The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1221: Andrew Bustamante | A Spy's Guide to Our Dangerous World Part Two

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

The intelligence world is evolving rapidly. Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante explains Cold War tech, Ukraine strategy, and global conflicts. [Pt. 2/2 — catch Pt. 1/2 here!]Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1221What We Discuss with Andrew Bustamante:Jeffrey Epstein was likely an FBI confidential informant rather than a CIA asset. The FBI can grant immunity for domestic crimes, while CIA has no authority to provide legal cover for American citizens committing crimes in the US.Blackmail is the weakest form of manipulation. Once information is released, it can be denied as fake or AI-generated, and the blackmailer has already spent their only leverage with no guarantee of success.Social media isn't a battlefield — it's a mosh pit with all offensive operations and no defense. State actors create chaos cheaply, forcing opponents to spend vastly more resources fighting disinformation.Israel serves as a strategic watchdog for US interests. By weakening Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran, Netanyahu has secured not just Israel but also Saudi Arabia and the United States for two decades.CIA persuasion and influence techniques are based on empirical science and human behavior patterns. You can learn to build trust, read people, and communicate effectively by understanding these age-old principles in everyday life.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: Gelt: 10% off 1st year: joingelt.com/jhsShopify: 3 months @ $1/month (select plans): shopify.com/jordanSimpliSafe: 50% off + 1st month free: simplisafe.com/jordanProgressive: Free online quote: progressive.comSomething You Should Know: Listen here or wherever you find fine podcasts!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to checkout is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspiruality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life

and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional neuroscientist, correspondent, four-star general or real-life pirate. If you're new to the show

or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more.

It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, part two with Andrew Bustamante. If you haven't heard part one, of course, go back and listen to that one first.

We're talking about espionage, Epstein, Iran, Ukraine, and more. Now let's continue this conversation here with Andrew Bustamante. Surveillance states like the UAE, what's it like living in a place like that? You know, nobody wants to hear it, but there's a lot of conveniences that come from living in a surveillance state. It's super safe. It's a big part of why I really do think that the U.S. is on a trend towards being more of a surveillance state. Because it's so convenient, it's so safe, it's so efficient.

In the United Arab Emirates, I lived in Abu Dhabi for a while. And as soon as you enter, you're given a national ID. You don't have to be a resident or a citizen, but you're given a national ID because your national ID is tied to your passport and then you're required to create to have a local bank account. So now your passport, your credit card, your bank account and your national ID are all linked. If you rent a car, it's linked. If you own a car, it's linked. And the reason that happens is so that anywhere you go, cameras can either pick up on the RFID and your

ID, they can connect everything. There's no showing up in court if you get a speeding ticket. you're immediately fined. They see you going too fast on a camera that's sitting every quarter mile, every half mile along the highway. They don't call them miles there. They call them kilometers. Every 500 meters, you pass a camera. If you're going one kilometer an hour over the speed limit, you're immediately fined.

You're immediately billed. It's taken off of your bank account. It's taken out of your license. Even really, is it really one kilometer over? A one kilometer amount. So Dubai and Abu Dhabi live in two different Emirates. so you drive the highway to get between them. You can, I shit you not, when you cross the midpoint,

because all the cars go from speeding, because in Dubai, in the Emirate of Dubai, laws are much more flexible, where they're much more Sharia in Abu Dhabi. So you've got all this speeding on the highway, and then as soon as you cross into Abu Dhabi, everybody slows down the speed limit. It's clear as day when it happens.

Really? Some surveillance states are not great places to live, such as North Korea. I don't even know if North Korea really even counts as a surveillance state. Because they can't surveil everybody. Think surveillance state without real electricity. It's a little rough around the edges, right?

Tattletale state. Yeah, Tattletale state. China, maybe. But again, as an American, cool place to live if you're a foreigner, less so if you're a rural Chinese person who's trying to survive in a modern economy. But anyway, I was just curious what it's like to live in a place like that because most people haven't. Most people never will. Do you think the CIA had anything to do with the JFK assassination?

And now you can see, by the way, I'm just trying to get clips for stoners on YouTube. But let's do it. So I don't believe CIA had anything to do with a JFK assassination in terms of choosing to kill JFK. Do I think that they had some kind of operation that was going on that may have overlapped with the assassin? Very likely. Especially if there was so much foreign, domestic, political subterfuge that was going on all around JFK. Everybody was probably involved in some way, shape, or form. Not to mention the fact that it happened at a time when there was no government oversight.

So everybody's doing their own fucking thing and the left hand isn't talking to the right hand. So it would make sense that there's overlap, but I don't think they were responsible for it. Tell me about Jeffrey Epstein, speaking of stoner clips for YouTube, but tell me about, let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein because, so first of all, people are like, he was an asset. It's easy to say that, but people have no idea what they're talking about. Why would somebody like that be valuable, for example? So there's two terms. There's officers and assets in the world of human intelligence, right? Officers are the people who work on behalf of your national security infrastructure.

So if you're the United States, you have a U.S. intelligence officer, or you have a law enforcement officer. But your asset is not usually a member of your national security apparatus. Your asset is the information source that's helping to secure national security. So whether you're a CI asset, a clandestine informant or confidential informant for FBI or for a local police force, you're an asset producing information that yields security infrastructure, information relevant. right. So you've got officers and assets. Epstein, many people, I think correctly identify him as an asset. The guy was for sure not an officer. There are some people who are like, oh, he worked for CIA as if to imply he was a CIA officer. That is for sure not the case. As an asset, CIA has a very difficult time getting American assets. There's all sorts of legal, rigamarole elements that make it very difficult for an American citizen to be an asset for CIA. And then if that American citizen is committing active crimes, for sure, can't touch him because CIA has no authority in the United States to grant leniency on criminals who are American citizens.

Right. So you can't do the law enforcement thing. Like, where the mafia guys who come on the show that they send me these documents. I forget exactly what they're called. But it's like, this person for the purposes of law enforcement in this particular case may engage in racketeering, bribery, gambling, illegal, whatever. And it's, you're like, wow. And it's protected. It's a note from the DA or the U.S. attorney that says, this guy's allowed to gamble. engage in a prostitution, racketeering operation, money laundering within the scope of this particular operation. And then it's also in return he's rolling over on everybody's deal. Correct. So the idea that Epstein was an asset for CIA also doesn't make any sense. The most logical intelligence

role for him outside of the United States would have technically been a country that is distrusting, but still has access, pro-American access, a country like Israel. And that's why there were so many suspicions that he was some kind of Israeli asset, which would make more sense than being a CIA asset. But I actually had somebody recently who came from the national security law enforcement infrastructure side who gave me the most logical outcome. It makes the most sense that Epstein would actually be a FBI clandestine informant. He would have a letter like what you just dictated that says he's allowed to do all these things in the best interest of this FBI investigation against 55 other people. Because

Everything Jeffrey Epstein touched was dirty. Every person, every deal, he helped rich people hide money. He was so much more valuable as a conduit for multiple cases rather than closing the case on him himself. And it would make sense for a guy like that. Once you get the get out of jail free card from FBI, you know that FBI has a legal obligation to grant you immunity because that's what they put in the letter. And immunity means that even posthumously, they're not going to explain. expose you because to expose him as an FBI source now would basically tell every other current FBI source will expose you to. And they can't do that. And obviously he was raping underage

girls. There's no way to sugarcoat that. You can't get a letter that allows you to do that from the FBI. Theoretically, can't get a letter like that. I don't think you can get a letter like that that allows you to do that to American girls. Interesting. Oh my gosh. That's dark. I'm sorry. People have to understand that there's a very big difference in the world between American and not American when it comes to the American legal system. You're not wrong. I think the other thing he was doing was filming all of these powerful people, also raping underage girls, in order to get something on them and then maybe control these people.

So is that sort of in line with the FBI? Because the FBI can't go, you can blackmail other people. Well, maybe they can, but that's a dirty letter. There's all sorts of tricky stuff here, man, because you've got islands that are not American islands. He was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but that's, so those are U.S. territories? I don't actually know what the legal obligations are. We'd have to ask a real lawyer who is not me to explain the subtle differences in FBI

jurisdiction between us and those. Or it may not even be FBI jurisdiction. It may be some other jurisdiction. But my point there is there are certain states in the United States require that both people under observation acknowledge that they know they're under observation. Other states don't. Like there are certain states in the U.S. where if I call you, I can record it without telling you it's recorded.

A single party consent, yeah. And there's other states where you have to have both. And the same thing is true for video. So again, if FBI was trying to collect incriminating evidence against American citizens committing crimes in a U.S. territory, him having cameras everywhere would make perfect sense. And maybe the majority of his footage couldn't even be touched because it was American businessman committing crimes against foreign girls that did not align in terms of illegality. Prostitution is legal all over the world. Slavery is still legal all over the world. we live in a bubble here in the United States. We don't realize it. What mistakes are oversights in

counterintelligence would allow somebody like Epstein to operate? It's the scale he operated at for so long. I mean, it would take a great deal of mistakes, which is part of, I think, the argument behind why it's almost improbable that all of those mistakes would have happened and then sustained for so long. It makes more sense that there was some sort of acceptable measure that he was working within. Because I think the conspiracy folks, and honestly, I can't say that they're totally off on this one from the sound of it, would be so many things have to go wrong to let somebody like that be off the leash for so long that it's almost like he had compromise on people who made important decisions whether to shut down an operation like that, for example. That's where it all starts to fall apart. People land on this idea of blackmail. Professionals don't use blackmail. Blackmail is the weakest form of persuasion, of manipulation. It's so fucking weak.

but people believe that it's such a big deal because of movies and television. If you just do a, again, thought experiment with basic blackmail, somebody comes out and tries to blackmail. You're like, oh, I know that you cheated on your wife. Here's the blackmail. Now, as soon as it's publicly available,

the person who receives that blackmail is like, it's a fake. It's a phony. Well, especially now. Deep fake. Bingo. It's AI. And then who's going to put the resources

into analyzing it to verify that it's real? Meanwhile, you, the person trying to blackmail the person, just spent your only round. Who'd blear what, exactly. That happens at an international level. It's even worse. If Netanyahu had dirt on Donald Trump and he released that dirt on Donald Trump publicly, Donald Trump would refuse it. Nobody would verify it.

And then at the exact same time, Donald Trump would be like, Netanyahu just tried to stab me in the back by making up fake information. He's cut off. We're going to put sanctions on Israel. Everybody's going to. It's not how it works. It's a huge losing game. It seems like the real real would be either all those mistakes were made and it was just a total cluster

over there or he was just really valuable doing something else and everyone was like, God, this guy is so gross but look at all this great stuff. He's getting us all the time. And gross people are super valuable. When the public says, we'll never know the truth. Do you agree or do you think they'll never know the exposed this? And you know, it's funny. It's like a JFK thing. The shooter of Donald Trump in July in Butler, Pennsylvania. No motive has ever been established. Oh, really? People forget that shit, people just completely forget. And that's the trend that government understands. The memory hole.

People don't pay attention long enough. So everybody's throwing a fit about it. No one's going to remember fucking Epstein, what, 12 months, two years? Even with all the clip traffic, you can go to like Google Trends right now and watch how the trending searches for Epstein have significantly dropped. Just a matter of time before something else takes over. It's a little disturbing, but it's also like, look, the government wants to cover something or keep something secret. it, what are you going to do? That's their right.

Yeah, that's their right. They choose what message to share publicly and what not to. People don't like hearing this, but the United States government is what defined your rights, which is why they can take your rights away. People often will say, you know, these are inalienable. Okay, why? Because a government document says so. One thing that people are often surprised by, I saw this absolute knucklehead at the airport,

and he had put all these, like, anime stickers on his passport. and I said, man, you better get those off there. And he's like, why? It's my passport. And I was like, let me stop you right there. Not to be too much of a law nerd, but that is not yours. The government of the United States owns that document. And if you go to this customs officer and you got freaking shrizzard on page seven, instead of a visa for South Korea, they can confiscate this and make you get a new one.

It's actually a crime, I think, to deface this in the first place. I feel like the front page of your passport says this is government property. Yeah, as if anybody read anything in there that wasn't just their name and a address, right? It's just sad that people carry around a document. They haven't read it. Yeah, you're supposed to sign it, too. That's another thing. If you don't sign your passport, you can go to a place and I can't remember where I was. It might have been hungry or something, but he's like, you didn't sign your passport. And I was like, oh, let me do it right now. He's like, no, no, you can't just sign it right now. You can't just sign it. This is your past. You have to sign this in the president of a government official, which, by the way, is not true. But he was like, how do I convince this guy to give me a hundred euros right now? That was basically the conversation we were having. And, This has actually happened to other people with the whole signing of the passport thing. Sign your passport and read the fine print. Don't put freaking stickers on there with otaku or whatever the hell it is. What elements of your CIA training do you find yourself applying in your day-to-day life? The vast majority of what I apply is understanding human behavior, persuasion and influence techniques. It's how we've grown our business. It's how we've grown popular in the last few years. It's how we live right now, right? Because those things are just based in empirical science. And we use. use them all the time at CIA because the process of creating an asset, the process of getting someone to share their secrets, the process of somebody transitioning from a patriot who loves their

country to a traitor who betrays their country, that process is age old. It's predictable human behavior. It's nothing more than building the experience of an intimate relationship that's artificial. And everybody learns those skills through the school of hard knocks, who to trust, who not to trust, what the right things are to say. We call it. how to play the game. We all know what it's like to suck up to the teacher we don't like, but we're only sucking up because we want an opportunity to get a good grade. And we never know when we're going to have to call on that card, but we're going to build up that social capital anyways. All CIA does is give us the terminology and the process to do those consistently.

So now that's what we use. I use those all the time. Personal security, home security. I mean, the list goes on and on. But I use so many spy skills in my everyday life that I knew I could build a business called everyday spy, which is just spy skills in everyday life. Yeah. How do they choose the cover? I assume you don't get any part in that. And it's something that's beneficial to the agency, obviously. But are all the covers relatively boring, like corporate attorney, finance manager? Or is it like, wow, this dude is already kind of a well-known-ish reggae artist that travels around the world. Let's lean into that. No, I will speak for the post-9-11 CIA because pre-9-11 CIA didn't have structure, didn't have oversight. It didn't have left and right boundaries. The executive branch's tool of foreign policy. They could do whatever the executive branch chose.

So everything prior to 2001, if you have an example of a professional tennis player, that's fine. But post-9-11, with the advent of government oversight, with Senate intelligence committees, right, with a DNI in place, everything had to change. And it professionalized in a way where it was using best practices. for intelligence operations. And one of the best practices is you want cover identities that are benign that are not alerting, that are uninteresting, because the benefits of that are exponential. Not only does your officer have an easier thing to remember because they're a middle manager and an envelope company, but now it's really easy for them to tell that cover story on a plane or in a cab and nobody wants to talk to them. If you make them something interesting and then

they talk about it, other people are going to ask questions. And the more questions, the more you have to master your cover, the more room you have to make mistakes inside your cover. So they want very benign cover identities. Now, I will also say, you are correct. We don't get any say. 99% of the time, we don't get any say in what our cover is. And the one percent of the time that we do get a say, we have to justify why it would matter. Like, for example, you have family connections in Taiwan. So if they were to be like, hey, we're going to base your business out of Malaysia, you might be like, uh, how about a little bit further? It doesn't really make any sense because it's going to hold up to scrutiny if it's out of Taiwan. So that's the 1% where you're going to say. So basically,

if you can backstop it a little bit by accident, by who you really are. Really are. Exactly. It's helpful. Yeah, the reason I ask this is because, and again, I don't know if this is apocryphal bullshit or not, but there are these stories like, did you know that whatever film actress was a CIA asset? And it's like, but that's the difference between an officer and an asset. Like an officer, middle manager envelope company asset, this person who, I don't know, dictators love him and he's always performing one-on-one shows with Murar Gaddafi, like, all right, we kind of wanted to be in this guy's orbit. We don't have to give him a cover.

He's a pop singer. Yeah, exactly right. And that's why I love that you understand the difference between asset and officer. And hopefully everybody listening now knows that better, too. So when you see, was Frank Sinatra and Asset, how many musical artists have been accused to being assets? Yeah, it's a ton. Yeah.

Possibly, because especially if they get a letter that says, hey, when you're doing this stuff on behalf of the United States, you're also allowed to get free gold. Yeah. And cocaine and women. And we won't tax you on the gold that you collect. That's right. All of a sudden, Sinatra's like, hey, I'll cheers to that. I'll come back once every six months and tell you about how I got banged by three hookers and, you know, whatever in France.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Probably do it for free. Information warfare and influence. I'd love to talk about this because social media is a weird battlefield now, more than it has been in the past with TikTok. I think, how would you explain to the average listener or viewer how it's, how it's, you explain to the average listener or viewer how, how, intelligence services might weaponize something like TikTok X, Instagram, and maybe we use the

conflicts like Ukraine or Israel, Palestine. It's not a might. Like it's an active weaponization. I just said might because in case you're like, I can't say how they're actually doing it. It's actually happening. But I will say this. I would not call social media a battleground because in a battleground you have offensive and defensive efforts that are taking place. You have no fucking defensive efforts in social media. It's all offensive. It's a mosh. pit. Everybody's shooting shit all over the place and nobody's trying to build defenses. All the defenses were kind of outsourcing to the executives who run those firms or the security teams or the moms and dads who have to babysit their kids or we create apps that block content from kids. But nobody's trying

to actively identify the fake information and prevent it from coming. So it's not really a battlefield. It's just the giant like lava pit. But the way that it's used professional intelligence services, so when it's coming from state-owned sources, state-owned bots and state-owned services, they understand that getting a specific outcome is very, very difficult. The probability of getting the outcome you want when it comes to an influence campaign, an information campaign, probability is very low.

But the probability is very high that you'll be able to create so much chaos and noise that you will consume more of your opponent's resources at a proper ROI. So I can put $5 into an ad that creates a huge headache for you. And then I know that you have to put $200 into resources to try to fix the ad that I put out there for $5.

So that's what ends up happening, especially with Russia, Belarus, North Korea stealing cryptocurrency, China. It's so easy to create these influence campaigns that just create doubt and chaos and discord because the cost to fight it is so expensive that they already know the United States isn't going to pay it.

Instead, they're going to say, hey, counterintelligence center, please send out a note to the American people that says, maybe you shouldn't trust what's on YouTube. This conversation has spies, one-time pads, and an accent on a shortwave radio. This ad break has less existential danger and more discounts. Stick with us. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, and spies every single week,

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Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again, all free, zero shenanigans at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Andrew Bustamante. China and other places, at least for me personally, China has tried to get me to post-propagana before, but I'm curious, what's the most effective way governments quietly influenced journalists or media organizations without it looking like outright propaganda? Because this attempt by China was really clunky, it got exposed on YouTube. It's basically like one guy who was an agency, sent a bunch of stuff to a bunch of YouTubers without vetting them. Like, you would know that I probably wouldn't post Chinese propaganda if you, I don't know, looked at anything I've done in the last 20 years.

And they also emailed my friends at the China show, which is like properly anti-China. And they asked them to do the same thing. So they got exposed. But other countries are slicker. They're better at this. It's about the modus operandi, the strategy behind the country. China, their strategy is a bull in a China shop. That's how they do things. That's how they've always done things. They do lots of sloppy operations. And I say sloppy because that's a generic term. What I mean by that is they have no problem handing over to amateurs multiple opportunities to do covert influence, to less covert influence, to do digital offensive cyber operations, foreign commercial operations. They'll just outsource it to anybody because they want as much noise as possible. The more noise, people feel like China's so sophisticated. They're such a threat. They're everywhere. Meanwhile, very high sophisticated operations can sneak by. But even when they broke into the Office of Personnel Management, in 2003, I think it was, they left clear mess in the code

that was easy for people to go back and be like, China's the one who stole this, which they love, because this is all art of war stuff. When your opponent talks about how dangerous you are, it makes everybody afraid of you.

Russia is the opposite. Russia doesn't want anybody to know they were there. So Russia goes in, and when they leave, you actually don't know they were there. So we don't even know what they stole. Or you think it was North Korea because they put that in it.

Like one of my friends does high-level cyber security stuff for like the ruling family of Dubai and stuff like that, right? And he'll say things like this looks like a Russian attack. And then the next day is, this looks like a North Korean attack. Actually, no, we think it's a Russian attack. How do you screw those things up? And he's like, well, what happened was we saw Korean in the code. And we knew it wasn't South Korea because it didn't make sense. And it was using North Korean vocabulary. Then we realized that probably was put there on purpose to make it look like it was them when it was actually fancy bear.

And that's a false flag. False flag operations are very common. And it's a great way of throwing people off the scent when you make it look like somebody else has done something because you know that the first scrutiny is going to go to the other flag. So that's a big part of it. When the U.S. finds that Russia has infiltrated a system and they've done it with tools that the U.S. didn't even know existed, they don't make a fucking press release about that because they don't want to tell the American people, hey, the Russians. We can't protect you.

The Russians just stole all of your data from the Social Security thing and they use this tool that we'd never seen before. Yeah, pretty smart, huh? Anyway, back to other news. It's quite interesting to see how they use journalism and media and social media, and that's just going to get worse and worse. And there's nothing you can do to prevent bad information from getting out. The only thing you can do is identify it on your own and then not internalize it, not trust it,

because right now there's no sufficient defensive strategy out there. AI can't do it. The government can't do it. The people who actually control the platforms can't do it, even if they wanted to. Meadow wants to block disinformation. They want the government off their ass, but they do the best they can do. But at the end of the day, it's still user beware. Israel, Palestine, man.

I'd love to talk about how radicalization happens. It's a little bit maybe it's too spicy of a meatball. It's such an interesting meatball, though. Yeah. I agree it's spicy, but it's such a good meatball. I mean, we can dive into it. First of all, this is also a tough question. Where do you stand on this?

I mean, it's a tough conflict. Yeah, it's a tough conflict. And I think at the end of the day, Americans need to understand that Israel is good for us. Tell me about this because everyone's like, we're wasting our tax money defending some random country in the Middle East. That's because they're dumbass. Right. I'm like, you're in high school. You don't know what you're talking about it. So we have to understand that America all the way back to the days of Civil War, the reason that we chose the fights that we chose to fight were so that we could secure ourselves for the future. The federal government isn't here to take care of us today. The federal government is here to ensure the survivability of the federal government. The American idea, the institution survives. They don't really care about you today. So anybody who thinks like, oh, the government's there to serve me.

They are public servants, but you are just one small, like a reminder that you don't even own your passport. They're not here to serve you. Correct. Yeah. So the United States knows that Israel serves as almost like a watchdog that keeps Iran and all the threats from the Middle East over there first. In order for something to reach us, it basically has to go through Israel.

And Israel being a country that we fund, that we helped to develop, that we help to build their economy, that we supply with weapons. Like, it's a strategic partner. It's a tactical partner. It's an ideological partner in so many ways. And not only that, but Israel sits in a very different place than where we sit. We sit with no threat to our northern, southern, eastern, or western borders. We have ocean, Canada, and Mexico. We're good.

Israel literally sits in a den of thieves almost every day. border is an active aggressor. And if it's not like a country like Jordan, they're just a pass-through away from an active aggressor. Land borders are exposed, ocean borders are exposed. So you have to understand that Israel is in a highly threatened posture. And it knows governmentally that part of its job is to reduce the threat to the United States. So when you look at it through that lens, Netanyahu going after Hezbollah and weakening Hezbollah benefits the United States. Him going after Iran and weakening Iran benefits the United States. Him bombing Qatar benefits the United States.

Tell me about that. Because people are like, Qatar's a U.S. ally. What the hell? Yeah, people are fucking stupid. Qatar is the financial hub for Islamic extremism. It has always been. That's where all the Islamic extremist money goes through. And they facilitate that, which is a big part of why Hamas has a footprint in Qatar at all.

Qatar also is the largest military base in the Middle East because the United States made that strategic decision in an. age before we had Islamic extremism, but gets complicated. So Netanyahu knows that he needs to win back favor with Islamic countries. And the chief Islamic country is Saudi Arabia. Everybody else is second to Saudi Arabia. And if people don't know that, they need to wake up to that. You're Bahrain, your Oman, your UAE, Iran, all of them come second to Saudi Arabia. So he knows that if he pissed off Saudi Arabia the most with the devastation that he's wreaked on Gaza. So if he wants to get any favor back from the Saudis, he needs to, without giving up on Gaza,

what he needs to do is he needs to find other ways to make them happy. And when I say happy, I'm talking about the Abraham Accords that they almost signed between Israel and Saudi Arabia before October 7th. So now what Netanyahu has done in the last year and a half is he has systematically reduced the biggest threats, not just to the United States, but also to Saudi Arabia. Taking out Hezbollah weakening Iran and then having Syria fall, this is an uncomfortable analogy. But you remember when Osama bin Laden was surprised that the towers fell?

They weren't just severely damaged. I feel like that was what Syria was. They were like, we're going to take out Hezbollah. They're going to rebuild eventually. Oh, wait. It made them pull their forces from Syria. Well, we kind of saw that come. Holy crap.

Assad flew to Moscow and it's over. And then Iran was like, how did we own goal this? How did we screw this up? And I think then, and only then, was everybody kind of like, wow, we thought a couple dominoes were going to fall. We didn't realize they were all going to fall or almost all going to. So Netanyahu, as much as people want to criticize him, and a lot of what he's done is illegal, according to international law and human rights. But he has essentially secured Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States for probably two decades. We're not going to be. dealing with Hezbollah. We're not going to be dealing with Hamas to the level that we've been dealing with them in the past. The Houthis and Iran and the Iran nuclear program, they're all significantly reduced. That makes everybody happy. So even more than that, Netanyahu is enough of a statesman to understand that formally the United States and Saudi Arabia and UAE are all going to come out and say, Israel, you're a naughty, naughty boy and we're not going to support you. He understands that's what they have to say publicly because diplomatically they will want

100% continue to support the Israeli government, even if it means Netanyahu has to fall at some point in the future. Do hostage situations, like the Israeli hostages, for example, this is a conflict hostage situation. So it's a little different from, I don't know, American hostages in Iran or something like that. But do they follow predictable intelligence patterns or are they all kind of entirely unique in situational? Yeah, I would say they're more unique and situational. And even then I would want to really defer to a hostage expert in what they've seen in multiple But what we find playing out that people aren't speaking to is the fact that hostages don't live. And when they don't live, for whatever reason, they lose their value as leverage.

So you've got one side that wants to believe they're alive. And you've got another side that wants you to believe they're alive. Because as long as you believe they're alive, whether or not they're alive, you have leverage. As this conflict has taken so many years, one of the dark realities that we do have to understand that people, again, don't want to accept. If Netanyahu decides to air raid a building and there's two sick hostages alive in the basement and the air raid kills them, he can still claim that they were killed in custody before they ever got there.

So he has leverage to continue to prosecute conflict because the impetus to prove that it wasn't the air raid is on a terrorist organization, which is going to be very difficult to prove. What's interesting to me is I'll be talking about this conflict. looked with somebody and they'll say like, this is Israel's fault, the hostages are dying. I was like, if the police storm a bank that's being robbed and the robbers kill the hostages in the bank, you don't blame the police. And people are like, of course you do. That blew my mind. Because I'm like, no, you blame the bank robbers who shot the hostages. The police went in there to, or the military, like trying to get them out. No, I blame the military. I blame the police.

So you can't convince people on this one. They've picked their side. And that's what, this conflict, speaking of social media and disinformation, like this conflict is it's almost like religious in nature, literally in some ways, but culturally religious. You will never convince somebody who's pro-Israel, like a hardcore, that they're doing anything wrong. And you will never convince somebody who's pro-Palestinian that do contem Hamas, yeah, but whatever. And they'll qualify it with, but their resistance movement. There's no middle ground here for most people. Responsibility lies in so many places. I don't blame social media because social media is just, It's the shitstorm that everybody's watching.

If there's anything I blame, it's the individual ignorance, each individual person's ignorance in their inability to separate Hamas from Muslim, Hamas from Palestinian, and Israel from Jew. There are plenty of Jews who are not Israelis, and there are plenty of Israelis who are not Jews. We did an episode on anti-Semitism, and people are like, I don't hate Jews. All I'm saying is that the reason we blame Jews for everything is because of what Israel is doing. And I was like, dude, I don't think this is a little nuanced discussion that you think you're making right now. Yeah, yeah. And even Hamas. Hamas is only recognized as a terrorist organization by 12 countries because it has two different wings.

It has a political wing and it has an extremist wing, a militant wing. And even though I would say that the two are not as distinctly different as they probably want us to believe, they're still completely different from just being Palestinian living in Gaza. No, I agree with that 100%. I'll move on from that because it's, again, a spicy meatball. And we're not going to solve anything on this. I was just curious about your opinion on that. Iran's always fascinating to me, right?

Because they want conflict with the United States, but they want it to be opaque. They can't just go, we're shooting rockets at American forces. That happens sometimes, but it's pretty rare. It's usually in response to something else. They can't really attack the United States. They do it via proxies. They're like a shadow player, not really a direct actor most of the time. From a former spy's perspective, how does that you?

does Iran project power without openly going to war? Talk about Hezbollah and other organizations. Yeah, absolutely. So Iran's primary point of conflict isn't even with the United States. It's with Saudi Arabia. Because inside the Middle East, you've got two different centers of influence that are competing for dominance. And it's Saudi Arabia and Sunni Islam and Iran and Shia Islam. And you've got these two distinctly different centers of gravity. What Iran really wants is to make more Shia states. And what Saudi Arabia really wants is to make more Shia states. And what Saudi Arabia really wants is to maintain more Sunni states. And that's where the main access of conflict is. But Saudi Arabia is so important to the United States. And Saudi Arabia has been the reason that the United States has expanded so deep into the Middle East that now Iran understands that the United States is a secondary threat because anything that it does well, Saudi Arabia benefits. Iran also understands, though, that it's in a precarious situation because it's isolated. Iran's primary wealth comes from

natural resources, of which is oil and agriculture. It is the breadbasket of the Middle East. So when you go to Saudi Arabia, when you go to UAE, when you go to Oman, you eat Iranian food. You eat Iranian produce, even though those countries all see Iran as a villain. What methods does Iran's intelligence service use to fund and coordinate proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas? And how do Western intelligence agencies counter and track that in the first place? So it's a great question. Iran funds its proxies through a mix of subsidization, like subsidizing the proxies, and then also letting the proxies do whatever they want to do in addition to Iranian directed missions. So like hang out, take over Lebanon, but also shoot stuff at Israel when we need you to. Correct. And we'll pay you for the stuff we need you to do. And then maybe we'll give you like a monthly stipend for the other stuff. But you definitely have to survive on your own. So keep stealing and robbing and whatever else and extorting whoever you can. So there's an element of both, which is a why the proxies never really get very efficient. They never really get very large or successful. They're perpetually in third world mode. Hezbollah hasn't changed much except in terms of size in like 30

years. It hasn't really modernized because it hasn't had the budget to modernize. It's just trying to survive. So that's how they fund them. And then you had a second question. How do Western intelligence services track and counter that? And that's a big challenge. So a lot of times what we do is we follow the money. We follow where the transactions are coming from, where they're originating, what the denominations are. Big part of the reason why I am not a fan of decentralized currency. I will never be a fan of decentralized currency is because the primary use case for decentralized currency is criminal activity. If you really care about economic benefit, you want centralized currency because every transaction generates money that doesn't come out of your taxpayer pocket.

So that's the big challenge. Bitcoiners are so angry right now. They're punching this guy. Oh, yeah. And thank you Bitcoin for making a bunch of bad guys really fucking rich because your price is going up so much for something that people can't use in a pizza shop. I do see people cheering a lot for Bitcoin. And it's usually people where you go, oh, that guy. Yeah, exactly. It's like a bunch of like human traffickers love it. Drug runners love it. People who sell people. Traffic children. Yeah, exactly. They love it. And us nerds. We love it too. But we're not what people are concerned about, okay? Yeah, it's the decentralization. It appeals to the geek and the libertarian, but it's like, we're cracking some eggs to make the salmon and those eggs are minors and innocent people. Yeah. So follow the money.

Follow the money. And then when you find the source, this is what people also need to understand. When you find the source of the money, you don't run a raid. You then start to monitor it. Intelligence collects. Intelligence very rarely ever interrupts. It was really when CTC, when the counterterrorism center was first stood up, Every center inside the CIA has a mantra, if you will, right, like a saying that goes along with them.

And CTC had to come up with a mantra. So they came up with this mantra that was deny, disrupt, and destroy. And the whole idea there was deny access first. If you can't deny it, disrupt it. If you can't disrupt it or deny it, then destroy it. But if you can't destroy it or if you can deny or disrupt, then do those things first. Given the recent talks around nuclear enrichment and the fact that Iran moved all their uranium out, by the way, what was that about? So for people who don't know, we dropped the, what was it called, the giant bomb on the Natanz facilities of several months ago.

But we gave them a warning, so they moved out the personnel, they filled the tunnels with concrete so they could dig them out again, and they moved all the uranium from what we understand. I don't know that we gave Iran a warning. I would want to double check that. I don't recall us giving them a warning. Either way, they moved everything out and everyone out, and they preserved the interior of the structure with concrete before the bomb hit it. We don't know how much has been preserved, how much has been destroyed. But the satellite imagery suggests that there was a mass exodus to get things out before we actually bombed it. And people were saying we set them back by a few months, a few years. How does spies verify how close Iran is to a bomb? This is another uncomfortable truth that Americans really do need to understand.

American insight into Iran is only as good as the assets that we have in Iran. And there are plenty of people out there who both within their brief and outside, of their brief have commented on the fact that we don't have very good assets in Iran. We don't as an American intelligence service. So what that means is we get our information from somebody else. It's not like Mossad's going to tell us 100% of what they know. They're going to tell us only what they want us to know. Right. They're four years behind. But Masad, go ahead and tell them they're four days out so that they blow more fit up in Iran. The United States, especially with the Trump administration's first term and the disruption that happened to CIA and all these people leaving CIA, now you have

fewer people to cover more hostility. And you have a CIA that often feels like repugnant at their leadership now because it's all back and forth. So how professional are they in carrying out their operations? Quite professional. But are there enough of them to actually do it? We don't know. I've had people from inside CIA who have talked to me off camera who have said that they believe that 40% of CIA's intelligence right now is actually being provided by foreign intelligence services. That means only 60% of what we're telling the president is our own intel. 40% of, if it's coming from someone else. So we could be feeding all of our military and civilian decision makers just disinformation. And here's why that's so important, because in the 1980s,

it was the 80s the Clinton era? No, that was the 90s. That was the 90s. So in the 1990s, because I knew what a blowjob was. I wouldn't have known that in the 80s. That's a Monica Lewinsky reference, not a random perverted other thing. That's awesome. Just in case anyone's more. In the 90s, the Clinton administration was making executive policy decisions about Cuba. And the primary two people that it was getting information from was a senior analyst in DIA and a senior analyst in the Department of State. These were the two people primarily feeding the President's Daily Brief on what policy decisions to make about Cuba. Well, it came out in the mid-80s, 88, 89, that both of these two individuals were Cuban intelligence assets. So Cuba was feeding these two different sources,

the same false information. And then these two sources were feeding the false information to the president, and it looked like it was valid corroborated information because it came from two different services, not recognizing that they had both been penetrated by Cuba. All right, we're talking about Cold War vibes, number stations, and deep fakes. But first, a word from a company that definitely, probably, maybe won't sell your IP address to a hostile actor. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do.

That is, take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support. the show are searchable and clickable on the website at jordan harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a code, you can't find the code, please email us. The team would love to help you out with this. We are happy to surface codes for you. Jordan at jordanharbinger.com will reach somebody here. It is that important that you support those who support the show.

Now for the rest of my conversation with Andrew Bustamante. Whenever I hear about Cuban intelligence success, they're so good. They're so good. And it just shows you how terrible they are at managing an economy. because they owned the crap out of the U.S. They had Soviet backing. They were in this amazing spot for all these reasons, and yet they still are, and I love Cuban people,

but the country is a fucking dump. It's beautiful. It's been mismanaged so poorly that it's like you couldn't have tried to make it. It looks like tropical North Korea. It really does. It's just amazing how much they screwed it up. It's almost like communism doesn't work.

I know I'm going to get unsubscribed from that. I don't care. It's almost like communism and repressive authoritarian. just are not the best way to run a country. It's a shame that you have to worry about your opinion on communism taking away subscribers. Oh my gosh. I don't really worry about it.

I'll say, I remember what I was talking about my experience in North Korea. This is a few years ago. And it was on a live broadcast. And I mentioned Iran as well. And it was probably 2022. And I was just saying, like, look, you'd be grateful you don't live in Iran where this and that and can happen. And North Korea, this and that.

And one guy was like, don't you think it's a little ethnocentric to say that the U.S. is a better system than Iran in North Korea? I'm like, dude, you're calling me from what, an iPhone? Do you think any North Korean or Cuban random civilian has one of these? Do you ever ask yourself why you were able to eat three times a day with absolutely no issue? If there's two countries where we can objectively say our system is better, it's going to be Cuba and North Korea and Iran. There's a couple of countries where you could say our system is better. It's going to be this mess of nations.

You stack China against the U.S. They have this and we have that and they have this and we have that. Okay, fine. There's debate going on there. if you go to any one of these places, the lights turn off half the time. And that's if your city has electricity in the first place. When we were in Cuba, we didn't just stay in the capital. We went to some rural areas. And I remember people, kids and young people would come out in like dirty underwear. And I go, why is everyone naked? And I remember one of the ladies is like, they don't really have other clothes. And they would ask us for stuff like pens because they were blown away that we had working pens. And I'm like, this is, I thought you had free health care. And stuff. And I remember our guide going, they have their teeth and if they get lung cancer, but they're naked, they're walking around naked. They don't have running water. And he's just like, you know, and even that was the propaganda line because a few years later, he escaped to Miami after

telling me for a week how amazing Cuba was in every conceivable potential category. It was just I mean, it's important to know that what you're describing isn't just villainous countries. Cambodia isn't that different from what you just described. In large parts of Vietnam, it's not that different from what you just described. Yeah. Back to Iran. I know that Israel was super successful in taking out Iran. There's a podcast with Sam Harris that they interviewed an Israeli journalist. I don't know if you heard this. But apparently there was a meeting where all of the missile command brass, Air Force brass, they all met in one place in Israel bombed it and took out all of them.

And it turns out that this meeting was organized by the Mossad. Imagine this. All your top brass, all of the right people emailed to set up a meeting that was credible to go to this easily accessible place. So it's not like they all got a fake email and they showed up. The organizational people called the meeting, which was influenced by the Mossad, that had enough clout to get every single one of those very important people into a place that was vulnerable at that specific time. That kind of intelligence sounds fake. Here's what's important to understand about Israel. Israel is also an information warfare machine. So they love getting people to take the step too far

and think that all those people were in one place because of Mossad influenced. So it sounds like you're saying, shit, they're all in one place, go bomb them right now. And then they're like, what we're going to do is say that we organize this whole thing. Oh, that's so smart. Correct.

That's almost better. They have the intel to know that the meeting is going to happen. But then when they actually release it, they're like, let's go ahead and tell everybody that we orchestrated it too. So next time anybody calls a meeting, they're like, last time, my superior died. How do you know it's not Israel?

Remember, we were just talking about how misinformation and disinformation is really all, about getting the other people to spend more resources. Well, if it costs you $0 to go ahead and make a public statement, yeah, we bombed them and we orchestrated the meeting. And meanwhile, everybody else is spending tons of resources like... Trying to verify the next meeting is not a trap. Actually, I love that take because that's even better somehow than that we're going to...

No, we organize the whole thing from start to finish. It's... Or did we? But what you need to do is make sure that you never have a meeting again, and everything you do is 16 stories underground, which is much harder for you to execute. This is, again, we talk about M.O. Israel's M.O. is to do incredibly brazen acts of violence and take public credit for it and then air footage and everything else because they know that there's a fear-mongering element that deters its enemies even further. Whereas China goes in and just breaks everything and they don't really care if they get caught and Russia doesn't want to get caught. The United States also doesn't want to get caught, which is why the United States denies everything. I'm pretty sure that we saw U.S. airplanes over that site. Nope, that wasn't us. There was somebody else.

They painted their airplanes to look like us. We deny everything. It's why our politicians are the way they are. That's so interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But you're right. You look at the pager thing where they took out half of Hezbollah. And of course, it's all on security cameras so they can verify the whole thing.

Hezbollah is probably using smoke signals by now to communicate with each other, right? Think about when they released footage of their own drone pilots inside Iranian territory. First of all, there's no way to verify that those drone videos were coming from inside Iran. But they didn't care. They were like, let's put it out there. We're going to even have somebody recording clandestine footage. You think the Navy SEALs have somebody in there on like an iPhone? Like, wait a second, before you breach?

It's a GoPro. Yeah. You know what, though? I will say, I do know some special operators. Apparently there are body cams and stuff for probably breakdowns later. It would not surprise me at all if they were like, that video is pretty sweet. We should put that on the internet. That's pretty, that was a hell of a shot.

It's only a matter of time. This reminds me of that information warfare. Remember when Ukraine had put the false tops on the trucks and put the drones in there? And they lifted the drones up. If you all haven't seen this, you got to YouTube this. Ukraine basically spent, I don't know, years orchestrating these containers that had a false compartment. And inside the compartment were drones that had explosives.

And as soon as the truck drivers from Russia picked it up and drove them deep into Russia, these drones took off and landed in Russian airfields and took out, I don't know, a billion dollars or two worth of advanced military hardware. But they videotaped from what I understand how this went down. And that was as good as the victory of blowing up all the hardware or close to it, Right? Because you see that and you go, guess we shouldn't count them out just yet? Holy smokes. This is like a Mossad level intelligence and military success. And from Ukraine, the country that we thought was a bunch of shrubs in trusses. It's not coming from Ukraine. It's coming from all the allies that help Ukraine. I see. Because who's going to bake that idea and then be able to test it? But they can bake it and give it to Ukraine and test it just fine. And if the whole thing goes tits up, yeah. Ukraine tried it. But if it works and now there's a reason for video footage, Because now, whether it was the French or the British or the Americans, they're like, oh, now we know that shit works. We can start creating vehicles that we only sell abroad that have false compartments in the bottom.

To your point, Russia's checking every single truck now for a false compartment. Correct. Spending a bunch of time and money. Yeah. So the imports of goods during wartime for them just skyrocketed in terms of time and effort. Yeah, it's really interesting. Now that you've pointed that angle out, you can almost see it in every operation, right? The value of causing friction for your enemies is just huge.

Absolutely. So there was this famous Soviet document that was collected during the Cold War, early on in the Cold War, shortly after World War II. And in that Soviet document, it said that one of the key things that Soviet intelligence operatives should be doing to their American intelligence assets, they should be encouraging their American assets to have as many meetings in the building as possible, as many meetings in their daily life as they can have. Because the KGB was like, the more Americans are in meetings, the less anything is getting. getting done. So it was actually like a KGB, like seal of approval, hey guys, call more meetings and do whatever you can to encourage more meetings and more communication in your office because we know it's going to slow the Americans down. It's going to slow them down militarily. It's going to slow them down in their communications and telecommunications infrastructure. And now look at us. Now we're fucking meeting hungry culture. A whole corporate culture was dictated by the KGB isn't that crazy? We're going to need a Zoom to talk about our planning meeting for our Q3 objectives meetings. So are we having a meeting to talk about a meeting where we're going to talk about meetings?

Correct. Correct. But it's an important meeting. So be there. Yeah. It's all hands. It's funny. I did a call with a really, really, really big multinational corporation that everyone has heard of. They're trying to acquire my show for their network. And the initial call took two weeks because there were like 27 people that needed to be on it. And finally they were like, screw it. Only 22 of the 27 can make it, but it's as good as it's going to get. So we had the meeting. And we talked about basically nothing that couldn't have been done in an email. And they said, we need another call in three weeks. We're going to do this. It took about eight or nine weeks for that to happen. There were 150 or 100 something people on the invite. And they finally gave up and two people

showed up to the final thing. And I was like, so did the cost of time, the delay only to have almost nobody show? What benefit was there to that? And I remember one of the guys is like, ask me that when we're not on a company Zoom call and I'll tell you. And I saw him in a meeting and I was like, do you guys always do that? And he's, you'd be surprised. There's a lot of that. Holy shit, your whole day is just meetings. I get most of my work done after work. Unbelievable. I know we're running out of time. I would love to plug the book at the end, too. Plug it right now because otherwise I might run up the clock. How's that? Yeah, my wife and I just released our CIA memoir. It took three years to get it through the CIA approval process. But it was important to us to go

through that process so that we couldn't be held criminally liable. So you don't go to prison? Yeah. That's a good idea. really exciting because our book, Shadow Cell, our memoir was an instant New York Times bestseller. We just found out the news a few days ago that we hit the New York Times bestseller list. It was really big deal for us because the book was such a labor of love. It was such an interesting project that we were dedicated to to have it reached the kind of success so quickly that it has already reached is really exciting. So I always want to encourage people.

If you want to know what modern spycraft looks like, if you want to understand what a memoir looks like that CIA doesn't want released, go check out our book, Shadow Cell, because CIA deemed that book classified in 2022, and then only after threatening them with a First Amendment lawsuit did they choose to allow it to be released to the public in 2025? Full of stuff you're not supposed to know. According to CIA, yeah. All right, we'll link that in the show notes. I want one more little juicy question than we can finish in the next nine minutes.

You're one of the only people that has a rational, in my humble opinion, take on why China is not ahead of us in every area. I think a lot of podcasters and journalists for that matter, they're out of their minds. China has a speed on this, this and this. And my only conclusion is they watch the social media where people are like, there's a train going through the building. We don't have that in America. And it's this the, so the rubric for whether you have a modern society

and you're living in the future is how many LEDs are on the outside of a house. Like, I don't get it. But people really, they go crazy for this. And I think China has a lot of cool advanced stuff in major cities, tier one cities. But I don't believe, and I don't think this is cope, I don't believe they're ahead of us in most areas. And you're the only other person I've seen that kind of agrees with me. That's not like doing it for political reasons.

It's a shame, too, because I love China. I had a chance to travel there and study there when I was with the military. I love a lot of China, but I do not like the Chinese government. And I do not like the Communist Central Party. There's all sorts of issues there. And it's those issues that also prevent them from being the juggernaut that we're also afraid of. Yes, because they're authoritarian, they can make decisions quickly. And yes, they can copy and mimic and do all sorts of things that we can't do very well.

But that's their strength. When it comes to their weaknesses, they can't innovate. Like we can innovate. They can't build ideological relationships like we can build ideological relationships, which makes everything they do very pragmatic. And then that just breeds this culture inside of nobody really wants to brief bad news up and nobody wants to disagree with the boss, et cetera, et cetera. That doesn't create the kind of conflict and,

constructive criticism that you need to actually get better. So even politically and economically, they're dealing with completely different unique issues than our different unique issues that are plaguing them from their currency to their property and real estate issues. We have it bad enough with 330 million people. They have all of that times 1.6. I think they're at 1.4 or 1.5 billion people. Billion.

So if we have 330 million Americans, that times. times three is still only 75% of what China has, right? It's insane how huge they are. So think about their population challenges, their taxation problems, their infrastructure problems. They are growing. But I had this great friend of mine who explained to me once, the United States spent 50 years laying telephone wire so that we could connect everybody by phone. China was basically living out of ditches while we were laying telephone wire. And then we invented cellular networks. All China did was they joined us at the same time that cellular networks were invented. So they don't really have 50 years worth of laid telephone line.

It's interesting. Other countries have this problem too, where it looks really great. And it is. They have all this modern connectivity. My friend went to Africa. He said, I have better service in Uganda than I do at home. What happens when that goes down? There's nothing else there.

That's it. That's the thing that we need to understand about China. Like they don't want war, even more than we don't want war, because they know their vulnerabilities very well, which is why they're happy to play the long game and they're happy to continue to just peck away at our ideology because they understand that the biggest vulnerability for America is Americans, that otherwise we're wealthy and we're healthy

and we are unstoppable. So it's like the fat kid that has everything that he could possibly want. His biggest risk is just his health. Diabetes, yeah, exactly. Well, there's no better metaphor for the United States than a fat kid. than a fat kid. Seriously, a fat kid on an iPad. That's right.

Fat kid on an iPad. Guilty. Thanks for coming. It's how I spent the show. Thanks for coming in, man. Awesome as usual. I appreciate you, man. Thank you.

That was a good episode. Another one in the bag, man. I appreciate it. Holy moly. Thanks very much, dude. What kind of person breaks into systems for a living legally and uses those skills to catch online predators? Ryan Montgomery, one of the top ethical hackers in the game,

joins me to expose the dark web's ugliest corners and the tools hackers used to exploit vulnerabilities these most of us don't even know exist. I like to call myself a cybersecurity professional. I got a bunch of data from a pedophile website. I left where I was at and I went home, and I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. Obviously, I just knew that I needed to do something.

After I did some digging and I found my way into their server, I installed a few back doors and I'm going to take the identifying details, which includes their emails and usernames and more. It took, I guess, going viral a couple times for people to take me seriously, but law enforcement is involved now and things are being taken care of. I'm not going to stop until I make as much impact as possible. I have a skill set that I can use for good.

There's many ways for me to figure out who you are with just the tiniest detail. This is not just the teen chats. This is Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Xbox, Roblox, Minecraft. I can go on for hours. You'll be blown away at how quick it happened. So it's important for your kids to know

it's okay to come to you about this stuff. It's just important to make sure you know what your kids are doing and not just taking their word for it. I don't believe it's stoppable, but I believe that if you just let it go rampant and hope for the best, it's just going to continue to get worse. I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking. I do know that I can offer my abilities and my network to do something about it on a large scale. You know, if I can help one kid, it's worth it. This is my goal right now to not only run my companies, which is a separate thing, but in the time. that I do have available, focusing it all on this.

If you are a member of one of those sites, I guess you have any reason in the world to be scared. To learn more about hacker hierarchy, wild exploits, and why doing the right thing in cybersecurity can still mean living in the shadows, check out episode 851 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks again to Andrew for flying out here and doing this episode again in my kitchen. Actually, I like that guy. He's a personable dude. He's using his spy skills on me. He's charming me with his spy skills on me. skills. All things Andrew Bustamante will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. Very practical, very specific, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, in under two minutes. It is a very practical and short read almost every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com.

I am at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, where the mostly not crazy people are. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Tadasidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested, in espionage, Epstein, Israel, or Ukraine, maybe even a little Iran sprinkled in there, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show

so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is brought to you by Gelt, your modern year-round CPA partner for business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, and high-net-worth individuals who want to keep more of what they earn. Look, taxes aren't just an annual chore. They're one of the biggest levers in building wealth. Gelt helps you pull that lever strategically combining elite CPAs with intuitive tech to create personal. personalized tax strategies that work for you and your business. Here's the difference. Gelt works with you all year, not just around tax season.

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