as i heard you say that word with me like you know haunches went up spikes went up like, I got to defend myself on this. But then you said resign to change. And I was like, holy shit, you're exactly right. I am absolutely resigned to change because I have seen firsthand you can control all the variables and there's still something that's going to change. So what you have to be able to do is rapidly adapt to whatever change happens whether it's a change in the weather i mean friggin the clock changes its position every second right there's always some change the people who can adapt faster to that change are the people who

are going to win the people who try to fight the change they're destined to lose i try to in every client in every customer in my, all I try to do is encourage people like, hey, when change happens, I am guaranteeing you that when we work together, you will be better prepared for that change than anybody else. When I say resign to change in this context to finish off the full explanation, i would say with you i'm referring to the fact that you know america was viewed or has been viewed consistently as like the world power and everything but you seem very resigned to the idea that that no longer is going to be the case that within our lifetime this is what's crazy you and i our lifetime is the first adult lifetime where we realistically have the chance of seeing that change. Our parents would have never seen that day, right? Your parents that I just met, they're not going to see that happen. But you and I, we realistically could see America become the second largest country in the world in terms of economy, which is the only thing that matters.

Right? If people think that religion or population or whatever matter, it doesn't matter. What matters is economy. Who can create wealth? Who can control wealth? So yeah, we might see that happen. Doesn't mean it's a foregone conclusion, but we might see it happen. The bigger question is, are we willing

to remain part of this country... while this country adapts to whatever it has to do to stay to stay in first place because what china's doing right now has helped it grow five spots on that economic what is that what are they centralizing their government quieting dissent? It taking manipulating global economy is taking advantage of the freedoms of human rights of non-chinese citizens These are things that it's done to go from fifth or sixth on the economic scale when I was in college It surpassed Japan two years ago three years ago in terms of its economic size Japan also does have some problems. They're not having kids. that's an issue china used to have the same problem yeah right they used to limit how many people could have but that was also by choice because they had so many japan's the opposite they just don't fuck over there i know what's going on they really appreciate their old people yeah get it together

japan come on but but yeah but now we get to this place where it's like hey if if doing what we have always done doesn't keep us in front are we willing to stay american citizens in a country that changes to do whatever it takes to stay in first place so do you want those things you listed off as trying it to be realities here though no right i would rather be in a third place economic country yeah that has freedom than in a first place country that does not but do they really have freedom if they are at the beck and call of the places that control their dollar or their money. So, I believe that freedom is self-defined, but the cult, that's because American culture is an independent, an independence-oriented culture.

They are a collective culture in China. So, collectively, they believe that freedom is what they collectively define it to be. Which is the freedom to not have to... choose what country they live in. not have to choose all the little choices that their government has to make. They believe the freedom is different than what we believe freedom to be. They've also been wired that way. They've, so have we, we have been wired this way.

Yes, that's fair. We've been wired this way to determine what our freedom is and we view that as better because we know things that their citizens wouldn't know that's what we tell ourselves also right right all right and to an extent that's not even always true but i'm saying at least on a grand scale it's more true than false because there are rights that we have that we get access to things that they don't under their system they also have access to things that only a few people here have access to because their systems support it like medic like medical care medicine education um food like basic basic human the bottom tier of their hierarchy the state takes care of all of that they don't have to worry about

social welfare because culturally the family takes care of everybody so here in the united states what do families do disperse parents have kids what do they expect their kids to do leave the house when they leave the house do they expect their kids to ever come back again no right so we believe in this dispersed society you're on your own That's not the case in china in china The cultural idea is that there's always someone there to care for you And when there's nobody there to care for you the government cares for you, which isn't the government to them. It's the state It's the party. It's the larger culture that cares for them. And it's not just like that in china, right? It's like that in in almost all of those quote-unquote socialist countries of the world, where they believe that it's okay for someone

who has failed at life to become a ward of the state. In the United States, if you fail at life, we believe that you are a failure. Even social welfare here. When you talk to real social welfare professionals, what are they trying to give people? A chance. They never assume that they're just gonna save people we're giving you

a way of life for the next 50 years they all think now they just need another chance they just need someone to help them give them another chance it's like give a heroin addict another chance enough time so they're just gonna keep becoming a heroin addict at what point you call it quits at least in china like up heroin addict so let's go ahead and dog-year that person for 12,000 renminbi a year, and they're gonna live in that state house, and boom. Done. We've given up trying to help this person. Now they're just gonna live there until they die. Whew. It's heavy, though.

It's heavy because we believe in, ideologically, in something better. We believe in opportunity. We believe in bettering our lives. That's why our immigrant ancestors came here. in something better. We believe in opportunity. We believe in bettering our lives. That's why our immigrant ancestors came here. The belief, the faith that things could be better. That's why you're making this podcast, man.

It's the way, it's the reason I do my work every day on the hope, on the belief that things will get better. What I have learned from the agency is that things will get better for a few. And for the vast majority things will remain the same or degrade outside of that because that's obviously a change from working at the agency and seeing things around the world seeing how different governments work how it compares to ours and all that but it seems to me that a lot of your, I don't want to say worldview, but the way you look at things had already developed before you were same thing, but it wouldn't be as mind blowing to you, right? Because what credibility do they have? What's fascinating to me is that the agency doesn't have to teach us our mind frame, our worldview. They just have to find people who have a certain set of character traits, and then they have a high probability chance that those people will also have the same kind of worldview. The same plumber that could sit in here and blow your mind if he had different credibility could be the next CIA officer

because he already has the larger moral and ethical flexibility to exist in an intelligence apparatus collecting, prosecuting any legal operation overseas. Whereas your brilliant engineer who's working at whatever google may not have that kind of flexibility so they would never be recruited well that kind of opens up a whole can of worms too because then it gets to like well how much of the agency is built on a total bureaucracy of groupthink that's planned. And by the way, to be fair, how much of that is actually good.

Correct. For the country. I would also make sure that, I know you've used groupthink a few times, right? So groupthink is a little bit different than values, right? Groupthink is something where a group comes together and then they holistically as a group land on a new thought and then they stick as a group to that thought. Whether or not they just accept the flaws in the thought. That's groupthink. It's completely different when you find a group of people who all value dogs and then you bring them together as a group of people who inherently value dogs.

Right? So I think what the agency does is it finds the people who are all dog people you're like hey you guys are already dog people we need really good dogs so let's bring these people together and now we don't have to spend any time training these people to understand the value of man's best friend you bring in people who already are contrarian bring in people who already believe in american primacy bring in people who already are contrarian, bring in people who already believe in American primacy, bring together people who already are willing to accept that things aren't equal, things aren't fair, and they never will be. Just bring those people together and now you don't have to spend any money or time training them to think that way. They already think that way. So now you get to the good stuff. Now let's train you how to do tradecraft. Now let's train you how to detect surveillance. Now let's train you how to shoot guns and throw knives, right? It just cuts to the chase so much faster. Now, I also recognize there needs to be an element of, you can't just hire to hire, right? Like you can't just throw a bunch of shit against the wall

and be like, oh, well, they'll figure themselves out. This is the highest level thing. You can't be having like learning experiences left and right that are planned, let's say, right? So it's not like you're ever going to have a system that doesn't at least attract on some of these qualities like like you're saying i just worry about where it becomes bigger than itself and we've kind of beat around this today but it's come up without coming up like you look at the ultimate theories of government bureaucracy which probably start with eisenhower's speech on

the military industrial complex and things like that that then occur over time and frankly it's hard to argue it because you see it over and over again but But when I look at this, I'm like, well, some of it's necessary for sure to protect the people, protect our place in the world, protect our economic interests and continue to expand democracy. I understand that. at what point do you start to then have a big dick and say, oh, well, we're better than everyone, so fuck it. Whatever we are, shit doesn't stink. We can do whatever we want. We're already there. I know we are, but I'm saying, like,

when do you then just totally justify that and move all the way down and suddenly become everything you hate? That's what people worry about. So what's funny to me is... Normal people. What's funny to me is normal people like me what's funny to me is the uh so let's just look at politics real quick right we're in a polarized country what is the one thing that basically every heavily polarized democrat and every heavily republican would agree on uh i don't know they would all agree that the entire government should be their party yeah okay what happens when the entire government is one party fascism or communism

you are a one one country one party country like china yes? So what's fascinating to me is that people are willing to make this argument, and yet they're not accepting, they're not recognizing the fact that what they're saying is evolving the United States into a country like China, into a one-party system, which is

absolutely opposed to anything that we've ever wanted to be in the past. Right? So, it's difficult for me... It's difficult for me to be able to live in a world where people aren't thinking about the long-term outcome of the argument that they're trying to make. That's everyone. That's a lot of people.

Which is why I don't talk to many people. Better way to say it, a lot of people. It's why I'm here talking to you, but there's plenty of podcast interviews where I just don't talk because I know where they're going to go with their argument. I know what they're going to say. It's not productive. If it's not productive, it's not worth my time. Well, I try not to marry, and like Danny's great at this, I try not to marry myself to things. You know, don't kill somebody.

All right, yes, I'll marry myself to that, right? But, you know, if someone comes in and holds a gun to my mom's head, I might kill them. You know, there's nuance to it. Excellent example, right? Excellent example. Everybody has the right to life, except the guy who's holding a gun to your mom's head. Yes, right? Does that person have a right to privacy?

If what they were doing in private was planning to assault your mother, would you like a heads up on that maybe? Would that be okay with you if maybe the federal government tapped their phone three days in advance? Oh man, people don't like answering that question. They don't like answering that, but what if they then lie? Then they lie. They're lying to themselves, they're not lying to me. There's only one answer but then it costs you you may go to jail for something that you didn't you know what i mean like it can it can take away your right and and affect your entire life if they lie on behalf of something that involves you directly the person that they're lying on uh so i think that i might be getting lost in the in the hypotheticals but essentially what i well what but what i lean on is the fact that we have three arms of government. So it might be one arm that takes you into custody, but it's a different arm that determines your innocence or guilt. And then it's a different arm that handles

everything about intelligence. So the one arms, all three arms, they're, they're checks and balances. Like they were always designed to be sometimes those checks and balances work and we never hear about it sometimes those checks and balances fail and we all hear about it yes and then sometimes those checks and balances systemically fail and we all hear about it but we have no way of fixing it because the system itself is the flawed system that's what you see see so often with prisoners and re-education and everything that's out there, everything that's led to the BLM movement, right? Those are all justified systemic issues, but nobody's found a way to fix it.

And for sure, going to the streets and destroying businesses is also not going to fix it. But that's where logic and reasoning are thrown out by emotion. This is the world I live in that drives me mad. You know, I say it all the time. I just want to go 50 miles an hour. But everyone who gets attention wants to go 100 miles an hour or zero miles an hour. And neither of them work.

I can point to anything over history i often say this as well fascism and communism are the same thing with a different picture on it they have the same ends to whatever their means are if their means are a little different fine but their ends are the same you know and so when you point out like this polarization it's it's a great thing you say because I think you're right about it. The people who are most polarized want the other not to exist. They don't – they're so fucking blind that they can't see four feet in front of their face that that is then going to cause the same problems that they claim to fight against. Now, I understand that people are a response.

Our world, the law of physics, an equal but opposite reaction happens like that. I get that. But I just wish people could step back sometimes and have the ability to give up some ground somewhere. The problem is it's the prisoner's dilemma of, well, the other side is not going to give up ground, so I can't. So it's fascinating. happening right now with uh with russians with russian debt and all the sanctions and the uh and the the difficulty that the us has put on russian money right so um for people who listen to this in the future for folks who are not aware of it right now russia's on the brink of defaulting on multiple debts which would essentially just crush their economy. Yes. Okay.

That was by design. That's why the U.S. and NATO put sanctions on Russia to penalize them for invading Ukraine. When you take that logical step, you're like, oh, that makes sense. That doesn't sound unreasonable, right? Now let's take it one step further. Russia can pay the debts. They have the money.

But the reason they can't actually pay the debts is because the U.S. is not letting the banks that hold the money that Russia owns give the money back to Russia. Right. So if we were to put that in everyday terms, you owe $5,000 on your credit card. Your credit card is with Wells Fargo Bank.

Your money is also in wells fargo bank But wells fargo bank has now decided that they're not going to let you access your money to pay your own credit card Who's the bad guy in that situation? you or wells fargo Well, you're saying wells fargo decide on their own To do that because of whatever because you got a dui. Yeah, then they're bad then they're bad, right? So who's the bad guy in this situation globally russia for invading ukraine or the united states for freezing the

money that russia could use to pay their own credit card it gets sticky well both are bad depending on the lens you're looking at it with but also the argument and it's fair is that if russia just didn't fucking do that they wouldn't be dealing with this. That's true too. But also, if the United States has the ability to destroy a country economically just by freezing its assets in American banks, what does that mean about every country in the world? Any country that has money in US dollars.

Now, it's basically a nuclear weapon in the economic world they can kill any country they want if russia falls the message that's being sent to every other country is we can crush you too it's just like when we dropped hiroshima on japan or it's just like we dropped when we dropped the little little boy and uh i forget the name of the nuclear bombs when we dropped them in japan on hiroshima and nagasaki we sent the message hey we can crush you too i think about that a lot i see it i really do so what's fascinating to me is that just like what you were saying are we letting ourselves become so blind that we're doing the thing that we promised ourselves we would fight and now we're basically becoming a one country deciding factor. We will just

obliterate you. We will destroy you economically instead of with a bomb. And then even worse than that, what does that mean for the future U.S. economy when China and Canada and Mexico all wake up and they're like, ooh, maybe I don't want to have my money in the U.S. banks. Maybe I want a different option. And then our economy suffers because everybody else is like, I don't want... But they're doing different. They're not doing different. Canada just did it to their own people. But what I'm getting at is if the U.S. has that kind of power over a country like Russia,

every other country is going to be like, I don't want anybody to have that kind of power over me. Just like everybody diversified their supply chain out of China after COVID, people are going to start diversifying their investments out of the United States. So they're going to put their investments in China, though? Or maybe they won't put it in China. Maybe they'll diversify it in a thousand other places.

Either way, our economy is the one that's going to suffer because that money is no longer in our coffers. It would be a different story if it weren't for the fact that Russia can pay their debts. They can pay their debts. But we're not letting them pay their debts. Because of the sanctions. It's so interesting because that is the kind of situation where I would worry about Putin being like,

the game is lost, so let's just blow some people up. Because it's hopeless. Like, they have everything they need there really is the only reason that they can't access their own money is because of an internal issue that already previously existed dating back to 2014 and before like now for me it's getting it's getting a little bit crazy because now we're talking about regime change and destroying an entire country's economic future Based off of what amounts to a domestic conflict and you're dealing with an irrational

dictator type human being who you know, we all love mutual assured destruction, but Radical narcissists who are backs against the wall with absolutely nothing to lose Lose any reason they may have maybe had in the first place and this is what i worry about and let's also would it really be mutually assured destruction that's what else is fascinating if if russia in desperation launched nuclear missiles let's say let's take two scenarios if they launched them at france and germany u.s isn't going to launch why would the u.s join a nuclear fight that doesn't involve American citizens? But France and Germany could launch.

France and Germany could launch, right? Yeah, same shit. Right. But what happens if Russia decides to target the United States? Who's the source of their true economic problems? Is the United States going to return nuclear weapons

and blow up a bunch of innocent civilians who are not their enemy if russia did it to us fuck yeah they're gonna i don't think that's true i think if you're kidding me nope i think that honestly in the cold war days that would have happened because then it was it was two equal countries you think that if vladimir putin send a nuclear bomb in the united states it blew up killed hundreds of thousands of people you don't think that the us would send a nuke back i'm not convinced because right now there already is a massive war an economic war happening

and and i believe that in the united, we would at least have run the calculation that if Putin bombs the United States, there is nobody in the world who wouldn't agree to every one of us going in, taking Vladimir Putin and owning Russia and giving all of Russia to the United States. So why drop a bomb? Why drop a bomb and destroy our own future land and wealth opportunities because now we have to deal with a crater in the middle of washington you're saying use it as an opportunity and and do the same thing through another lens but make it more advantageous for the united states okay i would believe that i would but point being putin would still lose to start this whole thing. He loses all logic and reason. Mutual assured destruction. Boop!

Out the window. He doesn't care about that anymore. He's like, fuck you. Boom. Right. It's not logic and reason. I don't think he's losing logic and reason. I think that is the logical conclusion he would come to. It's the same thing that when you're when you pin an animal against the wall, is the animal losing all logic and reasoning when it bites you? No. It's the same thing that when you're, when you pin an animal against the wall, is the animal losing all logic and reasoning when it bites you?

No, it's pinned. It is in life or death. It is in fight or flight. And it doesn't, it has lost the option for flight. The only option left is fight. But he also knows, here's the difference. The animal against the wall can bite you and perhaps it can then get away. He knows, he should know know this is why i say he

loses logic and reasoning if he does the bomb i mean he's dead either way he's done he's done like he will not he's done it's the done either way part though that's what makes it a moot point if he stays in power of a country that's economically destroyed by the united states sanctions or if he stays in a country that launches a nuclear missile at five major western countries he's done so if you're done either way how do you go out do you go out fighting or do you go out quietly someone like putin does not have a history of going out quietly that's what i worry about i don't i don't worry about it because we have a choice like the united states has a choice they don't have to continue down the path where they're essentially economically bombing russia but they're going to

and you're not the guy in charge and you can't i'm not the guy in charge and i can't say one way or the other but i can say they have a choice not to right so you do have to worry about it because you have no control over the situation i don't have to worry about it man i can go to another country you know who's not going to get bombed albania georgia turkey botswana beautiful country new zealand what do I have to worry about I I can pretty much predictably count on one hand who the first five like target cities would be that they would blow up I don't live in any of those city Washington DC is on the list San Francisco is on the list New York is on the list Chicago is on the list Miami is on the list if I was in one of those

five countries right about now I'd actually probably be looking at a long-term rental in the country somewhere. North Carolina. Or in one of those five cities, you're saying. Yeah, if I lived in one of those five cities, I'd be looking at options to go somewhere else. Because if Putin wants to make, if he wants to end his legacy

with an exclamation point in history, it's not going to be blowing up ukraine no it's it's two weeks ago i was telling people i didn't think nuclear was a realistic option now that i'm reading headlines now the biggest default in history in 40 years and most of the debt that russia has against the united states probably goes back to the u.s supporting russia in world war ii well you were a nuclear guy so let's ask you this directly how realistic because i i don't know much about this part of it how realistic is it to be able to stop a nuclear bomb that's on its way here almost impossible it's almost impossible

the only way you can the only way you can intercept a nuclear weapon is after it launches that's the only time you can intercept it because the missile moves fast but slow enough to intercept it from its location into the atmosphere once it's in the atmosphere it releases something called a multiple re-entry vehicle it's almost like if you can imagine a uh um a pistol like a six shooter if you were to take the the six shooter and put up in space, it's going to have six warheads, independently targeted warheads. And they just drop out of that six-cylinder shooter at six different targets, self-directed. Oh, so it wouldn't be one target. It'd be multiple.

One missile can hit multiple targets. So one missile has to survive. And we don't have, like, like an iron dome, something like that. Well, could that stop what Israel's got going on over there? Could that stop any of that? It could try. This is preponderance of force, right? Even in the United States, our nuclear code calls that when one missile is launched, all missiles are launched.

So a true Hail Mary is all of Russian missiles are launched. All of their mobile missiles, all of their submarine missiles, all of their land-based missiles, all of their futuristic missiles, all of them go up at once, come down at once. Maybe we have a handful of like 737s up there with anti-laser capability that can intercept a few of them. But if only one missile gets by

and it's got seven warheads, so that's that's the thing that i hope that we never get to nuclear war the only thing that brings us to the brink of nuclear war is true like hopeless scenarios that's what made us drop bombs in japan we are pushing russia to a true we are pushing put Putin to a place where it is a truly hopeless scenario for him. Yeah. It's one thing if we're doing this in Venezuela. Completely different thing if we're doing this in Russia.

Right? The other kind of wild card that gives me hope that even if Putin did say launch, they wouldn't all be launched is because the way that the military is structured in russia the commanders have independent jurisdiction over the missile they command really in russia in the united states it's not like that really in the united states the president says launch he gives a code and done everybody launches done in russia he says launch

and each individual commander has to say launch if If they don't, if they decided to not launch, they can bow out. They would be punished under Russian law afterwards, but it's not a decentralized. So they're not really allowed to say no. They're allowed to say no, but they're not really allowed to say no. But if they had an out, I mean, if the CIA is cultivating some assets there, then they might have a good out. Well, what's interesting, too, is that if some intelligence assessment has already been run, and they already know that 99% of commanders would not take the order, that might be all the United States needs to be like, well, let's go in and take out Putin. We already know that 99% of the officers are not going to launch we only have to prioritize the one percent that will yeah this this whole invasion he did one thing you have to say about

him he's always been an awful dude and a tyrannical guy but he's been frankly pretty calculated and made some smart moves in the past i mean like the way he pulled off crimea was fucking genius he did it in georgia before that yeah exactly and that was what like oh 2008 yeah so you know the way he rose to power which david satter uncovered and no one wanted to listen to and libanenko and some of the guys in Russia as well uncovered like stroke of genius you know the guy has has made a lot of moves that even if they're evil for his own power they've been smart and this is the first time where it feels like it's been a clusterfuck like he hasn't there's no way they built in losing 15,000 Russian troops in the first 21 days.

Why do you think they lost 15,000 troops? You're looking at me like I know. Because the narrative that's come out is 15,000 troops. Do you know how many Russian, you do have any idea how many Ukrainian troops they claim have been lost? When you say they. The existing English narrative, English language narrative coming out of NATO and the United States.

That's where you're hearing 15,000. Actually, you're hearing somewhere to the tune of like 45,000 Russian troops have been lost. Well, now. Yeah, okay. Right? And they say that like 1,500 to 2,000 Ukrainian troops have been lost.

That means one untrained poorly equipped Ukrainian is killing between 10 and 40 Russian soldiers on any given day those odds are just not realistic yeah I think that's fair I think that's fair I I'm not saying that there aren't numbers that are off or some that are exaggerated no doubt about it and you can see some of the damage too you know but still this was the kind of thing that when you do it you assume you're taking this shit in two days you're taking what you want maybe not two days but quickly with minimal problems with highly trained soldiers going in doing their thing he sent a bunch of guys including dudes who were drafted in december they're 18 years old they just want some hot soup and they get the fuck out of there like there's no way that's smart and that's not i feel like just based on i look at results

look at his for him in the context of putin look at his quote-unquote positive results throughout his career none of that so i don't disagree with you but i i i do want to highlight that we say he has not won look at the results right if you look at the results the results are he controls more of ukraine now than they did the day before the invasion that's fair they control more of the regions where they were already had a presence they control more of those regions than they did before and they control almost two-thirds of the southern coastline which they did not control before and they have nearly created a complete land bridge through to odessa and moldova which allows another russian sympathetic country moldova to join the union like Belarus has joined

the union. Because right now, Moldova is technically an independent country with a strong Russian separatist movement that's politically acknowledged, but not a point of contention, right? So when we say that he's lost, or when we say that Ukrainians have won, I think what's more accurate is to say that he has gained ground in the places where he was strong. I don't know why we seem to think that Kiev was ever a primary objective. Kiev could have been a stretch goal. Kiev could have also been a strategic distraction. Yes.

To gain more ground in the actual superior, arguably Odessa and the south are a much more strategic position. Kiev is not a strategic position at all. It just has a lot of people there. It's got too many people. If you had to invade a city that you knew you were going to lose as a distraction, what type of weaponry would you use? What type of troops would you use? Not your best and brightest, not your best and brightest not your most expensive not your most high performance i'm not saying that's what he did but i am saying that is a potential decision that was made he has more land than he did before and even more important what are nato in the united states doing right now not putting boots on the ground seven weeks of conflict eight weeks of conflict and they still haven't done anything except give some technology and made a lot of public statements

so if putin's goal was to take more of ukraine and control more of ukraine because he could control the southern border and control the access to the Black Sea, which is where all support for Ukraine comes from. If his goal was to control those regions, he's succeeded. If his goal was to partner with China and demonstrate for Chinese and Russian leadership what would happen in a full-scale invasion of a sovereign country, like China has promised to do in Taiwan, if that was one of his objectives, he has also completed that objective. Yeah, you made a prediction on concrete with Danny about Taiwan. And you've said on this podcast that you spend time in Asia, I don't know how close that is to China, or what's going on

there or how much but you speak from a level of the CIA in the sense that you have a lot of knowledge about these world powers, Russia, China, so that's at least a lot of credibility there but you had said that in the lead up to the 2024 election china was going to take taiwan correct what makes you so certain about that so um i i remain uh it's not certainty it's probabilities i remain i think it's a highly probable scenario that in the lead upup to the 2024 election, China takes a very aggressive military stance on Taiwan. We see them, even during this invasion of Ukraine, we see some really interesting and powerful moves from China against Taiwan specifically. Flyovers, influence campaigns, etc. that have been covered in the press but not they're not mainstream by anything by any stretch so uh the per the the convergence of important events in 2024 are what really drive me to have confidence that china is going to take an aggressive stance against taiwan first they

took hong kong successfully in 2019 and the whole world cared about it until COVID hit. And then the whole world forgot that China forcefully took Hong Kong in 2020. So that happened. That is a demonstration of China's ability and capability to just go in and take a sovereign, in this case, a city, but something that wasn't necessarily there, something that was a democracy, and then make it their own, just suck it in, change the laws, abuse the people and take over and you're saying and then kovat happened and then kovat happened everybody forgot nobody remembers hong kong if you ask people do you remember what happened in hong kong a lot of them are like yeah the chinese daryl mori tweeted when did that happen it happened like two years ago three years ago right really really recent

oh the whole world had already forgotten about Georgia. Most of the world had forgotten about Crimea, right? So now we're getting a sense for how often the world forgets about massive scale movements against sovereign countries. Russia has had this thing with all the former Soviet republics for a while.

China has a thing with basically Hong Kong and Taiwan. They have now, they have found a way to take Hong Kong. So they have certain proof of concept, set up legal actions, do a bunch of back-end bureaucratic work, make sure that when it goes up to an international court, the international court can't make a fast decision on whether or not something was legal or illegal. That's how they took Hong Kong. They basically changed the laws in Hong Kong before they ever put a person in hong kong to take the hong kong people so then international courts when they looked at it

they couldn't say it was illegal because technically china had already changed all the laws in hong kong to make them fall under the chinese communist party are they doing that right now in taiwan yes exactly right they had already launched multi-year campaigns to increase the positive Interpretation of Chinese culture and Chinese values and the Chinese people in Hong Kong before they took Hong Kong They're doing the same thing in Taiwan And why do you say in the build-up to the US election in 2024 because we are a highly divisive country and China has watched what's happened in 2022 and china has watched what's happened in 2022 and they've watched what's happened in 2008 and 2014. they've watched how an aggressive leader

takes aggressive action and our country gets jammed up without and more importantly they know that if we don't have a stake in the game an economic stake in the game we're not really going to fight we have a stake in taiwan we care about the fact that taiwan is the largest exporter of nanotechnology of of computer chips in the world right but the reason that taiwan is the largest exporter of those chips is because china controls access to the rare earth minerals that are used in those chips so it's a symbiotic relationship if we prevent taiwan from if we fight for taiwan against china we stand to lose more than we gain and they know that so now you have in you have an election year where a divisive a divided country is going to have to choose who's the leader for the next four years and they know that the country already doesn't like Biden very much.

They don't like, like, Biden has historically low approval rates among polled people, and there's always problems with polls, of course. But they know that we are a divisive country, and they don't, whoever comes up to compete against Biden in 2024, they know that they can stoke the fires of conflict if they pick a fight in their own region. And then whoever comes in, whether it's Biden or somebody else,

they're going to have to make fast, decisive decisions in the first few months of their new presidency. Even better if in 2022, this year, the House, the Congress, and the White House all become controlled by different parties. Now, it's a lame duck president in office when China invades Taiwan. Yeah, so why would they wait?

They would wait because there's no strategic value in them doing it early. Doing it early runs the risk that somebody acts in an unpredictable way, or maybe suddenly there's, like, 9-11. They all know what happened after 9-11 the country unified and everybody was like, let's go get the bad guys So they want to make sure that but that's not 9-11 was here. They hit us on our soil, right? They hit us, correct You pull Americans 60% of them don't know Taiwan's a country

That's that's why I feel like Taiwan is is not long for this world if I could take my family to Taiwan in the next two years so they could see how beautiful Chinese culture is I would take them because after that I won't be able to take them Wow yeah I'm for all it's not just me saying it right but but if you haven't heard it before, look for Taiwan to get taken by China in 2024. Okay. Yeah, we're going to be watching that. That was a whoa moment when I heard you say that. Especially, like right now you see, in my point of view, the US and NATO have already stopped talking about Ukraine.

They've already said, we won. Russia's on the retreat. Russians running away. We won. They know they didn't yet, though. they've already said we won russia's on the retreat russians running away we won right they know they didn't yet though but that's not what we're hearing in media right so you're separating the two i'm separating narratives i'm separating the two because because china knows that what the u.s is actually going to do in tai Taiwan is most likely what they actually did in Ukraine. Make a bunch of noise, spend five or seven weeks making promises that they don't fulfill, and then moving on to something more important.

If that's what the world leader is going to do in 2024, then that just gives them total confidence. Like, well, let's go take Taiwan. But the president's going to beat his chest for seven weeks, and then it's going to do in 2024. And that just gives them total confidence. Like, well, let's go take Taiwan. But the president's going to beat his chest for seven weeks, and then it's going to be over. Or it's not, because Russia's got a long fight ahead of them still.

But China's like, we'll gain ground. We'll have troops on the ground in Taiwan, a standing influence in the area, and the United States isn't going to get involved. That's all they really care about. And even if supply chains did diversify and leave and stuff, economically, China came out of COVID okay. For sure. And that was a good now in this way to look at the case study for them to be able to say, oh, well, they didn't fuck us after that.

So maybe they won't fuck us after this. Two years or five years of penalties. Yeah. And then we'll be moving on. Right? Damn. And just like China's offering Russia the off vent for their currency, two years from now, Russia will be in good enough standing. They'll be the off vent for Chinese currency.

Or China, who's also doubling down on their investments in the Middle East, knows that they'll be able to send their money to Saudi Arabia. That's a whole other thing. Yeah, wherever else. All the tentacles. There's always going to be somebody who can vent. The tentacles are everywhere. Like, who do we call up when we have the energy problem? Saudi Arabia, baby.

Yeah. You know, the same people that are killing journalists on foreign consulate soils. Yeah. It's just. And cutting off hands every Wednesday afternoon. Yeah. It's, I mean, you are going to have bad, to your point, anywhere. And I get that. It just, it doesn't make it easier to go down when you actually look at it and live in this world where you try to follow this stuff and why these people talk to these people and those people talk to those people. But you're not going to fix it 100%. So where's the least threatening scenario? Go with that one. Well, and not only that, but I would say that you don't have to fix it, and you don't have to keep up with it.

I know some of us think that we do. A lot of us have anxiety over what's gonna happen next. Mm-hmm. The way that we're trained to overcome anxiety, CIA likes to hire people with anxiety. It likes people that have a natural set of anxious or paranoid wiring in their head. Because those are people who are already more naturally cued for details observable changes in their environment so then

all they have to do is train you to control your anxiety and they get all the benefits of you already naturally being paranoid so the way that they train us to overcome our anxiety is to basically say okay you can't control all of this, but as you shrink the circle, you increase control exponentially. So you can't control what your neighbor is doing two buildings away right now in their living room. You have no control over that. But when you shrink it to what you're doing

in your living room right now, you have almost total control. So when you look at the world as a whole, can't control what Russia's gonna do with a nuclear weapon. Can't control what Biden's gonna do with, you know, the world as a whole, can't control what Russia is going to do with a nuclear weapon. Can't control what Biden's going to do with, you know, the next round of funding and missiles that he's going to send to Ukraine. But when you shrink it down to what you can do right now,

you have quite a bit of control, whether that's researching what country you would go to if you wanted a second citizenship or researching, maybe, maybe you have, if you're retired, let's just say that we're talking to somebody who's 65 years old, they have $2 million in the bank, right?

And they're managing their own portfolio because they're day traders. That's a huge population in the United States. If that person just decides, you know what? I can do all the same stuff from Costa Rica. And, oh, by the way, $200,000 buys me a house in Costa Rica that gets me Costa Rican citizenship in six months. Guess what they don't have to worry about anymore?

Any of the garbage between Russia and the United States. Forever. Because now they're a U.S. citizen living in Costa Rica with joint Costa Rican citizenship, still managing all their funds, still living a very comfortable life, if not more comfortable. Right? Because they shrank their circle of their nexus of control that's what we do with cia all the time can't control the surveillance team but you can control your movements and when you control your movements

you'll be able to spot the surveillance team which then gives you a chance to increase your nexus of control and when you can see that you have surveillance you can count how many surveillance and describe them you increase your nexus of control. If you try to start here, it's never going to happen. Shrink it down, grow it from there. What's your opinion on the CIA having left it and been in it? So I... I can't put my finger on that. I am a huge fan of CIA's mission. I will... It's very, very rare that you're ever going to hear me say anything negative about cia i love the mission it's a valuable mission i was super privileged and honored to work with the people that i worked with there nine out of ten like you were saying nothing's perfect but some of the most amazing and impressive people that i never knew existed i got to be friends with i got to have coffee with

we ate shitty breakfast sandwiches and talked about you know, iran. It was awesome It was awesome But it's still a giant broken government organization Right all the weaknesses of cia are the weaknesses in our bureaucratic process like what spending? Bullshit promotions stuff done talented people aren't the ones that rise to leadership positions, right? It's all politics. It's all who do you know? Who did you work with? You know, the most challenging jobs, the most important missions, those don't go to the

people with the best qualifications. They go to the guy who knew a guy who did a thing for a guy, right? Gina Haspel. Gina Haspel was the director of CIA. Big deal because she was the director of cia and she was a former operations officer that made director of cia so people were like gina haspel gina haspel she's also like known and fully admits that when the order came down to destroy evidence for waterboarding when she got that order she destroyed evidence yeah that's not a leader no that's somebody who plays nice in the

sandbox and that's exactly the kind of person that rises to power inside CIA. Until they figure that whole thing out, they're always just gonna be a big bureaucratic. It's no different than IRS or Homeland Security or Health and Human Services or the Department of Education. It's just a big government building. It's like I was telling you, when was the last time you went to the DMV and had a positive experience?

When was the last time you went to the post office and had an overwhelmingly positive experience? Government organizations are not built to be efficient and supremely effective. They're just built to function. Ideally, function and achieve the minimum expectation, which we failed to do in 2001. So why would we expect CIA to be any different just because hollywood says that it's super cool awesome people work there with a heart for service and they are braver and more intelligent than i ever will be when it came time for me to choose between raising a family or building a career at cia i chose to invest my time in my family plenty of people don't make

that choice. They choose the CIA over their family. So I absolutely want to honor all of those people. But you're never going to hear me say that CIA has it all figured out. They're still just another adolescent government organization like everybody else. If I touch that, we're going to be here for another four hours. So I can't touch that, because you got a flight to catch and everything. But this did not disappoint at all. I mean, I was really looking forward to this. Like I said, I loved your podcast with Danny. And again, people should go check that out. It's been on Concrete. Type in Andrew Bustamante. They're all great episodes. for you i didn't even scratch the surface today but i also just kind of wanted to let you riff on on a bunch of things and see where it went so i thought it was pretty good but in the future we'll have to have you in here again if you come back yeah absolutely and um listen man i i really really appreciate people who were in the inner sanctum of some crazy shit and are very very open to discussing what they're literally allowed to you know because a lot

of people they just you know they feed you shit and keep you in the dark on everything but it's nice to have like in order to eliminate as many of the people who are just going to be far gone on one end or the other the way you do it is to having at least diplomatic conversation about the good and the bad and then decide for yourself what's in between. So I really, really appreciate you doing this. I appreciate your pursuit of exactly that. Independent thought. Yeah. That's the key to our success

is always going to be independent thought. And the biggest frustration I have is when you see people willingly volunteer their independent thought away in favor of actual groupthink, like you talk about. Yeah. Well, let's try to combat it here.

Keep doing what we do. I like it. Andy, thank you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.