Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Spies vs. Criminals: Why They’re More Alike Than You Think

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Andrew Bustamante, former-CIA spy, and Matt Cox, a former-fraudster, sit down to talk about the similarities a conman and spy.Andrew's LinksFind your spy superpower: https://everydayspy.com/quiz/Learn more with Andy: https://everydayspy.com/Follow Andy's podcast: https://youtube.com/@EverydaySpyPodcast?si=qiiz3KXbHA8KT_JZFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen 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/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

The only difference between a CIA officer and a criminal is that what we do is sanctioned crime. We're trained how to execute criminal acts and execute them on foreign soil to the advancement of American national security. As a criminal, you have to figure these things out on how to get the documents, how to get these things, how to get an ID, how to get a passport, and possibly getting arrested every single time. You created your own fraudulent documents. I had a team of artists create mine. I cannot imagine how stressful it must be to actually try to commit fraud face to face. with a bank. The difference is that if I got flag going through customs, I'm going to get arrested and brought back to the United States and I'm going to go to jail. A CIA agent is facing a vastly

different scenario. The only kind of person who's going to be a useful spy is somebody who has had incredible success in their country. Think about it. To steal secrets from a country, you have to get access to somebody who's been trusted with secrets for their country. These are people who have had fantastic success who have done amazing things, which means they're a little f***ed up too. And the only way they're going to trust you to give you their secrets, the only way they're going to trust you to get into a clandestine relationship where you exchange gold, alcohol, porn, whatever, is if they look at you and just like you were talking about how drug dealers can sniff out a narc, the only way that a f***ed up trader is going to look at you and trust

you is if when they sniff, they smell that you're f*** up too. Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I am here with Andrew Bustamante. He is a former CIA agent, and can I say podcaster? Yeah. Podcaster? You've got a podcast, because you've got a podcast, right? Yeah, absolutely. Is it just audio, or is it on YouTube yet?

It's everywhere, man. I got a YouTube podcast. I've got a Spotify podcast. It's everywhere. He's huge. He's everywhere. And we're going to be doing an interview that has been a long time coming. And thank you guys for watching.

And let's be honest. Let's be honest. I'm sorry to interrupt your intro. Sorry. That the reason that I got as big as I got was because of an introduction that you made. See, I'm taking 100% typically, I was there, no, that's not true. You were already on your way. No, but you were already on your way.

But I did, listen, and what's so funny is that I hammered, because the way this, yeah, we'll just start here. So you, I was writing up the book. Just throw him under the book. Let's throw Danny under the bus. Yeah. No, Danny, we did a great. Danny did good, eventually. Sometimes you have to twist someone's arm.

So you, wait, wait, wait, what is the guy? Wait, what's the podcast guy first? Because it started where he contacted me. It was a K-32 or K-Oh, K-5 or something like that. K-L-2-3. You're exactly right, man. So he had contacted me and said, hey, would you be interested in coming on my show? And I said, yeah, absolutely.

He goes, well, give me a little bit more time to put some more stuff up because I haven't put a lot of stuff off. I said, yeah, that's fine. And I just done Danny's show, whatever, four or five, what concrete, six months before. And then I said, yeah, no problem. Well, then I started writing Frank Amadeo's. I took a synopsis and I turned it into a full-length book, a very short, full-length book. But I contacted him and said, hey, do you have anybody a former CIA agents? And he said, I got three of them. I said, do you have anybody that would be willing to read the book that is not going to tote the line?

that it's not going to, that they would be interested in actually giving me a, you know, a, you know, his viewpoint of this, you know, nutty kind of character that I've got that I've heard a story about. He said, yeah. Oh, you want, he is, you want, you want Andrew Bustamante. I said, okay. And he gave me your number. You contacted me immediately. You said, absolutely. Send it to me. I sent it to you. You read through the whole thing and then systematically broke down the character kind of piece by piece by piece, which was great. And I appreciate that. And then I remember, and then I said, hey, you know, you'd be great to talk to my buddy, Danny. And then I called Danny, and Danny goes, who? I said, no, no, listen, this guy. And he goes, well, I don't understand. What did he do? I said, no, he's like former, he's a former CIA agent. How do you even know that?

I said, look, I know that. Okay. Talk to the guy. I said, what do you care? You're not checking any facts. And I said, so check him out. And I said, call him. And he said, all right, bro, give me his number.

I sent you his number. And then I... This is a great Danny impression, by the way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's, he's always annoyed. He's a little bit of a cranky guy. He's always annoyed until he wants something.

Yes. And then it's like, bro, you've got to come now. I had a guess for, oh, now we're buddies. We're always buddies when Danny want something. He's either cranky or excited. Yeah. Danny Jones. Concrete podcast, fantastic guy, but he's only, he only has two gears.

Cranky, excited. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, he, I told him over and over again. And then you, and then I think even a couple weeks, maybe two, three weeks later, you said, hey, whatever happened with that guy? And I was like, bro, I don't know. I texted him twice.

Texted him again. He's like, who? I said, bro, I told you about the guy. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, the CIA guy. I said, yes, the CIA guy. He goes, I don't know. What's he going to talk about? How would I know what he's going to talk about?

He was super interesting. The guys worked undercover. How many CIA people do you know? You know? And he was like, all right, let me think about it. So I'm telling you months and months went by. It happened again. Same conversation I had with him again.

And then one day he called me, he's like, bro, I had somebody fall, uh, fall through. They're not coming. I need, I need somebody. Can you either come or do you have anybody? I said, oh my God, bro. Are you serious? I said, I have told you. And he went, he said, all right, you're, you're right, send me the information. I sent it to him. And then you went on the show. It's my favorite, my favorite kind of guest to be is the guest of last resort. Yeah, I know. Yeah, but you It's how I, it's how I dated most of my way through college too. But then you walk in the door, you sit down. And as soon as you left, Danny, called me, said, this guy's amazing, bro. He talked about this and this. And I was like,

second gear. Right. I'm like, second gear, Danny. What's, I'm like, I told you. No, but I think he said, I'm going to have his wife on. I think that's, at that point he had said, uh, talked about, I think I did I already know that your wife that you had met her in the CIA? Yeah. I mean, you and I spent a lot of time going through your Frank Amadeo story. Yes. And you even were so gracious as to come and be filmed by the guy who clearly didn't know what he was doing um who i had somebody who said he would help me make a sizzle reel and once again i was i'd been out of the halfway house six months i have no idea how anything works cannot do a podcast didn't even know how to you know work my my phone um very much uh certainly didn't know how to use a camera or

upload to videos but anyway what's funny about that is that then i then i did a podcast on danny's later. So I later did a podcast on Danny's show and we were talking and he said he was talking about how you had gone on Julian's show and how you, oh, Julian loves him. Julie, he's like his go-to guy and he's this and he's going on and on him. I said, oh, yeah, yeah. He's like, yeah, you know, he's been on here and this and I was like, yeah, yeah. I said, yeah, you know what's funny about that day? I said, is that I begged you. He's like, you did beg me. He did. I said, you know, he went on Alex Freeman? You know, he's been on this and that? He's doing great. I'm like, right, right. I said, you know what happened now? I said, like, I was supposed to come on my.

show he's like yeah what's up with that and i said yeah i said now when i text him hey bro what's going on i said i don't get a return return i said and you i said danny you will be there too someday you'll be like hey bro you're in town can you come on the podcast he'll be like annie jones sounds familiar i know but here's here's the thing just like you were saying right you you you spent you spent time in prison man so when you come out you have a little bit of an uphill learning curve right and uh and for sure you're struggling on how to send a text message because for for like months the only text messages they got from you were links to videos that you had made yes I was like I feel like I feel like Matt's account may have been taken over by a bot right so I went ahead and put you on a filter

on a nice screen you're on a list yeah you're just you're just one of 30 guys on a list that get all the new videos and I'm trying to get views like I don't know how to do it I make a video that's not that's not the way to do it that's how you end up on a spam filter oh I've had people call me and say, listen, stop sending me these things. I've had people send me, I've had people that I've never texted, I've sent them stuff, and then all I'll get back is it'll say, stop. Because they think it's a bot. And if you send stop, it'll stop. I'm like, bro, this is mad. It's like, oh, I don't know. You keep sending me these videos. So that's all right. But that is, that is exactly what happened. Yeah. Well, you know, baby steps. I don't know what I'm doing. You, you clearly have gotten quite a bit

better. And let's let's not fail to mention the fact, right? That you started by having some dude come out and film a scissor reel. It sounds like it didn't go well. No. Dude, you've crossed the 100k subscriber mark on YouTube. You've got a beautiful studio here. Yeah, you got

the plaque. That's what I'm saying. Which, by the way, there's a very small percentage of people who get to that spot. So you're doing something right. You're doing lots of things right. I appreciate that. And the funny thing about this. You're just not sending text messages right. No. Well, the funny thing about that whole thing is that everything I'm doing right now is what, while I was in the halfway house, kind of scrolling through YouTube and looking at these different podcasters and stuff is everything that I thought, how silly.

Look, this guy did a whole video about getting 100,000. They sent him a little plastic plaque. That's just silly. Listen, I was thrilled when I got my plaque. I was like, I'm closing in on mine. Oh, my God. And I know exactly. I'm like, oh, when is it going to happen?

What's it going to happen? Is the channel everyday, everyday spy podcast? Yeah, the Everyday Spy podcast is the YouTube channel. And my Andrew Bustamante YouTube channel is the one closing in on 100K. Oh, okay. Yeah. I was just going to say, Julian would not approve. Julian has convinced Danny to rebrand concrete as Danny Jones.

Yep. Which makes sense. You know, he, I had heard that prior to that. I'd heard people on YouTube explaining how you need to kind of, to brand yourself and so I had called mine initially like inside true crime but then I've switched it then very quickly I switched it to Matthew Cox inside true crime so because you are you there are people that are watching videos where literally I'm saying I'm talking for five five percent of the video yeah it's 95 percent the the guest but they're watching it and

half the comments are about me and I said nothing so I get it people for some reason they they get they get to like your personality they like you they follow you they they support you, which initially sounds silly until you really need that support. You know what I'm saying? And then you're like, you feel like, wow, I, I, you know, you really start appreciating it where before it just seemed, it seemed silly to me until I was in that position where it's like, this is all I do now. So how, you know, you, it would, I'd be a pretty big jerk to still think it's silly when I'm

living off it and I do appreciate it. Yeah, I think the word you're looking for is, I mean, silly is definitely the word that comes to mind, but what we're really reaching for is humble. It's a humbling thing. Yeah. To know that people watch you, to know that people can connect with you, to know that they can relate to you. And that when they hear your guests, right, they themselves are putting themselves in your shoes. Yeah. Right. And that's what I think is so, that's what podcasting has taught me. It's that it's a humbling privilege to get to reach that many people. No, privilege. It's definitely privilege. Yeah. Well, keep in mind too, because I've told you, I think I've even said

this to you was like six months before I, six months before I left prison, like I was laying in my cot in prison thinking, how am I going to pay my bills? So this is what's crazy about you, right, man? So, so there's a concept at CIA that we call the availability heuristic, right? Huristic is just a fancy word for cognitive bias and cognitive bias is just a fancy word for assumption. But there's this heuristic that is called, that ties itself to availability, because it basically means that you're always comparing yourself against the most, you're the most similar thoughts, the most similar memories that you have that are of recent memory available to you, right? Availability heuristic. So, for example, I was talking to my mother-in-law.

My mother-in-law is my mother-in-law. So you fill in all of your own words there, right? She's almost 70 years old. And she's talking about, like, how she sees the world. But she doesn't realize that everything she's saying is her opinion. It's not fact. It's just her opinion. right? She thinks that she's going to live to be 125 years old and she thinks that she's going to live to be so old because, you know, my aunt lived to be 105 and my grandmother lived to be 97 and, you know, my aunt's grandmother lived to be 102, whatever else, right? And I'm like, for every, all she's doing is listing people that fulfill in her mind, her own assumption, desire to live to be old. Right. She's not even thinking about all the people in her life that died at 60, 65, 70. Right. She's for sure not considering statistically that most Americans don't live past the age of 90. Right. So she's leaning on what's known as an availability heuristic. She's jumping.

She's immediately referencing the exceptions to the rule. That's what she's available pulling from. And that's the same thing that you're often doing when you're remembering your time in prison, right? You're reaching back to this very limited period of your time, of your life, where you were... Felt significant, but... I'm sure it was very significant to you. But the significance that it was to you does not actually make it significant in terms of your capabilities.

Right. Well, it was your awesome capabilities. Let's be honest. It was your capabilities that made you come up with a crime that kept from being identified for so long until it was finally identified and you were what, $12 million in? 15. But not many people can steal $15 million and not get caught. In fact, no one. You've done me and then no one can do it and not get caught. But I was going to say The other thing is, too, I'm also pulling from my prior, my own, because you basically are stunted when you enter prison. So I was pulling from my prior experience where YouTube had been out for two years. I don't think I'd ever been on it. There were no podcasters.

There were, podcast was not even a thing. That wasn't even a name. I remember the name. So it was come, it came up. It was developed once I had been in prison for two or three years. I didn't know what it was. So, and the fact that people would become fascinated with. criminals to a point where they could actually turn that into a living wasn't a thing.

So my whole thing when I'm getting out of prison is I'm thinking, you're a scumbag. Everybody thinks you're a scumbag. They're going to have, the only thing I know about the, about the internet is they're very quickly going to realize you're a scumbag. What are you going to do? You're going to work at McDonald's. You're going to rent someone's spare room. You're going to be humble.

You're going to be appreciative. You're going to keep your head down. These are all the things I'm telling myself. Then I get out. Book Club on Monday. Jim on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday.

Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. I realize, like, there are guys that have been in prison 30 years.

years getting out doing YouTube channels, talking about prison stabbings and riots. And they've got half a million subscribers and they're making a living doing this. Well, when you first came, when you first contacted me, I think the thing that really had stopping power for me was that you were super connected to like these creative artistic endeavors. You were painting. You were writing. You had a blog that had just incredible true crime stories on it. Oh, that right. Like that's where you were when I met you and that was there when that spoke to me more than whatever criminal sentence you were given because and I mentioned this to you before right CIA officers as much as we are also like rejected and denounced by huge chunks of society one of the few groups out there that we

actually make friends with that we actually connect with are criminals right current and former criminals, partly because the only difference between a CIA officer and a criminal is that what we do is sanctioned crime. Right. We're trained how to execute criminal acts and execute them on foreign soil to the advancement of American national security. Criminals have to go through the school of hard knocks. Right. Take a risk, take a chance, and they prey on usually other Americans. Right. Right. So there's a, there are differences between us, but when it comes to the mindset, the risk tolerance, the creative solutions to problems that nobody even faces. And for sure, questions that people aren't willing to ask themselves, right? You have asked

yourself those questions. You have taken those risks. And you've also done your service for your time, right, for being caught and captured and for recognizing that you've had to change your life. But that creative element of you, right? The writer slash painter slash podcaster, like that exists in all of us too like former CA officers that's how we cope with the terrible things that we've done in the past when we get a chance to separate ourselves from our our acts our operations we oftentimes turn to the arts that's how my company started too i started by just by writing yeah you had mentioned that um well i mean one that you know as a criminal like you you have somebody to prepare these documents for you to help you along the way and explain where you

know, as a criminal, you have to figure these things out through getting arrested or other criminals or just figuring it out, will this work? What's the worst that'll happen? And figuring out how to get the documents, how to get these things, how to get an ID, how to get a passport, and possibly getting arrested every single time. You created your own fraudulent documents. I had a team of artists create mine. Right. Like, it's incredible, dude. Like, I had a driver's license that was sanctioned by the state that it was fraudulently created in. Right.

I had a passport that was that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of State. It's completely different in terms of, you didn't have anything like that. And what's great, what's great, I also didn't make $15 million along the road. You're on your way. But it is, it's stunning to me to think

because I know how nerve-wracking it was for me to cross an international border with a professionally crafted fake passport. I cannot imagine how stressful it must be to actually try to commit fraud face to face with a bank or with a with a police officer looking over your shoulder, whatever else that you had to do. It's powerful because I know what it felt like to do it my way. I can't imagine what it feels like to do it your way. And the average American who has neither experience, it must be as seriously like, you know. I was just thinking to myself, the difference is that if I got flag going through past, going through, you know, customs.

something happened, I'm going to get arrested and brought back to the United States and I'm going to go to jail if I'm in, and I don't know where you were or anything, but if I'm in Saudi Arabia or wherever and you get caught with, you know, a fake passport, like, it could be bad. Things could go really bad. You don't go back to the United States. No, yeah, you know, and it's, it's, oh, you know, I have a friend Pete one time. What did he say? He was talking about the cartel, like doing content on the cartel. He said, you just got to be careful. He said, because you know, if something happens and I go, ah, I said, I said, I said, what am I going to do? I said, somebody's going to, you know, somebody's going to kill me. I said, I've lived pretty good

life. He said, no, no, it's not them killing you. It's how they're going to kill you. And I thought, he said, if they just shoot you walking out your front door, that's, that's a blessing because that's not what they're going to do. And I just remember that the way he said it so seriously, like the hair on my arm stood up. And he said, oh, he said, bro, you'll, it would be, it would be horrendous. You'd be praying for death. And I just thought, Jesus. Like, so worst case happened to me, I go to jail. You know, a CIA agent is facing a vastly different scenario. So, you know, in some ways, I'm in a much better position. No, I don't disagree with you. And, you know, it's funny that you mentioned a story like that, because what I'm, what I've discovered since

getting out, since becoming more public with my own agency background, is that people really don't, I mean, especially American people. The average American out there doesn't realize how despicable the world outside of our borders really is, right? Like cartels. Cartels literally will torture you, right? Terrorist groups will torture you. Not because there's any strategic benefit from it, but just because they want to send a message. It's their version of psychological operations, it's, it's a number of different things, right? Not to mention the fact that they're oftentimes, like, these are not well-educated, you know, balanced, emotionally stable people who gather into cartels and gather into terrorist organizations or gather into extremist groups.

These are desperate people who, who live hard lives, who learn to live by a code of ethics that's defined by the organization that they come into. So, you know, the idea of that that you or I might ever actually inflict prolonged pain on somebody, it's difficult to even imagine coming from the American mindset. And it's fascinating to me because oftentimes Americans will get all up in arms about saving whales and about protecting animals from makeup testing and we'll get upset about immigrants being shipped from Texas to New York. Right. Like when you compare those to what's happening in Mexico City? Like, it's insane that people don't realize how protected and privileged and humane we are and that we're subdividing and limiting and

arguing with each other over, you know, minuscule things. And we're calling it humane. And it's, the definition of humane is so much wider than what we consider. I was going to say in the, you know, periodically I'll, I'll get somebody on that will be. either an ATF agent or DEA agent or Raymond Hicks. He's a sheriff's deputy who was in the, is it Broward County? Broward County.

He was in Broward County Sheriff's deputy. They had taken him and they were using him to do under control buys because he grew up in the streets, right? So, you know, it's hard for a normal cop to come off like a drug dealer. You know, he's a, even if it's a black guy, right? Like if he's a black guy raised upper middle class drug dealers, They talk to you for five minutes ago, absolutely not. Like, you're trying to talk this, but I can feel it's not you.

You know, intuition is insane, right? So Hicks goes out, and he's one of these guys selling drugs, and they're busting people. But the other deputies are stealing money. Like, they're taking money from the drug dealer. So he starts to speak out about it, starts to complain about it, starts to make waves. And they go, oh, no, you know, you're a problem. They send him to live to go back and work in the jail, which is where he'd come from. He said, I didn't even care about that.

He had made statements where you guys should be in jail. Not some of these drug dealers. Like, you guys are just as bad as them. You're stealing from them. You're beating them up. You're, you know, what ends up happening is they end up basically including him on a case. It's like 700 kilos of cocaine or something. It's ridiculous.

And he ends up going to trial and wins. They then arrest him again and indict him for something else. This time that he goes to trial again and wins. He lost everything. Like he lost, you know, his savings. his house, everything through this process. He was actually arrested again. And keep mind, every time they raided his house.

So, and in the comment section, guys are saying, we're the most corrupt country. We're the most, we're the most. And they keep it. And I'm always in there going, okay, look, there's corruption. Any system, you could design the perfect system. But the moment you put humans in charge of it, there is going to be issues. There's going to be corruption. People are going to take advantage of it.

So, you know, and they're all, you know, our justice system is the moment. most corrupt. Stop. It's not the most corrupt, okay? Is there corruption? Yes. Is there an old boys network in some situations? Absolutely. But there's just, you know, it's certainly not the most, you know, is it, it's actually, look, I just didn't, I honestly think maybe I met one or two people that it was questionable, that maybe they were innocent. And I, I know one guy that absolutely he's innocent. He should have got some time for stupidity. You know, just for putting yourself in this situation and being stupid, you should have known better. I don't think he was technically what he did was illegal, but you're an idiot. You should have done two years just for being

stupid. So, but still innocent. Honestly, other than that, the only real disparities I've seen is in sentencing. You're not innocent. You didn't deserve 15 years. I read your whole case. I read the transcript. You didn't should have gotten 15 years. You probably should got a year or two. But is that corruption? Like, no, it may be slightly unfair. and it's not, but in comparison to other countries, bro, come on. Yeah. This is, people, people in America, they have no, there's no idea how brutal it is out there. It is. It's wild. It's wild that in countries like Thailand, in countries like UAE, in countries like Saudi Arabia, you can't speak out and say a negative comment. Even privately, it's, it's legally culpable to say a negative

comment about a royal family, right? The royal family of Thailand, the Saudi royals, or one of the seven royal families that are inside UAE to even say something negative about them makes you legally culpable and the and the prisons you can imagine what a prison looks like in UAE it's not it's not like the prisons here in the United States where people are given you know a closed space where the where the barred windows are still windows yeah you know what I mean it's it's pretty wild and I will it's also interesting because uh you were just talking about uh the the the sentencing being the area of discrepancy, right? I don't know what, I don't think people understand how our justice system works. It is a, it is a system that pushes all authority to the judges, right? Judges have

independent authority over their court. And judges can't even agree with other judges. It's there. It is, it is the exact opposite of objective. It is a subjective world. They get to interpret the law. They get to apply the law. They get to do it in their district, their municipality. If their Supreme Court judge, they do it federally. And I didn't realize this until recently either. Judges are oftentimes given lifetime judge. Yeah, yeah. Lifetime. Like, so if you're, if you get, you get accepted to be a judge at whatever age, 35, 45, 55, whatever it might be, you never have to leave. It's not publicly elected after that. Like, you're, you're a judge forever. So if you, you're not really concerned about public opinion because it's almost impossible to get rid of me.

Exactly. It's insane, man. And that's the justice system. which is one of the three legs that our entire American system is built on, right? The judicial branch, it's just, it's one of those things to me that's both a superpower and a vulnerability in our system because we, we have that process. Right. Where you are, you do have to earn the right to be a judge. You do have to be publicly elected. And it's reviewed.

There's a review process and review process and review process up to the Supreme Court if they want to hear it because they don't always have people like, oh, it goes to the Supreme Court. They don't have to hear it. Yeah. But yeah, there's a review process all the way up through the, through the whole thing. The only problem is it does take a long time. It is cumbersome. And you may have to sit in jail for five years until your situation gets rectified.

But the fact that there is the possibility of it being cleared up. A system at all. Right. Yeah. Right. Oh, it's funny. There was a guy, Ephraim Devoroli had told me one time. But this is, this is, it goes against what you're saying.

He said, they can do anything they want to you, as long. they give you a system to appeal it. And I was like, I was like, oh, wow. Like the way he said that, I was like, wow, he's a think about it. Oh, you have a problem with that? Well, here, fill out this form. You can, you can appeal it. It goes to the next step. Oh, you didn't like our opinion. Great. Go to the next step. You know, so he's like, he's like, they'll drag it out by the time. Maybe you'll win. He said, but two years later, you've already done your sentence. Yeah, ours are. Perfect. No, I agree. And what's, what's wild to me is that what I've discovered in my kind of, it's CIA experience looking at the United States is we are very much a country of conviction. We're looking for

and rewarding the most convicted people, the people who can show the most tenacity, the most determination, the most diligence, and all of our systems are created to eat away at each of those things, right, so that the person who doesn't have follow through, the person who isn't tenacious, the person who doesn't have the courage to keep pushing on. The person who gives up, that's our favorite kind of person. That's inside the United States. Everybody, loves the person who gives up. Because the person who gives up just pays a little extra money to have somebody else fix the problem. The person who gives up pays their taxes on time and at the maximum rate. The person who gives up just follows the rule of law and crosses at the crosswalk.

The person who gives up is the person that everybody gets to walk on. And we raise people to get walked on. Public school raises you to be walked on. Church raises you to get walked on. Like we live in a culture that's all that's literally propagating the idea that to be a good citizen, you have to shut up and take it. And then the people who don't, the few that don't and the few who show the resilience year after year, decade after decade to not get stepped on and to not put up with shit, those few people end up being wildly successful and they become the target of criticism and anger from everybody else. But by then, they've already gotten accustomed to being yelled at all the time. So they just roll with it, right? That's look at, look

Hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor about Wagovi. Yeah, ask for it by name. Okay, so why did you bring me to the circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers. You know, with the chair and everything. Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit wagovi.combe.com for savings. Exclusions may apply. Look at your Steve Jobses, look at your Elon Musks, look at your Donald Trumps. Look at all these fantastic celebrity names, but then you don't even have to look at the biggest names. The people out there who are making millions of dollars a year in silence, because they're the kings of their

industry, the king of the tire industry, the king of the motor oil industry, the king of the foam wall industry. They all have tops of their industries. And inside their industry, I guarantee you, they are hated and despised by everybody else who's just trying to scratch by and make a living. I was going to say, I had a guy one time who was telling me, he was actually, we were talking of the middle class or something. He actually was kind of like, almost mocking the middle class. And I was like, bro, like, I wish I had been middle class. To be honest, you know, like, I wouldn't had to go to jail. I wouldn't have lost all the things that I lost. And all because of my, oh, my fault. But it's like the middle class, like, you know, they are the backbone. You know what I'm

saying? But you're right, but you're absolutely right. Like, that is what, and I was joked about this of how any type of program in prison is designing you is, is they're educating you to go work at Walmart. Just like public school, they're educating you to go just go get a lower middle class or middle class job. Like that's really what high school is, hey, by the time you're done with high school, you are educated to be lower middle class. You know what I'm saying? Like still middle class, but not in the high end. So that's what they want because they need that massive tax base to follow the rules and pay in everything. And you know, and as horrible as this might sound, you know, God bless them. It's critical. It's critical. It's critical. Absolutely.

it's exactly we would fail as a country without them and it's it just didn't work for me well and this is this is what I think is so interesting because as much as people might want to hate the fact that what we're saying is true the other thing that's also true is that the reason we are the world's superpower the reason we are the top economic engine in the world right is because we have created this massive class of cogs yeah right cogs that are that are dissatisfied angry for frustrated, you know, they bitch about it when they go home. They struggle for 35 years and they complain, but they still do it. You know what's funny, though? You go to any other foreign country out there, and what you'll find is that the lack of cog-based education becomes a massive

drain on their economy. And they would die to be in that position in the United States. What's funny is, it's so funny because it's totally, it's just circumstantial because the same people that are middle class today or even lower middle class a hundred years ago like the Rockefellers these people are all living better than them you say they say oh no they don't have as much money

doesn't matter they have dental kids they're not gonna they have medical they're gonna live twice as long like like I forget which like one of the Rockefellers lost like three kids I don't know if it was a Rockefeller but it was one of these guys that like he lost like three kids and his wife like to diseases that now you go to the doctor

they'd be like here take these pills for 10 days you're good you know what are you talking And they won't because we'll only take our pills for seven days and then we'll feel better because we know more than the doctor, right? It's insane because you're exactly right. Dental technology of the 1950s. Dental technology of the 1920s hails in comparison to what we get right now on your employer's health insurance plan. YouTube, entertainment. Like across the board, your life is so substantially better. But people, it's because it's so available and cheap that they don't appreciate it. They don't understand it. You go to prison for 10 years. Get out and be like, I'm walking around with my. my cell phone like oh my god this is amazing there are boobs right here could watch anything so and i could find anything that's that's the availability heuristic man that's that's exactly what you're talking about when you're surrounded and inundated by cheap entertainment and boxed wine and anything that you could possibly want it's all available to you so then you think it's it's something that it's

not you take it for granted you assume it's either less important or more important than it really is like that's all part of that that cognitive bias that that distorts your point of view. I have guys with YouTube, since this is something I have in common, with the YouTube thing, it's funny, I'll meet these guys that are like, oh, you're doing a YouTube channel.

Oh, you know, and I'm like, yeah, what else do you do? I'm like, no, no, it's like paying like all my bills. Like, it's great. It's actually working. Like, it's working. And they're like, oh, well, that must be nice. I'm like, well, I mean, yeah,

but it didn't, I didn't put up a video, bro. Like, I had a plan. I had a long-term plan. And you grind. And I, exactly. And listen, I even the first videos I was putting out for the first six months that every video was called the grind. It was like the grind and then the title like grind one. We got video, you know, one, two, three.

I did it for six months. And every week I was putting something out and was like, it doesn't matter what I put out. To put out something, it has to be longer than, you know, I had a strategy. It has to be like 15 minutes or longer. So it's 15 to 30 minutes every week. And it doesn't matter what I do. I have to put it out. Why?

Because YouTube is the algorithm wants consistency. So I was putting them out constantly. I was coming up with a decent thumbnail. I watched 10 videos on what a thumbnail looks like. I had this long-term strategy and it's like, well, how did you know it was going to work? I didn't know what's going to work. But it doesn't take that long. And I didn't have anything else going on in my life.

Because I'm an ex-con. Right. It's either this or McDonald's. If it fails, I'm going to take my chances on this. I'm not in any worse position. Like, this case takes an extra five hours, you know, and I was editing the videos myself. It was like, and I got to that point. And I remember even saying, I can do this for so long.

And then I am going to have to get to a point. where I'll be out of material. I have to start interviewing people, other criminals. But at that point, I want to have like a three-camera setup, right? So I had, like, so I start people by this point, people are reaching out to you. What can I do to help you? I like you. And I'm going on other podcasts because I knew by going on other podcasts, I'll get more subscribers.

I kind of conscript. I always think I'm scripting their subscribers. And everybody's like, oh, well, you have a story. Yeah, but it doesn't matter if you have a story because everybody's got a story. You could, there are other podcasts, entire platforms that are based on the fact that they're starting a podcast or that they're starting a small business or there's, and they need content. There are entire websites that are dedicated that you can put up a five-minute video about here's who I am. And it could be as simple as I worked at McDonald's for six years. I don't like where my life is going.

I don't want to go to college for four years. It's not what I want to do. I dropped out of high school. You know, I talk to my mom. I haven't heard. you just tell a silly story that you think this is this is nothing and this is what i'm doing and i'm trying to build my my my youtube channel and i've got 300 subscribers and half of those are my relatives and friends and i really need people to subscribe and i like and here's what i talk about

on my podcast i'd like to come on your podcast and talk about being a podcaster yeah and if you put that out there believe it or not you'd probably get four different four or five different interviews from other YouTubers about your channel and it would grow. And people don't realize that. You just have to be consistent and it grows and it grows and it grows. Yeah, you know what's really

funny is, you know, in human intelligence, what we call human in CIA speak, right? There's different types of intelligence. There's signals intelligence and measurements intelligence and imagery analysis and all sorts of different intelligence. But human intelligence, where you're actually collecting secrets from human beings, we call that

human. And there's this concept in human where we say everybody's worth a cup of coffee. That's the same thing as you got to kiss a lot of frogs and business, right? So what we are taught and how we operate in the field is that we have to essentially reflect the thing that we're trying to attract. So we're trying to attract spies. Right. So we have to behave in ways that attract spies. That's the same thing you're talking about right now. If you want to, if you want to launch a podcast, you can create a podcast about launching a podcast. And then what's that going to attract? That's going to attract a bunch of people who have thought about or are thinking about or are in the process of launching a podcast. Right. So now all of a sudden you got all these people who are, it's a built-in

audience. Now, does that mean all of those people are going to be super useful for you? No. No. But who will be the people that become your future source of guests? Who will become your first round of guests? Who are going to be the people who will follow you for years just because they found you when you were small? That all comes from that first. audience, right? It's everybody's worth a cup of coffee. You got to kiss a lot of frogs. And what fascinates me is that so many people are conditioned to think that they're supposed to be generalists. You're supposed to be good at everything, right? You go to public school, you go to private school. You have how many classes? There's like 11 classes that you have to take a year.

You take sociology and you take social studies and you take math and you take science. You take chemistry and you take algebra and you take gym and you take art. You're not good at any of them. Like you're getting exposure to all of them. Right. Specifically to make sure that you're not really good at any one of them. And if you want to get good at one of them, then you're supposed to go to college. And then when you go to college and you want to pick your major, you still have to take a bunch of core courses before you even qualify to start focusing on your major. Why? Because college is a business. And college has learned that why would they let you take six classes and make you a master of fine art, when they can force you to take 24 classes to pull out $85,000 from you and you still get

the six classes that you were looking for. People don't realize that if you can just niche down, if you can just focus on the thing that you care about and you reflect what you want to attract, you're going to have in just this rich, small pool of assets that take you wherever you need to go. I didn't, I mean, the concepts that I learned at CIA have become the bedrock of all the concepts I use in business, which could be good or could be bad. I'm not sure which one it is. But this idea of a small, powerful asset pool has become invaluable to my business because now every year that I succeed, dude, I get messages weekly from people who are sending me a message just to remind me that they've been with me since the beginning. Oh, we get that all the time.

It's awesome, right? Yeah, it is. It's awesome. I've been following you since such and such. I'm amazed at your progress. You're amazing. You're inspiring. It's like inspiring. I always feel like I'm, how am I inspiring? But your opinion of you, right, your opinion of you doesn't matter. Right. It's their opinion of you that matters, right?

And let's be honest, one of the things that keeps us grinding every day is that person who you know is listening, a person you know is following, that person who you know is grinding through their day wondering, am I getting stepped on? I feel like I'm getting stepped on. Am I being ignored?

Is there something here I can learn from? Is there, if I make one small change, is that actually going to change my life? Fuck yes. Right. It will. watch us. Watch us make mistakes. Watch us take these steps. Watch us resist. And if you find this inspiring, go do it. I was going to say, like when you're talking about the CIA, like reaching,

you're putting yourself in a situation where people feel okay with coming to you and, you know, spying, right? Like you're trying to collect spies. You're trying to get people to, you know, what? Well, I guess become spies, right? So you're trying to create an environment. where you're saying, hey, I'm here and I can help you without giving yourself up. Right. So it's like, you know, and you're putting those tentacles, you know, out there. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. But it, you know, it's like when it's the same thing, like when I was in prison and I'm writing these guys stories.

There are guys, well, do you think my story's got, you know, legs? Do you think it old this? I don't know. But I have the time. So I can waste two months or three months on your story. Maybe it goes nowhere. Maybe his goes nowhere. I just need one to go somewhere.

You just need one to go somewhere. So is it a waste of time, right? It's an investment, man. God, there was a, there was a, there's a movie called, oh, man, the score. No, no, it's the heist. It's called the heist. It's got Gene Hackman in it. And he, I remember there was, there's a conversation between two guys.

And the guy said, I forget what it. They were doing something. He's like, why this is a waste of time? And he goes, he looks at him and he said, you ever cheat on your girlfriend? And he goes, yeah, of course. He said, you ever set up an alibi? say I'm going to be in a friend's house and he goes yeah sure he goes you ever go through you cheat you get home she never called your friend and he goes yeah of course doesn't he goes yeah he goes

was that a waste of time he goes subterfuge is never a waste of time and I was just like love that like I was like I don't mind doing all these just like going on all those podcasts you don't know yeah you don't know like on Julian's you know you know you know well I've been on since concrete you've probably been on whatever 10 or 15 or 20 or who knows how many. He went on Julian's and probably thought, you know, well, it's just, it's just another one. You don't know which one's going to hook into you and say, this guy is worth doing a ton of content on. He is amazing and I'm going to push the hell. And some of your shorts on his have, I mean, 5, 10, 15 million.

I mean, over 40 million views. 40 million. I mean, his top short in an interview with us, has 43 million views. That was the last time I checked it. He is, and here's the thing about Julian, too, like Julian has, Julian has studied more about how the algorithm works and how, like, he will literally go through, he'll spend four, five, six, seven, eight hours on a one minute, one minute short, I said TikTok, but short. And I mean, he will alter every little thing. No, no, they don't like that line. See that line you got right?

Like, I was there one time. I showed him one of my short. Yeah, no, no, it's pretty good. You see this line right here? I'm like, wine. Yeah, the line between this and the, it doesn't like that. So here's what you have to do. And he's explained, I'm like, who figured, who told you that?

He's like, I've just, so I've, here's what I did. I put out and he, like, he runs little tests and studies the analytics. And it is insane. But see, he's, I think he's taking, you know, he was, what, a stockbroker, right? Yeah, he was on, he was a financial investor. Yeah, so he's taking that whole thing and applying it to the algorithm. Yeah. And plus he's, he's, he was on, he was on a financial investor.

Plus, he's also, you know, he's got a great set up. Young, single, obsessed. And amazingly curious. Yeah. You know, a super curious soul. Danny's the same way. He's a very curious person. You know, these guys, I have a buddy Bozak who will sit down and talk to you for an

hour and a half and never interject anything about himself, which I'm incapable of doing. So, yeah, these guys are, you know, they're good interviews, interviewers, sorry. Yeah, it's funny because at CIA, you know, People think from the movies that, that, you know, we become like this shadow government and we control everything. Right. In fact, we mostly hate each other. The vast majority of CIA officers don't get along because we're all basically cut from a very similar cloth, right? We're all type A.

We're all perfectionists. We're all egotistical. We're all, you know, self-motivated and self-interested. So when you put five people into a room and you tell them they have to work together, what's really going on in all five of their heads is how do I work together enough that I can actually be the best by, you know, differentiating myself from the other four people. Because it's still a giant, it's still a government job, it's still a pyramid to get to the top. They might, they might train and recruit 200 new field officers a year, but there's only one

director of the National Clandestine Service or one director of the director of operations, right? Not all 200 people are going to make it up there. So there's a huge attrition rate as you go up the chain. So this idea that we all somehow collaborate together to run the government secretly is a ridiculous concept. What actually happens is we create very strong bonds of loyalty to individuals within the organization that supersedes our loyalty to the organization as a whole. And the reason I say that is because, you know, we're talking about the Danny Jones podcast. We're talking about the Julian Dory podcast, both of which are podcasts that we have been on, both are which are podcasters that have essentially. grown up with us. Danny's almost doubled in size. Yeah. And Julian's like quadrupled in size,

right? And this was all before you, like they were reaching out to you before you had a podcast. I've had a podcast on YouTube for a month and a half. And how many subs do you have? 30,000 subscribers on the podcast and 80,000 subscribers on my original channel. My original channel was me like not knowing what I was doing either. Right. Right. But the reason those numbers grew were because of the early on help, even as begrudging as it was from Danny, right, right? But that early kind of incubation period where they were like, hey, let's have a, let's have a conversation and let me share you with my audience. And then it just grew from there, right? I mean, I've done some of the biggest podcasters out there in the space. I've

sat with Lex Friedman. I've sat with Tom Billu. I've sat with, you know, the, I mean, there's countless numbers of incredible podcasters that I've had a chance to work with. Chris Williamson and Brian Rose, Patrick Bet David, like huge podcasters. And it all points back to those first initial podcast with Julian and Danny, right? So I feel an incredible amount of loyalty to both of them. So I do laugh when you're like, you're Danny Jones. Who the hell is that? That will actually never happen.

Right. Right? Because I will always remember you, Danny, Julian. These people who back when I had very little competition for my time, dude, I remember getting your first email. I remember logging in because I was still working for somebody else and I was trying to build my own business and then I get this email from you. I don't even know how you found me. Oh, Kilo 23. Yeah. Kilo. Yeah. So I get this email from you and I'm like, you know, this is, it was so different from my daily grind in my corporate job. But I was like,

yeah, I'll tell me. I'll totally do this. I'll read this guy's story and the whole, uh, it was Frank. Amadeo. Amadeo. Listen, my guys love Frank Amadeo. Absolutely. I'm waiting for that movie to come out i'm waiting for someone to pick up that story i've me too so i was going to say uh it's funny because in the in that amadeo thing you actually you talked about how with uh the CIA how they how most of the people in the CIA are um well you were just saying like type a but you know that there's a you know they're they're they're they're narcissists they're you know they're different they have different type of personality defects but that's what makes that's what makes them unique and amazing and that specifics within that organization. It's the same thing I say about

like narcissists. I'm like, yeah, you're right. They're jerks. They're narcissists. They're self-absorbed, but they're also the guy that gets it done. Like narcissists tend to, they tend to either be running a, be a CEO running a billion dollar company or they're in prison. You know what I'm saying? Like very few of them, unless you obviously there's a scale. Right. But, you know, yeah, that's what it takes to push that envelope. It takes that guy that's willing to, you know, step on people and push people and be a bully and, you know, it doesn't make you super likable, but it's the guy that gets things done. And it makes you likable to other people like you. Yeah. And guess what that means? That means all the sudden, instead of having 50 friends

that are kind of worthless, right? You have five friends who are all incredibly valuable because they're all cutting throats on their way to the top too. Right. Now, if you don't want to be the person cutting throats, that's fine. Turn off this fucking podcast because you're not the one we're trying to talk to. But if you are the one who's like, you know, I kind of want to cut throats. I kind of want to step on people's shoulders. I kind of think I am smarter and better than other people, but I'm hiding it so that I can blend in with society because I don't want to be criticized for the way that I think. And I don't want to be, you know, I don't want people to think less of me.

I don't want people to judge me. No, fuck that. Let them judge you. Invite the judgment because you just identified somebody who is threatened by you. And this is such a huge concept for us at CIA is that we are, we are. are all a little off. Yeah. Right?

We're ethically flexible or we're morally flexible. We run on the spectrum of autism, you know, in multiple different categories from from sociopath all the way down to, you know, for somebody who can't handle themselves in society at all. And the reason that we do that is because we need to attract the same kind of person. Because the only kind of person who's going to be a useful spy is somebody who has had incredible success in their country. Think about it. To steal secrets from a country, you have to get access to somebody who's been

trusted with secrets for their country. Right. You don't accidentally become a general. You don't accidentally become a politician in a foreign country. You don't accidentally become a CEO. These are people who have had fantastic success who have done amazing things, which means they're a little fucked up too. Right. And the only way they're going to trust you to give you their secrets, the only way they're going to trust you to get into a clandestine relationship where you exchange gold, alcohol, porn, whatever, in exchange for their secrets, the only way that's ever going to happen is if they look at you and just like you were talking about how how drug dealers can sniff out a narc, the only way that a fucked up trader is going to look at you and trust you

is if when they sniff, they smell that you're fucked up too. Right. And the only thing that we really have to offer them is at some point we're kind of like, hey, you know what, you're fucked up, I'm fucked up. We can trust each other. We can work together. But let me tell you who backs me, the U.S. federal government, right, right? And I can offer you all the benefits of working with the U.S. federal government, whether that's, you know, extracting you from your country or hooking you up with money or taking you on trips around the world, whatever it is. And to a to a cutthroat fucked up person who has that kind of power

and that kind of leverage in their own country, that's a very appealing offer. So, okay, can we, and this is, I, I hear you. but we got so far off like here's here's a here's the thing i was going to mention and this is funny because this happened this somebody said this in the comment section and i'm you know whenever i and i've mentioned this a couple times is that uh like typically when i interview someone i i usually say okay well you know let's let's start at the beginning right um and you know and uh you know like where you're born kids that sort of thing you know kids your parents you know kind of at the beginning so and this guy in the comment section said if matt cox was interviewing

jesus christ he would start off with so where were you born no so just just so we have it in the podcast because i mean i i know you know we don't want to go three hours right so um can we can you do me a favor and just kind of you know tell me like you know where were you born mom and dad how did you how did you get to the CIA yeah reader's digest version right exactly it's fine yeah So I was born in Arizona, born of a mother who was, who was born Mexican. So I'm first generation U.S. citizen. And the whole reason that we're American citizens is because we immigrated illegally across the border. So that's how my family started.

And we have a long history and a long tradition of being proud American citizens, but we got there through loose borders back in like the 1960s, whatever it was. So I was born in Arizona. My father died very shortly after I was conceived. So I was technically born a bastard child to a Mexican Catholic household, raised by my mother and my grandmother until I was about five. And then my mom married a white guy. And the white guy that she married, moved us to Pennsylvania. And I became like a brown kid in rural Pennsylvania school. So for anybody out there who's had like a rural school experience or who's had a minority

experience in any kind of, you know, normal public school or rural school, like I totally, I totally understand what that's like. They were using racial slurs on me that I didn't even understand. I remember being like in eighth grade and having people call me spick and wet back and I was like, I don't understand. What does that mean? Going home and talking to my mind. I'm, I was raised by a white guy. So in my mind's eye, I'm a white guy. Right. I am not a white guy, dude. Like I look at myself in the mirror still and I'm like, damn, that's a good looking beard. White guys don't have that kind of, oh shit, I'm not a white guy. Right. It's wild how your self image is defined by what you see in your parents when you're younger. Right. So, you know, I'm raised by a stepdad who's your fairly stereotypical stepdad, right? I have my two half-sisters. My mom gives birth to two sisters with my new dad. He's favoritists towards them. I struggle with that, you know, yada, yada. We all have childhood trauma if we're going to be successful. So fuck it, who cares. I go and I reach like the years where we start thinking about college. And I know that I don't want to stay in rural Pennsylvania. I don't want to work at the hardware store. I don't want to, you know, be a. a mortician and no shit my school was so rural that senior year they take you on a tour of the local downtown and you do like a half a day's work with all the local businesses like that's how rural my school was and i was like it's kind of nice that's nice that's all right i mean maybe that's nice for some people but for me i was like hell no i don't want to do this so i have i don't want to work in

factory i've got to figure out how to get the fuck out of pennsylvania this part of pennsylvania my the part of pennsylvania was grew i grew up and it's called enola enola enola spelled back is the word alone like I was not going to not going to double down and invest in that kind of lifestyle right all right so I had two options I was either going to go because my parents had no money saved up we were we grew up poor yeah I was either going to go military or I was going to somehow get a scholarship to college now for me getting a scholarship to college was like a laughable a laughable thing it was so laughable that when I went to my guidance counselor and I was like hey I think I might want to go to college he actually like

did what guidance counselors aren't supposed to do and he was like oh shit I mean that's Let's talk serious about this now. Let's take a little of your grades. You haven't exactly been preparing yourself for that. Exactly. Exactly. So needless to say that when I looked at like the scholarship options, I was shocked to find out that, you know, I'm going to have to pay $50,000 for college, but the scholarship's

only $3,000 and that scholarship's only $8,000. And that's like, like, $500 scholarships. I was like, I don't understand how this whole scholarship thing works. Right. This is really complicated for me. And then this senior, I was a sophomore in high school. and this senior who was smoking hot, this beautiful female, it's accepted to the Naval Academy.

And I'm like, what's the Naval Academy? And if chicks like that go there, how do I get there? And not only was I dead wrong. She was probably also going there because chicks like her go there. But anyway. All the better reason for me, right? So that's how I learned about these things called Military Academies. And military academies are a full-ride scholarship,

but you are supposed to be like generally good at multiple things. not like really good at math or really good at art or really good at science. So now I had kind of a new objective, right? Get smarter in all things, but just kind of smarter. And then even better, those were the days of like solid affirmative action. And as much as I might think I was white, I'm actually brown. So now being a brown kid in Pennsylvania is really going to work out. Right.

So that was what took me to a military academy. So I ended up qualifying to get into the Air Force Academy. I had some good interviews along the way that got me in there. And boom, I'm a college student living in Colorado instead of, you know, staying in rural Pennsylvania. And that led into an Air Force career. And in my Air Force career, I ended up getting a high level of security clearance because I was working with nuclear weapons. And it was a very depressing thing for me because I had joined the military to like see the world. And all of a sudden I was living in a missile capsule, a hundred feet underground, maybe sitting nuclear missiles for the end of the world.

Alone. back in my own hometown right with one other person oh really no no no no oh okay but it was in your hometown oh my god but no that whole idea of being alone and you know when you're living underground we had 72 hours shifts which are just as horrible as they sound when you're living underground 72 hours at a time with one other person that you don't get to choose it's it's more horror story than porn it's horrible right right like this other person like it's just you know it's it's it's it's not fun. So long story short, I was like, you know, having been in the shoe for 45 days, my heart doesn't really go out to you, but I hear you. I get it. I get it. Fair point.

I mean, I'm definitely preaching to the wrong choir. Nobody asked me who my cellie was. So the, you know, coming out of the military in 2007, right, we're in the middle of Iraq, Afghanistan. I've got medals in both wars. I'm sitting underground, babysitting nuclear missiles. And, and generally, hating the fact that I have to shave every day, keep my hair less than an inch and shine my shoes to be underground out of the sunlight three days of three days at a time. Right. I was like, this is not for me. So like most people, when they break up with a significant other, I start looking for something that's completely different than what I'm doing right now. Right. Okay. So right now I'm, I'm wearing a key around my neck that can destroy a humanity. What is the polar opposite of this?

I mean, technically it was going and becoming a priest, but there was no way in hell I'm going to do that. So the next best thing was to go join the Peace Corps. So I was like, oh, there we go. So I start applying for the Peace Corps and I start submitting my paperwork to resign from the military when my time is up. And in the process of applying to the Peace Corps, I get contacted by a CIA recruiter, who's basically like, their opening line to me was, hey, we saw you were looking at this.

We think you might be better at this. And that was kind of what got me started on the whole path. Okay. So that's my Reader's Digest version of how I went from, you know, bastard child in Arizona to... So you never did go to the Peace Corps. You didn't go into CIA. Correct. You can't. Did you know it was CIA when they approached you?

No, not by the way. No, because I was, I mean, I was 27 years old and like most people, when... Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus, IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. Somebody calls you and they're like, hey, this is the U.S. federal government. We think we have an opportunity for you. You're kind of like, all the creative juices start flowing. You're like, I don't even have to say yes. Like, you're going to pay for a plane ticket in a hotel room and a

rental car. I don't know what you were like at 27. But to have a conversation. Yeah, let's go. For sure, right? I don't say no to cool opportunities like this. It's like a hot chick showing up and being like, hey, can I come in for a drink? Yes. Yes, you can. I don't know where it's going, but I know where I hope it's going. So for sure, when I got my phone call, I was like, I really hope this is going to fast cars and tuxedos and I'm going to be a spy. But it wasn't until I actually got there for the first interview. And after the first interview that they were like, we think you might be cut out to be a national clandestine service officer or an undercover CIA officer. Like, what's that conversation like right like what you know that's one of those things you just I'm sure you

absolutely at no point do you think I I've been preparing for this no there's no confidence the hardest thing for me have the right file the hardest thing the hardest thing for me in business has been wearing that that bravado right because like there was no bravado in me right I'm having to learn that you have to turn that on publicly at times, right? So it's funny that you say that because that first interview, no shit, that first interview I was talking to a middle-aged woman, gray hair, wearing a, no shit, a sweater and Velcro sneakers. That was the first interview. So she didn't scream CIA. No, dude. So like, I'm getting on a plane in Montana and I'm like, I'm going to go interview to be a spy, I hope.

And then I get off the plane, I get to my hotel, which is a shitty hotel in my small little economy size rental car. And I go to this nondescript building. and I'm like, I'm not going to be a spy. And I walk in and sit behind fucking Bertha. And Bertha is sitting there asking me questions about, tell me this thing that you were very proud of and tell me this thing that was a great failure. And how do you feel about being dishonest?

And I'm telling her the truth because part of me is just like, whatever Bertha has to offer, I don't want any part of it. Right. Right. So I'm like, oh, yeah, I have no problem lying to people. And yes, I think I'm better than most people. And yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm telling her all this stuff, right? And then at the end, she's like, she, no kidding,

pushes back from her desk and pulls out a drawer on the side and then pulls out like a little manila folder and sticks it down on the table and she's like, I think you might be a really good fit for the national clandestine service of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. And she opens the manila folder

and it's a fucking flyer for CIA and she pushes it across the desk and she's like, this is what I think you might be a good fit at. What do you think? And I had that moment, that same cognitive dissonance that is in your head right now was in my head.

And I'm like, this is a fucked up test. Like, are you telling it, punt? You can't really be, and it's a flyer like this isn't Lego land you don't just open a manila and hand me like a here's your timeshare brochure for CIA that's not how this is supposed to work this is supposed to be like hidden walls and special lights and laser beams and stuff right so no it was uh apparently it was real even though i didn't really believe it was real um but yeah so then she walked me through that whole thing and and that was how my my process of application actually started how long were you how long were you

there before you you met your wife, right? And, um, she was in the same line of work. Yeah. So my wife actually started at CIA the same day and in the same class of new recruits that I did. She was a different skill set. And she had taken her own path to get there. Like my wife has a law degree and she has multiple degrees and she speaks multiple language. She's actually brilliant. Right. But, uh, but yeah, we ended up landing kind of in the same. It's a, the room where a new initiate, where new initiates are kind of sworn in is a big pavilion called the bubble. And if you look up CIA on like Google Maps and you look down at it from the sky, you'll actually see a giant like building that's shaped like a golf ball.

And that's what we call the bubble. It's basically where we go for all of our, you know, all of our auditorium conversations and all of our, what was it called in high school whenever you had, you had like a speaker in the middle of day? Yeah, yeah. Whatever that term was. Yeah, like a, okay, yeah. Yeah, so it was that kind of auditorium, right? So we're in there and we're in there with 250 different people and some of them are covert operators and some of them are tech officers and some of those are targeters and some of them are analysts and we're all kind of getting sworn in and doing our whole oath of allegiance to the American Constitution. And that's where we met. There are other podcasts out there that have gone over your story. So if you can talk a little bit about, you know, being the CIA and basically how, you know, you and your wife got to that point where you said, We want to have kids. We want to have a family.

Like, we can't be disappearing for six months at a time or two years at a time. Yeah. Nobody can get in touch with us. Like, so if you could go into, you know, that whole thing. Yeah. If we could talk about that, then that would be, that'd be great. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's kind of cool as I get to tell a little bit of a different story this time because

we've been in the process of writing and publishing a book. Okay. And our book has been picked up. And our book has been, uh, so we're going to be, we're going to be launching. We're going to be releasing in June of 2024, a new book that's under the imprint of Hachette publishing company. So the third largest publisher in the United States. And in that process, we've had to have a lot of conversations with what's called the PCRB

or the pre-publication review committee for CIA. Right. And they've cleared us to tell more of our stories. So it's actually going to be a different story. But long story short. Is it okay if he keeps that part in? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

My wife and I both started CIA and we didn't know what we were getting into. She was just trying to get a government job so that she could retire. And the only organization she didn't want to work for was CIA. And I was trying to get to the Peace Corps. Right. So we both came from very far flanks to end up at CIA. Yeah. And then because we were recruited as generalists, not as specialists, right?

Because like if you're a Chinese speaker, you're a specialist in China. If you're a Russian speaker, you're a specialist in Russia. And if you know how to hack a computer, then you're a specialist in what's known as the information operation director at IOD. So, you know, there's all these different specialists that come in. We were brought in as generalists, which basically meant that we were kind of farmed out to whoever needed help. Right. So for me, I'm a brown guy with like, that looks ethnically ambiguous. And I was former military. So I ended up getting assigned to all the shithole places of the world, right? Any place where a brown guy can blend in and not be remembered, that's kind of where I ended up going.

So I was doing a lot of counterterrorism stuff, counterproliferation stuff, counter narcotic stuff. My wife had multiple degrees and she was fluent in multiple language. So she ended up doing a lot of covert influence stuff. She ended up doing a lot of covert action stuff. So we ended up doing these kind of non-mainstream things in a very elite organization. And it's important for people to understand. CIA is a very large government organization. Not everybody does sexy shit. There's a lot of boring, mundane shit that people end up doing. And that was kind of where we ended up. So I'm, I'm assuming that, you know, just because of my vast knowledge and watching movies, is that, is that basically like, it's not like they're sending you somewhere and saying, you know,

you have to go infiltrate this or do, or do this, but, or they may be saying that, but what they're, what's really happening is you're going and you're working a regular job. Yeah. And you're put into a position where you can either, you know, you can. influence certain people or you can hope to, to lure people into giving over government, you know, government information for their government because they're in a good spot. So they're trying to put you in a spot, but you're basically still working a regular job. So you're there working a regular job. And that could take, that doesn't take two months.

That could take 18 months. It could be, you could be there for a year, working a regular job, hoping that you are able to put yourself in a position to meet. people that you can build up a friendship with and convince or at least a, you know, whatever, you can build up some kind of a, uh, their confidence in you, trust in you that they will then, you can then approach them. But that could take, that doesn't take 30 days. Right. Exactly. So I mean, you're, you're more right than you are wrong. Okay. For sure, we go and we, we, we go and we take on some kind of phony career. We're basically trained con men. Right. Right. Or con

women. So we go somewhere and we build up a footprint that we belong there when we don't. And we can kind of we can craft the footprint. We can prepare the battlefield before we go because we're the CIA. So we can create fake fake, you know, banking records and education records and everything for our alias before we actually land on site. So when we land on site, we know it's actually day one on site. But if somebody in that country, Mogadishu or or Turkey, if they were to actually research us, they would see like all this stuff that says that we've been there forever. So we go there and you're right, we basically live in an undercover capacity, which means that we live off of what we call the local economy. We become somebody in the local community.

And we live that role and we do a day job that's basically a nine to five job, but we don't just hope to make contacts. Our job for CIA doesn't actually start until after the day job ends. so what really happens is you work a 12 to 14 hour day six to seven days a week you live your lifestyle we call it a lifestyle career because you don't really get days off so you're doing your nine to five and then during your nine to five all that's there to do is just what we call it's creating cover for status you're there for a reason the reason that you're there is because you work in a tire factory so boom you work in a tire factory all day long but then by night you actually go out there and you try to make friends with with the people that you need to influence

Now, for me, a lot of my work was in the counter space, counterproliferation, counter narcotics, counterterrorism. So the people I had to, like, cozy up to were scumbags. Right. So my cover rolls were oftentimes scummy cover rolls, right? Because it's the kind of person who, whenever they sniff me out, I fit, right? I work. So you don't have a cushy job in the embassy. So I was looking to drive sports cars and wear tuxedos, and I got recruited to, like, you know, sell fish tacos on a frigging wheel cart.

You're pressing stuff in a factor like this mother. Why am I doing this? It's not sexy. It's not, right? So after from 2007 to 2008, I was going through training. From 2008 to 2010, I'm basically in a variety of these just armpits of the world, trying to crack into terrorist groups and trying to crack into proliferation circles and trying to get arms dealers and human traffickers and collect low-level secrets.

Because the government secrets are all your really elite stuff. the rest of us are out there just trying to keep Americans safe, prevent bombs from going off in Boston and prevent airplanes from crashing into planes in New York. And we didn't do very well at either of those, right? So that was the main focus of what me and many, many different CIA officers did until 2010. And in 2010, I got called in to a secret meeting where my history of fixing shitty stuff turned into this opportunity to, like, combat a major threat against CIA.

which I didn't even know existed at the time. It was so compartmentalized, I didn't realize it was happening. So. Specter. Yeah. So that invitation, that conversation in 2010 completely transformed my entire career. And my wife and I were a, we were a married tandem couple. We had just gotten married like two months before that conversation happened.

So we both got pulled into the same operation. And the operation was essentially a way of creating a new operational methodology. that would take CIA into the next, like, 50 years of operations, right? Because we had been built around Cold War tactics. Right. And then we had not really evolved past Cold War tactics, even though it was 2010. We were still leveraging Cold War tactics to fight terrorists, and it wasn't working. So they wanted us to create a whole new way of doing operations.

Before you think that that sounds special, I can guarantee you that knowing the way CIA works, there were 15 other people that they had the same tasking for. Right, right. And it was just, okay, all 15 of you go out there and try and do it. And we already anticipate we're going to lose seven of you. But hopefully one of the remaining eight will figure this out. I don't like the way that sounds at all. But that's the way it works, right?

When you say lose, you mean like it's not going to work and then they come back and do something else. No, that's not quite what I mean. That's what you meant, right? We're all disposable assets, right? That's one of the things that makes the job sexy when you're a little bit off. That's horrible. That's a horrible story. Oh, I don't, that's, because you're not one of the seven.

It's easy for you to say. You're like, no, it's a great story. I mean, nobody, we haven't seen Bob in a while, but I didn't like Bob. Bob's Bob, there's no guarantee anything bad happened to Bob, right? Bob was compartmentalized out of sight out of mind in that world, man. That's part of the profession. Oh, my God. So, okay.

So how, well, how long did, how long are these, these, these. I'm going to say missions is probably generally a mission is between like three and six months okay what we were assigned to do in 2010 ended up taking us two and a half years oh I was just going to say but if it if it takes root right like if it if it bears fruit then it they start extending it sort of what ends up happening is if it bears fruit they have to ask themselves the question they being CIA leadership has to ask themselves a question if we extend this with the same people do we run the risk of losing the people who have set it up or do we replace the people who have set it up and make it more of an institutionalized process, right?

Think of it like a director of sales or something like that in a business. When you have a good director of sales, do you keep them as the director of sales or do you move them up to become the vice president of sales? Right. That's the same kind of process that happens at CIA. Okay. And oftentimes what they want to do is they want to move you up because it's a major loss. It's a loss on multiple fronts if a successful officer gets captured in the line of duty because then not only do you lose the successful officer and all of their intellectual property

and all of their continuity operationally, but you also end up having an international issue. Right. Whereas if you can fleet that person up in the chain of command and replace them with somebody who's more disposable, you end up documenting their processes and now you can basically just institutionalize the process and protect the asset. right there's it's a people don't realize this is how CIA works but a lot of times what ends up happening is is if you are captured like there was a guy I worked for uh there's a guy I worked for at CIA I don't even know if I can say it I probably can't say his name publicly even

though I'm pretty sure he's overt Jimmy Jimmy so I worked for Jimmy at CIA Jimmy was captured by SVR in Russia during an assignment that he had in Argentina in like the late 90s so he's captured by the Russians in Argentina, extradited to Russia, where he spends three to six months in a Russian prison until there's a spy swap between CIA and Russia

in the early 2000s. He gets to come back from Russia. Well, now they don't ever want him to be at risk of being captured again. So how do they protect him? They promote him into positions of authority, right? That protects him from ever going overseas and it rewards him for a job well done.

Right. Right. Even though most of the people that work for him are like, is a train wreck. That dude is mentally unstable. That dude has alcohol issues. That dude is a CI security risk. So popular opinion was irrelevant because CIA had a way of basically putting him into golden handcuffs. Keeping him in the organization and moving him up is how they kind of kept him under control. Yeah, I was going to say, unfortunately, in like the Bureau of Prisons, if they have somebody who is a train wreck, you know, they'll, they can't fire. They have such a good

union. They can't fire them. They'll promote them just to get them. We can promote you and send you way over here to get you out of the prison that you're in just to get rid of you and move you up. So I always say that like the people at the top are the ones that were the most problems. And that's often, I mean, that's not just true in CIA and the prison system. That's part of the flaw that happens in our government professional system. Your generals are not always the best soldiers. They're just the soldiers who were problem children who got migrated up the ranks so that they wouldn't cause more problems, right?

Your public officials are not always the best public official, just the ones who stuck around. Right. Right. So how bad is the situation if you get grabbed and brought to another country? And they, first of all, if they've grabbed you and brought you to another country and you say, no, no, I just work at a tire plant. I'm not this person. If they grabbed you and pulled you to the other country, the truth is they're 99.99%. So you can hold out and say.

say, no, no, no, no, no. But first of all, nobody's holding out forever. Right. You know, but how bad would the treatment be of a U.S. CIA agent in another country? Does it depend on the country, probably? 100%. Yeah, it depends on the country and it depends on the geopolitics at the time, right? So there's a, there's a pretty famous case out there about two Americans in the 1950s who were captured by China. Their names were downy and facto. And these two, officers went into China to help evacuate an asset out of China. But if you remember, 1950s, China was the very beginning of the Maoist revolution, right? They had just become communist. Right. And there was still a large nationalist component in the country that was allies with the United States

from the end of World War II. So you can imagine how different that China is or was from the China that is now. Downey and Faktow were captured in mainland China in like 1952. They were not released from China until 1974. Wow. They were there for over 20 years. They both had children. They both had marriages. They were both legally announced as dead after about three years.

They had funerals. Their families didn't know they existed. Did the CIA know that they were there? The CIA knew that they were there, but they had no plan for getting them out. They had no way of getting them out. And they did not want them to become chips in a geopolitical game. So anytime they're brought up. they just go keep them yeah we don't what so yeah they just deny that they were ever

CIA to begin with that's what plausible deny that deniability is right plausible deniability means that you can plausibly to the public deny that that person is CIA it does not mean that you can plausibly deny to a foreign government okay it means that you can plausibly deny it to the American people right so these guys ended up being there for like 22 years until China released them in the early 1970s after Nixon made peace with China and there was all this cooperation with China and then these two guys come back and they get 22 years of back pay and they get medals and then they get reunited with their families and their daughter who like one of the guy's daughters was like seven when he left and she was 29 when he came back and like there's

no relationship there no so so how were they treated they were treated poorly they were they were systematically tortured, systematically interrogated. They were kept like one breath from death until the Chinese government transformed to the place where they realized like, oh, we might be able to use these guys as political chips with the U.S. government. So then they were treated a little bit better. Plus, after two or three years of like torture and interrogation, there's such a thing as your information becoming obsolete. The way that CIA was running operations in 1958 is not the same way they were running at 1952. So what's the point in torturing these guys? You're not going to get any new information. So that was, that's just one example, right? And then you've got other places

like there was a major flap in Paris, France in 1998, where two CIA officers were captured by the French DGSE. And France is a place where there's flaps more often than people realize, because the French are actually very astute at intelligence. Most people don't realize that. But they're also allies to a degree, right? So why are we spying on them? Right. Well, because- And everybody spies on us, right? There are no real allies in this world. Right. So there's a flap in 98. These two guys get captured by the French DGSE.

They go into a French prison. But they're treated very, very well, right? Because the French are like, oh, mon ami, we spy on you, you spy on us. So we don't want to cause a big international incident. Right. So we're going to make just let you keep spying. So we're going to put you under house arrest and a nice hotel and we're going to take care of you for three, six, eight weeks while the U.S. and French figured out.

And then we're going to extradite you and we're going to get French spies back. in our prisoner swap. So it absolutely depends on the country and the geopolitics at the time. Okay. But it's not always a death sentence and that's, it's very rarely a death sentence

because a spy is a very valuable asset when a foreign country detains them, right? You've got access to names, places, people, organizational hierarchy, modus operandi, the way the things are actually done. Not to mention your assets

and your tools and any technology that you've developed, and that you've used in the field like this, it's a treasure trope of information. So it's much more valuable to keep them alive and then interrogate them. And then after you think that you've reached the end of your secrets,

then you move into like the more aggressive, you know, torture and detainment type of techniques. And that's what foreign countries do to us, which is part of the reason why I don't understand why we got so offended when we started torturing terrorists. Oh, yeah.

The waterboarding. Yeah, waterboarding. Like they're not going to die. It's insane. It's all right. We put a road. We put a big roach in with a, guy in a thing like, well, he hates blood, like, really, he's not going to kill him. And going back

to our conversation about judges, a secret court said it was legal. Right. A public court said it wasn't. Right. Does that really mean that it wasn't legal? Not anymore than it means that it was before, right? It's just subjective to the judge. I just don't know that you're going to get, like, if the person doesn't actually have, my problem is that people, if you don't have the information, you'll say anything at that point. I don't have the information this person wants. So that's the problem I think I have with torture. It's like, not that it's not that. It's not that, necessarily the torture. It's that if they don't have the information, then they start giving anything they can think of until you don't know whether it's reliable. Well, that's why you have

information and intelligence best practices, right? You don't take single source information. So when you're waterboarding somebody and they're like, the bomb is under the bridge in Central Park. Right. Okay. Well, now that's just a piece of information. Can we corroborate it with any other piece of information anywhere else? Because if we're torturing two terrorists and one of them is like, it's under the bridge at Central Park. And the other one says, it's under the bridge at Central park now we can corroborate that information right one would they both come up with the same wild story under the same circumstances very unlikely i was going to say listen like these guys are like in i don't i want to say Saudi Arabia i think it's Saudi Arabia i could be wrong where they

they lure the the journalist into the yep uh into their embassy and then they they grab them flesh them guys and chop them up and get them out like and then i think what is it the indians that killed. Yeah, in Canada. Yeah, in Canada. Was it a Sikh? Yes, a Sikh, a Sikh dissident. Yeah, and this is what you know, it's interesting about that. I've watched several videos on that. Some of the videos say that he had applied to become a Canadian citizen. And some are saying that that he had applied him and turned down. He wasn't a Canadian citizen. And then other ones were saying he was a Canadian citizen. So I, I'm still not sure. I know if you know. No, I don't know the details there. I think what that, what that's highlighting, though, is the fact that it was

in their country. Right. Yeah. And Canada's. one of those countries that America doesn't want to become. Right. Where simply by being present in the country, you fall under protections of the country, right, the socialist law that exists up there. So there's a certain level of responsibility that Trudeau takes just because it happened in his territory. Right. The most interesting thing about the Sikhs death. And if for anybody who doesn't know that there was an assassination on Canadian soil of a Sikh dissident by the Indians, yeah, the really important things understand there are one, India is is considered and has long been considered, an ally to the West.

Right. What kind of an ally comes in and kills somebody on their allied soil? It shows you how differently India thinks about an allied partnership versus what Canada and the United States think of as an allied partnership, right? The second thing is that India kills people that it disagrees with. Nobody realizes that, right? The difference between India and Pakistan isn't nearly as big as people think it is. Not to mention the fact that Pakistan, as fucked up as it is, is all.

also an ally of the United States. So how is the United States an ally to both India and Pakistan when India and Pakistan are basically out to wipe each other off the map? Right. That's just a little bit

of interesting geopolitics there for you. But I thought it was mildly entertaining and wildly interesting to see how Canada and how some of the world reacted to this idea that the Indians came in

and killed somebody on Canadian soil. Like, they're still the Indians. Yeah. I mean, the problem is is like it goes back to our original conversation where it's, you know, what a, what U.S. citizens think of the United States and what the truth is. And then it's even like saying, hey, we, we're our allies are doing horrible things. They're horrible people. They shouldn't be our allies. Well, wait a second.

Yeah. Wait a second. Time out. There's no, there's no innocent people out there that we, if we were only dealing with countries that were like-minded, then we'd have, we, we, it would just be us. Yeah. Like, who else are we going to be, you know, allies with? Yep. So exactly. You've got to have to, some of your allies are going to be monsters. Yeah. And then, and you know what? There's a fantastic book out there called a case for psychopaths. And there's a strong case for why the world needs psychopaths. As much as the average, what I call bobblehead, your, your typical cog, the average bobblehead out there is going to bobble their head with whatever the current trend is in media and say, oh, psychopaths are bad. No, you know who make up our Tier 1 forces? Psychopaths.

You know who can make it through seal training and not give up? Psychopaths. Right. Like the system that we've created in the United States has made it so that we can identify them young at 18, 19 years old, 20 years old, and then cultivate them so their psychopathy becomes a sort of perverted loyalty to a nationalistic sentiment instead of a loyalty to themselves. their own ambitions, right? But that also then leads to problems when your Tier 1 Navy SEAL is 50 years old and not a seal anymore. Because now they're like, now he's on a gun tower taken out college student somewhere. Well, yeah, because they become a person, they become a person who's capable of great skill. Yeah. But they're almost like a samurai who lost their master.

Right. That's not a good situation. Yeah, it's not a good situation. That's why you end up having so much PTSD and so many issues with veterans, especially well-trained veterans. And I know that you're, I mean, good luck parsing through all the negative comments now from people who are saying I talk shit about tier one offers operators. Yeah, but either way, it's accessible. They'll agree, right? There are some of them who then go on to like write books and start businesses and do whatever they can because they've been told for for 20 years that they're God's gift to the earth. Right. And then after 50 seals, write 50 different books and people are like, oh, seal's just a seal. You're like, you know, they don't know how to handle that. Not to mention the Delta operators

who simply can't ever admit that they were Delta operators or the, Marsock Raiders who can't admit that they were ever Marsock Raiders. I'm going to knock my head like I know with both those. Exactly. Exactly. Colby and I were talking about the Marsalk guys the other day. But yeah, there's intense, intensely trained people out there who are on the spectrum of psychopathy.

And we need them because who else is going to answer the phone call when somebody says, hey, you guys have 10 days and then you need to raid this house in this desert and kill everybody there. And then you need to take blood samples of all of them and bring back some piece of DNA from this one guy who we think is the leader. And then they're like, okay, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Cut off an ear. Stick it in a bag. Stick in my pocket. Catch the helicopter back. Pizza for dinner. It's a special kind of person, man. Yeah, that is definitely, definitely. I was, I was just thinking like it's the same thing with the, with CEOs or or con men or

whatever because they have to do not, they're not cut people's ears off, hopefully, but they have to sometimes, you know, sometimes is that guy at the boardroom, you know, at the boardroom meeting who said they're where they're trying to get a deal that. will save their company and make everybody millions. And the company say, you're telling me absolutely 100% you can do that. Absolutely we can do that. We've got, right now, we're already tooling up. This will be done within 30 days. I give you my word. And the two guys sit next to them who are just normal guys who, you know, graduated college and are just your average, you know, average citizen are sitting there thinking, oh my God, what did Jim just say? He just lied.

We haven't talked to anybody. There's nothing being tooled up 30 days. I don't think so. You know, And they're sitting there like, and saying nothing, the guy's like, all right, well, we're ready to go. All right, well, we're going to need the deposit at this time and this time walks out with 100% confidence. The other guys walk out and go, oh my God, what do you? Doesn't matter when we get close to 30 days. We'll get a two-week extension by that time. They've already invested in us. They can't pull back.

We spent their $50 million. So, you know, they're like, oh, my God, you're lying. You're this. You're that. That's fraud. That's this. Doesn't matter. They'll be too deep in by that point to change their mind.

And listen, the people that build our submarines. and our boats and our and our plane, you know, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Yeah, they do the same, like, that's how it works. But the projects they're taking on are immense and that you need somebody to do those types of things to get things moving. Otherwise, they never get out of committee. Correct. And you never get those things built.

There's so much complexity of how those big deals are closed on the, on the government sector and in the private sector. There's so much complexity that your average person can't comprehend it, right? The idea of saying yes to something that you're not totally sure of, I mean, everything about a bobblehead's cog upbringing and public school, private school, and college tells them that you don't over promise and under deliver. You never let yourself do that. But then what actually happens is at the highest scales, you're exactly right. You end up having to put on this fake bravado. You have to put on this air of confidence that you've got it all figured out because if you don't give them that piece of mind, then you don't get the investment that's critical to.

to what you actually need to have in order to start the project. And you're totally right. That's how the Joint Strike Fighter was delayed for five years before it actually hit the skies. And that's how the new stealth bomber was delayed. That's how silent engine submarines were delivered. None of them were delivered on time.

None of them were delivered within budget. None of them were even, many of them were actually delivered by a different provider because they had to change contracts after five years because they were like, you know what? You've missed the deadline twice. So now we're just gonna take all of your IP and give it to Boeing or give it to North of Grumman

or give it to Mantec or give it to somebody else, right? Yeah, I was just thinking a little, like the Kennedy speech when he says, we're going to go to the moon and do the other things that, you know, the other hard things and it and turns around and the next day, people that scientists are getting phone calls saying, so how are we going to do this? He's like, what are you talking about?

It sounded like he had it all wrapped up. No, no, you're in charge. I'm in charge or what? Yeah. I don't even know how we're going to do that. Doesn't matter. He just promised it. It's going to happen.

You know, wow. So, yeah, it's insanity. But that's also part of another superpower that we have with our government is that oftentimes the first adopter of technology is the federal government. As much as we're having consternations about AI right now, the first time I touched AI, I was at CIA. People didn't even know AI. I didn't even know AI existed.

I thought it was, I watched like the Terminator movie on Monday. And then on Wednesday, they put me behind a console. And they were like, oh, yeah, there's an AI on the other than this console. And you're like, there's a what? Like, you're going to have a conversation. Yeah, it's insane, right? And it wasn't a very good conversation. It wasn't nearly as good as what you get right now talking to Bard or chat GPT.

Right. But you were able to basically be like, you know, find me this person. And it was like, okay, Andrew, here's this person. Here's what we understand about this person. Here's where we leave they're going next. And you're like, this is crazy. Yeah. And somebody made a fortune.

I can't tell you who and I can't tell you what company, but Wikipedia will. Somebody made a fortune building that AI for CIA. Right? It's insane. Yeah. I was going to say it's funny because we used to joke about having Facebook friends, right? Like you never meet, but my wife's daughter, Mary Shelley, spent all day chatting with like, you know, chat GPT. I mean, all day, like they have like a, whatever, a friend feature or whatever it is and just joking and telling her jokes.

I mean, literally giggling and laughing like you or she's talking with a friend on the couch. And you're going, it's like, what are you? doing oh my god i just this and they just told me a joke and it's so funny and you know i'm just asking questions and it was like like this isn't even now it's not even a facebook friend yeah who's at least a real person on the other end like this isn't even a real person you can have a pretend girlfriend you can have a you know it's yeah it's it's it's it's such a vastly different world that it was when and and it's going to continue changing right and if anything it's that changing face of the world that makes me so much more comfortable dealing with people who were

already outcasts of the normal world anyways. Right. Right. The criminals, the spies, the, the folks like us who kind of, who refuse to be stepped on, those are the people who are taking control of their own future, their own destiny. So in the future, as much change is coming, as scary as it is, we've, we've been fighting for ourselves already. So we'll just keep scrapping all the way to the end. It's all the cogs in the middle. It's all the quiet future entrepreneurs. It's all the quiet future podcasters. It's all the ambitious people who refuse to pursue their ambition. They're the ones I feel sorry for because they're the ones that are literally going to get stepped on and left behind as they continue to wonder if they should take a chance, if they should

take a risk. I was going to say, it's like, did you ever read? There was a book called, I think it was called Syrup by, I think it was Max Berry wrote it. I could be wrong, but I feel like I'm pretty right on that, where he was talking about how there were certain people, like almost everybody, he said, has a multi-million dollar idea within their lifetime. The difference is is that most people just don't act on it. Like how many times has somebody been like, bro, I was talking to my buddy about that right there. And they're watching a commercial or something came out on, you know,

Google or there's some new thing. And they're talking about it. They're like, 10 years ago, me and my buddy that, but you didn't do anything. Yeah. Like that's my idea. No, it's not. Yep.

Like, it may be your idea, but it's his company and he did something. And so those are the people that make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars because someone like, you know, Elon Musk says, yeah, we're going to deal an electric car. And yeah, there have been people. people have tried and we're going to do it. Yeah, but you need, yeah, but that's not good. They don't only get two or three hundred miles.

I know there's no. Yeah, but you know what I'm, what if we, we're going to go ahead. We're also going to build all these, all these electrical chargers. And we're, you're insane. Yeah. Like, what are you talking about? It's true. But those are the guys that make tons of money.

And so I have one more question. I have one more question is that when you and met your wife, I know, just from, you know, talking with you. And is it you guys, you met your wife and you guys kind of decided, hey, you know, we want to have a family and this is just not the best environment. Working in the CIA is just not the best environment for that. Right. And you left. Like, what was your plan when you left? Because I'm thinking you're more of a long term planner that, you know, what was the plan that we were going to do for a living when we let when you left and where did it end up? Like was doing the, the, the, the. YouTube podcast, like, was that something we're going to make an attempt at, or was that the sole goal? Yeah, there was no plan. Oh, yeah. So, no, we were, we were actually in the middle of an operation when my wife took a pregnancy test and found out she was pregnant. And I'll never forget the day, because she came out of our little foreign apartment bathroom with tears in her

eyes. And I was like, what's wrong? And then she showed me this birth control test. And she was like, I've taken it three times. And I was like, we're pregnant. Like, this is a good news story. And then she handed me an unused pregnancy test. And she's like, I think it's broken. You pee on it. Right. So she was crazy. She was like in the pits of despair. And I was on this high. I was like, we're going to have a baby. But once she was able to level back out again, we had a conversation. And we were like, you know what? We didn't join CIA to be CIA until we were 60. We joined CIA to see if it would be a good fit and see how it would work. But we've always, always known that we wanted to be parents. both of us individually and then married too.

We knew it was something we always wanted to do. So now the timeline just got taken out of our hands. And now we're pregnant. So how are we going to handle this? So we decided to give CIA another year, year and a half of time. And in that year and a half, you know, we had a child and our child was, you know, nine months old. And CIA had no interest at all in facilitating our goals as parents. They were like, you're CIA agents first.

And we were like, well, we would like to be parents. And I remember, oh man, I remember this conversation, going to my supervisor and saying, just give me five years. So just give me five years in a cushy desk job in Virginia. I'll do anything. Just give me five years to raise my first child, get them into school, have a second child before my wife becomes, you know, at an age where she's afraid to have more babies, have my second child so that we can get like a nanny or a daycare set up.

And then you can have your way with us. Then my wife and I'll be back. We'd love to keep serving. And they had no appetite for that. They're like, no. This is your assignment. You need to do this. If you don't do this, then your career's tanked.

And I was like, well, then I'm just going to leave. And I went back home and told my wife, it's time for us to resign. And she did not want to resign. She did not want to leave CIA. I told her the same thing CIA told me. She went back in, had a conversation, got the same kind of stiff arm. And then we were both like, this is not going to work. This is not going to work because CIA is not going to recognize us as human beings.

It's only going to ever see us as cogs in their machine. Right. That's sexy and cool and fun when you're 29 years old. traveling the world and taking life, like taking risks with a life that you don't appreciate. When you have a child that depends on you, it's not fun and sexy anymore. Right. So we put in motion our plan to leave. Nobody left.

The attrition rate in 2014 when my wife and I left CIA was 0.2%. The only people who left CIA were retirees who left on Friday, took a contract with a private intelligence company and came back in the door on Monday. That was the cycle. But to have two successful middle career officers just throw in the towel, they had no idea what to do with us. So we left. Dude, it was humiliating.

I lived in my in-law's garage for six months trying to find work. And I couldn't because I had a resume that was written by CIA. I couldn't write my own resume because it's a published piece of content. So somebody else had to write it for me. And it was horrible. Mispellings, typos. there were all the referrals like all the actual references were empty empty leads so if you called the reference nobody was there it was an empty fake phone call phone number that was created by

CIA so like I wasn't getting hired so what ended up happening is just to get a job I ended up having to be a con man and fraud my way into a corporate 10 company I was going to say you couldn't come up with your own version of your resume I would have been held legally culpable to publish a document that was not reviewed and approved by CIA that's a prick move. That's a prick move. They didn't know what to do with us. They'd never seen it before. Thank you Donald Trump in 2016. Because when Trump took office in 2016, the attrition rate skyrocketed. And when he started taking a hostile approach to CIA and he didn't like what CIA was saying about him, he stopped the funding to CIA. Right. CIA has started seeing

double digit attrition since then. They have a hard time holding on to people. They have a hard time hiring people. So that forced CIA to figure out how to handle that many people who were leaving. Right. But anyways, to answer your question, it was in the process of lying my way into a corporate career. And then having to learn in real time how to do the things I promised the corporate company I could do. Like I promised them I could do. I'd see project management. I promised them I could code. I promised them everything just to get a job because I had a baby to take care of. And I was living in a garage in Florida and I'm fucking 33 years old. I was like, this is humiliating. And what I found is that over the four years that I worked for that company, all I did was apply what CIA taught me. I applied rapid learning techniques, influence techniques, persuasive techniques, you know, managing dialogues, managing management, right? I worked my way through the chain and I went from making $80,000 a year to $125,000 a year in four years working for a company that I lied my way into. And that's when it kind of dawned on me. I was like, oh, shit, if I can teach other people how to do this, I could make a lot more money and have a bigger

impact than what I'm doing right now. And that's where that's where my company started. That's where everyday spy came from. The lying your way. It's 1150 by the way. Thank you, sir. Yeah, yeah. The lying your way into a company just made, you just went up a notch in my book. So, so at that, but at that point, so you're working for this company and you started Everyday Spy. What does Everyday Spy do? Everyday Spy is an online learning platform that teaches people authentic practical spy skills and tactics that give you an unfair advantage in everyday life. That's what we do. It's not just that. I mean, you do like outings and stuff, right? Like you do, you actually do things where you get people

together and you do like, um, we do training events. We do like we do experiences. Yeah, we do. So the company started on a very basic premise, right? How do we teach real spy skills to real people? Right. To get a real advantage, a real outcome, right? That's all it was. Just be real. It's just like you said earlier on. Kilo-23 connected us because you were like, I need somebody who's not going to tow the party line and tell me something real. And Kilo-23 was like, well, you need to talk to Andy. Yeah. Right. So I've always been very focused on being real because my loyalty is not to CIA. My loyalty is to individuals at CIA and to the mission of protecting the American people, right? Being able to share real stuff with real people is what is so rewarding to me. So we started there,

and then what I found is that some people wanted to learn through a blog. so I opened a blog. Some people wanted to learn through online courses. So I created online courses. Some people wanted to learn through live events. So I created live events. Some people wanted to learn under a paycheck that was paid for by their company. So we created corporate events. So the company has very much been reactive. And I'm not saying that's a good thing. But my business has been very reactive because people come and they say we love what you're teaching. Can you teach it this way? And just like when you reached out to me, I have a propensity to just say yes without really thinking it through. Right. So you're like, hey, can you help me with a book? Absolutely. And then I didn't realize how much work that would be. So people come to me with all these ideas. I'm like, yeah, let's try it. Let's see how it works. And then that's how we got to where we are now. Yeah, I do that all the time. I think, I'm not really sure, but I can probably figure it out. And it's funny because my dad used to say, God, and this was 40 years ago, but he's like, listen, you can get to the guy you need to get to with three phone calls. You may not know him, but you know somebody who might know him and he might not know him,

but he probably knows somebody that might know him and he know he definitely knows somebody that knows that guy that you want he's with three phone calls you probably be talking to that guy it's like the old game we played in high school right three steps to kevin bacon oh yeah do you remember that game no i don't but i've heard the kevin bacon that seven is it three or seven i think it's seven steps to kevin bacon but yeah um i don't i've never had the movie knowledge to be able to get all seven uh okay well that's um yeah that's cool i mean i'm glad that it's i'm glad that it's taken off for you and that it's working and you know and let's face it you know this is so much more fun than anything so much more fun man uh um god i feel like there was a did you do something

that was like a scavenger hunt uh i mean there's a there's we don't have to talk about the events i think what we've covered is plenty oh okay i was just but there are different kinds of events yeah i was going to say one of the events you had talked about i just remember thinking how much fun that sounded yeah and i would but you had already done it yeah like by the time it took place I thought that sounds like it would be cool. What's wild is how demand influences the price of all of my stuff. Right. Because I remember when I first wrote my first book, I was just trying to sell it on Amazon for 99 cents.

Right. First book on Amazon for 99 cents. And it struggled to sell. And then when I took it off Amazon and I put it on my own homepage, I put it on my homepage for like $9. And it sold like wildfire. And then I increased the price and increase the price. And now that same book is on my website for $27 and it still sells. But at 99 cents.

So it just shows you how different, like, demand is and how different time impacts the cost of your products. Yeah. So, you know, the event that you're talking about, the scavenger hunt event that you're talking about still exists, but now it's like 10 times as expensive as it used to be. And most likely we'll be changing again. Well, cool. I listen. I appreciate you coming. I appreciate.

Did there anything else you want to, you want to? I loved this conversation. Thanks for having me. Thanks for putting up with me ignoring your text messages. It's fine. I'm glad that I guilted you into it. Yeah, it was Danny that guilted me into it. But still, but if you just, I mean, dude, send me, send me messages telling me how awesome you're

doing and how awesome you're feeling, and I'll know it's not a bot. All right. And I'll give you my watches. I'll subscribe to the channel. All right. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching the interview. And we're going to leave all of Andrew. I always say boostamonte, but that should be because of prison.

I just always go by somebody's last name. It was like, Jones. So we're going to give all of Andrew Bustamante's links. We're going to put them in the description so you can subscribe and check out his stuff. Really appreciate you to you guys watching. Thank you very much. If you like the video, do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the button, hit the bell.

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