Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Cia Spy Exposes Corrupt Double Agent Cia Secrets More The Cia Tried To Ban This Story

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante shares his story about how he and his wife built a covert espionage cell from scratch, only to discover they were unknowingly being used in a classified mole hunt.⁣ ⁣ Andrew's links⁣ Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/3U9y6Di⁣ Read Andrew’s CIA book ‘Shadow Cell’: https://geni.us/ShadowCellBook ⁣ Follow Andy on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante ⁣ Explore Spy School: https://everydayspy.com/ ⁣ Support Andy's sponsor Axolt Brain: https://axoltbrain.com/andy⁣ Listen to the podcast: https://youtube.com/@EverydaySpyPodcasthttps://shadowcellbook.com⁣ ⁣ Go to https://OmahaSteaks.com to get 50% off sitewide during their Red-Hot Sale Event. And use Promo Code INSIDE at checkout for an extra $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. See site for details. A big thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks!⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Get started NOW while you still have time. Go to https://donewithdebt.com and talk with one of their specialists, FOR FREE. ⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Get 10% sitewide for a limited time. Just visit https://GhostBed.com/cox and use code COX at checkout.⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Do you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7⁣ ⁣ Send me an email here: [e-mail]⁣ ⁣ Do you extra clips and behind the scenes content?⁣ Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime ⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Follow me on all socials!⁣ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/⁣ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrime⁣ ⁣ ⁣ Do you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopart⁣ ⁣ Listen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox ⁣ ⁣ Check out my true crime books! ⁣ Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCF⁣ Bent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TM⁣ It's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8⁣ Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5G⁣ Devil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438⁣ The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3K⁣ Bailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402⁣ Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1⁣ ⁣ Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!⁣ Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WX⁣ ⁣ If you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:⁣ Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69⁣ Cashapp: $coxcon69 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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My wife and I wrote our memoir of our time at CIA and they classified the entire thing. This is the kind of tradecraft that no one's ever talked about before. This is about real-time operations still happening today against America's largest adversaries. And this is part of what made CIA so nervous. My wife and I wrote our memoir of our time at CIA

back in 2021. And then the world exploded in 2000. 2022, CIA received our manuscript for review and approval, and they classified the entire thing. Just shut the whole book process down. They said everything in this document. I think the specific terminology in their email to us was the premise and content of this manuscript is considered fully classified from end to end. Which is bullshit. You can't, like, there's a very specific definition for classified information.

There's a burden of evidence for classified information, so there's all sorts of stuff that made that BS. But the message that they were sending was, if you want to publish this, we're going to make it very, very difficult. Right. So CIA's tactic with a lot of former officers isn't necessarily to press charges. It's to make it so hard to get it published that the publisher gives up on you, that producers give up on you, that the audience, like the American people, kind of give up on paying attention. So that was their tactic. At the time, because it's my wife and I and we're two different people, the tactic worked on her.

She saw CIA say no, and she did not want to cross CIA. Right. And my wife is a smart former CIA officer herself, and she said, we should stop. But for me, it did the opposite. For me, I was just like, fuck no. Like, we got to push harder now. Yeah. You know this isn't classified.

You know this is important enough that they would call it classified. We have to move forward. Right. So how did you go about that? Did you write a letter? Did you get an attorney? Did you? So for about two, so for the first year,

We tried to work it out cordially. Yeah, we tried to send them a note, and then 35 days later they'd respond, and we tried making edits, and then we'd submit it again, and 90 days later, they'd come back and say your edits weren't good enough. So for a year, we tried that way. Then we retained an attorney, and we went and got one of the most successful attorneys in the classified information business. His name's Mark Zaid, super famous guy in the world of former CIA and military

and diplomats who want to write books. And Mark came on and Mark started to counsel us and Mark reviewed the project as much as he could because technically he couldn't read the story because it was classified. So you can see how much of a pain in the ass CIA was successfully making this whole bit. But what we came across is that the story is really at its core about a mole hunt, a mole that CIA had never disclosed to the public that was penetrated into CIA. and how my wife and I were used as bait for CIA to catch that mole. Okay. Well, once that became relevant, once our attorney realized, oh, you were the ones who were put in harm's way without being informed that you were being put in harms way.

That made it a First Amendment issue. Oh, okay. So you didn't know going in that they, so they put you in and gave you an assignment, put you out here telling you, hey, you're, you guys are gathering evidence doing this. year. But really, they're trying to wait for the mole to pass that information on to somebody else, which you definitely were in danger of being grabbed because now somebody, some government. Do we know the government? So we've had to use pseudonyms to cover the names of the assets that we worked with, to, of course, cover the names of the key players. So like our mole, we can't call our

mole by his real name. But we can say that there was a mole. It's publicly disclosed now. Our book will be the first book to ever publicly expose this CIA mole. And then we had to cover it through pseudonyms and cryptonyms because that was CIA's request. Okay. So what, you'd come up with a fictitious country? Well, more like an encrypted country.

So it's a real country, but we just can't call it by its country name. So we call it Falcon. See? Yeah. It's a, you know, kind of, yeah. So that's a long. I would have come up with something better. Falcon, I would have...

Oh, we tried. So we tried. So here's what's funny, right? We tried to come up with... Kukistan. We tried to come up with... You know what I'm saying something. Totally interesting stuff.

But here's what... Every step of the way, C.I. was fighting us. So I shit you not. We came up with one whole set of cryptonyms for the country and for the assets that made it so that the country and the assets didn't have a connection to each other. Because we didn't want people to be able to kind of guess like, oh, it was Iran. Yeah. Well, it wasn't...

We weren't worried about American people. if anything, we want to maximize our transparency for Americans. What was our concern and CIA's concern was our adversaries. Because anything you sell on Amazon, somebody else can buy it, Russia can buy it, Iran can buy it, North Korea can buy it, China can buy it, right? Anybody can buy what you put out there. So what we didn't want was to equip our adversaries with information that they could use to reverse engineer CIA operations that were current.

The other thing that's really important to understand here is our book is the most contemporary, current memoir on CIA tradecraft that's ever been written. This isn't something that was written about the war on terror. This isn't something that's written about the Cold War. This is about real-time operations still happening today against America's largest adversaries. So real-time operations, what we started in our shadow cell, the name of the book, those operations are still happening now. So we had to protect them as best we could.

So we came up with a whole suite of names. And then CIA came in and said, all of these names are, they don't meet our requirement for proper clandestinity. So we want you to change them all so that they are American wildlife names. Because if you use this name, it sounds like you're talking about this country. If you use this color, it sounds like you're talking about that country, if you, whatever else. So we were like, okay. So now we have Wolf, Falcon, right? We talked about whether or not we want to have bear or whether we want to have pigeon or whatever the hell else.

So everything is encrypted after American wildlife. Silly. Because to me, if you were talking about Russia and you said to me Russia would be a bear, could be a bear. You know what I'm saying? Like there's a lot of countries that like America to me is an eagle. Like most countries have some kind of an association with some type of an animal, right? Like isn't it Iran or Iraq is like a lion? You know what I'm saying?

A lot of them. And they don't make sense. It does nothing. But this is all just part of the government game, right? The government game is just a game of putting as many barriers in your way as it can in the hopes that you give up. Well, you didn't give up, and you got to. And it's a love story.

I'm just a joke. I'm assuming it is. I mean, there's a little bit of love story. And it's funny because there's what I love about the story that we've built is that it was shaped by many people, right? My wife and I wrote it, but it was shaped by the publisher, shaped by our editor. Of course, it was shaped by my wife, who's shaped by my wife, who sees it. things very differently than I see things. And so for that reason, yes, there's a, there's a story

of two young people meeting at CIA falling in love and then ultimately being assigned on the same operation. And that's what we got to do. That's why she loves it. And that's why the publisher loves it. What I love about our story is it's about two fucking people who were given the ability to be criminals in a foreign country. Right. I love that. Here's what we got to do. Here's how we did it. Here's, you know, the specific tradecraft that we use along the way to not get caught by local police, to not get caught, you know, transiting borders. Here's how we changed our aliases to, you know, to stupefy flight manifestos. Like, it was such a fun time. And that's, I guess that's for me, the thing that I get really jazzed about with espionage, because espionage is illegal.

Right. We've talked about this before. Yeah, yeah. Like, the people that I feel like I can connect with the most are oftentimes criminals, because criminals get this. lifestyle. I get it. I get it. I was, so there's multiple things of kind of coming to my head while you were talking. Did you ever see, I always talk about movies, bro. But as you were talking, I was thinking, did you ever see the movie with Kevin Costner, no way out? I feel like I have, but I don't remember it. God, bro. I actually was talking about this movie within the last week to my wife, one of the many movies that I forced her to watch where she, all right, we'll watch her tomorrow. You know, and it's, Kevin Costner is working in the Pentagon.

His boss is having an affair. He ends up, his boss ends up killing the woman. And so to cover it up, they say that Yuri, which is a hidden inside mole that has always been believed to be operating inside the Pentagon, that Yuri killed this girl. And so they're searching for Yuri to try and divert attention. from who was, who really killed her. Right. Because he was also sleeping with the girl,

Kevin Costor's character. The problem is you find out through the whole thing he's, you know, he's covering this and dodging this because he's afraid they're going to find him, but you think Kevin Costner's character. The truth is, at the very end of the movie, you realize,

no, he is Yuri. Like, he really is Yuri. Like, he was all made up by them to divert attention. But the truth is, he is Yuri. And the very end, the Russians grab him and everything. They've got him in there. And they come and sit down and they start talking to him

and he starts speaking Russian. and you realize like, like some of the things that weren't, you didn't quite understand. I'm like, now absolutely makes sense. But it was great. But the thing that Bob,

that I don't understand is, well, and we can, if you want, we can, can we kind of go over the story. Yeah. At this point.

Because I'm very curious to know at what point, don't tell me now, but my curiosity is that at what point do you realize, like, oh, you're using us as bait? Like, at that moment,

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And for an extra $35 off, use promo code inside at checkout. That's 50% off at Omaha Stakes.com and an extra $35 off with promo code inside at checkout. See site for details. Let's go back to the beginning when you first started at CIA and, you know, you first get there and you were in the Navy. I was in the Air Force. So close so far away. Right. And you got, you came in, and that's when you met your wife, right?

Right. So my wife and I were both recruited to CIA through two different recruitment methods. I was contacted by a recruiter. She was an online application. I came from the military. She came from the world of, like, basically social work. And we came in for two different skill sets. I came in to be a core collector or an intelligence collector in the field, somebody who actually meets with assets. She came in to be what was known as a targeter. A targeter is a targeter is a. the person who identifies human sources of information. So this was at a very kind of transformational time for CIA. They were transitioning after the 9-11 event in 2001, after the 9-11 commission in 2003.

So there was a huge hiring surge and a whole new kind of shaping effort to build this more professional CIA. And in the middle of this, we came in in a giant group of new recruits. I think there were 250 people in our class, which is massive compared to what was traditional. Traditionally, it was like 25 new people would come in three times a year. Well, also, I think they typically were hiring like lawyers. Like most of the CIA was like white males with law degrees. And when you're having people fly planes into buildings, it's hard to infiltrate those types of organizations when you've got four people on staff that speak Arabic.

And everybody's a pale faith. Yeah. Right? Like you got no brown people in this. in this bunch. Correct. And that was the traditional CIA. So now they're transforming that, right?

More women, more minorities, more age differences, different religions, different backgrounds and education. Because you're right. The traditional role, the traditional model for hiring was advanced degrees, Caucasian person, multiple generations in the United States. That was kind of what they were looking for. Well, now all of a sudden. Which would be great if you were in the United, if you were functioning in the United States.

And the idea used to be, you know, As silly as this is, the idea used to be send white people into foreign countries and let everyone know they're American because then they're just going to come and want to sell their secrets. Because when you go to, when you are American and you go to a foreign country, they think you have money. They think you have money. And it was really easy. That's kind of how things worked in the Cold War era. But you're right. Post 9-11, it's the war on terror.

It's a completely different world. And dual-docked citizens are now something they want. People who are naturalized American citizens. It's something they want. People whose parents are first-generation immigrants, that's something they want, and it's a whole different world. And of course, you can imagine the culture challenge.

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with Advil plus acetaminopin. Advil, the official pain relief partner of the NFL. Ask your pharmacist at this product's rate for you. Always read and follow the label. When you start going through training, because here I am a brown 27-year-old military kid with no advanced degree and my wife, who's got three advanced degrees, but as her dad was born in Venezuela, right, so she's first-generation U.S. citizen. When the two of us go up against some like seasoned, gray-haired white guy who's Cold War his whole career and he's 20, 27 years in the agency, he's looking at us thinking that we're dumb shits.

Yeah. So that it was just, that was kind of the soup that we found ourselves in. And in that soup, we kind of collided with each other. We were friends. We were attracted to each other at first, but we were both there for our careers. So there was this weird sort of avoidant effort from both of us where we were like, hey, if we hook up, that's cool, but we shouldn't get serious. And anybody who's been in a relationship like that knows what I'm talking about.

And that's where we started. What happened is my wife was very successful in her career right from the beginning. I had struggles. I struggled with authority. I struggled with policy. I struggled with principles. So we had these two very different trajectories in our career that ultimately got us to the place where she was very well respected. And I was very disposable.

And we got engaged and we committed to marriage. And that's something CIA hates. CIA does not like it when its officers get married. Okay. So what, so you, but you got married, are you, when you were married, were you already kind of in the field? And you said she wasn't really in the field. Correct. So I was in a position where I was, I was traveling for short-term operations, something that we would call TDI-Y temporary duty yonder.

So I do these short operations in these shitty places because I'm not really a high-stakes officer. I'm not really a pat-on-the-back kind of badged award-winning officer. So I just go deal with fucking narco-traffickers. and drug dealers and human smugglers and shitbirds all over the world for two or four weeks at a time. She was a targeter who stayed in headquarters in Langley and identified high priority targets that would be sent all over the world. So we had these two very different jobs and these two different trajectories.

When we got married, CIA's big kind of beef with that is just, well, now we have to blend the two of your cover stories and your cover identities together and all this extra administrative work that they didn't want to have to do. we often joke CIA is the first organization to help fund your divorce. Right. But they're going to do everything they can to slow down your marriage. And that's not just marriage between two officers. That's marriage between an officer and a U.S. citizen or marriage between an officer

in a foreign national, right? You name it. They don't want to see you get married. And that's because what they don't, because it makes it more difficult. It's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to, if a guy's married, it's hard to say, hey, by the way, for the next 18 months, you're going to be living here and you can't have any contact with your wife. Like, that's a hard pill to swallow.

Correct. Yeah, it's a hard sell because administratively it's difficult. But then the other big thing is culturally, where's your loyalty lie? Is your loyalty now to the job more than to your spouse? And what happens when kids are born? Right. Where does your loyalty go there? And CIA does not like having unclear loyalty.

I see some guys being like 18. Baby, I tried. Gotta go. Yeah, until they're sent to, you know, they're sent to Mozambique or they're sent to, you know, fucking Timbuktu. I actually had a buddy who was sent to Timbuktu for 12 months. Is that a real place? It's a real place. He was so upset. He was so upset that he had to go to Timbuktu. And then in hindsight, he talks about how it was one of his favorite assignments ever. Because everybody there was so miserable. He was like, holy shit, everybody here's having fun. So how do they come to you with the two of you with, hey, we're going to connect the two of you and here's an assignment for you? So they come to us with an assignment, and what they tell us is that we need a whole new way of running operations against this high priority American target.

It's an adversary, Falcon. And Falcon is a real country, and Falcon is a real adversary for the United States, and they are a strategic threat to the United States. So my wife and I, as two junior officers, second tour officers, which means that we've been through training. We've been through one formal tour at CIA in our career category, and now we're getting ready for our second tour. as second tour officers, we're stoked because, you know, we get to create something new against a strategic threat, which means that's a lot of career advancement if we do a good job. And we get to work together. So we're super excited about that.

So for us, it was all, as soon as they told us, pat on the back, we're ready to rock and roll. Later on, when like my suspicious self started to kick in, I kind of pulled my wife aside and I was like, Does this seem strange to you? Like, you're really good. I'm not. They're putting us together to do this hard thing. Does that not seem odd? Why wouldn't they put you with some other superstar?

Right. Why would they even invite me? So there were all these kind of questions that started to bubble up. And again, my wife and I being two very different people, I'm suspicious of the whole thing. And she thinks that CIA had some revelation where they realized they'd been treating me wrong with. She's like, oh, no, CIA just realizes you are talented and CIA realizes you are hardworking and CIA realizes you are committed and this is them extending a fig leaf to

you to say. Yeah, because they're always looking out for me. So it was just such a funny time in hindsight, stressful time in the moment, but funny time in hindsight because she really thought they were like being a kind-hearted professional organization. And I thought they were they were being like sketchy. Right. Yeah. Like I'm, but here's, well, here, but you're, like you said, expendable, but she's not. So I would have been like, yeah, me, okay, I get it.

They put me in a situation where if I fail or something goes wrong, who'd they lose? Right. They're not impressed by me anyway. Right. But her, they wouldn't put you in that position, I don't think. But for some reason, I guess she was expendable too. Well, so, and that's what I was telling. That was another element in the story that didn't make sense.

sense. Why are they sending you into the field with me? That basically means that your safety and security is on my shoulders, and you are a highly decorated, successful, highly desirable officer. Well, maybe so they could have somebody to blame it on. If something does go wrong, we just blame it on Bousamante. And that was one of the things that we kind of landed on, too, is that the idea here was if the worst happened, wherever we went, she wasn't going to be on the bleeding edge, right? Wherever we went, she was going to be in a hardened facility, and I would be out there collecting.

So that was essentially what we were expecting it to look like. And after, again, in the process of writing this book, we realized, well, shit, girl, like, if I would have died, if I would have gotten captured, if I would have gotten killed, that would have made her a widower, or a widow to, quote, unquote, someone who died in the line of duty. that would have absolutely ironed her loyalty to CIA forever. Otherwise, what's the point?

Like, this is a tool that the military uses all the time. You go to battle, your brother dies in battle, and then you are the one carrying the burden of, well, what did he die for? Well, shit. I can't quit now, otherwise his death is meaningless. So now I'm going to take it even harder than the enemy. Well, so what was, I have a question.

So what was, I understand you're saying, gather assets, but I mean, like, what are you doing? And my other question is, if they're going to send you into a country, this is like a third world country, I'm assuming, that I think we had kind of, I think last time our interview, that's what I got the impression. It was like a third world country because you had said like you were working in a factory or something. But do they send you in first and then you're there for two months and then she comes in and you guys act like you meet and you start dating and she moves in? Or do you guys show up? with a moving van, like, hey, we just moved from Caracas and we just drove here 150 miles

and we're married and we're going to move into this apartment and then you go trying to get a job and you get a job and she gets a job. I mean, is it like that? So it's funny because this is this is the kind of tradecraft that no one's ever talked about before that we were excited to share in our story. Right. So we detail it all in shadow cell. But essentially, and this is part of what made CIA so nervous. The way it works is that when you are deployed, you're from CIA, you go to a what we call a third country location. That third country location is an area where you do not operate. You just live. And then from that location, you deploy a second time to go to wherever you need to go. And then the reason that you do that is it allows you to

jump from country to country and essentially change your ID in every country. So imagine you start in you start in Caracas. Caracas is a very difficult place to start. You start in Spain. Okay. You fly from Spain to Armenia. In Armenia, your flight under Name A, under Matt Cox, your flight under Matt Cox ends. So the manifest says Matt Cox has landed in Armenia.

Now Matt Cox is in Armenia. Well, on your person, you're carrying a second ID. So now, from Armenia, you become John Tibald. John Tybalt has a ticket from Armenia to Slovakia. And there's a flight manifesto for John Tibolt that starts in Armenia and ends in Slovakia. By the time you get to Slovakia, nobody realizes. John Tibold is Matt Cox, and Matt Cox actually started in Spain. That's how we work, travel, and that's how we manage to cover up our steps.

It's called dry cleaning. It's how we dry clean our steps from country to country. So with my wife and I, we deployed as a married couple to a third country location, So everybody in that third country location knew that we were a married couple. But then every time we deployed operationally, we would deploy using this dry cleaning method and we would essentially hit as many cleaning countries as we needed to to ensure that there was no connection between our final destination and our starting destination. See, I would think you would want, I would go there and live as John Doe for a couple of months

and then go from there to somewhere, you know, to whatever my destination. is. That way, if people got wise at my final destination and they backtracked me, they'd be like, well, they rented an apartment. So if they go to your landlord, they would say, hey, you know, do you know who this person is?

Oh, yeah, that's John Doe. We used to rent here. Oh, okay. Hey, who's this person? Yeah, yeah. He used to sell apples at the, whatever, out of a cart. Yeah, I know him. You know, that way, they'd be like, okay, this is a real person, but maybe doesn't have a huge, a long history, but he's somebody that is backtracked. And I think that's one of the big differences between what movies portray and how real espionage works.

Right. Because in movies, what they make it, they make you believe that you want to have a realistic backstory. Right. Why? The only reason to have a realistic backstory is for when an investigation happens and they start to investigate you. Real espionage wants to avoid the investigation at all. If the investigation starts, we wanted to hit a complete dead end.

So when John Tibolt falls under investigation and they backtrack him to Armenia... They just can't find any... Nothing. Who's John Tibald? There's nothing. There is literally nothing there. The man seemed to appear out of nowhere. So is that suspicious?

Sure, that's suspicious. But the idea is we're always collecting intelligence. So once John Tibolt becomes suspicious, we know... I got to talk to him about that. That's a bad idea. You got to go a different way. Yeah, I got to go, we got to go a different way. Like to me, when I was changed my identity and moved to a different state, when I was wanted, you know, when I showed up, I had a cover story, but I'd also have like, I've got a website. I've got, you know what I'm saying?

Like I have things that show that I lived in somewhere else where I, you kind of have a back sort of. Why are you here? I own a mortgage company. I sold the mortgage company. I, you know, you know what I'm saying? And that sort of thing. Like I could see, I think it's not like I did it a lot or anything. Like, you know, I was more of the cover story than anything.

And because if you look too much into it, it breaks down very quickly. And that's the challenge. The challenge is if you look too much into it, it breaks down. Unless you had just a bunch of time. And it becomes more and more evidence. Like, if you had a year or so where you could really establish yourself here and then move, you see what I'm saying? Then they go here and like, then they get there and they go, well, he was here for a year.

And after that, it falls apart. Like, I don't know, it's hard to, you'd have to, you'd have to have way too much time to really build a solid story. And what you're getting into now is, is the classic kind of KGB illegals program model, where somebody comes here as an illegal from KGB, and they build a whole life here. And they have to build a whole life here, because the idea is, when they fall under scrutiny, they're not going to be able to flee back to the Soviet Union. They're going to have to stand here and continue to live that country. cover. So you need three, five, 12, 15 years of history so that when investigators probe into you, they don't see any Russian connection. Let me just show the series of Salt.

No, not Salt. I'm sorry, that was the Americans? But that was, yeah, the Americans, yeah. Salt did the same thing. She came when she was like a little kid, but the Americans was great. They come. They fall in love. They have kids. They have like nobody has any idea. They've been there for decades. Yeah. And that's the model for some countries. That's not the modeling. States because we change presidents every four years. We change who controls the house every two years. So it's very hard for us to have long-term, deep-seated operations like that. But our adversaries run those all the time. The Chinese run those. The Russians run those. Well, they catch the Chinese all

the time. They're working here as an engineer. He's been here for 15 years. And you find out he's been a spy for 15 years. He's been sending submarine, you know, schematics through some means for the past 10, 15 years. And you're like, um. And think about that, right? They catch. Chinese all the time. Yeah. Which means there's always more Chinese to catch. Oh yeah. For everyone you caught, how many are you never getting caught.

Exactly. Exactly. The rule of thumb that I learned afterwards is that for every one mole we identify, we assume there's five others. That's fucking crazy, man. Yeah. Like, you never think about that. You never think about if you catch one, you feel like, oh, let's pat ourselves on the back, high five.

We caught the bad guy. No. Yeah. If that one is there, let's just assume that there's four others in addition to that one. So there's a total of five at any given time. Yeah, it's like getting called for a drug deal. Yeah, you got to call for one, this is a hundred other ones you didn't get caught for. These guys, it's been doing this forever.

So, so you were supposed to gather information. You go somewhere, you show up, you and your wife show up, you're living in an apartment, you're like, what is the basic understand? What is the, can you explain kind of what the basically, what they told you you're supposed to be doing? Yeah, absolutely. So we were sent there undercover, under, under, cover purpose, something that's known as a cover for status. That's a very, that's an official tradecraft term is cover for status. And there's two types of covers that are predominantly used.

There's a cover for status and a cover for action. Cover for status is why you are where you are. Cover for action is why you're doing what you're doing where you are. So you can see how one is kind of generalized and one is more specific. So we went to our third country location. All we really needed to have was a cover for status. Why you're there. So they gave us a cover job. They gave us a cover purpose. They gave us everything we needed to so that we could get an apartment and we could get a car and we could have a life. And all that cover for status in the third world country or in the third country was set up. Also while we were there, the technical requirement, and this is silly to get into technical technical technicalities, but the technical requirement was

for us to build new operations, build a whole new methodology of operating. That, That didn't necessarily require that we, ourselves, collected the intelligence. It meant that we would build an infrastructure that we could use to collect intelligence. So I say that because the infrastructure that we decided to build was completely different than anything CIA had used before. We wanted to model operations off of something that our adversaries had never seen Americans do. And we also wanted to model it off of an MO that we somehow understood which you can see the difficulty there.

How do you understand an M.O. If you've never done the M.O. And that's when my wife came up with the idea. We had both participated in the war on terror. And the United States had almost a decade's worth of information on the modus operandi of terrorist cells. But we were the only assholes in the world fighting that war. Chinese weren't, the Russians weren't, the North Koreans weren't,

the Iranians weren't. It was just us, right? The Canadians and the Australians were kind of forced to play. So we modeled our operations off of terrorist operations. We modeled our M.O. Off of terrorist M.O. We modeled our communications, our financing, our strategic decision-making, all off of how terrorist cells are decentralized, and they don't communicate back to the master bureaucracy,

except through individual nodes, couriers who run back and forth. So that was when we arrived in our country and we started to build our infrastructure, that was the infrastructure that we built, this terrorist model. So instead of creating an intelligence group, we created an intelligence cell. And that model is how we chose to start going out and identifying targets and collecting intelligence. Are you recruiting people? Are you going? You're recruiting people?

How do you recruit somebody? Is it money? I mean, is it like, hey, you're in a position? Do you bump into a guy? You've been watching somebody. he's in a good spot. You watch him for a few days, and you bump into him.

You know, he goes to Starbucks every day, and you bump into Starbucks a couple times. You start chatting him up, and then after a month of being buddies, you say, by the way. So this is where the good decision-making of CIA came in. They sent Ji, who my wife, who was this stellar targeter.

We didn't need to just go to Starbucks and bump into somebody. She had the full power of CIA's databases behind her plus she was able to use her cover position as a reason to build relationships with the third country as well. So she was able to tap into police records, border crossing records, all sorts of stuff in the local country and supplement that with all of what we had at CIA. She was able to find targets all day long, relevant, powerful, interesting people along with their vulnerabilities, their motivations, you know, the ways that they were breaking the law, the affairs they were having. their routes to and from work, their cell phone identifiers, like she was able to find an incredible amount of information

that made it easier for us to find the people we wanted to talk to. Because we were creating this model based off of terrorist cells, we had to have a courier. Well, the courier is the one major vulnerability in the cell, because if you identify the courier, you basically identify the cell. That's what happened to Bin Laden. We identified the courier, followed the courier, hit the entire base where bin Laden was at.

So we didn't want to recruit a courier. We wanted to keep the courier in-house. So we identified me as the courier. So my wife was the targeter, and I was essentially the primary point of contact between CIA and all of our operations at the cell, acting as the courier. So what we needed to recruit first

was other CIA officers to go out and collect the intelligence. So that was our first job. Our first job was finding the CIA officers that were in Wolf already in the country where we were operating, the third-party country, find officers that were there and essentially pitch and sell them on the idea of, hey, we know you're doing stuff for your job, but you really want to come work for us.

And that was how we started building a cell. So we got lucky because the first person that we approached was like a mid-level careerist who was really frustrated with CIA. And when we approached him and we were like, hey, you have to keep doing things the same way you've always done them in a box. We was, I understand. He was, you said he was frustrated with CIA.

Correct. I thought you were in another country. He was a CIA officer already in that country. Oh, okay. Yeah. So when we arrive, yeah, this is what people don't realize. We're everywhere. So when you get to a country, you already kind of land in a community of people who are already

there. Depending on their level of cover and their status, et cetera, you can engage some. you have to be compartmentalized from others. But of the officers that were in country in Wolf, we were able to identify them, validate them, and approach them directly and say, hey, do you want to come work for us? Or do you want to keep doing the operations you're here to do?

So the first guy, mid-careerist, he was like, he had always been following the bureaucracy. He always had to do things a certain way. We came in with kind of a blank check and the freedom to create whole new operations, and he was all in, which was awesome. So we basically now have our first member, our first member of the cell outside of my wife and I. And that's how we started operating.

So he would go collect on targets that Ghee would identify. And then his reports would fall under my couriership. And then I would communicate the results back to CIA and then bring new orders back from CIA, communicate that to the cell. And we would continue to operate that way. Wasn't he already communicating that information to CIA? No. Because he was only communicating the information of the operating. operations he was assigned to.

Oh, okay. So now he's collecting for you for something separate. Correct. And you're able to pay him. Well, you're getting confused between a CIA officer and Nasset. He is a CIA officer. Oh, okay. Yeah, he's just a CIA officer assigned to that country already.

If you, if you, I get that it's confusing. It's supposed to be confusing. That's why CIA uses the model. If you think of, take any three countries, right? let's just say that you've got Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Slovakia, right? Three countries. All three of those countries have different levels of interest to the United States, but all three of those countries would have dedicated officers assigned to those countries

to collect what is of interest in each of those countries. So in Azerbaijan and Armenia, maybe the conflict is, maybe part of what they're interested in is the secrets of the other country, because there's a conflict between them. Right. And in Slovakia, what they're interested in is Russia, right? What's Russia's influence on Slovakia? So the officers in each of those countries are constantly collecting against the priorities of those countries.

But because they're professional CIA officers, they can be relocated anytime. So maybe after three or four years, they all get rotated, and now they're in France, Belgium, and Spain, right? But the point is, when someone like me travels to Slovakia, I'm not the only officer in Slovakia. I'm traveling there. there are already people there who speak the language, who have connections, who understand the area, and they're notified of my arrival, and I'm notified of a point of contact when I hit the ground so that we can deconflict operations so that I don't accidentally start talking to the same person he's talking to. So everywhere you go in the world, you have to deconflict with who else is already there. So for us, when we arrived in Wolf, we already had to de-conflict with everybody who was already there. So when we came up with our infrastructure to create this model, this cell that was going to live in Wolf,

we thought to ourselves, the best place to start is with the officers who are already here. It's going to be way easier to recruit somebody into our cell, not into the CIA, but into our cell, if they're already. here. Do you understand? I think I understand, but do your bosses in the CIA allow you to recruit other officers off other operations to your own? So. Right. I mean, because that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking this guy is an officer. He's already working for, let's say, the equivalent of the State Department in this other country. And he's gathering evidence on the Russians, what these guys know about the Russians and what their, their relationship with the Russians, are. And then you're coming to him and you're saying, okay, I need you to start gathering information

on what they have on, you know, Falcon. Falcon being the target country that we're trying to collect against. Oh, okay. Falcon, okay, on Falcon, you know, and give us that information. Where to me, if I was him, I'd be like, if I'm gathering that information, why wouldn't I just give it directly to the CIA? I'm already working for him. But you're saying, no, no, because he's been directed by the CIA to only give them information on Russia. And so for him to do extra work, he's already frustrated with the CIA,

so he's like, why the fuck would I do extra work, give them extra stuff they're not asking for? Why wouldn't I just give it to you and let you provide that to them? But to me, I'd be like, but why am I doing that for you? Why wouldn't I do that? I would do that for you,

but cut me some money, give me something for it, not just nothing, because, you know, like, I'm doing extra work. So that's what's nice. What's nice is it's, I get where you're coming from. It's not, when you're an officer and you're deployed, you have to meet certain requirements.

Right. You have to meet certain production requirements. You have to produce a certain number of intelligence reports, for example. The person who gives you the credit for those intelligence reports is, it's a bureaucracy. So there's a reports officer who says, says you did X, Y, Z number of reports. So let's say you have a quota. You have to do 30 reports in 30 days.

Well, if you're the guy in Slovakia and you're collecting secrets about the criminal underworld of Slovakia, it might be really hard to come up with 30 intelligence reports in a month. Right. So that's why CIA says, hey, well, if you want to be promoted, you have to come up with 30 reports. Well, if you write 30 reports, you have to submit it to your bureaucracy. your bureaucracy says only 15 of these count. Well, now you just missed your quota because of bureaucracy. We showed up and I was the one in charge of all the information.

So I was like, hey, if you need 30 reports worth of quality to meet your criteria, I can give you 15 of those. I can award you in the criteria it takes to promote. So you can either keep chasing criminal underworld because that's what you've been assigned, or you can help us and we can give you credit for everything you create for us, and now you have better promoteability. It's the equivalent of a paycheck, I guess, to some people. But that was the power that we had in creating our new infrastructure.

Okay. The difference is the important thing there is everything's compartmentalized. So the 30 reports that you, Matt Cox, create, they don't get reported to CIA saying Matt Cox wrote these. They get reported to CIA saying, Officer 289751 assigned to Slovakia wrote these. Well, nobody knows who that is. except for the head of the head of the station in Slovakia.

So we were able to work the bureaucracy, which was part of our job, in order to create this new way of operating. So now we were able to have one officer who was frustrated because he wasn't doing, he wasn't getting credit for good work in this third world country or in this third country. So we came in and we said, hey, do you want to do something fun and exciting with us? Because guess what? CIA is giving us lots of flexibility, lots of creativity, lots of creativity, lots of funding. to create something completely new. So if you want to come help us, you get to be part of this new thing

and get credit for it. Or if you want to keep doing your old thing, we get it. Maybe you don't want to. Okay. Believe it or not, we talk to five or six officers very early on.

The vast majority of them, we're like, no, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing now. I don't want to step on toes. I don't want to piss anybody off. I don't want to, you know, make waves. But James, the first person that we talked to, James in the book,

James was like, well, shit, I'll try that. That sounds fun. Right. He's not getting anywhere on his own anyway. So he jumps on board. Do you get anybody else? So James comes on board first, and then it's just the three of us for probably half a year. Because now what we have to do is prove the concept out.

So, Ghee, my wife, identifies targets. James goes out and meets those targets. And some of those targets are in Wolf because they have contacts back in Falcon. Sometimes he travels to Falcon, the actual average. country to the United States. Sometimes he travels there in alias and meets the targets that G he identified there. He's collecting and collecting and collecting. So his 30 report requirement, he's hitting 45, 50, 75 a month. So he's creating tons of production. I'm currying that production back to CIA. CIA's ecstatic. Wow, the two of you, we sent you,

and we told you to create something new and you're producing. This is awesome. Do more. So once we had the proof of concept, then we could start finding more people to be part of ourselves. This was when we had the opportunity to start talking to people who were coming in brand new. So now, as new officers are on rotation, right, as they leave their previous country and come to Wolf to do a rotation in Wolf, we're able to tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, we know you're here for counterterrorism, we know that you're here for counterproliferation, we know that you're here for counterintelligence. Would you also like to work with us?

And in small numbers, we started building our team from one to two, two to four, four to six, until we had a sizable team. We had eight people in our team that covered multiple different skill sets. Case officers who collected intelligence, targeters, tech officers, analysts, translators. We had a full suite of skills that were all just working in our little cell doing just covert operations against Falcon. with this terrorist model. Okay. How long does it go on and, am I, can I say like what information do you gather?

So it's a sensitive question, right? I'm already dancing around a bunch of sensitive questions, so, but I'm going to start asking. So the, the primary goal was to tap into plans and intentions for military, political, and industrial efforts at Falcon. When it comes to the world of geopolitics, you have two types of countries. You have non-competitive countries, and then you have near-peer competitive countries. Near-peer countries are the ones that we're the most worried about. Near-peer competitors are the countries that have sizable economies, sizable nuclear programs, sizable cybersecurity programs, they're the countries that create the largest threat to the United States.

You can really kind of count all of our near peers on one hand if you assume allies are not part of near peer competitors. When you realize that allies aren't really allies, now all of a sudden you see how our near peer competitors kind of go through the roof. Because now Spain and France and Germany and Israel, they're all competitors. Saudi Arabia, UAE, all competitors, right? All near peer. So you can see how the near peer really takes off when you when you see. stop looking at people as friends and enemies. But the goal was to collect the plans and intentions for their militaries, for their politics, and for their infrastructure.

And politics includes the intelligence services. That was what we were collecting on. So when Ji would create her targeting packages, her dossiers, that we would then send our case officers to go collect against, she's looking for people who are directly in the military or connected to the military. Here in the United States, we see that one of the vulnerabilities for military, are contractors. So she's doing the same thing there.

Who are the military, uniformed military officers, but who are the highly placed contractors that are working military contracts? In politics, who are the politicians, but also who are the staffers, who are the advisors, who are the funders, right? Who are the bankers? And in infrastructure, who are the CEOs,

who are the C-O's, who are the big market movers, identifying those people, collecting, creating a dossier, and then sending a case officer to go basically bump them, just like you said, only not at a Starbucks, because you bump them at their tennis club. Do other countries use subcontractors for military work?

Absolutely. I know that. I just assumed it was all kind of in-house that we were, you know, it just seems like a very capitalist model. I guess most countries, a lot of countries are capitalists in some form. And keep in mind, too, in the United States, we have a, at least we claim to have a distinction between government agency and commercial enterprise.

Where in other countries, they're much more blended. Yeah, like in China. Yeah, so in China is a great example. You have the country owns the corporation. So then when the country needs something, they just give the contract to the corporation. Same way in Russia, very similar in Iran and China, in North Korea.

I mean, shit, even in Europe, you've got places where the government is heavily invested in the infrastructure of the corporation, so then, of course, they partner together. Prime Minister just got into all kinds of trouble because of that. So how long, like, how long does this go on before you either, before you know it's wrapped up or does somebody else come in and take over where you're at? Because, I mean, if you guys, if you guys just, you know, pack your bags and come back, then that whole infrastructure, that

intelligence gathering operation, I guess, kind of just collapses, right? So do, the, somebody else come in and then you guys kind of explain the whole thing, introduce them, hang out for 90 days, and then you take off? Yeah, so the whole thing was supposed to be an experiment at first. So we didn't really have an end date in mind. What we learned, so if you, so fast forward about a year, after a year of proving our concept, we're having significant success. We have five case officers going and coming from Falcon, going and coming from other

countries collecting information that we didn't have before at CIA. I'm running that information back and forth to Langley. CIA is enthused about it. They're supportive. They like what we're doing. All of the senior CIA leadership at Wolf, because remember, we inserted ourselves into a country where there was already established operations. So the chiefs and deputy chiefs at Wolf like that they're getting more funding because

we're getting more funding because CIA likes what we're doing. At the end of the day, it's all just a game for fiefdoms. It's all a game for money. If you have good operations, you get more money. If you have bad operations, they take your money away. So everybody's now happy about a year into this thing. We think that we're moving and shaken and everything's hunky-dory. Well, remember, there's a mole.

And that mole wasn't something that we knew we were going to be used to essentially reverse engineer. So as we're running our operations, Langley is running their own completely separate operation to see who's snooping around, who's reaching beyond their controlled access to understand what's happening here. To figure out where's all this information coming from. Correct. And in that process, that's where they start to have what's known as a counterintelligence investigation or a spy hunt.

And they're trying to find the mole because they know the mole will be interested in what we're doing because the only way that the mole can find out what we're doing is if the mole finds the courier, which is me. So they're looking for one person who's trying to find information about me. About a year into this thing, we start having tons of success, and then everything shuts down. Everything meaning our cell starts continues to operate, but the country of Falcon transforms everything they're doing with their own people overseas. So all of our case officers who are meeting with falconians, all of our Falcon contacts,

all of our wolf contacts who are working with falconians, everything has like this wide transformation, and people stop talking to us. Our sources are no longer producing. They're not returning our phone calls. They're not, they're alive. We can see that they're alive because we can see them. We can track their cell phones,

but they're not responding to invitations to come out anymore. So what changed? And it all happened at once. So we start to look into, did we screw up? Did the cell do something stupid? Did we get caught? Did we get discovered? And now Falcon intelligence is basically on to us.

Or did one of us make a mistake? And then policy changed across the board for everybody. We never got the complete answer there. But what it looks like happened is after a year, the mole at CIA didn't know who I was or what we were doing. So instead he advised Falcon, there's something new happening. All this information is being collected and somebody's collecting it and we're getting a, we're getting a ton of information on all of these different types of things,

so you have to do something to stop that leakage. Correct. So then Falcon just clamps down on everybody, right? And we're at a, we're at a kind of a difficult inflection point because we can't collect because no one's talking, but we don't know why we can't collect, whether it's dangerous. Like if we send James into Falcon right now, is he going to get arrested?

Right. If we send, you know, one of our other case officers in a Falcon, are they going to get wrapped up? We don't know. So we've got to kind of assess what we're going to do and how we're going to handle it. And what we decide is that we need to send somebody in

who isn't actively committing espionage in that country. Because if you're not committing espionage, you can't be arrested on any fair and legal grounds. Right. Well, the only person in the cell who, wasn't actively collecting secrets was me. So they send, we decide to send me into Falcon to start running, you know, operational support tasks, nothing that's, that's overtly espionage, but it's a chance to see what's happening in Falcon. And when I go into Falcon, I fall under observation.

I fall under surveillance. And then that kind of tips us off that something has gone wrong. How do you know your, you just notice people are following you? Well, you're trained to detect surveillance. Yeah. So CIA teaches us what's known as a surveillance detection route and SDR. An SDR training teaches you how to identify when you're under surveillance in multiple different locations. Again, I'm super excited because I get to teach surveillance detection in shadow cell. No one's ever had a chance to actually teach it in a book before. And we talk about it in such a way that we teach it to the people who read the book. So I can talk about the route that I took and how I took it and who identified, who I identified,

why I identified them all through the story that we actually tell in Shadow Cell. But long story short is when I realize I'm under observation, for me personally, it becomes very, very real. It's not just like a theoretical game anymore. Now it's like, holy shit, I'm in a fake identity, in a foreign country that's very powerful because it's an adversary of the United States, and I know I'm under surveillance. So I have to run this surveillance detection route in a certain way. so that I don't tip off that I know I'm under surveillance,

but at the same time I have to collect as much information as I can, never really knowing if they already know everything about me. Do they already know who I am and what I'm doing there? Because the mole has tipped them off. Is this all just them kind of collecting on me before they choose to wrap me up at the airport or at the grocery store in my hotel room? And it's a very stressful period.

What do you do? Do you stay there for like a week or two weeks? And once you realize this, do you leave? or do you hang out for another two weeks? Yeah, so the general... You run screaming from the hotel, what doing the windmill, you know? The general strategy is not to do that, yeah.

The general strategy... That's my strategy. That's what I would do. That's all good. So I know not to build alias with you and I know not to... They're onto it! Not to tell you when you're being followed.

So our strategy, when we identify that we're under surveillance. It's a process that we call lulling surveillance. So lulling surveillance means that you try to act in such a way that's so predictable and boring and dull, that surveillance essentially the actual people watching you. Drop their guard. Get bored. They drop their guard.

They stare at their cell phone more than they stare at you. They read their book instead of watching the door. Like, that's what you want them to do. So I go into a lulling process to try to lull this surveillance to sleep. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night or all of the above. That's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the world, Ghost Bed is your go-to for cooling mattresses, cooling pillows, and cooling bedding.

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That's ghostbed.com slash cox and use code cox for 10% off sitewide. While also trying to maintain my situational awareness to identify if I'm actually lulling them or if they're just backing off the A team to get ready to move in the snatch team, right? So that's what I'm doing. I was originally supposed to be there for a three-day collection trip, meaning three days of operational support collection activities. I identified that I was under surveillance about halfway through the first day. Then I took them on essentially what we call a rabbit run,

so about an eight to 12-hour circuitous route of boring chores to draw them out so I could observe them as much as possible without them identifying that I was observing them. in that 12-hour route, I made the decision that I needed to get out of the country as soon as possible. Because when you're under surveillance, every minute that you're there is a chance for the home team to bring in more resources. So I needed to find a way to leave before they could bring in more resources. So I opted to leave early. So in the book, I detail how I go through that process and how we make that decision and how we ultimately, or how I ultimately communicate back to my team that I'm going to be coming back early.

And that whole process, you never know if it's going to work or not. So it was a kind of stressful 36 hours. But ultimately, I ended up at the airport and I had made the decision and the commitment, I'm just going to get on a plane and I'm going to leave. That's the worst part right there. Being at the airport, because if they don't know what's happening and suddenly you go to the airport, they're going, we got to grab them. If we're going to grab them now, if we're going to grab them at all,

we got to grab him now because this guy's, he's bolton. Exactly. So when you think about how to get out of a country, you have to think about land, see, or air. And then depending on whether you want land, see or air, you then have to think about how you're going to get across land, see or air. Truck or foot, boat that you charter, boat that you steal, large, like, commercial boat that you hire. Are you going to hire, are you going to fly out on a plane in coach class? Are you going to hire a small puddle jumper? Like, how are you going to escape?

And what are the ramifications if you do that? Because you're under surveillance. So the surveillance team is going to go with you wherever you choose to go. So if you go to a ferry or if you go to a cruise ship or if you go to a large airport or a small airport, they're coming with you unless you take the provocative action of trying to ditch them. And if you take a provocative action and ditch them,

then the cat's out of the bag. They know to suspect you even more because you have ditched them. So when I ran all these kind of calculations through my head, I landed on a commercial airport, especially in airport I was already scheduled to fly out of. I left a large digital footprint saying, hey, I'm changing my flight, sent multiple emails, made multiple phone calls,

because I assume if they're watching me, they're watching my cell phone. The whole world, I let them all know. I'm leaving early on this flight. Flight leaves in 12 hours. Here's my new updated ticket. Sent my ticket to like three different people, all under my same cover organization,

in the hopes that it would all get scooped up by their signals intelligence, and then it would be communicated back to their team. It turns out they may not have been as sophisticated as we thought. So I get to the airport and I get pulled into secondary immediately. They see my passport. And they're like, oh, you're leaving early. We see a change in your.

your ticket, you're going into secondary. We have people who want to talk to you. And then I go into an interrogation. We detail it all in the book, but in the interrogation, we find out that all of my concerns about them having a well-coordinated intelligence service seemed like they were either just as effective as the United States, where bureaucracy and human kind of motivation were lacking, or maybe I was just smarter than them. I don't know which. But the investigators, the interrogators were not aware of my previous activities. At least it didn't seem like they were. And so what just gave you what's going on?

You came here for? Do they know you're leaving early? They know we're leaving early. They know I'm leaving early and they know that my passport's been flagged because that's how I got into secondary. But what kind of what happens, because the interrogation happens in broken English. I speak English. I don't speak falconian.

and they don't speak very much English, but they speak enough that they got called and be the interrogators. So there's all this dialogue between me and the interrogators, but there's also all this dialogue between the interrogators. And they're arguing with each other, which was very interesting to me. When you go through interrogation training at CIA,

you learn certain rules to have a very effective controlled interrogation. As a simple example, one of the first rules that you learn is that when you put somebody in the interrogation room, you leave them there. Let the room do the work for you because their anxiety is up, their stress is up, they don't know what they're there for,

they don't know how long they'll be there. In a place like an airport, they already are, am I going to miss my flight, am I going to catch my flight? You can make the room hot or cold. You can keep them from a bathroom. You can keep them from food.

So you can control the room, but you have to let them sit in that room for a while. They didn't let me sit in that room for a long time. So right away, I saw that their methodology for interrogating me, was different than the best practices that I had learned at CIA. And as I saw that their methodology was less efficient, less professional than ours,

it kind of gave me more and more confidence that maybe I was going to get through this thing. So eventually they just say, all right, you're good, and you leave? I mean, I don't know why for some reason. The scene from... Another movie? Yeah, of course.

Everything I know is from the movies or TikTok is the movie. I want to say it was I want to say it was Transformers where it's a, it's a black guy. Maybe it's not that there was a black guy. He's a comedian and there's a white chick and they leave him in a room and they're waiting. They put some some cookies in the room and he's eating the cookies. He's like and and, and but they wait and they wait and then when they finally walk, he's telling her like basically like, I'm going to be good.

I'm going to get through this. Like, I'm not going to talk. I'm not going to this. But as soon as they walk in, he's like, he was her. She made me do everything. He breaks immediately. What was that?

It was hilarious. So, anyway, that's, that's the picture I see of you waiting in the room. And then when they walk in, you go, okay. I'm doing for more cookies. You got me. You see, now I'm afraid to bring up movies. But anyway, because there's so many good movies. You know one of my favorite scenes from movies, Argo?

Oh. Which was the scene where they're pitching the ideas on how to get these guys out of, it's Iran, right? And they're trying to get them out of Iran. And they're saying, and he's like, this is the best plan you have. They're telling the director. And he's like, he's like, okay, he's like, no, he is, this is a good plan or something. He's like, no, no, all we have is bad plans. Right, right.

Is this is, so this is the best bad plan you have? Yes, this is the best of all the bad plans. Correct. I was just thinking, like, fucking great. Like, we don't know, there's no good plans here. It's no good situation, but this is the best of the bad situations. And you got to remember CIA is what we call an agency of last resort. Right.

If it could have been done any other way, yeah, somebody else would have done it. The military would have done it. The Department of State would have done it. The Homeland Security would have done it. Health and Human Services would have done it. Somebody else would have done it. Right. By the time it comes to us,

it's the last resort. It's all bad ideas. Yeah. So we're throwing lots of bad ideas, just trying to find a way to make the worst idea a little bit less bad. You know what's disappointing about your story here? Lots, I'm sure. There's no gunfight.

Oh, yeah. There's no, there's no, you know, they didn't ductate for you to a chair. They, what was the casino royale? where he's stripped naked, the guy's beating. He's hit his nuts with the thing. Oh, God, it was horrible. That was horrible. Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, it's good for you because it doesn't seem like it'd be great to go through.

But, yeah, but really it seems like it's just what the CIA is really designed for, which is just supposed to gather information so that if it gets to a point where you need, where the president or somebody in the government needs to know what's going on, you can say, okay, this plane was built by this company who was run by these people so that you know everything. And, you know, this is a time when you don't have Google and websites to scour anything. This is, you know, that's typically where they're gathering all this information and all the backstories and who's vulnerable and who's not vulnerable. But, you know, everybody thinks the CIA is James Bond and or not who's. Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne. Yeah. Or what's the other one? It was a, come on, Red October, the movie, Red October. He was a CIA office. He was a CIA. He was just wrote books for the CIA or something, right? And he ends up being thrown in the field.

And that's a great concept, too, because he's doing what most, what I was thought, what really the CIA is supposed to be doing was just gathering information. They happened to throw them out in the field. And the next thing you know, he's like, fuck. Yeah. I'm not an officer. I'm not supposed to be out here doing this stuff. So the story, the story is real.

Yeah, yeah. And that's what, what's like police work. Police work, you only see the police work where they're having gun fights and car chases. The truth of every cop you talk to is like, listen, it's 99% paperwork and boredom with these moments of complete adrenaline, you know, situations where you're pulling in the gun or somebody's shooting at you or. suddenly there's a car, but the bulk of it is paperwork and sitting around. And that's what a government job is. And I think espionage is enjoyable. I think it is exciting.

I think it is sexy because it's all a game of deception. If you are successful, nobody even knows you were there. If you fail, they shoot at you, they put you in fisticuffs and they throw you in jail. like it's you want to avoid all of the action scenes from a movie as much as possible and it's yeah I understand it's disappointing it's disappointing unless it's the musad they seem like they're always getting into some shit remember they killed that they did some uh they killed some terrorist leader or something they caught them all on film where they're walking in the bathroom changing disguise going back out of the and then when after the guy

ends up dead they this was like 10 years ago or something like that god that was like it was literally just something straight out of it. a movie. But, you know, apparently they didn't know there was cameras. Yeah, they shouldn't have gotten caught. Out of all your research, like, yeah, you guys got out of the country, but boy, they put it together quick with the cameras. Well, I mean, you got a couple of things that you have to keep in mind. First of all, Mossad is a completely different beast than CIA, right? Massad is the intelligence service and the paramilitary intelligence service of a country that's surrounded by Enemies. Existential enemies that want it destroyed. That's not the United States.

We sit comfortably on the side of two different oceans. We've got Canada and Mexico to worry about. Oh, yeah. Right? So we have a completely different threat profile than Israel does. And then on top of that, we have the largest budget, the most sophisticated military, the best equipment. We don't have to show off our capability. If anything, we want to hide our capability. Masad has to do a bit of both. They have to use, they have to show their capability in order to intimidate aggressors against taking action against Israeli people,

but then they also have to hide part of their capability so they can still surprise people. That's how you end up having exploding pagers, and that's how you have them launching drones from inside Iran, because they have to show off a little bit, but they still want to hide their future capability. What about that, Ukrainian drone strike on the Russians? That was some shit, right?

I mean, there have been several, but yeah. No, I'm not the one where they took out all their long-range bomb. Not all of them. They took out, like, they said like 60% or something. And the Russians are like, oh, those were old planes. Yeah. But, yeah, that was something else. And that was where they just had, they just had 18 wheelers come in.

They thought they were moving like mobile homes in and then told them, no, go here, and someone will pick it up here, just drop it off here. And they pull up. They're right next to the Naval Bay, or right next day. air bases. And next thing you know, they pop open and the drones go out and they start slamming into the thing. Like, that was, that was some, that was insane. That was super interesting. And you're also, that's also an area of open hostilities. So open hostilities, again, you're getting more and more like the movies when you start getting into areas of significant threat, areas of open war.

That's, that is very, that is very, that is the inspiration that becomes Hollywood movies, right? The stuff that happens in the shadows, there's a reason nobody makes movies about that stuff, right? Because it's methodical and it's systematic and it's professional. There's a reason nobody makes movies about how hospitals actually work. There are no TV shows about how actual surgical wings work. Instead, they make TV shows about, like, highly dramatic hospitals and highly dramatic court cases and highly dramatic stuff that just doesn't happen in real life.

Well, you know, the Aldrich Ames thing, it's like, like he had a very boring career that was wiping out, you know, dozens, if not a hundred agents. Yeah. You see what I'm saying? Like, like, it's all just paperwork. They've tried to, they've made this, that movie a couple of different times. They try to make it exciting. Yeah. But it's not exciting, but you don't realize that with a, you know, just drop and putting a note and a piece of paper under a bench and walking away.

He's doing all these things, and just people are just getting picked up left and right in the Soviet Union at the time and being executed, including their own people, right? So Americans and assets. Yeah, and Robert Hansen was doing the same thing for FBI. And there's another great example, right? So CIA was very invested in finding and hunting and neutralizing the mold that they had within the agency because they know what Aldrich Ames, Aldrich Ames was able to. to do. They know what Robert Hansen was able to do. They know what Eva Montez was able to do when she worked at DIA. They know the damage that these moles can do. So when you have to pick between identifying and neutralizing a mole versus letting them just continue to run while you hopefully

collect enough evidence over time, it's a no-brainer. They have to find a way to aggressively capture that person. And in the United States, this is both the strength and the weakness of the United States, that mole inside CIA is an American citizen. So they're given all the rights and privileges of an American until they're taken to a court of law in front of a panel of their peers, a jury of their peers, and then they are given the assumption that they are innocent until proven guilty. So even though you know that that person's operating, you know there's a mole, you have a suspect or five suspects, you can't do anything.

You can't fire them, you can't put them on administrative leave, you can't do anything. You have to let them keep doing what they're doing until all of it is said and done, which is how Russia and China and Iran are able to come in and kind of scoop their American assets out because we have this period of time between when you're identified and when you're actually convicted. And anytime in that window, you can be pulled out and saved by the person that you're working for. So speaking of pulled out, so when you come back and you're now in, Was it Falc? Wolf. Wolf. You're now in Wolf with your wife. Do you guys get word? I mean, you now know something's wrong. Correct. Do you pass that up the chain of command? Do they come back and say, okay, you know, you're going to, we're going to come grab you tomorrow night or? So one of the reasons that we're, yeah, one of the reasons that we're in Wolf is because we're safer in Wolf than we would be in Falcon. Right. So by, by successfully leaving Falcon, I get to a safe haven. in Wolf. And we report everything up to CIA. We report everything to our cell itself. And then we go

through a very detailed what's known as a counterintelligence scrub. And that scrub is a giant investigation that we run internally and that CIA runs from Langley. We run this CI scrub to see where did the breakdown happen. Can we isolate the mistake that led to the surveillance operation against a known, like what we know is a known trained CIA officer. How did Falcon intelligence find us? How did they find me? So we scrub all the cases in Wolf. Langley scrubs all the cases that they've been tracking that we've been

that we've been touching. And we all come to the same conclusion that there was no identifiable mistake at Wolf. Our operations were sound. All of our officers continue to report no surveillance activities. Our tech scrubs show that. that nobody's being collected against. There's been no external vectors coming into our tech. So it seems like we're still solid.

It seems like the motor operandi, the cell that we created, is doing what it's supposed to do. It put me in the courier position, the most vulnerable position, to be a tripwire so that if I became someone of interest, everybody else would know that I'm of interest and they're still safe. And that's exactly what we were able to identify in the back end. So what happens? I can't go back to Falcon, but they still need to continue operating.

So the cell continues to execute. They bring in someone new to be the new courier. We train that person how to handle a cell operation. CIA actually pulls me back and starts having me train new operators all over the world, how to create cells of their own. So from that moment forward, we start building cells in other areas of interest all over the world, basically recreating our little group in other countries. Your wife leaves too. My wife goes along with me.

Well, we're still at CIA. Yeah. But now we're traveling and we're kind of like we're essentially trainers, training people in our methodology. Some officers pick it up. They like it. Some officers don't like changing the old way of doing business. So we don't really know what the success rate is. At the same time that we're training other cells, we find out that we're pregnant.

And we come to a, we come to the personal decision ourselves that we would rather raise a family than build a career at CIA. So we choose to leave CIA. We go on to raise our family. And then a few years later, we see in the headlines that our model, our cell model, is now being applied to the entire CIA, this complete restructure of CIA. under director John Brennan, and the whole agency is transformed. Okay, well, when do you, when are you let know, when do you realize that they had only put you out there as bait? When the mole is captured.

So the mole is captured in 2019-ish. Oh, so you've been gone. We've been gone for a while. And when the mole is captured, we see it come across the, the, you know, the, and the mole is captured, we see it come across the justice.org or justice.gov site because we always track espionage cases. We see that this person who fits the mold was captured. We start to research that person and we start to see from the evidence trail that FBI created that that person slammed into our operation at the time that we were in Wolf.

And that was kind of, that became part of the evidence trail that led to their arrest. Okay. That's when we became aware of it. Now, when we wrote the manuscript and we submitted the manuscript to CIA, that they verified it for us. They were the ones that were like, you can't talk about this because what you're saying here happened. That's why it's classified.

And that was kind of when it all came together. Before you were put the pieces together, you were like, this makes perfect sense, but now you actually have verification. And classification. Right. You and your wife, you're kind of out. One of the issues you had, we talked about this last time, one of the issues you had was when you guys left because almost nobody ever leaves is that they didn't really know how to set you up to leave and be successful, where they didn't give you, weren't willing to give you a cover story.

Yeah, they don't care about setting you out to be successful afterwards. And CIA wasn't happy with us that we were leaving. We had just finished this operation. We had just built a whole new model for operations that were secure. And you're helping to train people on this model. Correct. And then it's not just one of us leaving. It's both of us leaving.

So both the architects of this program are now walking out the door. At a time when CIA didn't have people walking out the door. So the last thing they wanted to do was help us. And they didn't even really have an administrative process for dealing with younger officers choosing to leave. They had a retirement process. And they had a process for firing people who, you know, had affairs, were alcoholics, et cetera, et cetera. They had a process for people who were malcontent, but they didn't have a process for good people who just chose to choose a different path. So we go through and we submit our

resignation. They tell us they can't process a resignation, but they can process a leave without pay. So when we go to leave, when we go to quit CIA, they actually ask us, please don't quit because we don't have a process for that. But we do have a process to put you on six months of leave without pay, and then at the end of that six months, if you just don't come back to work, then we'll process you as a resignation. We have that process. So I go to my wife and I tell her the same thing.

I was like, I mean, it's six of one, half dozen the other for us. We still get to leave. They still won't give us ever, they'll never really acknowledge our affiliation, but we can leave. And it's just administratively two different sheets of paper. So we leave. we relocate to Florida.

We have no work history that can be validated for almost seven years or for almost eight years. So we leave, we have all of our credentials from before CIA, and then we have this block of cover activity because we're required by law. We're still undercover. Even though we're leave without pay on our way out, they haven't rolled back our cover, meaning they haven't gone through the process of exploring our operations and telling us what we can and can't say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we're still CIA officers by law and commitment, but we're not being paid, and CIA will no longer offer us backstopping for our cover and will no longer give us, you know, anything. So we have we have this situation where we can't get a job because we can't verify our employment because if you call the number on our resume, it's an empty phone line to a fake business or a fake office somewhere with nobody answering the phone anymore. So we can't find a job for like six months. And I'm living in my parents,

in-laws, converted garage in fucking Tampa, Florida, feeling like a loser, man. Because there's no hope. And my wife is there, and my one-year-old child is living in a fucking playpen on the floor of a converted garage, a cement floor in Florida. I mean, anybody who's been down here knows what that feels like. Yeah.

You don't feel like a winner when you're in that. situation. All right. So, well, how long, how do you get out of that? I mean, I know I would have gotten out of it immediately. I'd have faked everything. Somebody would have answered the phone. Somebody would have, it would have been a website, business cards.

So when we left CIA, we both thought we had to create like a completely new life. So our life of lying and faking and fabricating was over. And now we had to start this new square life. So we tried to do everything by the books And we tried to find the right resume And we tried to polish it as best we could And we went to all the networking meetings And we put our resume on all the right channels

And you know, this was Early early 2014 That we're trying to figure this whole thing out But you still have a huge gap But we still have a huge gap And it kind of dawns on us in the moment of need Like after six months of a fucking Florida summer In a converted garage

It kind of clicks and we're like we've been trying to play fair, but all of our success came from being trained how not to play fair. So what if we just started kind of borrowing some skills from CIA and using it to find a job? So my wife targeted an executive in Florida. I bumped that executive in Florida. We already knew that that person had a job. That was an opening. They had a need.

They were looking for people that were going to be able to, the position. that they had was a high turnover position because it was high stress and people didn't want to deal with that shit in a growing company. So we already knew all this, so then when we talked to the actual person, when I met the person,

I was able to ingratiate myself using CIA skills to win their trust and win their support and win their affection or whatever else by making myself a perfect fit for this job opening that they had this problem filling.

So before along, it was an easy conversation. The person was like, I got this job that you might be perfect for. Tell me about that job. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would love to apply. I happen to be in need of a job.

You know, you don't even have to apply. I'll just directly, I'll just connect your right to the hiring manager. And if you think it's a good fit, you're in. You mean no one's going to call my resume? No one's going to verify my employment. Like, I'm down for that. So two meetings and a phone call later, I get a job offer to work for CVS Health when it was growing in 2015.

And I'm brought on as a business analyst doing a bunch of quantitative analysis, which I had no experience in whatsoever. CIA taught me how to learn shit fast. All right. So I started learning how to be a business analyst as quickly as I could. It's got to be a YouTube video. Not back then. For that.

But yeah, and then we just kind of just climbed the ladder. What I found is that once you're in a corporate setting, all of these skills that CIA taught you for how to live and operate undercover become incredibly valuable. You can learn things faster. You can memorize faster. You can remember for longer. You learn how to kind of capitalize on persuasion and influence in the workplace with, with your coworkers and your bosses and the people who work beneath you and the people in other offices.

And all of a sudden, you just have incredible amounts of success. So my wife and I both get into CVS health. And we both start to climb the ladder in record pace because we don't know what the fuck we're doing. We've never worked in pharmacy before. But we're able to climb the ladder because we have all these soft skills and these shortcut skills that allow us to really understand the war battlefield faster than the average person. So how long does that go on? And when did you, because at some point you start, like, you start a podcast.

Yeah. So it's funny, I am known for podcasting. Podcasting is the smallest amount of money I make. Right. Which is, for me, I think it's hilarious. It gets the least amount of my time and it's the smallest amount of money I make. But my, after two, two and a half years where we're promoted every six months, I mean, I go from leaving CIA. I leave CIA in 2014 making 91.

$1,000 a year in Washington, D.C. I get hired in Tampa, Florida, working 100% remote for a growing company. I make $80,000 a year. Now, $80,000 a year in Tampa goes a shit ton farther than $91,000 in Washington, D.C. Right. And then every six months I'm promoted. My wife is promoted about every nine months, just because of the different job categories. So after two years, I went from being a business analyst to being an advisor to a Fortune 13 company.

I'm making $120,000 a year plus 25% annual bonus in stocks. It's way more money than I ever thought I would ever be making. And then I'm living in Florida where that money goes super far. And it clicks on, it clicks on my head that I wasn't skilled. Like I'm not great at business analytics. That's not how I climb the ladder. I climbed the ladder because I knew how to make my boss like me and my boss's boss like me and then get picked first for the job.

like I kind of cheated the system. And I cheated the system with spy techniques that anybody can learn. So then I just wondered, well, what if I just teach these techniques to other people? Like, won't I make more money teaching these to other people rather than sitting here and working 12 or 16 hours a day in the grind of a daily job? And my wife was supportive. And that's when we launched our business, everyday spy. So our business was launched in 2019. Very shortly thereafter, we started creating YouTube videos.

Just little videos to experiment with how to even create YouTube. You and I were talking off camera. I was literally making videos on my Android phone. Shitty videos, no edits, no cuts, no good lighting. Like anybody goes to my channel and looks at the oldest videos is going to see some trash, right? But that's where we start. So I started doing that on YouTube and I started launching my business.

And then my business actually started gaining the most support early on from entrepreneurs and from corporations because they want me to come in and teach their people how to speak to each other, teach communication, teach leadership skills, teach techniques that CIA was using for risk management, for sales, for marketing, for leadership development, etc., etc. So a lot of our early sales came from corporate clients, and using that money, we spun that money into creating courses for the everyday person and creating a whole digital back end so people can log into our private library, they can go into our private learning system. We built all that infrastructure on our own. So everyday spy started to grow. My podcast,

my YouTube channel started to grow, but what ended up happening is war broke out in 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine. And I was one of the few voices that had a YouTube channel at all that was talking about how CIA actually works. So Lex Friedman, one of the larger podcasters at the time, had a conversation with me and that's when YouTube, the whole YouTube viral world kind of blew up for me. Yeah, you've got shorts on Julian. I don't know what they are on Lex. I saw you I saw the Lex, but it was Julian's, I mean, obviously I knew you before that, but it was some Julian shorts on you, I mean, 45 million views. I mean, I don't know if they're higher than that, but I know at least one. I think his largest is over 300 million views.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And that's when, so Julian Dory, if people don't know him, is 100% of podcaster to check out. I think he might be the most underrated podcaster. I know he is. Aaron right now. But he does, he does great stuff. He does. Listen, his, he'll take a minute and a half short. And it's like a documentary. For real. They're phenomenal. He knows, he's the same guy, like the guy's in the UK.

Like, it can't be longer than exactly two seconds. And you have to do this. You have to show move it. That doesn't have move. We have to have move it. Make sure the eyes line up with the eyes when you, I mean, it's like, bro, like how the he could write a 300 page book on how to do the perfect short. Right.

They're phenomenal. And the numbers prove it, right? Yeah. So Julian, it was Julian and Danny Jones who found me first. I interviewed with both of them. We had great interviews, great conversations, and that just kind of springboarded me onto more and more of the bigger shows. But what's wild is, as I've grown this kind of YouTube presence, the real value for me

has been that all these lives who find me on YouTube then go. into my business and then I get to change their lives in the business. So we've had people that we've turned from employees into entrepreneurs. We have people who were making $40,000 year. They're now making $140,000 year and they have tons of success because the skills work and the skills are teachable and the skills are simple enough to learn. Are these like video courses? We have video courses. We have audio. We have books. We have work books. We have in-person training courses. Like everything that's CIA, and there's more coming all the time, because everything CIA trained into us that isn't classified,

we get to train into other people. And there's nobody else out there doing it. Who do you, did you go to somebody? Did you just create your own courses? Or did you actually go to, like, you know how Bradley is? No. Yeah, he's got a whole studio designed. Like he does, I would say Tony, is it Anthony?

Do you go by, does he go by Tony or Anthony? Do you go by, does he go by Tony or Anthony Robbins? Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins, okay. Tony Robbins, he does Tony Robbins. He does, who else? Grant Cardone. He does, like, I don't think he does Grant.

I don't know if he does Grant anymore. He does a bunch of, like, all the really huge ones. He does. He's out in Las Vegas. And he's got a huge thing, and he's got, like, people, they answer the phones for you. He's got a whole system set up. So, I mean, I'm sure you're doing fine. But if you want, if you, you might want to at least have.

a conversation with him because he's listen I'm not impressed by a lot of people's setups when I walk in you walk into the place this is man this place you're like this is of course if you got Tony Robbins as right right right your clients you're probably making bank um but yeah matter of fact he's got uh Luke uh Luke uh I'm not can't I'm I'll butcher Luke's last name whatever remember the big Luke lookenheim collecting yeah the big guy yeah the bank robber anyway he's got He does Luke's. Yeah, he's, he's really good. You ought to, you ought to think about talking to him,

unless you're perfectly happy where you're at. Anyway, so, yeah, so you're doing that now, and then you had a TV show. What happened with the TV show? Yeah, I mean, we are, we do a lot with A&E networks, with History Channel, and I've been part of their Beyond Skinwalker project for two years now. Beyond Skinwalker. So it's a high strangeness research study, which is basically a way of, it's kind of an all-encompassing term that starts talking about where modern-day science meets the unknown.

So sometimes that's UFOs, sometimes that's energy orbs, sometimes that's UFO. Sometimes it's, I'm sorry, like alien cryptids. It's all that kind of space that people try to explore. but applying real science to it. So Beyond Skinwalker's on History Channel, it's part of the Skinwalker Ranch investigation that's going on through the sister channel, the sister show called The Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch.

I've been doing that for about two and a half years now. And then Shadow Cell, the book that we've been discussing, has sold rights to legendary films. Oh, the option of the film rights? Correct. So whether or not that gets flipped into a film or a TV show, they're still working through right now. but along with the book publication on September 9th,

we're also expecting to make progress towards some kind of film media. So, okay, what are they, what are they, are they thinking, feature film, or are they thinking series? They're thinking, I mean, I think they're thinking TV series, but it's so early in the process. I don't know that they know whether it's a three-season arc, a one-season show, a nine-season show, a four-season show,

a miniseries or whether they flip it back to their parent organization and it goes feature film. I don't, and we've talked about this too. Like media is a really fickle world. Yeah. Yeah. Or if it's just the option expires in 18 months and they couldn't put it together. And then Paul bumps into Larry at a party in two years from now and they call you up and they say, you know, we think we got something here.

And three months later, you're shooting a fucking film because two guys bumped into each. Like the way it works is so bizarre. It's like, you know, Bob's cousin was talking about possibly doing something on spies two months ago. And yeah, let me call him. And they call it. Two phone calls later, you're signing a contract with Warner Brothers. You're like, I went 18 months pitching seven different production companies with all the main players and two guys bump into each other in a party and put it together. That's why you'll go to the movies and see a movie and go,

how the fuck did this get made? And then other stories that are fucking, that are phenomenal, you're like, why is this not a film? Why isn't this a series? Because Tom didn't go to the party. He wasn't golfing that day. That's the problem is you just don't know how it, how it doesn't work the way you think it works.

Yeah. You can see how frustrated I am because you know I've been through this process. Well, I mean, you and I met in the middle of this process. You and I met when you were writing a book. And it wasn't your first book, but it was one of your many. Either way, what I've learned through the media process, right, through the podcasting process, the TV history channel process, the book writing process, the publishing process, the optioning your film writing. This is not a business where people get rich. Oh, yeah.

The richest people out there, all of your A-list. celebrities, your A-list directors, your A-list, you name the wealthy famous fucking celebrity that comes to your mind. They did not get wealthy being in the film. They did not get wealthy writing the script for the film. They got wealthy because they were able to flip what little money they had into producing high-performing films. Right?

That's how they did it. That's why your Ben Affleck is so wealthy and your Tom Cruise is so wealthy. not because they were in it, but because they produced it. And then they end up taking a huge portion of all the sales. Well, the first thing they do when these guys make a chunk of money, you know, when they get some money, they end up getting $5 or $6 billion. First thing they do is open a production company. Because you can imagine how many people are coming up to them at the party saying,

listen, you got to hear this story. And, you know, so, yeah, it's... And they have an idea of what it's like to be on the inside. And now they're Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise, he can get the meeting. Yeah. You know, where most people can't even get the meeting to pitch the amazing story. He can get that meeting.

Yeah. Because, and he can also help to move it along much faster because he can say, hey, by the way, I want to play the FBI agent. And they're like, oh, wow, right, Tom Hanks. Hey, by the way, I'll play the FBI agent and catch me if you can, you know, it's a, there's, there's so many of those films that take forever. And then you notice it's like, yeah, like, same thing, Ben Affleck, I'll play the CIA agent in Argo. Argo was actually an article called The Great Escape, which was in Wired Magazine, which got bought by Matt Damon. And he, after about a year or so, he just couldn't do it.

And so he mentions it to Ben Affleck. Affleck. Affleck. Affleck is the insurance company. Affleck is the actor. Ben mentioned it to Ben, and Ben said, I'll take it. And he ended up making the movie, and they called it Argo, which is one of my favorite favorite films.

Because other than, because my understanding is watching, I watched a dock on it, kind of like the thing is, it's so similar with the exception of one or two things that they tweet, you know, like the planes taking off and the cars are driving next to him. They're trying to get the plane down. Like somebody in the tower wouldn't say, you know, go ahead and power down. You know, that didn't have, you know. Instead, they've got the, and then, you know, they stopped. them at the airport and question like they did they they did a few scenes to make it a little bit

more exciting at the end uh other than that you know it was it was a it was super accurate and i love the uh the period it was a period piece and the whole thing i thought that movie was i thought it was really well done um i mean that's saying something from somebody who's borderline oCD like you yeah where every detail you're you're seeing them all yeah it it upset yeah there's stuff that upsides me we've talked about that uh I think just the crazy eyes that you had, for whoever edits this thing, you got to play back the crazy eyes once we talked about OCD on you. It was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's some, there's some issues. There's a lot of me straightening things and straightening it. Was that pre-prison, in prison after prison? I feel like it was, I feel like it might have been before prison. I know there are guys that You were so good at what you did criminally that you had to be super detail oriented I think I know that there are guys that become

kind of you know clean freaks and OCD after going to prison and being in that environment I've heard that I've actually heard that from my the original probation officer so because the first place I moved into was so just just kind of trashed. And she was like,

are you going to be okay here? And she said a lot of guys, they just cancel it. I'm running that back room. I'm not going in this area. I'm just going to stay in the back room. It had a separate entrance. It was,

when does the book come out? September 9th. Who's the, who's the publisher? So our publisher is Little Brown. Little Brown is an imprint under Hachette, the top five global publisher. Hachette's a French publisher.

And if we've, if they've never- Contact you? Or do you have a literary agent? I had a literary agent that connected us. Yeah. And speaking of which, like the friend of a friend of a friend, that's how I found the literary agent, right? Yes, hard to find a literary agent.

A friend connected me to this guy in L.A. who was plugged into film. I talked to that guy. He was like, you've got a great story, but you need a book agent. Let me connect you to this other friend who I know who's got book agents. And then four phone calls later, I'm talking to the guy who became my book agent. He was like, I love your story. And I think it could be a film. So everybody wanted a film, but they were like, you got to do the book first. So then we did a book first.

We'll see whatever. We'll see what comes of it because, like I said. it's a shit show, right? It's a total shit show. You never know who's going to like what or when they're going to like it or why they're going to like it. So I don't know where you learned to write a story because I'm just now starting to get into the whole process of story writing.

And there's an actual recipe for a story. Yeah. And I don't know if I'm just slow to the party or if everybody realize this. But like the scenes in a book, the moments that you choose to actually record in a film, whatever it might be, like there's beats, there's process, there's purpose, there's craft that goes into building it from beginning to end so that people go on a journey

and so that they don't lose interest and so they have emotional highs and lows. I've never taken the time to think about it until I started working on the adaptations of our book into TV and movie with different screenwriters. And it's a really fascinating process. And it's so complicated. It's so, it's not so complicated. It's so, it's so crafty, meaning like there's an actual craft to it. It's so crafty that if you don't know what the fuck you're doing,

you're not going to succeed. Not everybody can actually create a story. How did you learn to create a story? I mean, I wrote, I wrote my story when I was locked up and I read several books. about storytelling about how to write and about writing you know and i mean that the it's funny too because the books that i bought were like you know how to write memoirs for dummies you know how to write true crime or not how to write true it was a the idiot's guide to writing true crime or nonfiction uh you know

that's i remember those yeah those for dummies and idiots guides and probably the the best book i i got was some guy who knew i was writing my story walked by me and he said Hey man, I saw this book you might want and he handed me this book and it was I'm telling it was this big. I remember it had a sailboat on the cover and it just looks like what I was Maybe a hundred pages. I can't remember what it was. It was tiny and it was from a woman who'd actually written like two maybe three memoirs Huh. And reading that book probably taught me more than all these other books because she just these little things she said that I understood for the first time was like, you know, get into a scene as late as possible and get into it as early as possible.

And then she would give like a little example where it's like you don't say, you know, you know, I walked across the parking lot and got my car, you know, opened the door, got my car, turned on the radio. And as I was listening to the radio, the news came on. and that's when I found out my wife had been murdered. You don't do that. You know, what you, you know, and you, what you say is, I'm in the car, you know, I'm in the car, you know, I'm in the car listening to the radio when the radio announcer came on and said, boom, so-and-so's, you know, had just died. You see what I'm saying?

It's like, you don't explain that or you get to, that's as late as possible just before the action and then you get out as quickly as possible. Then next scene is, you know, you're, you're running into the hospital or you're, it's more, you try and write visually and, you know, it's a whole. whole show them, don't tell them. But it's funny, she had all these things that... Did you remember the name of the book? No, that's the problem. So many people, I actually was interviewed by the Atlantic magazine, and I remember the reporter was like, you can't remember what it was.

Like, no, I can't. And what's even worse is, I gave it to somebody. And I said, because he said, hey, he was talking to me about writing a memoir and he said, do you have any stuff? And I said, I'll tell you the best book I have. And you can read it, literally, you can read this book in an hour or two. And I gave him the book. And I said, I want that book back.

I never got the book back. I am literally going to go to my backpack right now. Just because I'm curious. That would be interesting. You know, one of the things I remember about the book is that she talks about, she wrote, one of her memoirs, she talked about how she, when she was a child, she literally used to walk to school to the bus stop and it was three, you know, how it's the cliche, you know, people say, oh, I used to walk to school three miles back, you know, uphill both ways.

And she said, I used to walk to the bus stop. She was literally, she was three miles away from my house. And, you know, as a child, she mentions this in the book. And she says, later on in life, after I'd written my memoir, I had come out, had gone out, She said her husband, they were taking a trip. And she went back to her house where she grew up when she was seven or eight years old. And you used to tell people this all the time. She said, I'm telling you it wasn't half a mile.

But as a seven-year-old, it felt like forever to the bus stop, right? So she said, I literally did walk three miles back and forth. No, it was like quarter of a mile or something. So I don't know if this is the person. But the author of this book is a super famous. in the niche sci-fi writer. The original cover had a sailing boat on it

and it's actually called sailing The Sea of Story. Right. And it's tiny. It's tiny. The author's name is Ursula Degin. If she has written memoirs, I don't know, but the reason I got into this is because she is a highly lauded sci-fi author.

I'm going to take a picture of this so that I can look it up. And I want to see if the stories that you're talking about are in this. Have you read it yet? yet this is actually what I'm reading on the next plane flight. The book I read right before this is something called Save the Cat. Save the Cat is like a crash course in screenwriting. And it's really been, that was an awesome book for me to start understanding screenwriting. And this is a book that everybody I've ever spoken to in the writing industry praises this book.

That's funny. It's got little sailboats here. Got a little, come on, a little sailboat. Yeah. And it's only 140 pages. When I said it was like 100 pages? Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, definitely.

So if that's it, I am 100% going to lose my shit. It was a... And it was a great. It was great. It was probably the best one I had written because she just explains that, you know, especially writing a memoir, it's not about accuracy. It's about how you recall things and how you remember, you know, it's this is how I felt at the time.

It's from your perspective. I want to say, does she the one that said something about the whole, you know, your version, their version, the truth. And she said some little,

I think she said something about that. And I was thought, she was like, well, memoir is your version. So I'm like, she was like, she's like,

well, listen, memoir's your version. And then she gives the example of the walking to the home and, or, you know, walking the cars. Yeah,

four miles, four miles back uphill both ways to school, you know. But yeah, So I wrote that story. And of course, being in prison, writing stories and letting people read them and just having a little audience, you start to realize, you know. What works and what works and what, like, nobody's ever interested in this. Things that I found interesting or that I did that I thought were interesting.

I realized right away, like, nobody cares about that. They only care about this. And then sometimes simplifying the story. Because, you know, parts of my story, I have to, I would initially explain like, what. why what debt-to-income ratio is, why it's important, why this, why that. And then you realize, like, all I really have to say is, you know, I made W-2s so that I could qualify for the loan. I don't have to explain that you have to get the debt-to-income ratio right because the

way the underwriting calculates DTI, nobody gives a shit. You know, I think it's interesting because that's the nuts and bolts of why this works. Right. Skip that, you know, cut to the chain. So, you know, you learn that. I wrote it and then somebody read, they read it, and they tell you what you'd like, and you tweet this and tweet that, and everybody had lots of time. And in prison, there were, there were guys there were in the low, there were guys that were very, very smart.

There are school teachers. There are guys, there were a couple guys there from NASA. There were guys that, you know, there were very, very, a lot of guys have, you know, they run Ponzi schemes. They've got finance degrees. They've got, these aren't, you know, crack dealers. Right. These guys are established.

sharp guys that have nothing to do. And they were your editors. You go, hey, boom, read this for me. Will you? Sure. Give them a pen and they write notes. So I learned how to do that. Once I learned how to do that, I really, really liked it. Yeah.

And then I started writing other guys' stories. And then, you know, then it gets to the point where everybody, you start writing synopsies of the stories. And then people are coming around asking me like, yo, bro, you wrote that guy, so-and-so story. I read the synopsis. Do you have another one? I'm like, well, yeah.

Well, I'm not on him. They're like, no, no, like, anything on drugs? I'm here for drugs. And you're like, yeah, I do, actually. And you give it to him. Or a guy would be like, you have anything on credit card fraud? Because, you know, yeah, I show you this guy that did counterfeiting. You know, I'd give him that story.

And before you know it, people are walking by. You know, bro, I just read that story. Yours Cox. And you're like, I've never talked to this guy. Yeah. You start to kind of be almost like a little celebrity. People want to read your stories and people are lining up and they're coming to you and at. And you're starting to think, I never thought I was, I never thought I was any good at

writing story. I used to say I'm a good storyteller. I'm not a great writer. I'm a good storyteller. But then when you towards the end, when I was sending my stories to writers all over the place, journalists all over the place, and they're coming back with these letters like, yo, I'm not interested in the story. I can't really, there's nothing I can help you with on this because I'm trying to get help get them to help me get something into Rolling Stone or whatever, GQ. They're like, yeah, I'm booked. I can't do it. But I wanted to go ahead and say that, you know, I find what you're doing fascinating and be honest with you, but you should think about pursuing this outside

because you're an amazing writer. And you know, you've got guys that are, guys doing this 20 years. You know, he's saying I'm an amazing writer. Like this, like,

you hear it over and over, and then you talk to a literary agent or two, and they're saying, no, you're really a good writer. You're like, well, I'm a good storyteller.

Like, no, you're, you're a good writer. Like, this is. And so I got to a point where I was like it. And I really liked it.

And I figured I probably won't go to go to prison for this. You know, and the judge, been so adamant about me not committing fraud again. He's really, really serious about it. So I thought, I should try and do something related to this. And if I make money at it, great. And if I don't, well, that's okay too. You know, worrying about making money is what got me to prison. So, yeah, I just started doing it. And I also, you know, because having read also, listen to this, there was a guy who was a professor who was in prison who taught the Christian. Who taught the

creative writing class. I took that class several times. I say his name was Mike or Robert. Anyway, he, he, uh, anyway, so I had taken it several times. And so having read those books and taken that class, as I would hear people's story, you're looking for things, right? I'm trying to figure out, is this guy a sympathetic hero? Is he an anti-hero? Is he a, you know, what type of protagonist is this person. So, and you kind of figured out, and then as they're telling their story, and then suddenly they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you know, my mom left when I was such and such. You're like, ooh,

what happened there? How old were you? Did that bother you? Well, what happened when she left? Because I'm realizing that can make him a sympathetic person. You left when you were seven years old. You remember standing in the dirt driveway, crying as your mother drives off with all of her stuff, people's hearts are going to go out to you.

Right. Like, you're now, you were raised by your sister who was a stripper and you still, you know, like, oh my God, like, this is great. You know, you're, this is great. Your misery is a horrible upbringing. Thank God, you went, you suffered so much. Like, I can use that. Yeah, so, so, uh, you start looking for those things and that's how you kind of craft that story.

Like, and you realize, too, it's so funny, too, because you start to realize how many times, especially you can never really watch a movie at later. afterwards because you're sitting there watching a movie and suddenly did you ever see the movie this is a good example um sniper or shooter shooter with uh with uh mark walberg i haven't seen it but i know what you're talking about yeah he's sitting there and the the helicopter comes in and flies in or they they drive up the whatever it is they drive up the the the dirt road and he's there and he's clearly a sniper and he comes up and i'm like this is the reluctant he's a reluctant he's a reluctant They're going to ask him to do something.

He doesn't want to do it. He's done with them. I'm done with the military what they did to me. You know, it's a whole thing back. But then there will be some reason that he decides to give it, to do this favor for them. And so they have to convince him. So he's the reluctant hero, right? And then there's a different character.

And that's what he becomes. And when you're talking to someone, you start to realize, like, you know, like the CIA comes to you. And you're like, I don't want to work for the CIA. I'm working for this guy's up. I'm going to be a pilot or I'm going to be whatever. You know, and then, but then, you know, 9-11 happened and you decided to call that guy that left the card and said, just in case you change your mind. And two weeks later, 9-11 happens and you said, I want to sign up. You see what I'm saying?

There's some catalyst. What was the catalyst? Maybe it's just during the conversation. Maybe it's two weeks later something happens. Right. Like, you know, what kind of a hero are you? And so you start to realize those types of things and how it, and it's always a progression. Nobody ever just, nobody ever just decides to run a Ponzi scheme.

I'm saying. It's always a progression. It's always, it started off legitimate. And then it always starts the same way. We had one bad quarter. What do we do? I lied. I knew if I told these guys, I just lost 20% of their, of their fortune, they would pull out. So I lied. And I said we had, we only made 1% last quarter. And I thought I'd make it up in the next quarter. But the next quarter, we didn't make it up. Before you know what, I could never make it up. So then what I do, I realized I just had to borrow more money to pay these guys. They're dividends or their whatever. So I started borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, trying to keep all the plates in the air as long as possible. It's always the same way. It's the same

stories. And plus I like nonfiction better because the stories are, you really just can't make it up. You can't, you know, I remember Mike Hudson. I sure remember Mike Hudson was telling me a story one time. And he's like, so, you know, his partner had been doing so, much had been shooting or something. And so he's like, yeah, you know, and you do it so much. And then, like, his veins had collapsed. And then this, this. And he's going.

So he's bent over, he's bent over naked. And the, um, the hooker's pushing rocks into his ass. Because you can, that's another way to it could. So he, so I remember starting the scene out with. Oh my God. So and so has been over naked with his ass. And the hooker was shoving a, uh, uh, uh, you know, a, a, uh, a, you know, a, a rock, a whatever,

you know, an eight ball or whatever it was into his ass. And it was just like, you know, like you just, it was just such a, you're getting into it as late as possible, out as early. I'm like, so what do we do? Let's jump straight to the guy, the chick, the hooker shoving the thing in his ass. So it was a great attention get her. So, uh, but yeah, you, you can't make that up, bro.

I'm never going to come. I'm never going to come up with that. When he said it, I was like, okay, what, what did you just say? He's like, yeah, I go, what, why? Why? And then he explains why, and I'm like, I love it. It's great. I could never come up with that.

Just keep writing. But yeah, it's definitely a process. I mean, it's fun, and I like it. Well, I mean, what I've discovered in the process of writing my memoir, just like you're saying, is that the stories, the stories are there. They're so accessible. Yeah. It is about understanding what people do want to hear, what they don't want to hear. And then getting the scenes right, getting the blocks right, getting the progression right.

And we've been getting a lot of really excellent praise for Shadow Cell initially. We've gotten it from literary groups. You've gotten it from individual readers. So I'm really excited for the launch. But the bug that I have now, right, I've been bitten by the creativity bug where it's like, hey, what else can we write? What other stories can we bring to life, fiction or nonfiction? Right. Right.

Because it's really, it's pretty addictive. I'm more able to understand. the writer Matt Cox that I met three years ago. Right. Now that I've gone through the process of writing my own book. Oh, if I could just write, if I thought I could just write true crime stories and make like a good living,

the problem is the disparity between writing, being a regular writer, and being a bestseller, is so massive. You know, it's same thing with like being a professional, like a successful professional comedian, right? the guys who are at the comedy club who are making $75 a show and the guys that are selling out stadiums that are making $200 and $300 and half a million a show.

Like there's no in between. There's no middle class. It's the haves and the have-nots. Like you've got to do it for, it's a labor of love because there are very few professional writers that are writing. And maybe I guess if you're writing for maybe a magazine or something, and let's face it, you know,

how many of those jobs are going to be going to be going? soon. But yeah, if I could just write true crime and make like a good living doing it, like I would love to do that. And it's so much fun too. It is like being a, it's like being a detective, right? Like you have to order the documents and get them in. And by the time most of these guys' stories were done, I knew way more about their case than

they did. I'm telling them, no, no, here's how you got caught. So-and-so got, you know a guy named Pookie? They're like, yeah. You know, his name's Robert, you know, John. Yeah. Okay, he and another guy robbed the 7-Eleven. He got caught.

He then cooperated against so-and-so, and then he told the agents he could set you up. I don't know exactly what he did because they didn't put that part in. It was redacted, but, and he's like, Pookie's aunt called me, and she's the chick that I showed up to sell the rock, though. He got his aunt to sit. And they're like, guys are like, oh, my, I never knew. I didn't, I didn't even know she was involved. Of course, it was his aunt. He, she got, he got her involved.

Yeah. But yeah, you learn so much stuff and it's so much fun to read the documents and get them in. It's exciting when they come in the mail or the email and you're like, woo, who's going to print this out? Yeah, it's great. I wrote, I wrote, um, I wrote, uh, my, my wife's story, you know, I might actually turn my wife's story into a book. I wrote a synopsis.

It's like 14,000 words. We were going to, Rolling Stone was going to publish it. They kept putting it off and putting it off. And finally I got so frustrated. And then when I finally got the guy on the phone, I was like, well, what's taking so long? He was like, well, you know, there's no hurry. It's an evergreen story.

And I went, no, no, we're done. You know what I'm saying? No, I'll just publish it. And then we were having to trim it down from like 14,000 words like seven. And so I just said, yeah, I'm just going to publish the 14,000 word version. The truth is, if I just double that in size, maybe, let's say it will triple it. Let's say I got it to 50,000 words, which I could easily. That's a memoir.

I could put that book out. Would it make any money? No, of course not. But it might be a series. You don't know. Argo. Argo is written by Joshua Bierman. Joshua Bierman had published 10 articles prior to that, roughly.

He'd never optioned anything. Never sold anything? He was being paid $5,000, $7,000 for an article, publishing them in GQ or whatever. And Matt Damon read the Great Escape and went to him and they optioned it, 18-month option. He then, I think he then re-optioned it. When he re-optioned it, he still didn't have time to do it.

So he said, give it to Matt Damon. It became Argo. As soon as that came out, everything he'd ever written got optioned. And every story he ever published got optioned. Then he just, he started a website and started because it's such a process to get your book turned into an article. Yeah. He just started writing articles and putting it on his own website. Sold.

Sold. So every one of them, option. Now he lives off of options and the conversion of those options into actual films. but see, it was nothing. He went years, years, starving. And then you just need that one. And that's what I keep saying,

if I just get one thing made, everything else will be optioned. So that's, that is very similar to the story that we're going through right now with Shadow Cell. Right. We were nothing in a garage

until we had a good conversation on the internet. And then because we grew on the internet was the only reason a book agent was the only reason a book agent was willing to take us seriously because they were like, oh, you have a following. You have a following. So you have a good story and a following. Let's give a shot. You have a unique story is what you have. You have, I mean, I'm not saying it's not a good story,

but you also have a very unique story. Agreed. But, I mean, you're still taking the risk. You don't know whether or not I'm a good writer. You don't know whether or not I can tell a story. You don't know whether or not the market's going to be ready for the book when it comes out. Because when you agree to write a book. And when the book is published, I mean, this is a three and a half year, almost a four-year process for us. That's a huge change in the marketplace. Now, it just so happened that our marketplace changed for the better. Right. Because in 2021, when this thing was starting, there was no war in Israel. There was no war in Ukraine. There was no trade war that the United States was running. There was no massive conflict. There was no depreciation or crashing of the

American economy. Like, it was, it was pre-COVID even. Well, thank God for you. that everything went to shit. Everything went to shit. And now, theoretically, it will either help or hurt the book. But my point with all of this is, you know, you've got to put in a good faith effort. It's the person who quits after six months or a year is never going to have the success. You've got to be the one that keeps trying. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Well, I was going to say, and you could keep writing because there are so many things that you could. Look, you wrote a couple thousand words of Frank Amadeo's book, right? And that was just you just kind of commenting on a few things that I threw out. Hey, this question. It's funny, too, because I, when I, because I met you through another guy. And I said, I need, it was another podcaster that had wanted, was going to have me on a podcast. And he said to me. So I contacted him.

I said, hey, I'm writing this book. It'd be great if I could get, get a former CIA or someone who had worked for the CIA, their input on something. things. And he had actually told me, just during conversation, hey, I know several CIA agents. So I called him, I said, you said, you know several CIA agents. He goes, yeah. I said, and he goes, I know three. And I said, who will be the most vocal and be willing to give me an honest opinion of what's going on? And he goes, oh, you want to talk to Andrew Bustamante? I said, oh, okay. And then I sent it to you and I thought, I had whatever it was, 15, no, maybe 10 questions. And every question you came back. And I said, And I mean, it wasn't like, yes, no. Or, yeah, that's possible. It was three or four paragraphs on every single question. I was like, this is great. So, I mean, I threw them all in there, you know, rewrote them a little bit.

So they dovetailed in to what I was saying and had your quotes. And it made the book so much better. But you could do that with anything, you know, because you have an expertise in so many different categories that you could take anybody's story. and rewrite that story or take that story and expand on the story. And the thing is, too, books don't have to be long. Like, when I started writing in prison, I thought it has to be at least 300 pages. And books are 150 pages, 200 pages. Boom.

Yeah. 140 pages, right? Right. And people, I didn't even consider that, like, is that even a book? You know, that the definition of a novel, it has to be over 50, it used to be. I don't know if it still is. Definition of a novel is, one, a novel is nonfiction, of course. but two, it's over 50,000 words.

They don't make any, nobody's writing 50,000 word books. They're all, 200 pages is roughly about 40, 45,000. Oh, no, yeah, no, 200 pages is about 50, 60,000 words. But books are coming out that are 150, 150 pages. Yeah. That's probably 40, 50,000 words. So you don't even have to write a lot. You could just take a subject and run with it, you know?

And who knows what, like if your thing gets turned into a, a series or a movie and you wrote it and you're obviously on screen as having been having written or it was adapted from your uh you now have that now and now the way Hollywood looks at it is he's got a proven track record yeah and now you can end up you know yeah it's fascinating i mean it's uh i've had the chance to consult on the amazon series mr and mrs smith i've had a chance to uh support some some some new projects that are coming out that are under NDA. And then we have multiple TV projects that we've been able to help develop and advise on because

you're way ahead of the curb. Well, I'm not saying that I'm not. But what I'm saying is that I've learned in that industry that it's very, very fickle and very unpredictable. And at the end of the day, what you want to do is you want to follow the model that you just talked about with Argo, right? You want to be the person who everyone comes to on your own website with your own product at your own pricing.

otherwise you're always the one pitching. And if you're the one pitching, there's 50,000 other people out there pitching all the time. And the winner of the pitch often doesn't boil down to skill or expertise. It boils down to a mixture of luck and access. Yeah, exactly. Tom and Brad bump into each other at Jennifer's party. And next thing you know, they're making, you know, Dumbo drop.

That was a movie where they, you ever remember that? Oh, gosh. Dumbo Drop was a movie they made where they took an elephant and they dropped it out of an airplane during the Vietnam War or something. With Ray Leota. Because he was broke. He just got a divorce and needed money. So they paid him half a million dollars or a million dollars and he decided, okay, I'll do it. We got Ray Leota.

He's desperate. And we got this script and let's put it in. I mean, just fucking failure. I was just in L.A. I mean, like a week ago, that was where I started the kind of podcast tour to promote the book. And while I was there, I was talking to somebody who was explaining why Nicholas Cage was in almost every bad movie that you can remember from like 97, 98 until 2010. And it's kind of a cool story because apparently Nicholas Cage had a manager or some kind of person who was in charge of his finances. So he was living this lavish lifestyle, trusting his money manager to tell him like, hey, you got to pull back here, hey, you can't do that there.

So the money manager never did that. And the money manager made bad investments of Nick's money. And then Nick lived his lifestyle. And then come like late 90s, early 2000s, he's broke. So broke that the money manager is like, well, you could just claim bankruptcy. And Nick was like, fuck that. I am not going to claim. I'm Nicholas Cage.

I can't claim bankruptcy. Like, it's not going to look good. And apparently he was also so principled by the way he was raised. He was like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to just wash away debt that I spent. I have to earn it back. So he went to his agent, his actual booking agent, and was like, we're going to work our ass off. And we're going to build back everything that I spent. And I am not going to take loans.

And I'm not going to claim bankruptcy. I'm not going to do anything that shit. And then that's why you saw Nick Cage in all these movies when we were younger that were just that we seem were bad movies. And we kind of started to associate Nick. Cage is the guy that was in the bad movies. He was building back his whole career. He was doing the responsible thing, which was such an inspiring story for me because I was like, fuck yeah. Like you, that's, that's awesome. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, a lot of these guys get in trouble. You know, you surround yourself by surrounding yourself by yes men is, is a major problem.

Yeah, I just got a few questions that are shorts guys would like you to answer. And how does a normal person get into the CIA? I mean, a normal, I don't know what a definition of a normal person is. How does somebody get into the CIA? I like that. I think that's an easier... If you think you're normal, you're already fucked. Don't even try.

If you think you're not normal, if you think you're smarter than the average bear, maybe you've gotten edge, or maybe you're a little bit more ethically flexible than the average person. There are really three primary ways into the CIA. The first is what my wife did. You apply. Lots and lots of people just straight up apply. I think it's something like 75,000 applications a year. year. The second option is that you're recruited from the military, and there's lots of conversion

that comes from the military. Army, Air Force, Navy, Intel, Special Ops, Sagan, linguists, you name it, right? There's all sorts of people that get converted from military and they come in. Sometimes that's because CIA is present at your military base. Sometimes it's because the military reaches out to you and says, hey, we've got a CIA person here that wants to talk to you. The third is that CIA will contact you because they come across you someplace. So they might come across your resume because you submitted it for a job to a different government organization. They might come across your resume because you submitted it at a job fair. They might come across your resume because you submitted it to a government contractor and that government contractor flagged you for somebody else. But CIA might

come to you and ask you to essentially submit a clandestine application or a secret application, a backdoor application directly to them, rather than through the front door. on the website. What type of person makes a great CIA officer? Like what characteristics? Yeah, so... Someone who's morally flexible. It's true. Yeah. Great CIA officers are kind of shitty people.

Right. If you're going to be great at one thing, you can't really be great at the other thing. So I would say a great CIA officer is somebody who's willing to put the CIA first. They're also willing to put kind of principles aside and ethics aside to do whatever needs to get done for the mission. it's somebody who plays by the rules so they're creative enough to work inside a box but they still work inside a box

they don't try to go too far outside of the box to be a great CIA officer because when I think of a great CIA officer I'm thinking about somebody who will have will reach the pinnacle of their career inside the organization

I don't think of somebody who comes in and shakes everything up like they do in the movies and then you know goes on to do great things that's not how it works if you shake shift shit up you're never going to get promoted three X wives their kids don't talk

to them. Yep. Everybody thinks they're an asshole. They've got a bloodshot nose and a big belly because they drink to get rid of the stress. Yeah. What's the most valuable skill that you learn from the CIA that the average everyday person could use?

Hmm. The CIA gave me a lot of really useful skills. Okay. So the number one skill that I would say that they gave me that the average person can use is something called perception versus perspective. We all live in a world that we engage with through our own five. senses. That is our perception of the world. I go outside here in Florida and I think it's hot. You may not think it's hot. You might think it's hotter than I think it is. Some people might think

it's pleasant. Who knows? It's all different because it's our perception. CIA taught us that your perception is completely irrelevant. All that matters is the perception of your target. And if you can think like your target, then that gives you perspective. Perspective is more valuable than perception because perspective is based on the objective information in the environment, and it accounts for both what you see, what you feel, your five senses, but also their five senses, all of your lived experience, all of their lived experience, plus the situation as it stands right now. So when you leverage perspective, you can start to think like your target. You can start to predict your target.

You can start to anticipate your target accurately because you're not just assuming based off of your perceptions. You're actually assessing because of your perspective. So I have a follow up on that. You've heard of Victor Lusting? He was... I've heard the name. Yeah, he was a con man.

He actually sold the Eiffel Tower twice. That's why I've heard this. Yes. His big thing was to go on these cruises. I think this is back in like the 20s or 30s. Yes. He go on the cruises and he did the money box where he would, you know, he could, he could had a box or well, this little machine that would take, you know, whatever, $20 bill or $100 bill.

And you could roll it in there and it would actually make a duplicate $100 bill or whatever. Anyway, complete, you know, BS obviously didn't work. But he had a whole thing. And he also would raise money for plays that never happened. It was just a straight comment. but he had the, I think it was the five or ten con man rules. Can you look it up, Victor Lusting? Ten con man rules, ten con artist rules, ten con artist rules or five con artist

rule, Victor Lusting. And what he was exactly what you're saying. He was saying, look, don't, like, he was, is how to endear yourself to your, your victim. And one was, you don't ever talk about politics. You don't ever talk about, like, and first it was, you don't talk about politics. you wait to find out what your victim's politics are, and you emulate them. You mirror them. Same thing with religion.

Wait and find out what their religious views are, and you emulate. Don't ever talk about women or talk about sex unless they do, and then only engage slightly. He had all these little tiny rules. All right. Here are the Ten Commandments for Conmen. There it is. Be a patient listener. Never look bored.

wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them. Then agree with them. Same with religion. Yep. Hint that sex talk, but don't follow up unless the other fellow shows interest. I don't know if Victor Lusting's words would have been hit that sex talk, but this might be a translation. Never discuss illness unless some special concern is shown. never pry into person's personal circumstances, never boast, never be untidy, and never get drunk.

Yeah, right? Like, he has... That's the rules of espionage right there, too. I was going to say, right? Like, it's a way to get into, to endear yourself to another person. You don't want to offend them, you want to, right? So that's kind of... That kind of follows up on this last question where you guys can kind of add on to it.

This is the last one is how do you... manipulate somebody to get the information or what you want? Human beings are shockingly easy to manipulate. I'm sure that you've had the same experience, right? If you give them a chance to just say what they want to say, you agree with what they say, that makes them feel like they're interesting and correct, which makes them want to say more,

and then all you have to do is basically find a way to connect what they're saying, which is going to include what they're feeling, what they think, why they think it, You just have to find a way to connect all that with what you want in the end, whether you want to sell them something, whether you want them to sign on a dotted line or donate money or whatever else. That's really how all it takes to manipulate somebody.

I was going to say that's very much the whole, the Ten Commandments thing, right? People will have themselves. And you put so much power in the hands of the person sitting across from you if you don't realize how easy it is for us to all. just lay it on the table, right? You have to show some restraint not to lay it on the table because it's funny to me

when you watch two people have a conversation, a lot of times what it is is they're competing with each other. It's like, here's my story. Oh, well, here's my story. Well, my story is better here. And here's a bitter story.

It's like this one-upmanship, this one-upmanship. And if you're the person sitting beside those two, you just walked away with the fucking the bank, the ocean of information between these two, plus understanding the day

dynamics of how they both handle conflict, et cetera, et cetera. It's an incredible what can happen if you just refrain from speaking. If you just try to listen, if you just take a few notes, if you make callbacks to things that somebody said once in the past, it's just unbelievable. Yeah, just periodically ask a question here or there

and let them just keep talking and talk. Most people like talking about themselves. Of course, you're an introvert. You know, like my wife will be, her answer, are like, yeah, no, I went to Okochopee High School. Like, it was just like, it was fine. Jeez. You just pull a teeth.

But, yeah, I think most people like, and the more they talk, the more, the better they feel about themselves, the situation, the conversation, they walk away saying, wow, that was a great conversation. That was a great conversation. That guy was so nice. Yeah. I can't wait to talk to him again. Yeah, but you talked maybe 5% of the time.

They talked to 95% of the time, but they feel like they had a great conversation. And then it's so strange. we feel like people are supposed to remember us. Fuck no. You want people to forget you. You want people to only remember you when they see you again. They're like, oh, I remember you. And then they have all these good feelings.

They don't even know why they have the good feelings. They have the good feelings because the last time you talked, you shut up. They told you their life story. They walked away from that feeling good about themselves. Wow, I'm interesting. I'm valuable. That person really connected with me.

They really heard me. And then two fucking minutes later, they don't remember your name until they see you two weeks later at the coffee shop and they're like oh hey how are you doing and they want to talk again so you know what's funny as i used to always say like with with women you always leave them laughing i used to say i used to because i want them to in order for them to remember me and think about me once you get them laughing a little bit then you go hey listen i got to get going though it's great meeting you and walk away because their last moments their last thoughts are he was so funny and when you're laughing and you're i got to

to go. So they're still laughing. You know what I'm saying? So you leave them laughing. They feel good about the conversation. They feel good about you. They want to see you again. And they don't control when they get to see it. Yeah. Yeah. You control when that happens again. So for them it's a surprise, even though you already knew that you were going to show up the following Thursday at the gym at the same time. So I remember this one chick. She gave me her phone number. She gave me her her phone number, and I went home that night, and I called, and when called her, and when she picked up the phone, she said, she says, wow, she's like, you didn't even wait like 24 hours. She's like, you must really like me. And I was just like, God, this chick. So when's the book come out?

The book comes out on September 9th. It'll be everywhere worldwide. You'll find it at Target. You'll find it at Walmart. You'll find it at Amazon. You'll find it at Barnes & Noble. Go out, grab it anywhere you need to. You can also click on the link below. I'll make sure that you get a link directly to the book sales page. Hey, you guys, I appreciate you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so get notified of videos just like this. And please share the video. Thank you very much. See you.