CIA Spy on Trump, China’s Takeover, & Israel-Palestine
03:20:50 Share

Is it part of your jurisdiction working for CIA to put holes in Kennedys? First of all, we don't call them jurisdictions. We call them authorities. What a strong denial. I want to tell you why I think you're still part of the CIA. I am not a part of CIA. It's not true. It's not called the CIA. It's just called CIA. I'm going to get you to call it the CIA. Then I win. Then I'm the super sponsor.

There's a presidential election coming up in November. There is no good outcome. Trump said, you guys are a bunch of idiots who keep calling me a Russian spy. All of a sudden, that called into question whether CIA even knew what they were doing. He chooses not to use CIA? Private intelligence can do things that national security can't do. Aliens, UFOs, real or not.

UFOs are real, but they're not alien. It's us. - Did you ever kill somebody? - I cannot answer that question in great detail. I can't say that I've never intimately killed anyone. What I think is gonna happen is Zelensky and Netanyahu are gonna get political sanctuary asylum in the United States. The United States can't let Zelensky die. Everybody knows Putin wants to kill him. - What do you think happens? - In Israel? - Palestine?

- Alex thinks Chinatown is a cell. - Yeah, six cells. - You're right. - What the ? - Chinatown is a diaspora of Chinese immigrants, so the intelligence community plants its own operatives inside that community. But keep in mind that the CIA-- - The what?

He's my asset. He's my asset. What's up, everybody? And welcome to Flagrant. And today, I'm very excited because we're going to expose. Yes. That's a good YouTube title. You got it right. Expose. Reveal. Secrets. Secrets. A CIA operative who's still working for the CIA, as I say. But we'll get to that in a little bit. We got Andrew Bustamante. Hey!

Thank you so much for coming in. Okay, we have to do this thing, which you've said this on every podcast that you've been on, but I do want to just set a baseline understanding. What is... Are you wearing leather? It's fake leather. That was crazy. I didn't even notice that. You know a little something. Okay, okay. We had special guests. I had to dress up. Fair enough. Look how casual his is. I know. I was going to say, I'm rocking some

Tiger Stripes sweatpants. You didn't get the memo, man? You look leather today, bro. All right, all right. We do have to understand a few things here, right? What the fuck is going on? That took me for a loop. Okay. You dress like Janet Jackson, dude.

Okay, we need to know what is the CIA? I know you've answered this on every single podcast, but I do think it's important. What is the CIA? CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. Yeah, and why do you say CIA? You never go the CIA. So the CIA is something that is commonly, it's a misconception by the American public. It's not called the CIA. When you talk about it as an acronym, it's just called CIA, Central Intelligence Agency. Okay. The CIA is...

It's silly grammatical stuff, but then it makes it sound like CIA itself is a word. It's not, it's an acronym. So if you're trying to act like you're not part of the CIA, you call it the CIA. Bingo. But if you're casting with Slip and then you know they're a fucking spy. Correct. I'm nice, dude. I'm fucking nice. If you want to know if somebody is part of the Brotherhood, then you call it the agency.

Because there's only one. So you just called the agency. You're part of the agency. There's only one CIA, though, so it is the CIA. I mean, I'm not going to argue with you if you want to keep calling it the CIA. Okay.

Right? But I know... That was a good trick right there. That was a good idea. I know. When I talk to somebody and I want to see if they actually know what they're talking about, they say the agency. Okay. So, okay. CIA. What is it? CIA is the national security arm for the United States that collects foreign secrets. Okay. So we don't collect domestic secrets, which means secrets inside the United States. We are charged with only foreign secrets. The FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, collects secrets inside the United States. Okay. Now...

Is it part of your jurisdiction when you're working for CIA to put holes in Kennedy's? Because that doesn't feel international. That feels like really national. So you bring up a great point right out of the gate. So first of all, we don't call them jurisdictions. We call them authorities. Yeah, yeah. So inside. Wow. That's what you're wrong. What a strong denial. This is good. This is good.

We don't call them Kennedys. We call them jelly. I have an issue with what you just said. We have authorities, and authorities define what we can and can't do. Okay. That's what makes us different than, say, police jurisdictions. What can you not do? Because it feels like you guys can do— Yeah, yeah, yeah. Central Intelligence can do a lot because the agency is charged with foreign secrets, and foreign secrets don't violate American citizen rights. Hmm.

Which is why when you hear about like, oh, you guys sell drugs in the Middle East and you guys do this and you guys do that and you run cocaine, like, fuck, yes, we'll do whatever we need to do if it keeps Americans safe. Gotcha. But you can't do any of that stuff here. Correct. Now, there's also an important divide that happened in 2001, 9-11. I mean, right here, we're in New York. We all know, we all remember that day well. Prior to 9-11, you had a very different CIA than what you had after 9-11. How so? Because of the 9-11 commission. Okay. Keep in mind that 9-11 happened because CIA fucked up.

CIA and FBI dropped the ball. You know what we're talking about, right? Why would he know? Why would he know? Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. He knows because he's saying yes. Now I'm nervous. Yeah, I thought that too. Did you know about it? Yeah.

Yeah, well, I didn't know about it. I wasn't in CIA. But they had leads that there were people planning an attack on the World Trade Center. They had information and they just chose not to act on it. Whether it was they didn't think it was serious or whether it was maybe this will help us get power. Who knows? Let your own theories run wild. Exactly right. But that is exactly right. Yep, it's exactly right. And he even said he's not smart.

You can't be 100% right on that one. Yeah, what the hell? It feels like you would need insider information to be 100% right on that one. That's the inside information. They knew it was happening. I know CIA. He looks like them, too. All I'm saying is you have now referenced CIA twice without using the. I did that for you. I appreciate you.

So the 9-11 Commission, the September 11th 9-11 Commission, which was published in 2003, was written at the behest of Congress. And it was in that very public report where all of what you're saying was referenced. That FBI and CIA, you read, power to you, man. FBI and CIA separately had all the information they needed to prevent 9-11. And? They didn't share the information with each other, which meant that they couldn't put all the pieces in the right order. But isn't that the CIA's fault? Nope.

That is a failure of what the 9-11 Commission identified as no overarching national intelligence directive. I thought that's what the CIA is. CIA is technically it's a central intelligence agency, which means it is the hub of intelligence. It was never the hub of decision making for where intelligence goes. Ah, so it collects all the intelligence. It collects from the FBI. It collects from the NSA. It collects from all these other different organizations. But it doesn't disseminate it to the people that need to...

And it doesn't prior, it used to prior to 9-11, it did not prioritize it correctly either. So you're part of CIA, you're part of FBI. Who do you, who do you as CIA think has the best information? You think you do. So when he sends you a report that says some shit's going to happen, you're like, ah, it's just not going to happen. I got my intel. My intel is better. I want to get into, that's something I want to get into, but continue on this real quick. Continue making this point. Okay. So what changes after 9-11? So I want to get into. After 9-11, Congress basically comes in and says CIA,

The blood's on your hands, FBI, the blood's on your hands. You both failed America because you are continuing to prosecute intelligence like it's the Cold War. And you've ignored terrorism. You've ignored the development of authoritarian regimes. You've dropped the ball. So now we are going to step in and force you to evolve. So then from there, there was the birth of the National Director of Intelligence.

and an overarching authority for all the intelligence community that now does have the jurisdiction or the responsibility of saying, CIA, you must listen to FBI. You must prioritize this. You must do that. Instead of kicking information to each other and ignoring it, they have to go to this overseeing board and the overseeing board dictates what actions. Correct. Who? That's the national director of intelligence. Who appoints that person? Are they appointed the president?

And can the president appoint a new one every new president? Correct. I don't believe it. Okay. I don't believe that we are going to allow a new dude to come in, set up shop every four years, maybe every eight years, and expect that company to function properly. That's not how companies function properly. McDonald's wouldn't function like that. Exxon wouldn't function like that. He could be a figurehead. Well, that's what I'm trying to say. You need long-term vision. Mm-hmm.

This is what I hoped the CIA was doing. I hoped that the president of the United States was a figurehead and that you guys were actually keeping the fucking train on the tracks. So you're thinking about CIA as a company. CIA is a federal. I'm going to get you to call it the CIA today. Then I win. Then I'm the super spy. CIA is a federal government organization. So stop thinking of them like Exxon and think of them more like the local DMV.

When was the last time you went to the DMV? Yes. That's terrifying. That's what people need to understand, right? It is a well-intentioned institution, but it is still a government organization. It's run like the DMV. It is not run like Shell Oil. Because we think of them as not even having the best intentions, but incredibly effective, nefarious intentions, hoarding power. And you're saying they're kind of just a bumbling government organization. Look at the larger government overall right now. See, I don't subscribe to this.

I'm really glad you don't subscribe to this. I don't believe it. Because could you imagine the chaos if Americans actually were like, what do you mean CIA is just like the presidential elections? If people actually understood. I don't think it would cause any more chaos. To me, like the CIA, Americans watch Homeland. They're like, yeah, that's what they do. And then they stop terrorism. I don't think they actually really care. You are, you know,

You're deep in. You're entrenched. So I think that you inflate its importance to the average American. I think we think it's important and then we check out. No, but we need to feel safe. We need to feel safe if we feel. I'm not saying it doesn't make us feel safe. What I'm saying is we don't think about it. No.

It's never on. The average American spends a point to 20 seconds of their years thinking about the CIA outside of a TV show. A very powerful tool for any politician to be like, yo, you know, you guys aren't safe. OK, the CIA, CIA, whatever. They're actually kind of bumbling idiots. I can come fix that. You have no idea how shoddy things are. I've been there. That is a super. Do you really think they're bumbling idiots? I mean, you work. No, I don't.

think they're bumbling idiots. I think they're a well-intentioned government organization. I think that the challenge that CIA has is that it has a lot of very smart, very hardworking, very dedicated heroes who work as worker bees. And then you have political appointees and career-seeking govies who become the senior level managers. So when you are in government, you only have one track to promotion, and that is to find

further entrench yourself in government. When you're in the commercial sector, when you're like a corporate executive, you actually want to broaden and challenge the status quo because you might work for Shell this year, but then next year you might get hired by Exxon. And then next year you might get hired by Amazon. And then next year you might get hired by Google, right? So you want to constantly broaden and challenge the status quo. Whereas in government, you have one way to promotion.

entrench yourself in the status quo. And so bureaucracy inevitably just takes over and clogs it up. Correct. So that's what ends up happening. And those are the people who are in charge.

And then you've got this whole workforce at the bottom that has to decide, what is my career path going to be? Do I entrench to try to climb or do I bail the fuck out? And what you've seen ever since the Trump election in 2016 is a mass exodus of people in the intelligence community because Trump challenged the intelligence community, just like you said, right? And once he challenged it and said, you guys are a bunch of idiots, you keep calling me a Russian spy, right?

All of a sudden, that called into question whether CIA even knew what they were doing. Okay, I want to talk about the Trump thing. Trump steps in and he chooses not to use CIA for his intelligence. Right. He openly says that? Correct. And then who does he use? He commercializes. He hires commercial intelligence. Wow, that was my next. For example, do you know James Baker? Yes. So James, who used to work for the CIA, like you, is

used to work and now he has his own private intelligence firm. So would Trump, I love James, by the way, great guy. We call them for the Netflix show. 100% still works for the CIA. 1000%. I love you. He's so fucking talented. Like he can host a comedy show. He'll be on Fox News hosting a show, but 100% still works for the CIA. And that's like the best position, which I think you also do. But we'll get to that in a second. Now he would hire him and then get his intelligence from him and his company. Right. Right.

So the reason that that works, the idea of commercialized intelligence or private intelligence is what it's called on the inside. Private intelligence is a successful business model because private intelligence can do things that national security governance can't do. For example? The war on drugs. It's very difficult for you to get congressional funding to fight the war on drugs doing things as inefficiently as the federal government does them.

You got to send troops. You got to get orders approved. Like there's a huge cost that comes with all the administrative stuff of getting the government to do something. In the commercial sector, you basically write them a check for $2 million and say, hey, we need secrets about cocaine drug lords. And then the company does whatever they need to do to get those secrets. So maybe they hire five former SEALs, two former Colombian special forces, two former Mossad agents.

And they go in, and maybe they do good things, maybe they do bad things, but they definitely deliver secrets, right? Wow. And that's where private intelligence becomes powerful. And Donald Trump... It's the efficiency of privatization. Donald Trump knew that and took advantage of that. And as a result of that, he essentially showed in four years that CIA was super powerful, but can be replaced by private intelligence. Okay, so then you... I think it was on Lex's pod you were speaking about this a little bit. And then...

He also limited something. He limited security clearance for people who would leave CIA. This is important. This is important because this was one of the things that Trump did very well that he never got credit for. Mm-hmm.

The way that you make money when you're a federal government employee is not being a federal government employee. Like 30 years and you're a senior ranking officer and you're making $160,000 a year. Yeah. Like that's not what people want to do with their life, right? A junior salesperson can make 250. So what ends up happening is you work those 30 years so that you can build a network and so you can have very high level clearances. And those clearances don't expire the day you resign. They expire with time.

So when you have a top secret clearance or a secret clearance, the thing that makes it expire is either you break a law and they pull it from you, or you don't engage in activity. You don't engage in a job where you use that access. As long as you keep using that access, it keeps being valid. The job is for the government, or can it be any job? It's a job for the government because the government is what defines classification. Got it.

making $160,000 a year, you retire from government. Well, now you have all the contacts of all the other offices inside the agency, contacts with FBI, NSA, DIA, NGA, right? You're connected to everybody.

So then Booz Allen Hamilton or Khaki or Mantec or any one of the big national security intelligence contractors, they can hire you, make you an executive vice president, pay you $400,000 a year. And they're essentially paying for your clearance. And what they're paying for is for your access. Mm-hmm.

To all these other agencies because of your network. So Trump shut that down because he was, there was like a brain drain, if you will. People were leaving the agency to go work in the private sector and go make money. And he was like, you're not going to leave the agency and take your clearance. So you can either stay here or you could leave, but you're not going to take that. And there was a second, there was a second reason to doing it. The other reason he was doing it was because he wanted to limit the competition.

of private intelligence firms outside of the firms that he was using oh so he was doing it to scratch their backs oh for sure so he was doing it to scratch their backs oh my god this is next level and then good reason okay so he's scratching the backs of his friends his friends uh allegedly let's just say have these intelligence companies what would you call them firms yeah private intelligence private intelligence firms and

So they already have these employees that have clearance? Yes, and there's also employees that don't have clearance, right? But it's all about, at the end of the day, I know this might shatter your trust in the federal government, it's still a good old boys network. It's still who do you know, who do you trust, and who's going to be loyal to you when people turn on you. That's still very much how the government works. And that's just...

because it's hard for the government to evolve. It's not like the commercial sector that can evolve very quickly. - It has to. You said there was a mass exodus when

Trump came into office. Is it the older people that are like, the rules or the younger? It's the younger generation. And why? They were leaving. The younger generation is leaving because they're asking themselves the question. What's my future? Wow. And my future is in the private sector. I'm out of this. I can make more money. I'm not going to be able to take my clearance with me. I'm going to make no money for 30 years and then not even have the balloon when I retire of private security. And what does their career look like? Their career looks like serving a federal government

that can't tell its ass from its elbows. - Yeah. - Right? And don't forget too, that from 2016 to 2020, during that Trump administration, he didn't trust the CIA. So when he doesn't trust the CIA- - For good reason? - For mixed reasons. Some were good, some were bad, but keep in mind that the CIA falls under the executive- - What'd you say? The what? - Got him!

God! Well done. He's my asset now. This is my asset now. Is that how it works? Let's go. Keep going. That's all it is. He's like a Pokemon? That's all it is, bro. You slowly get them to, what does it get on board? What does it do? There you go. There you go. Oh, fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got worn down. I got worn down. That's it. That's it. But you keep in mind that CIA. CIA. Right? CIA falls under the executive branch. There's three branches of government, right? The executive branch, the boss is the executive, the president. So when the CIA, when CIA can't-

the boss doesn't fund them. Mm.

So when the boss says, I don't need you, I'm going to cut your funding, now all of a sudden your operations get cut. Everybody who's working there can't get those sexy operations that they need in order to get their promotions. Now, is that system built? No, no. Because in 20 years' time, all the government agencies are going to be shit because we're not getting any of the best young talent. But think about it real quick. The system then is set up not to bring forth the best data and intelligence, but to bring

It's built to satisfy the boss and satisfying the boss might not keep America its safest because sometimes what the boss wants to be true is not. If there's an imminent threat and the boss doesn't care about it, but the CIA or CIA is like, yo, this is what it is and you need to fucking listen and you need to fund this.

This is a big problem. Now the CIA fucks up when you lose the confidence of the boss. So this is a huge issue. It's a massive issue. This is why you hear so many people, every election cycle, you will hear people talk about intelligence reform.

This is what they're talking about. Question though, sorry. Can you just finish that idea, the intelligence reform, what that means? So intelligence reform is the idea that we need to reform the way that we do intelligence. Everything from our promotions process all the way through to our sharing process, to our analytical process, because what the American people trust to be a functioning, efficient vehicle is

We actually call it on the inside, we call it a sandbox. A sandbox. Because when you put kids into a sandbox, the most important thing is that they play nice with each other. It's more important than them being creative. It's more important than them doing anything else. And if you guys aren't getting along...

Then we get 9-11. Right. That's right. And the whole getting along thing becomes a cultural challenge because now if you're a 27-year-old go-getter and you don't get along with the old guard, then they're going to start holding you back and then you never develop until you just punch out. And that's good for them because they want more

of the old guard. Right. Real quick on this, on this reform, how would you reform it? And this might be a longer question, but how do you create a system that puts forward the most efficacious data and intelligence while at the same time doesn't alienate the boss of the organization, which is the president? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there has to be a, there's checks and balances already in place. That's how the federal government, that's how our democracy works with checks and balances. Yeah.

Being able to institute checks and balances where, let's say you're a junior officer, you make a recommendation, your senior officer doesn't accept your recommendation, but there is some kind of documented process that you made, what you said, what you said, right? Then no matter how the intelligence plays out in the future, it can actually be audited back to what the junior officer said.

Then you end up having this thing. You have an incentive for junior officers to say, this is what I'm assessing. And you have an incentive for senior officers to listen to them. Because it's documented. It's on the record.

But what happens now instead is literally senior officers change junior officer reports. Wow. So I will write a report. I will send it to my middle manager. My middle manager will rewrite my report with what he thinks is important on top of what I did before it goes to you. And what's the justification for that? Because there must be. Because the idea is that the more touch points, the more it will be refined by people who have more experience. So they think it's refined, but in reality, it's a game of telephone.

And what happens with the game of telephone is the information changes by the time it reaches them. And there's no accountability at the top. And then you remember there was the divide in culture. So once you get to like a senior level officer, they were raised in the school of Cold War. So now we're talking terrorist reports. It gets passed to a middle manager who's got a little bit of terrorism experience, a little bit of Cold War experience, but it ends up in the hands of a senior manager who's really only Cold War. Can you tell us? In 2000, when you're getting this information, we're not thinking terror is a real threat. That's over there.

Can you tell us what Cold War, but real quick, just Cold War, what does that mean? Cold War. The difference between Cold War intelligence and terrorism. When you remember the Soviet Union and you remember it was America versus Russia. Of course. That's Cold War. No, no, I understand the period, but like why would there be a different way of interpreting intelligence for the Cold War versus terrorism? Because people weren't dying in the Cold War.

In the Cold War, it was cold. There was no conflict. So there's not an imminent threat. So you're learning about, hmm, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. Imminent threat. Those are the two words. Yes. So with terrorism, we're immediately reacting or 9-11. We're immediately reacting. Bomb goes off. Whereas Cold War, these are nations jockeying for position via, I guess you would say, hmm,

Economic and military growth. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's economic growth. I guess and military growth too. Ah, so you can be a little bit more relaxed during a Cold War because you're not protecting your people in that instance. We call it strategic, not relaxed. You can be more strategic because things don't happen at a tactical pace. It's a little more chess. It's more chess. Yeah. Got it. Okay, sorry, go. My overarching question, what I'm hearing is this is very scary.

To me, privatizing intelligence probably will be a better solution in general. And this ties back to what we had Vivek Ramaswamy on the podcast. And he basically was like, I just want to cut a bunch of government jobs. People who I think are small government, they might have distrust. For me, it's just government has no incentive to be efficient. There is no profit margin. Whereas a private organization, we always got to be efficient. We always got to be the best. Our business is literally on the line. We will go broke. I don't see a real problem. And you can tell me where I'm wrong.

I don't see a real problem with let's just privatize intelligence because that's probably going to run the most efficiently. The real problem with privatizing intelligence is then you open intelligence up to marketing. Yeah. Marketing or promises with no meat. Yeah. So really what needs to happen is checks and balances, like we were saying before, where there's a government held accountable for the intelligence, but the highest performing bidder

is the private intelligence firm. Think of it like a plumber. The reason you don't do the plumbing in your house, I assume, is because you can send out a request to five different plumbers. You can get five different estimates. You can have them come in and make five different assessments. And the one that you trust the most is the one that you try. And if he fucks up, you never hire him again. That's essentially how it should work because you're the boss. It's your house. So we need an intelligence organization that is federally controlled.

To say the quality of intelligence has to meet this standard. And you think if we privatize, it becomes more about marketing than quality? If you go 100% privatized. Yeah, look at news. Like you privatize news, you're not getting the real news. You're getting the most monetizable news. And the exact same thing would happen with an intelligence. They're like, what does the president want to hear? Okay, we're going to go find it. WMDs. We're going to find the WMDs. It's like there's certain news organizations that are like, hey, there's some racism out there. Find it.

I don't want to harbor this too long, but again, that is exactly what the government did. The government said there's WMDs. There were no WMDs. I just don't think this is as scary as we're making it. Well, now I want to get into that point, which is how do you tell, or maybe the better question is, is it possible, because this is what you always hear, that there are corporations that are using the CIA almost as like a private military for their interests? Is there any truth to that?

I wouldn't say that. So the fact that private agencies are using CIA resources like a private army, there's no direct evidence that that is what's happening. Hey, I got a banana factory in Nicaragua. Go start a coup because the current administration is not letting me sell my bananas. So that's not the corporation that makes that decision, but that is the lobbyists who can lobby the policymakers who are federal lobbyists.

federally appointed or voted in, they're the ones that can then direct the CIA. And they're lobbying whom? They're lobbying the director that was appointed by the president or they're lobbying the president-

And the congressman. And then, oh my God. The president and the president's advisor panel. Because here's the other thing to keep in mind. So the CIA is getting all this shit and they're just doing what they're told. So it's really the politicians that should be getting the shit. Right. I thought the CIA was acting on their own. Well, they did in certain circumstances. Pre 9-11. Pre 9-11, they had a lot more autonomy than they do now. Because the 9-11 commission came out and said, you guys have way too much autonomy. Right.

So going back to your whole point about did they shoot JFK? Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows because they had so much autonomy. You fucking know, dude. Did they do it or what? If I knew, I would be a lot richer than I am right now. Why? What would you do with that information to make so much money? I would find a way to prove it, and I'd be the first person to ever expose the truth with the proof. What about Abraham Lincoln? What?

It's another president that got shot. You got a thing for this. It's only a couple of them that got shot. I'd like to figure it the fuck out. Was the CIA around in 1864 or whatever? It was OSS, dude. Yeah, yeah. Ooh, you know. Okay. Pony Express. Pony Express. But no, I'm not curious about why he got shot. I want to know if he was gay. You guys would know that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You guys had the intelligence. Was Abe Lincoln gay? I don't know. CIA didn't exist. OSS didn't exist. Back then, it was, I don't even know if the federal marshal. CIA doesn't have gaydar? Yeah. We need that, dude. They have gaydar because they're recruiting for gay right now. What does that mean? They want to diversify into LGBTQ+, all the various. They want that kind of diversity because the government is trying to bring back young people.

because they lost all their young people from like 2000. Yeah, young people are gay. You can get in. Yeah, young people are gay for sure. But now, isn't there an advantage in having some gay operatives? Yes, not to the Middle East. Exactly, yeah. No, for real. They can see if they can fly.

It turns out we can't fly. It's a good experiment. No, no, but maybe you could use them as, I know that you say that in the CIA you guys don't use the honeypot thing, but like that would be advantageous. You go to the Middle East, you're like, hey, like I'm kind of half gay. And if there is some shek out there that is a little bit gay, he might feel a little bit more safe getting his cheeks rinsed by, you know, a guy who's not from there who's not going to tell anybody. Right. So here's the-

Here's the interesting thing that people don't understand about CIA. CIA has always been one of the most diverse workforces in America. You need to. Always. Because you're getting intelligence from out there. Yeah, you said that helped you get hired. Correct. I'm a brown dude. Yeah, you're actually good. I'm ambiguously brown. Yeah. So nobody knows where I'm from. I mean, I did not have good grades in college.

I was a bad officer in the Air Force. Like, I am not your Ivy League white guy that was pre-9-11 CIA. And that's just me. I mean, there are thousands of people that were recruited with me, diverse in every possible way. The thing was, it wasn't front and center CIA recruitment marketing that you have to be diverse, right? So what ended up happening was-

They would find people the way they find people. They would run them through a psychological profiling as part of your recruitment. And then they would find out like, oh, you're gay or you're straight or you're this, you're that or whatever else, right? You believe in two gods or whatever it might be. But they would run you through a profile and the profile would tell them

That you're crazy in a specific kind of way, that's very useful for collecting intelligence. Like, for example? So the reason I'm here today is because you were referencing something I mentioned once about psychological high-performance trauma. People who have a certain amount of trauma when they're kids become high performers later in life. What that's really saying is that we're a little bit crazy today.

but we're crazy in a useful way versus a person who has so much trauma that they end up being like PTSD. Well, I mean, even that's still useful crazy. That is. But I'm talking about the kind of crazy that ends up with somebody shooting to people, like somebody who goes in and starts shooting up a grocery store. That's too much crazy. So they're trying to find the right amount of crazy. Right. Okay. And that's useful. So it used to be that they could bring in people who looked normal, right?

Right. Who looked like they blended in and then find the ones that were useful. Crazy. Now they're basically advertising like, hey, we want you if who's gay. Yeah. Are you are they are they going, hey, if you're gay, you had enough trauma in your life that you might be crazy enough to be in the CIA. I mean, that's maybe that's that might be part of their strategy. But if you if you see them, they are openly advertising to you.

diverse groups. I would assume that is the world is more openly, you're more comfortable being openly gay, openly, whatever. So that person will fit in better with those groups. Whereas before in the fifties, maybe being gay was something you probably hid from the nineties, man, we hid from that stuff. But then there's also, don't forget it's a federal organization. So guess what? Federal organizations have to mandate diversity. So you have to have this many women. You have to have this many gay people. You have to have this many people who identify as females, but are actually, uh,

have male sex organs. And you have to... Like, there's all these government regulations, especially in a democratically controlled executive... Right. ...that whenever you... They dictate the requirements to CIA. You think it's a good thing or a bad thing for CIA? What do you think? I think it's a horrible thing for CIA. I mean, let CIA...

hire what they need to hire to execute the operations they need to execute for the threat of the day. Right. Because the threat of the day changes. Okay. You, I want to get back to the second, but you met your wife on the job. Correct. How hard is it to sleep with a CIA operative?

I mean, are you talking about how to actually sleep with the CIA operative or like when we say sleep with the CIA? No, I mean like she sees all your fucking tricks. Yeah. She's trained in the exact same way. That makes it really easy. What? That makes it super easy because the hardest thing to do is lie and hide. So that's like, I think about how much effort we all put into that. In my marriage, that effort's gone. There's no reason to even try.

And even worse than that is my wife can read my body language. So she knows when you're lying. So she knows when I'm uncomfortable. She knows when I'm sad. She knows when I'm stressed out. Like she actually knows it because she can actually read it. So it makes the fact that I'm like an open book to her super, super easy. And the fact that she's an open book to me is no, it's not stressful. Do CIA marriages tend to last longer? They last until the job starts to interfere with the marriage. CIA has one of the highest divorce rates in all federal government.

Because when CIA officer, when they marry each other, they reach that point in their career where it's like, are you going to choose career or marriage? And that usually for those people, they choose career. And then if you're a CIA officer who marries a non-CIA officer, you still reach the point in your career where it's like, why are you working all the time? I can't really tell you. And then it splits up. Oh, you guys could share what you were doing with each other or were there limitations? So my wife and I had the benefit of...

and marrying each other when we were in different offices, but then there was a change in operational priorities that actually put us into a tandem couple so we operated together. Wait a minute, you guys were partners on the job, so you were pretending to be married and married? We didn't even have to pretend. We just actually were married. But you were using pseudonyms, I assume. We were using a structure of cover legend that was more robust because we had actual documentation behind it.

Who's the easiest race to trick? Why'd you look at that? He drops his bombs under his breath. What'd you say? Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Who is the easiest race to trick? So if you're talking about ethnic race, so ethnic race is really difficult because it's based on education. Okay.

But when it comes to race as a subcontext of nationalistic pride, it's Americans. We're the easiest ones to trick. We're the most ignorant culture in the world. That's fire. Number one. We're always number one. Nobody can top us. And that's a big part of the reason. We're the best. We're the best. Tour announced. Edmonton, Canada, July 12th. Shane Gillis and I...

are coming up to do the Great Outdoors Fest. It's going to be wild. Tickets go on pre-sale Thursday, March 14th, 10 a.m. local time. So go scoop those up. The code is outdoors. Okay? Go scoop those up before they're gone. Get those immediately. Edmonton is going to be fire. Also, a bunch more dates for the Life Tour. First of all, thank you guys so much for selling out the shows in San Francisco. It's been crazy. HLM,

April 5th, Houston. Okay, we added more seats. Go get those immediately. April 13th, Charlotte. We added a second show at the Belk Theater. Go get those. April 18th, Nashville. The Opry House.

Go get those. That's going to be wild. And April 19th, the Moody Center in Austin. Go get those. April 20th, the second show in Phoenix. Get that as well. And June 9th, Vancouver, we are adding a fourth show. So keep watching.

Keep your eyes and ears peeled for the announce for that one. dandrusholtz.com for all the tickets. Go get them. Thank you guys so much. Let's get back to the show. Guys, only real announcement. Gaslit, my full special is on YouTube right now. Go watch it. If you have already watched it, watch it again. Tell your friends to watch it. Shouts to PrizePix for helping me pay for this special.

otherwise it would have cost me an entire mortgage, but we got to give them their views. So please check it out. Also, if you want Gaslit merch, it's available on my website. Only dates this Saturday, Dania Beach in Miami, April 11th through 13th, Tempe. But my merch, ticket dates, everything, even the full special, akashsingh.com, or just go to YouTube. I love y'all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And are you picking this up when you're

When you're on the job, are you like, do they teach you these things or these human behavior patterns that are like in a notebook that you're learning? Like, how do you get this kind of wisdom? So CIA trains through a method called just-in-time learning, also known as experiential training or experiential learning. So they'll teach you a concept.

academically, you'll learn a concept, slideshow or classroom or whatever else. And then you'll go out and you'll practice that concept in a scenario. So with an actor, with a role player. Oh, okay. You're not just going to a coffee shop and doing it. And then once you have shown that you understand the concept in a role play, you're in the real world doing it. And that's how you cement a skill before you come back. How much are these actors fucking with you in these? Like how tricky are they making things? Do they even know? Oh yeah. Are the actors blind in it?

They're not actors like you're thinking of actors. They're role players, meaning they are CIA officers who have already been through the ringer, and now they're helping to train the next generation. Is this at the farm? So, correct. The farm is our training academy, and there are multiple schools that we have. The farm is the most famous, but that's where we go through. That's the most practical training

real world example of our full experiential learning cycle. Could you give us an example of one of these exercises? Sure. So there's a, one of my favorite exercises is a free cup of coffee exercise. So you have to get a free cup of coffee, but there's certain stipulations. You can't ask for a free cup of coffee. You can't trade somebody

for a free cup of coffee. So, but you have to get a free cup of coffee. Can you be a woman? Many of them are born that way. Yes. So unfair. Okay, go on. So what you have to do is they will teach you like, here's how you create reciprocity and here's how you create interest and here's how you create value for somebody in excess of what a cup of coffee costs.

And then here's how you put yourself in a position with somebody where they connect on their own through some kind of, what was the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio? Inception. Yeah. The essentially real world version of Inception. It's called neuro-linguistic programming or something like that. That's what some people call it. But you're basically planting an idea. You're priming an idea. Yeah. So here's how you prime someone for an idea where they are like, I just had a great conversation with you. I want to buy you a cup of coffee.

Oh, what a fascinating way to break down human behavior. If I want a free cup of coffee, I give him value emotionally that is worth more than a free cup of coffee. Or intellectually. You give me value in the way that I care most about value. And then leave a gap where they can fill it. Now, the cup of coffee you're getting from a stranger, not from the person at the coffee shop? Correct. Okay. I thought you have to charm the barista. You can. If you find yourself...

Selecting a coffee shop where you don't have other people in line. Okay being in line with somebody as benefit as you got what we call time on target But when you go up to a barista, how long is a barista used to dealing with a customer 12 seconds How are you gonna create value in 12? Wow, okay. Is it far? Is it like Westworld where it's just like hundreds of people like just living Essentially, it's a base. The farm is a giant retired military base and

Instructors live there. Students live there. Contract personnel stay there for long deployments. It's a self-contained place. And they have total control over your entire student experience there, which is how you can go through this kind of training. So that coffee shop is an actual coffee shop. Outside. Outside. Like in the movie The Recruit, you have to go and get someone from the bar and get them out.

out wow what's the uh okay have you ever had like a really awkward exchange when you're trying to practice something that you learned yes we would call it in comedy bombing have you bombed okay tell me about a bomb I've bombed a lot okay tell me well hopefully not real yeah yeah you can't say that no no but yeah so I mean uh I've bombed at uh in in the real world it

Like with this coffee example, it took me six attempts before I got a free cup of coffee. And what happens the first attempt? What do you? So I think the first time I went there, I tried to talk to a barista. Okay. And I tried to just show up and be like, hey, I've got this thing. And I went looking for like a wallet, like, oh, I don't know where my wallet is. And she was like, well, I can't give you any coffee. Oh, you tried to guilt her. Yeah. I was just trying to be like, oh, it's not very effective. It's not part of the training. I hadn't internalized the concept yet. Right.

So then I went another time and I was like with a dude and trying to talk to a dude about stuff that I was not connecting with what he cared about. I was telling him about how cool I am. Okay, how'd you open up to him? What was the first line? This is awesome. What cup of coffee are you going to get? I don't remember the details, right? But it was basically something along the lines of like, hey, what are you going to get? And he's like, oh, I was going to get an Americano. And I was like, oh, a latte is the best. Oh.

You started talking about you. Yeah, you were more interesting than interested. Why? Yeah, yeah. Why do you want an Americano? What is it? It doesn't matter. What matters is that the concept would fail because... What I'm saying is if you asked him why he likes Americano, you're tapping into what he's feeling. You seem like the kind of guy that has lattes. And then be like, oh, what does that mean? Like you're giving him something. Correct, yeah. So what you learn from bombing is you learn how other people actually think

think and how they engage with the communication that you're sharing. You guys know more than anybody, right? Because when you start to engage with somebody about what they're interested in, now all of a sudden they don't see you as a threat or an outsider. They see you as like a friend. You make me feel good about me because you're asking me questions about me. I like you, right? I trust you because you're saying things about me that I also believe.

And that's how you get to a place where after six minutes in line and you get up to the front of the line, they're like, can I buy you a cup of coffee? - Do you remember the moment that you were asked? - Absolutely. - Okay, what happened? - How'd you do that? - So it was a much older lady. It was like a lady in her 50s. - You son of a bitch.

Okay, good. And we had been in line. You just whipped it out. You're like, you seen one of these lately? I'm like, mocha latte. Okay, good, good, good. So it was a much older lady and we were in line and it became very clear to me that she...

liked to talk, but nobody would talk to her. So then I just kind of sat there and let her talk. And everything that she brought up, her grandkids, her kids, her cats, her job, I just asked a follow-up question.

I was like, oh, that's interesting. That's, I mean, how did your kids feel about when you retired from accounting or how do you take care of three cats? Do you feed them canned food or do you feed them food that you make for them themselves? And it was just this natural conversation, natural from her point of view, where I was just being nice to her and learning about her, gave her a conversation, which she doesn't get because most people don't want to listen to a 55-year-old woman talk. And then by the time we got to the actual checkout at the register,

She was going to pay with a credit card anyways. So she was just like, you can put his coffee on mine. That's amazing. And the hardest part is all you want to do is fucking celebrate and get the hell out of the coffee shop and go back and be like, here's my free cup of coffee. But you got to say, no, no, no, no, please don't do it. You say, oh, that was very nice of you. And then you sit down and you have another two or three minutes of coffee with her because you've got to find an exit.

that is normal. Positive, amicable. Now, now, now, now. Okay. You get this success. You get this positive reward, right? Like you said, you want to just run back to the office and be like, yo, I did it. Is that ever met with a sense of guilt as I potentially manipulated another human being? I love that you're asking this question. I love that you're asking this question because

To get to the place where you're going through that level of training, you've already been psychologically assessed in a realm of...

antisocial behavior that makes it so that you know and the people who are training you know that you're not really wired to feel good about manipulating others. My follow-up to that is this. Before you came here, I was ready to ask you a bunch of, I don't want to even call them hard questions, but I had less empathy for you. Now that we've spoken a bit and I like you, I have a

Do I really want to ask him a question that he might get in trouble for answering by the CIA? And I'm starting to feel these sensations. And I know the thing that would make me feel that guilt is,

Is also the thing that I'm curious about. But you've charmed me, I guess, or maybe I enjoy talking to you or arguing with you about Europeans being stupid, which is what we both agree, ultimately. But I guess what I'm saying is that would be horrible for the CIA. I would be because I feel too bad. I get operative.

Yeah, horrible operatives. He just said it right. Bad field. You also can't keep a secret ever. Yeah, I'm not good at that. So, I mean, there's a couple of things there, right? Or I'm already part of the CIA and I'm tricking all of you. And that's even better. Disinformation or not. So, the thing to keep in mind here is that

is that there's an element of predictable behavior that's wired into us cognitively from childhood, right? So especially people who have had experiences with significant trauma as children also have a higher likelihood of developing antisocial disorders or antisocial behaviors

conditions as adults, because as children, we tried to fit in and we were rejected. So now as adults, we're like, fuck trying to fit in, but maybe I should still try to fit in because it's just easier if people think I fit in, right?

So there's an element of that. Do you feel that way about yourself? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, for me, I'm nice because I'm like... You're incredible at socializing. It's all, but it's all... You think it's manufactured? It's all kind of learned? No, it's real, but the difference is what happens on the back end, if you will, right? Like having a conversation, like you were saying you'd feel guilty asking me questions. I wouldn't feel guilty asking you questions because I've been conditioned...

through my childhood trauma to be kind of safe of feeling like, I'm gonna ask you a question, it's your responsibility if you answer or not. I was literally talking to my wife about this the other day, 'cause my wife is also a former CIA, so we have some very dark conversations. And the question was, if you were crossing a street and you were crossing a street at a time when you needed to cross the street to get away from some creepy dude who was standing at the street corner, but when you cross the street, you made another car swerve 'cause you crossed when it wasn't a crosswalk and that car crashed.

So you just saved yourself from creepy dude who's standing at the edge of the sidewalk, but that car crashed. Do you feel bad?

Yeah. I mean, my answer is no. I don't feel bad. What am I supposed to do? I don't feel bad because I self-preserved, got myself off the X. What a term that we say, getting off the X. The dude that crashed wasn't driving responsibly or else he wouldn't have crashed. And it wasn't your intention. And it wasn't my intention. You know, it's a crazy coincidence. Maybe not. I grew up in Dallas, born and raised. The spot where JFK is killed, you know how it's marked on the road?

Yeah. It's an X. It's on the road. Yeah. There's an X on the road. So off the X really makes me think you guys killed JFK. They left their signs. Now you're, you've studied people enough to know that like this guilt response is quite normal. Right. Right. In a socially conditioned person.

And you're saying you just feel none of it. I don't feel none of it. I just, it's, it doesn't hold me back. All right. So you feel it, but it doesn't stop you. Gotcha. Whereas like a sociopath, for example, might not feel it at all. Oh, so you're in a really advantageous situation because you could act on that feeling if you think it's the socially responsible thing to do. But if you need to get where you need to go, you won't. I act on the feeling when it is a, a personal benefit. Okay.

And that's the difference between a true sociopath, which is, remember how we were talking about antisocial disorders? Yep. A true sociopath is actually clinically called antisocial disorder, antisocial personality disorder, ASPD. Okay. So that's a clinical thing, just like a psychopath is a clinical thing on the antisocial personality disorder spectrum. Whereas what I'm talking about is useful...

elements of sociopathy, but still able to fit into a larger society. Yeah, my cousin's a psychiatrist. He always distinguishes between sociopath and having sociopathic tendencies. And he's like, there's a lot of really successful people who have sociopathic tendencies. What a true sociopath would make a bad agent.

Correct, because a true sociopath lacks empathy. Now, follow-up question somewhat related. To get the coffee! Somewhat related. Everybody, mental health is huge in every job. In the CIA, they're like, no, you're not doing no fucking therapy. We're not paying for anything. I don't want you to work on this part of you, or is there very specific therapy? How does that work? It's an abundance of therapy options.

because of exactly that reason. So to your point about how some very high-performing people have sociopathic tendencies, what else do very high-performing people have? Incredible vices. Substance abuse, sex.

Right. Pathological lying. They really find the right operative. Wow. This is a fascinating case study. You need to find someone fucked up enough where they don't feel the guilt so they can go out there and do things that do induce guilt on the average person, but not so fucked up that they're going to be doing cocaine, fucking girls nonstop to get over the guilt.

To get over the guilt or to cope with these feelings that you have I mean that is a small window and still have some level of remorse because the truth sociopath again Not a good agent. Do they need IQ therapy? Can you see a regular therapist or has to be another CIA? Yeah, yeah, it's a CIA therapist and then if you have if you have conditions that are too significant or too severe for us for a staff Psychologist then they have a group of cleared psychologists. Do they test prospects on their vices? Yes

Oh, great question. How do they do it? Well, there's two parts. First, there's a psychological battery that they put you through, like an actual psychological exam. And then from that, they're able to assess... Is this what we see in the movies or TV shows where they're asking you difficult questions and it's not the answer but how you react? That's a part of it. Can you give us an example of... Do you remember anything you were asked? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well...

I don't remember the questions in the actual exam, right? But I remember there were questions in the exam where they're giving you questions and they're giving you answers and there's no good answer. Like there's no safe answer, right? Like have you ever, I remember this one.

Have you ever participated in sexual deviancy? Yeah, that's a subjective experience. Like yes or no? Yeah. And I'm in like the last stages of applying for the CIA. Is this the question that's going to get me kicked out? All this pressure starts to build up. So what did I answer? Yep.

Better to say yes than to say no. And then they find out you're lying. And then they find out that I'm lying. So I'm just gonna say yes and hope for the best, right? Now, I was also able to say no to ever using any kind of controlled substance because I have never, and still to this day, even though I dream of the day that I get to, use some kind of controlled substance. Right.

So there are certain places where I get to answer yes and no throughout that whole exam. And then after the exam, I had an in-person interview with a psychologist who was going through the exam results. And that psychologist was like, can you please share with me your sexual deviancy? And I,

I imagine that part is even more important than what you actually put on the paper. I don't know because I'm not, I never got the insight into how they recruited us exactly. But now you're sitting here face to face with somebody and the one question that spiked you during the exam, they're asking you to your face. And again, you're like, I'm not much closer to being a CIA officer. So then you're like, well, I've always wanted to do this and I did this and I've tried this and I've tried that. And then at the end for me, the dude was like,

none of that's deviancy yeah it's like oh sweet so like two girls at once and sex parties none of that's deviancy he's like no and i was like how can you trust the intentions of the psychologist you have to trust that the intentions of the psychologist are to get enough people through the pipeline that they don't look like they're too harsh or too easy in their exam now i'm talking about when you're already hired you're part of the cia and you are seeking mental help

I would imagine that the CIA is looking out for its interests. Correct. And you can only speak to their therapists. How can you fully open up to somebody if you know that you're being assessed? So you've got, this is such a powerful question, man, because this is the crux of why I left CIA. I left CIA when I was 34 years old. I'm 43 now, you're 40 now, right? When you're in your mid-30s,

whatever you're doing, you're all in. You're all in. If you've got producers producing you, if you've got supervisors supervising you, if you've got whatever, you're like, everybody's in this together when they're all actually in it for self-preservation. So as a mid 30 year old,

It took the birth of my first child before I was like, I asked myself that exact question. It's like, oh, shit, why do I think that this person's out for my best interest when they're just out for their own career? And and I started to see that the process we were trained to get a foreigner to betray their country, to give us secrets, that same process.

was our professional development process. 100%. But you knew this at an early age, I know. Well, I knew this at 34 only because of the birth of my son. But you knew it before. I mean, you're assessing people all the time, right? But you're assessing people through a state of conditioning where you've been brainwashed to believe you're the best of the best of the best. Wow. You believe their propaganda, so to speak. Correct. Really? You didn't see it at all? There was no signs of it where you were like, I'm a little skeptical? The signs are in hindsight.

right because if you give me a sign when you're in a sign yeah when you're in it you're in it so a sign of a sign is like uh when you're in it for example when you're in it people are always promising you the next best assignment right oh so the carrot we need a carrot constant carrots right we need you to go here we need you to go there oh that dried up with that dried up and you're the person and you're always going you're like i'm gonna take it there were a lot of intelligent nazis that thought they were the good guys not to compare it but like there are good people that are doing things that are outside of what

you could say are their interest or objectively true because they bought it. So law enforcement, and there were times where it's just like, ah, this is just chain of command. This is just the way things are. And it wasn't until you're outside of it where he's like, yeah, that's a little fucked up. So if you have people that are extremely motivated by reward, you can just throw a carrot in front of them and they won't ask questions about anything else.

If they're driven by reward, yes. However, if there's four core motivations, I'm sure that's kind of what you're referencing right now, that CIA teaches us. What is it? Reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. We call it RICE. Reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. Four main reasons we all do anything. Reward is a strong one, but it's not the strongest. Ideology? Ideology.

So what you do is you recruit these people who are borderline sociopaths who have an incredible amount of loyalty. And then you tell them America has to be the safest. You're here to keep the homeland safe. You're the future of our country. Your children, your parents, everyone's going to be safer because of your homeland.

Humble service. Is that how ISIS recruits you? Same, same, same? It's slightly different. What ISIS does is they use something called a radicalization ladder because they're trying to create radicals. What CIA is doing is creating practicals. Ha, ha.

Right? A little bit different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, and careerists, careerists don't end their career by strapping a bomb to their chest, but that's how it radicalized. What is your greatest motivation, you think? So for me, my greatest motivation is ideological. But my ideology- Changed when you had that baby, didn't it? Everything changed. You know this, man. It just happened to you too. Yep. Everything changes when you have that baby. That makes sense. So now your ideology is I'm a family man. I'm a father. Before that, my ideology was always keep America safe.

Yeah. Now it's keep my baby safe. It is. And is it a liability to let operatives, to let operatives have families? This becomes a big part of the challenge in any...

CIA officers mid-career. When you start having children or when your children are in that age where they're the magic age, like you're not in the magic age. You're still in like the puddle of blood and guts. I'm here. I'm here. Smile. Give me anything. But once like, once you start tickling your baby and they laugh. It's over. Oh, fuck. It's over. You're corruptible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once that happens... I almost started crying when you said that. Jesus. Empath. Big empath. But once that happens, everything really does change. And then you start to see, I have to protect this baby. And then you also ask yourself, oh shit, the stuff I do, if somebody really wants to fuck with me, they're going to fuck with this. Oh, fuck. And then it just gets worse and worse. Sorry, go, go. That's a big part of what contributes to

people in their mid-career making different choices in their mid-career. Why they stopped competing to be at the top of the food chain. And they're starting to be happy with being middle managers because middle managers get forgotten, get overlooked. I can stay home most of the time. I'm never going to be like in the cutting edge of stuff. Okay.

Does the CIA, once they find out that you're about to have a family or even before that, maybe when you get married, they know what's coming next. Do they start adding protecting your children to the ideology of what you're doing at work?

As an effort to maintain. Right. I wouldn't say they manipulate it that way. What ends up happening is you've got, culturally, your supervisor is older than you, right? Physically, they're older than you. Right. And they're a supervisor, which means they've been there longer. So they've already made the...

compromises to stay in their career. So then that person starts to feed their compromises on to you. The person who chooses family over career has already left. So they're not even there. So there's nobody to even look towards. Yeah. So everybody within the institution, Hey, this is what it is. This is what you do. How did you see that? Same thing when you were in law enforcement, right? That is cool. This is the way it is. Just don't ruffle. So it's very important that those people in those positions are

are enjoying their life. Because if they're not, you're looking at what your life is going to be and you're going, I got to get the fuck out of here. Well, it's not important that they are enjoying their life as much as it's important that they are doubling down on the ideology that keeps them there. Or they're committed. In other words, if they're starting to fray in their commitment, everything else trickles down. Ooh, that's scary. The number one thing that you're looking for in any kind of government service is the idea of service before self.

Anybody watching this, anybody listening to this who's military, law enforcement, first responder, government, we all agree. It's indoctrinated into you from the day one. Service comes before yourself. And what makes somebody, what is the character buildup or personality trait buildup to have service before self? It's just a matter of commitment, like you said. It's understanding that your discomfort and your opinions and anything that makes you unhappy is less important.

than servicing the mission. - But is there a trauma that you go through that would induce this personality type? Is there something that happens in your life where you can predict this? - Sort of, yes. So when we go back to that whole idea of childhood trauma, the outcome of childhood trauma is that you need an invisible authority

to approve of you. And as long as, and the challenge for us all is growing up in that world, you never know who that invisible authority is. So you're always seeking it. It's like, I gotta get good grades. Somebody say it's good. All right, I gotta do good on- Yeah, go on stage and- Yeah, I gotta do good. Yeah, yeah. When you get into a government job and you have that same conditioning, the difference now is you know exactly what you have to do to do a good job. To get that authority to approve of you, all you have to do is say yes to the next mission.

There's no guessing anymore. Whereas most of the time we're like, how do I get my mom's approval? How do I get my dad's approval? How do I get... So it's a pretty easy setup. It's a package. It's a nice package that you realize over time the federal government has learned how to do this well, intentionally or accidentally, because they've always been vested in making sure they, the government itself, survives. Is there a moment in your life where you felt, especially your professional life at CIA, where you felt...

completely validated and justified in your decision to spend all that time there? Is there a mission that you succeeded in protecting America that you were like, this is everything I dreamed of and I did good? So yes, there is one. And that one is the one I was actually referencing before we turn on any cameras. So I'm trying to get a book published.

And it's been a two and a half year process because CIA was on board with the book and then changed their position as it got closer and closer to publish. And why do you think? I think geopolitical concerns around the world changed. And then the mission that I was part of became more sensitive to them publicly. So now they're pushing back. So I actually...

After I leave this interview with you guys, I head up to Washington, D.C. in just a few days to sit with CIA to actually hash out how much of this book are you going to keep pushing back on? How much of this book are we going to be allowed to publish? And will we need to involve a court to get this to move forward? Okay. Sorry, I have to pee. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. So the answer to your question is yes.

there is absolutely a justifiable mission that I look at and I'm saying it was all worth it. But you can't share it with us right now. And that's very frustrating because the reason I want to share it, I don't want to, I love you guys. I'd love to share it with you. I want to share it with my kids and my grandkids and my great grandkids who I'll never get to meet. This is a part of your legacy. This process must be difficult. Is the book already written? The book's already written. So how do you have editors and people like review it if this kind of

like information in it that's not supposed to be seen. So this is the challenge because the geopolitical environment changed. We had everything approved and worked on and written out until that turning point in, in national security. So it was approved. It was. Okay. Got it.

Wasn't trying to get you jammed up. No, no, no. It's all good. But that's how it works. I mean, the reason that so few CIA authors exist is because of the exact problem that you said. How do you get an editor to look at something if CIA has to look at it first? And what if CIA looks at it and they take too long or whatever else? Publishers lose their interest and editors lose their interest and whatever else. Whereas for us, we took a different approach to it. We took kind of like a systematic approach where it's like, hey, here's what we want to write about. Do you approve?

Here's our outline for what we're going to write. Do you approve? Here's our summary for each chapter. Do you approve? And they approved every step of the way until we came to a point where there was a book proposal that they had previously approved in all previous versions, but change in national security priorities kind of changed the whole sequence. How do you feel about whistleblowers? I have a very difficult time accepting whistleblowers. Why? Because I think that

Whistleblowing. Let's name names. Okay. Ask what you really want. I just want to know. We're talking about Snowden, right? Snowden's one. There's many, right? So when a whistleblower blows a whistle because it is a true infraction of American freedoms and every other option hasn't worked.

than a whistleblower. That's what a whistleblower is intended to be. That's why the law protects whistleblowers. When they can prove that they've tried every other official channel, they can't go to jail. They're protected by law. What happens is people get either too afraid or too lazy to go through every other channel, so they go right to the press.

That's the wrong kind of whistleblowing. Because that whistleblowing results in more damage than good. Snowden is one of those examples. He did not try every possible avenue internally before he went to the press, which is why the law can't protect him anymore. Yeah. And then he immediately ran to our enemies. Which further proves... What do you really want here, bro? Correct. And we've seen the same thing with UFOs, and you see the same thing with national security, you see the same thing in police departments and educational departments.

Whenever anybody blows the whistle, the law is there to protect them, to show that they have gone through every formal option available before they have to simply make it public. And that's basically what you're trying to do with the book, right? You're like, I'm going to get permissions. If you don't give me permissions, then we can take it to a court system. And if the court of law says no, then you don't publish that book. Correct. And it is what it is. Correct. And you'll respect that. And that's the only way to show...

show that you believe in the system that you're part of, is to exercise every option in that system. And I do believe that while we are a democracy that is strong and healthy and wealthy, we're not the perfect democracy, but

But we're a whole hell of a lot better than most of the democracies out there and any of the autocracies out there. So if we execute according to the system and the system deems at the end of the day that we can't publish, you got to trust the system to a certain extent. Why do you want to leave America? I heard you said you want to live someplace else. So there's two reasons. The first and they're interconnected. Right. The first reason is I believe that the United States is in that I think we're going through our middle school phase. Remember middle school? Yeah.

Remember how miserable middle school was? That's where we are as a country right now. People forget we're under, we're less than 300 years old. We're young, baby. We're young. So that, that phase where you're used to wearing sweatpants, but then you start getting boners and you have to carry your math book in front of your pants to make sure nobody sees your boner, but you don't want to stop wearing sweatpants yet. And you're damn sure not going to start wearing tighty whities yet. Yeah. Right. Like that's where we are as a country and it's all, it's ugly and it's fucked up. But how long did middle school last? Yeah. Long time. And it didn't get any better in high school. Right. Like that's,

So we are going through a very awkward phase as a country and it's gonna be long and it's gonna be slow and it's gonna be painful. - In your estimation, what is long? - 10 years. - What is the pain that we'll endure? - Economic pain.

the loss of public influence, of international influence, we're gonna start finding that we're friends with the wrong people, right? Like you're seeing that happen now in Israel, Palestine. You're seeing that happen in Ukraine, Russia. Like you're seeing it happen in NATO. Four years ago,

If you were to ask anybody, they'd say NATO is strong. America has all the right allies, right? America is the best. Well, now you've got NATO is fracturing. The European countries are coming out and saying that the United States shouldn't be part of NATO. And those are our closest allies, right? France, Spain, Germany are coming out and saying we shouldn't listen to the United States anymore. Why do we listen to them, right? You can't get funding for Ukraine right now. You've got the president and you've got the vice president and the head of national security inviting Israel's opposition leader.

to come to the United States because they can't talk to Netanyahu, right? And that's Israel. I mean, Israel is one of our closest allies in the world. And right now, Biden and Netanyahu are at odds.

So you see this playing out, and this is just within the last six months to two years. So when you start to project that forward, there's a presidential election coming up in November. There is no good outcome from that election. Yeah, what do you think happens in that election? Nothing good. But give me an example. Can you say that to say you don't like any of the candidates? First of all, I'm saying that to say nobody likes any of the candidates. There's nobody out there who's like, Trump is the right choice, and there's nobody out there saying Biden is the right choice. There's a lot of people saying Trump is the best choice.

There's not a lot of people saying Trump is the right choice. I mean, that's, yeah, there's a lot of people who think Trump is the right choice. You might not respect their political opinions, but I hear what you're saying. You're talking about people with geopolitical expertise. They might go, hey, this guy isn't right for the job. But he does have a lot of fans that are just incredibly...

Fair point. So yeah, I think we're going to see either a Biden administration or a Trump administration or some sort of emergency administration that happens because of something completely unforeseen on both sides. Like? Like...

elected and then he has a heart attack and then there's an emergency administration or Trump's elected and then some criminal conviction comes through that makes it so his ability to serve as president is limited. He's also 82, so it's not like... There's all sorts of surprises that can happen, so you have to leave space for surprises, right? But in all three scenarios, it doesn't make it easy for the average American. And how is our quality of life impacted and why would you want to leave that? So I

I want to leave in the next four years or in about four years because it's not my quality of life that I'm concerned about. It's my children's opportunity. And whatever comes next in our country, one way or the other, the generation that's going to pay the penalty is our children. It's not us. Well, sorry. Here's where I'm stuck. I thought you said it would be about 10 years, the awkward phase. Right. What do you think comes after 10 years? Is it not good? After 10 years, it's going to settle out.

It may settle out to be good. It may settle out to be not good, but a new normal will emerge. And then we'll be able to reassess whether I want to come back and play out that new normal here or play out that new normal somewhere else. All right, guys, let's take a break for a second because, listen, a bunch of you have a bad habit that you need to stop. And the best way to stop a bad habit is you replace it with a healthy one. And that's what Fume here is going to help you do. Okay?

you're going to give yourself lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, or God knows what else if you keep with those bad habits. Instead of quitting cold turkey, which is damn near impossible for a lot of people, here's your solution. It's fume, okay? It's not about giving up. It's about switching up. Fume takes your habit and simply makes it better, healthier, and a whole lot more enjoyable. Fume is an innovative, award-winning, flavored air device that does just that.

Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air. Instead of electronics, fume is completely natural. And instead of harmful chemicals, fume uses delicious flavors. Listen, you get it, okay? Instead of bad, fume is good. It's a habit you're free to enjoy and makes replacing your bad habit easy. Your fume comes with an adjustable airflow dial. This thing right here, it also is great for fidgeting. You hear that nice little clicky sound.

It is a phenomenal way to pass the time and not succumb to those bad habits. The taste is excellent. I like the mint. There's a bunch of great flavors. You can try all the great flavors. The look is dope. Plus, fume just released. And magnetic stand for your fumes so there's no more losing it around the house. It's built with fidgeting in mind. You can spin your fume around and around. So start the year off right with the good habit by enjoying fumes.

and going to tryfume.com slash flagrant and getting the journey pack today. Fume is giving listeners of the show 10% off when they use flagrant to help make starting the good habit that much easier. Once again, you go to tryfume.com slash flagrant and you're going to get 10% off when you use the code flagrant. Now let's get back to the show.

All right, guys, let's take a break for a second because some of you are using supplements and you're using shitty brands. You're using shitty brands and you're not getting the reaction, the response, the growth that you actually can get if you use the best in the business. And the best in the business is momentous. Why is it the best in the business? It's very simple. Because this is what the billion-dollar corporations use. This is what the trillion-dollar corporations use. This is what the United States government contracts. This is what...

NCAA basketball and football teams...

contract this is what nfl teams contract when you need the maximum performance you use the best these corporations are not playing around with that they don't want 80 they want 100 and that's what momentous is going to give you momentous creatine uses creatine monohydrate okay so the gold standard in creatine supplementation all right it has full informed sport and nsf certified for sports certifications meaning it contains no banned substances

No toxic contaminants like heavy metals or pesticides. What you see on the labels is exactly what you get. Not like some of these bodega supplements. You don't know what the hell is in there. They go test them. They got metal in there. Why is there metal in there? Get it out. You want to use something you trust. Why do you trust it? Because the billion-dollar corporations that cannot risk their multi-million-dollar athletes trust it. So you know it's going to be good for you.

I'm telling you right now, especially with the creatine, the benefits for athletic performance include accelerated lean muscle development, increased strength and power, enhanced recovery and rehabilitation, enhanced injury prevention. I mean, you got reducing dehydration, muscle cramps, the list goes on. All right?

Protein. You get the grass-fed whey protein isolate. Protein is a fundamental macronutrient that's essential for muscle growth. You need the protein. Development of that muscle, the recovery of the muscle, peak physical performance in everything your body does needs ample amounts of protein. How are you getting your protein? You're going to get it with Momentous. It's that simple. They got the high-quality protein content.

That's what they're going to give you. The grass-fed whey protein isolate powder is sourced from EU dairy farmers who adhere to strict regulations and whose grass-fed cows are free from hormones, steroids, and synthetic growth hormones. This is what you need. Again, NSF certified. Sport and informed sport certified. You have the certifications. You have everything you need. What you need now is to get the Momentus. Momentus is offering our listeners...

Up to 36% off your first subscription order. And if you don't want to subscribe, you can still get 20% off creatine, protein, and all of my favorite products. Go to livemomentous.com slash flagrant and use the code flagrant at checkout. They are so confident that you will like it. They're not even asking you to 100% subscribe. You can if you want to save more, but they know that once you get some, you're going to end up subscribing in the long term. I wish you all the best. Now let's get back to it.

I want to tell you why I think you're still part of the CIA. Okay. Okay. One, I don't understand why they would let you leave. Two, if I'm them...

And I want influence in the YouTube podcasting space. I want someone who is eloquent, intelligent, knows the line. He's not going to publish a book about something that he knows is illegal. He'll go through the proper procedure and maybe we give him permission. And if we don't, you know what, maybe we'll string him along for a few years just to see if we would piss him off, just to see how loyal he is. And then when he proves his loyalty, okay, maybe we'll put the book out there.

But we have someone in this YouTube space. The YouTube space is massive. This is where information is existing. This is where intelligence is existing. And he'll go on all the biggest podcasts and he'll do what he does best, which is make friends and assets of all these different people and imagine all the intelligence he can glean from that. We'll let him have his consultation business where he can go and make millions of dollars. He deserves to do it. We can't restrict him because then he would totally leave. But...

If we need to call on him for anything, if we need to call him for information, he will be there for us. Tell me why I'm wrong. Because CIA would get all of that without me being on the payroll at all. So they are getting it. If they ask for it, but they don't ask for it. So I'm not part of CIA. Until when? Until when? You're thinking of CIA again like it's a corporation. A corporation would take those steps because it would be worth the investment. CIA is the DMV.

The DMV would not take those steps. What about- Right now, CIA is a bureaucracy. They are very confused about what to even do with me. Yeah, what do they think of you right now? Have you spoken to them at all? Yeah, it's a mixed bag. It's a split decision there. Can you give me both sides? Yeah, so there is the one camp, which is the older school camp, which believes that anything we do that capitalizes on our service and our time at CIA, using the term CIA is just us shilling out our background to try to make a buck.

So that's the negative side. But then there's another side that's like somebody out there needs to be saying good things about CIA.

Because everybody else who comes out and talks about CIA says shitty things about CIA. So we've got a foot in both hands. There's a PR war going on here. Right. And I don't necessarily think that you do bad PR for the CIA. Like, I'm kind of... Like, you saw Homeland, which I assume the CIA signs off on on some level, or... It's because it's not written or authored by a CIA officer. Yeah. There's no requirement for CIA to chop off on it. Oh, wow. Well, that shit...

is exciting. You know, I'm not saying how accurate it is. No, it might not be accurate, but still like you coming and you talking about this, right?

I would imagine there are young, talented people out there that would listen to this or watch this and then go, wow, I wonder if my skill set would lend itself to the CIA and that might be something exciting to do. I don't necessarily see you as somebody who is painting the CIA as this horrible organization. It doesn't even seem like you dislike them. It seems like you think there's a lack of efficiency and that could be restructured.

But as far as an organization, I believe you feel like it's important. Absolutely. Everything you're saying is accurate, right? And everything you're saying is the work that I put into my public message about CIA. Because I personally, as an American and as a father and as a former CIA officer, I want the next generation of high-performing, hardworking, talented people to join the agency.

Whether they join for two years, six years, or 10 years, all of us benefit from them joining the agency instead of joining the sales department at whatever. But here's an issue, though. You're an intelligent dude.

You have found a way to, I would imagine, make 10x, 20x what you were making at the CIA almost immediately after leaving. Right. The people with the level of intelligence to work at the CIA, and I'm assuming that there needs to be some IQ requirement, right? You could have all this stuff where you don't feel guilt, but if you're dumb, that's not going to work, right? You need to have an aptitude. You need to be able to learn these things. You need to be able to learn them quickly, and you need to put them out in the field. Right.

Somebody with that level of intellect and that lack of, do we call it empathy or lack of the feeling of guilt,

That's a huge advantage in the regular workplace. It is. You would rise quickly and make so much more money. So how do we incentivize these people? How do we incentivize smart people in the same way that we can't get smart people to be politicians anymore? How do we get them to be in government agencies at all? Well, that's the question. You guys are all going to be hedge fund dudes, like people in your position. That's the million dollar question. That's why you see there's a military recruiting crisis, if you guys weren't aware of that. Military hasn't hit recruitment numbers in two years.

The federal government can't recruit people fast enough, right? There's a dearth of interested candidates in supporting the federal government because they see the federal government. And put yourself in the shoes of like a 14-year-old back in 2009 or 2005. That 14-year-old who is now whatever the age is, 18, 21, 23, right? That child then has watched utter chaos in government. And now they're deciding, do I want to work for Trump?

Google or do I want to work for the federal government? It's an easy answer. There's also like, is there been a war that we feel has been justified that we want to support? So if you're a young kid seeing that and that's the ideology, you know what I mean? That's the ideology that you have. I mean, getting people to, uh, you know, getting people to join the army around like world war two might've been one of the easier things to do. You're like, I want to go defend my nation. Even after nine 11, there are people who are like, I want to go, let's, let's get this get back. Nobody can fuck with America. Not while we're here.

So I guess it is up to America and the powers that be to make sure that whatever wars we're engaging in are just enough to sacrifice our lives. And if there is waning military support, that's on you. Correct. Do you know what I mean? Correct. Yeah, it's not on the people for understanding what the fuck is going on. If you look at veterans now, it's shocking how many veterans exist right now that do not want their children to join the military. When it used to be...

Oh, I didn't even know it used to be like that. It makes sense. Completely logical sense. But the only veterans I know are like, I would never, never. But that wasn't the case. My grandfather was a captain. A big part of the reason I was military. My uncle was in the military. My mom was in the military. My stepdad was in the military. My aunt was in the military. That's what you do. So because it was so easy to recruit, did that make them lazy when it came to supplying services for veterans?

and then now they're in the opposite situation? I think yes and no. I think it was easy for them to recruit, so they didn't pay attention to what you do on the tail end of that person's career. So yes, I think there's validity there. But I think the larger thing that happened there is as the information age also took over,

20 years in the military between 1990 and 2010 is a massive 20-year transformation in technology. So then we all woke up to the fact that the reason that there is a veteran's affair, there's a reason, the reason you get lifetime medical benefits is because when you serve for the U.S. military, they don't care about your health and your well-being and your mental health. Like, you're there to be a cog in a war wheel.

And some cogs in the war wheels die and get medals, but many, many more cogs in the war wheel get traumatized, get hurt, and then they need medical care for the rest of their lives. And they don't have adequate medical, psychological, whatever care. And aren't they starting to strip a lot of the bonuses or incentives away, like schooling and housing and things like that, that word?

easier to get. And now it's like they're stripping some of that away. And that's because of cost structure, right? So now with a recruitment crisis, it's hard for the federal government to fund recruitment operations. So then budgets start to shrink where they save, where they find money to get more recruits. They take benefits away. And then you have a, we have more people who stay for four or five or eight years and less people who stay for 20 years.

So the whole economics of military and government start to shift. Can you explain to us what the military-industrial complex is and how the CIA plays a part in it? So the short, hard-hitting answer is that the military-industrial complex is our economic security blanket. That's what it is.

The reason that the United States loves war is because war ends recessions. And the reason that war ends recessions is because the military industrial complex spins up

Tens of thousands of jobs are made. Massive government spending is made. People make a whole hell of a lot more money. More taxes is taken. And then all that military industrial produce, all the production, isn't just for us. It can be sold to the UK. It can be sold to France. It can be sold to Germany. It can be sold to Israel. It can be sold to Saudi Arabia. So now you have money coming in. Yeah, it's interesting. And you have money coming in and...

the people who are, when foreign countries buy American goods, what denomination do they use? What currency do they use? American dollars. So then how do they get American dollars? They gotta buy them American dollars. And then as you buy American dollars, it takes American dollars off the market, which does what to the value of your currency? Increases the value. It's like a triple

It's like Justin Timberlake, man. I mean, this is really well said. So that's why the military industrial complex was designed. And it's a big part of the reason that Eisenhower warned against it. Yeah, his speech when he left office. Yep.

It was like, once we create this beast, you can never put this back in a box. It's always going to be there. And it has contributed to our wealth over time. It is the thing that China is trying to do right now. The thing China is trying to replicate is its own military industrial complex that

So because it has watched us leverage it for economic and international gain for the last 30 years. Now, doesn't it need war in order to properly utilize it? It needs conflict. Exactly right. My understanding with China's foreign policy, that it wasn't conflict-based.

It was more like investment and infrastructure-based. That worked? The Silk Road Initiative. Belt and Road. What is it called? Belt and Road. Belt and Road, yeah, yeah. Okay. So China's from 1990 to about – or I'm sorry, from 1980 to about 2010 –

China was primarily focused on Belt and Road Initiative, on diplomacy, economic diplomacy. And that's why you saw what they call the China miracle, where China went from, I mean, speaking of per capita, China went from 500 in

annual income per capita to $5,000. Wow. Think about that. I mean, a starving population to cities popping up everywhere. Unbelievable. So a 10x change in the average household income and the average person's income in just 30 years.

And we're talking about 1.4 billion people. We're not talking about a country of a million people where you can get that change. Okay, so you're saying- So they were engaging in that, let's be the world's producer. Let's be the world's warehouse and the world's workforce for a long time.

Well, when Xi Jinping took power, he started to say, well, what are we gonna do for the next 50 years? Which is why he came up with the 50 year plan. And when he started looking 50 years out, he started realizing that if you're the world's manufacturer, then you're always manufacturing somebody else's goods.

And then looking at the United States, we used to be the world's manufacturer. Yep. And then we exported that and we took on tech jobs. Yep. And we took on innovation and we took on innovation. And that is now what do we export to the world? Yep.

So now if anybody wants to import an American good, like, yes, they might get rice and strawberries sometimes, but most of the time they're importing financial structures. They're importing technology. Entertainment. Yeah. Big, big stuff that has IP behind it, not actual tangible plastic goods. Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah. On the military industrial complex. Real quick, I just want you to explain. So you're saying now China is going to transition into military industrial complex, which would mean that they would need conflict.

You've got to use the bombs, right? So for the last five years or so, what we've seen is a really aggressive push for China to change its economic foundation away from being the world's manufacturer and into being the world's tech alternative to the United States. At least Huawei...

Got it. Once competition exists, you can't put that back in a box. So what's different is the United States, we like to win like a good football game. We like to win where it's like, you know, second quarter, like last half of the game, we're 15 points behind and then we win by one. The Chiefs Super Bowl this year. That's what we want, right? We want a huge finish, a huge dominant and everybody talks about it for decades. What China wants is China wants to win like soccer.

Right? Like small incremental gains until there's parity. Once the United States, who is the world's economic superpower, once we have parity with another country, which is equality with another country, guess what happens to us? Our security status...

completely transforms. And why is that? Because we're no longer the dominant power. Because there's another alternative you can go to. If there's one restaurant in a neighborhood that's the only one that's serving the food, they could charge whatever they want. It's like if you're playing poker. The second there's another restaurant in that neighborhood, all of a sudden the price has got to come down. We're about to start watching Chinese movies.

Yeah, right? We already do. Okay, okay, okay. This is really interesting. But you still haven't explained what's happening with their military industrial complex. How will they engage in these? I assume what happens with us right now is instead of us engaging in the hot war, and yeah, it does happen, there's a lot of proxy wars that we are funding with weapons. And so the United States, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, the United States has 20 different special operations groups. Okay.

That's a lot. - What is it? Is that like Rangers, SEALs? Those are special operations groups. - Correct. - Got it. - Our nearest allies with very few exceptions like France, Germany, Spain, the UK, they have like four. - Got it. - So we have 20. The next largest country or the next country with the most is Israel. Israel has 18 different special operations groups. - Oh, wow. - The reason that you have these special operations groups is so that you can have a constant rotation of active training in real world conflict.

So we have people in Somalia and people in Mogadishu and people in Colombia and people in Peru. And we have people constantly fighting in support of joints forces, in support of allied forces and peacekeeping missions. Right. These are people who get real time experience with real weapons, firing downrange and shooting people for real.

Without it being a war. That's why we like proxy war. So that we can keep them warm. We keep them warm. Constantly training. Constantly training. China never had that. I mean, it's crazy to call it training. It's a real fucking war. Yeah. But we see it for its training value. And then you rotate people through that. Jesus Christ. Now, when you look at what's happened in the last year. Real quick on that. Yeah.

Knowing that we need training, do we induce some of these conflicts so that we can have it or do we kind of seek them out and then apply force? It's more of the latter than the first. We seek them out. But once you have the biggest kid in the playground on your side...

you're a whole hell of a lot more confident pushing the conflict. You're saying the other countries, knowing that the U.S. is going to come in, and we're not really mad at it because we need some training, so they go start... Just our presence unintentionally will stoke more war. Correct. It's like the way you would talk shit if you got a bodyguard. Yeah, exactly. It has a very different energy than when you're with yourself. Okay, go on, go on. So now if you understand that China has been investing more in its military-industrial complex...

then it has been outpacing its investment in military industrial complex than its own GDP growth for the last five years. And it's already projecting next year to do it again. Wow. So that means it, GDP wise, economically, it should only be investing about 4%. But it's going hard. But it's investing 9%. So it's overspending on military development. Combine that with the fact that in the last few months,

Taiwan actually just sent out a warning today saying that they're concerned because China has normalized, meaning it's so common that they have normalized military exercises in and around Taiwan, including in Taiwan airspace and Taiwan naval space, littoral space. So the reason that China is normalizing that type of military activity, because the first stage to military industrial domination, the first stage is being able to protect the homeland. Right.

This is why the Civil War was so critical. I know people think the Civil War was about slavery. It was not. The Civil War was about being able to create one country where from coast to coast we fell under one legal jurisdiction, one country, because it's easier to defend a country when it's one country with two sea borders. As soon as it's two countries with two sea borders and land borders— Look at Russia. Yep.

Right. You've got to worry about every single country around you joining NATO because then there might be a base that's put right up on your borders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So what China is doing now is it's normalizing this military activity around Taiwan. And it's doing that because it knows that with the size of military it has and with the modern military that it has for any other foreign aggressor to come to their home court.

and beat them is going to be difficult. Their plan for the next 10 years is to grow their ability to extend or reach their military out. So first you protect yourself. Once you can protect yourself, now it's time to dominate abroad. And do you think that they will start engaging in proxy wars? They're already engaging in proxy wars. Where? All over Southeast Asia, all over Africa. What about South America?

South America. Are they involved in Venezuela? So South America is interesting. I can't speak knowledgeably on it right now. What the Chinese have found is that because of the rapid growth they had from the 1980s to the 2010s, they had a surplus of revenue, surplus of money.

So they could throw that money around. That's what the Belt and Road Initiative is. The Belt and Road Initiative made it so that China could extend loans to impoverished countries at rates that no Western country could compete with. They were beating the World Bank, right? And the World Bank

Gives you the loan. Right. Specifically low so they can put you in the debt and whatever. So China basically followed that same model learning from us. Yeah. So when it came to Latin America, they didn't have to engage in proxy wars because there were so many people there. They were just willing to take loans in exchange for, you know, hundred year leases and property to land rights. They basically just bought the Caribbean and they bought most of Central America and they bought parts of South America. They just own for like 99 year leases. We just let them do that. We tried not to.

But the United States is a capitalist country. We don't extend loans that are going to default. We can't do that because of checks and balances. So then we rely on foreign aid to do it. Well, guess what happens with foreign aid? Foreign aid is not reliable because if you're hot, you get lots of foreign aid. If you're cold, you don't get lots of foreign aid. So when you're the corrupt leader of Panama and you're like, which of these two choices do I take? That one.

That one. So you think China is the next superpower? I would assume it's China or one of the Middle Eastern countries. Yeah. So China is the one that's the closest. Economic experts believe that by 2030, China will have reached economic parity with the United States. All things remaining the same.

So all things remain the same means we also have to remain the same. If we don't change, we will see the rise of China to economic parity with the United States, which in my opinion is just as bad as China being dominant. Yeah. Right? Because the effects are the exact same. The effects are the same. Yeah. Whether they're 1% better, 10% better, or 2% more. And that sounds far off. It's six years from now. It's six years from now. Wait, so you never answered the question. So where are you going to live? So I plan on moving to Europe. Where? Where? So Portugal, Spain, Italy, France.

Those are three of my top, Croatia. Fire options. Yeah. Those are all countries that have a number of things going for them. I'm also looking at Sweden.

First of all, they don't want to be a Sweden. They're neutral countries. Nobody sees those countries. Spain is incredible. I used to live in Spain. It's the best. Nobody sees those countries as a threat. Yeah. So as the economic superpowers of the world start to fight over everything, that fight's not going to Poland or that fight's not going to Portugal. That fight's not going to Spain. Oh, you're worried about hot war. I'm worried about hot war. I'm worried about economic war. I'm worried about

the forcing of policy, like domestic policy in foreign countries. Because that's essentially what both the United States and China do. The United States, we're no innocent country. Like we force our policies. We force domestic policies in other countries. That's why democracy grew was because we forced it. We basically said, you have to have free and fair elections if you want our money. You have to do this. And who defined free and fair elections? We did. We did. We're also the country that came up with gerrymandering.

Yeah. Right. So like it's it's fucked up. But that's China has learned from that. That's what they do in Hong Kong. It's what they do in Malaysia. It's what they do in the Philippines. Right. They try to force foreign policy. Andrew says this a lot. And I think it's true when America is not a superpower. Let's say it's China. And this is why I'm scared of China. You're going to miss the American superpower because I don't know that they're going to be remotely powerful.

friendly with how they try to exert their... Or even, like, front-facing friendly with how they try to exert their control. Is that something you think happens? Are you afraid of that? I wouldn't... So...

Fear is less of how I define it. It's more like a series of probabilities. Is that a probability you see? That's absolutely a probability I see. And the way that China executes on its ambitions is different than the way the United States executes on their ambitions. That was my next question. Right? We try to incentivize people to do what we want them to do. Hey, do it. And it might be a little bit bad for you, but it'll also be really good for you. That's not Asian parenting. That's not the Asian way of doing things. The Asian way of doing things is do it this way or you'll be punished. Or else.

So I like the world of incentives because incentives always give you options, but the world of enforcement is difficult. And so this is why 10 years will help to define kind of what's going to happen to all of us. But the next 15 to 20 years after that is going to look like this seahorse, right? Or this seesaw, this rocking back and forth of,

You know, democracy becomes a little bit more in vogue. Yeah. Authoritarian power becomes a little bit more in vogue as we're all kind of trapped in this fact of which of these do we really choose? Can you speak about Chinese officers or operators in America right now? So what I can speak on that's allowed is the stuff that has been making headlines more and more. We know that the Chinese have secret police stations in the United States. And Canada. Yeah.

It really was a big deal in Canada. Yeah. Everything's a bigger deal in Canada. Yeah. Maple syrup's a bigger deal in Canada. Yeah, yeah. And they do that because at the core of the Chinese experience, like we talked about the American experience, at the core of the Chinese experience, you are Chinese first. That's ideology that we're talking about. Right.

Right. So you you have such a close tie to your family and you have such a close tie to the homeland. And even if you are a Chinese immigrant, you're still fighting for your family and for the homeland. Right. It's still your first loyalty. It doesn't mean it's your first loyalty by like ninety nine to one. It could be 60, 40, but it's still your first loyalty. And you are oftentimes responsible for caring for the older generation. So your revenue, your money is actually going back to China to take care of your parents until you can bring them to the United States.

Which is quite common for immigrants, though. It is. I don't think it's a specific idiosyncratic to China. But I think he's juxtaposing it to the U.S. ideology, which is self-first, I would assume. Correct. In the United States, mom and dad have a retirement fund, and they have Social Security, and they save their own 401K. And if they didn't, well, why the hell didn't you do that, mom and dad? That's on you. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like now you're draining on me. How does it feel that, you know, the grandkids are eating ramen because you can't pay your diabetes bill or whatever it is, right? Like that's a whole different mindset in the United States. Yeah. So stuff like secret police stations that are not sanctioned, the incredible amount of Chinese intelligence collection that happens here. In the last week before coming here, we had a military –

a U.S. military officer, or sorry, U.S. military enlisted person, get arrested for Chinese espionage. We had Google...

A technician at Google got arrested for Chinese espionage. Wow. Right? So the Chinese are actually actively recruiting from our tech sector and from our military. And that's just in the last seven days. When you look at the prosecuted cases of Chinese espionage in the United States over the last five years, it's record-breaking. More intelligence espionage case arrests, just arrests, than ever before. Every time there's an arrest, our rule of thumb is for every one arrest, there's nine more operations that haven't been caught yet. Whoa, wow.

So it gives you an idea of how active the Chinese are against the United States. I don't want to paint the Chinese out to be a bad guy. They're just doing the same shit we do. This is the game. But we're the big dog. They're trying to become the big dog. They're a little meaner dog, though. They're a very different breed. What is their offer for espionage? Is it just money?

So this is, so the offer for espionage, when we talk about the offer, we have to remember it goes back to those four, right? Those four ideologies or there's four motivations. Reward, we usually associate with money, but reward is not about money. It's about what you will do with the money, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys don't work for money.

You might think at surface level, of course I work for the money. No, no, no, no. You work for what you're gonna do with the money. So what the Chinese have learned about our culture is that in our culture, we all brag about the money and we keep secret what we're gonna do with the money. It's really there because I'm worried that my kids might not have enough money for college. It's really there because I'm worried about when I get older and I get sick. It's there because I'm worried about something or something else.

So when they make a plea for us, or when they make an offer to us for money, oftentimes it's because we're already in debt and we've made bad financial choices because our culture is a debt-driven culture. And we're also worried about money in the future because we're already in debt. So it makes it very easy for them to come in with a monetary salvation.

Wow. And we're like, oh shit. Yeah. I mean, my secrets are worth that much to you because my own government doesn't think they're worth that much to them. 200K in student loan debt. Even though I work at Google, I still have a lot of debt and I'm worried. Yeah. And then you've got the whole, the ideology of the United States is,

also includes cultural ideology that doesn't exist in Asia. Like for example, sex is still a taboo topic in the United States. As open as it's become, it's still a very taboo topic. Like the whole sexual deviancy thing I was just telling you guys about, right?

We don't really like to talk about what our particular kink is with just anyone. We don't really like to talk about how often we have sex or don't have sex with our spouse or our girlfriend or whatever else. We don't like talking about whether or not we explored homosexuality in college. There's all sorts of stuff that we don't talk about.

That Europe talks about on the front page of the newspaper that they'll go out and have drinks and like cheers each other. Is China way more comfortable with it? No, but China, they're not more comfortable with it, but they know we are uncomfortable with it. So they know how to present us with what's known as in colloquial terms, sexpionage.

They can feed our sexual interest because they don't have individual freedom. It is what the CIA accused Trump of doing with Russia. Like, oh, you got peed on. You don't want anybody to know that. We got you to get peed on. Now we hold this power over you. China will do that to you.

Someone in the US. That's the C in rice. That's coercion. Blackmail is coercion. The other option to that is you get a Chinese girlfriend, a discreet, quiet, beautiful girlfriend that goes where you need her to go, when you need her to go there, and she treats you like a king every time you arrive. So every couple in Williamsburg is just spies? Ha! I mean, it's not a far-off accusation, right? But you want to know why all those? I mean, there's a real problem with American academics today.

traveling to Asia. And the reason that it's such a problem is because they land in Kuala Lumpur and they have their Chinese girlfriend waiting for them for four days that their spouse doesn't even know about. All taken care of by the academic institution that invited them there. And those girls might not start as operatives.

They might just be actual hookers or mistresses or whatever. And then they become an asset of an operative. Right. Yep. This is so interesting. And then you're saying that we can't do it in America because we have individual freedoms. In other words, force an American to become to prostitute their body. Yeah. Now, if they do it, they do it. But we can't say this is what you should do. Correct. And if they do it. So not only that, but in the United States, we've also gone for our actual trained operatives.

agents are trained field operators we actively enforce that they don't take that step because when you take that step it might be that any kind of romantic or physical anything yeah because of our ideology in the united states sex is very difficult to separate from connection okay of our control have you have has anybody ever tried to flip you

we've all been attempted in different ways. And how did you know? Could you tell they were an agent? Yeah, and what were they doing? Where were you? Can you say where you were? Yeah, so my time at CIA, I can't talk about that. Okay. When I left CIA, one of my first big jobs was in private intelligence. Okay. I went to the United Arab Emirates, UAE, to carry on a private intelligence contract there.

because they were pulling from the Trump school of thought and they were like, hey, we're going to privatize our intelligence also. And it was a high-paying job in a foreign place. I could take my family and write my own check, right? So you had to go get intelligence on someone out there?

Can you speak on it? It's an NDA contract. But I was supporting private intelligence in Abu Dhabi. Those are our peoples out there, you know what I mean? Well, they're our allies, right? So when you're out there, you're also presented to everybody else who's traveling through Dubai or traveling through Abu Dhabi. So you've got the Russians and the Chinese and the North Koreans, the Iranians. All of them can travel through Abu Dhabi.

the Middle East, unlike they can in parts of Europe, right?

So you have everybody presented to you all the time. So what oftentimes happens is it's not like it is in the movies where somebody walks up to you and they're like, they hand you like a suitcase and they're like, you're going to spy for us now, right? It's not quite like that. Instead, they try to build a relationship with you. They try to find out what you do. You know they're a foreigner. You hear the foreign accent. You know they're a foreigner because they have an ID, a national ID in the Emirates that says what your nationality is, right? Yeah.

But you still have to do business with all of them. So you have to work with the Chinese and the Israelis and the Russians. The difference is how do you determine which are doing a job and which are doing the other job. Yeah, what gave it away? Well, it doesn't get given away until they start asking you to have personal relationships where you keep secrets. Okay, and give me an example. Was there anybody who was really good and while it was happening, you were like, ooh, these motherfuckers. This is a new level. I didn't even... So the Mossad is actually really good at this.

Okay, so tell me, tell me. So when Mossad, Mossad will work with you. Mossad is the Israeli intelligence. Israeli foreign collection. Yeah. Shin Bet. Is their FBI. Is their FBI. Got it.

So Israeli Mossad will, they'll work with you, they'll collaborate with you, they'll share with you. Everything's a team fight and it's always in the workplace until you have a big victory. And then when you have a big victory, then they're like, we should celebrate this at this nice hotel or at this nice bar or whatever else. We've got a connection through the, you know, the Israeli connections. And now we're going to have like a private room and all this other stuff. And it's going to be this, this bang up party.

Once as an as a trained intelligence officer once someone takes you from a public setting into a private setting You know that you're now on a what we call a developmental path They're trying to develop you into so you're an asset to it. You're immediately red flagged. Okay, right Red flag me you red flag them. Yeah, got it. Got it. Okay, but at the same time like there's lots of cultures that just want to party Yeah, so

You go to the party. And then you have to assess. And you could go both ways, honestly. Okay, this is good. This is good. This is good. So you have to assess then what happens at the party. So you're at this party. So now when you're at the party, again, a standard Mossad tactic is you're at the party and then they'll start pulling you off of the main party to have like these sidebar conversations about work stuff. Like, hey, it was incredible that you found that thing, that you found that deepfake video and you were able to reverse engineer who it came from. How did you do that? Like, can you tell me how you did that? Yeah.

So now that it's important that you don't use substances. If you're a little loose with the drinks, you might volunteer that information. Right. And you've already built a rapport with these people. You guys just celebrated a victory. Your teammates. It's hard enough sober to not talk. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So you can, any stroke in your ego, like what you did. And exactly. So you can see yourself going down this, this, what we call, we also call it a slippery slope. If you've ever climbed a tall mountain, of course you get past the tree line and you get into the rocks. It's like a rock scramble.

We call that a slippery slope in espionage too. Once you cross that tree line, it's very hard to keep from slipping. How do you maintain your relationship with them

while shutting down their questioning. You have to... There has to be a point with a trained intelligence person where you use a language that they understand to let them know that the development stops there. Can you say what that is? Fuck. Yeah, so you'll have to say something like, I appreciate our work together, but you're getting into a realm that I'm not willing to share with you. Oh, so you got it... I thought it would be more subtle. You basically just tell them no. I mean, that's pretty subtle in our world. Oh, really? Right? In our world, subtle is...

I have professional obligations that prevent me from going down this road. What's not subtle? Are you a fucking spy? Are you trying to steal? Yeah. Slow-mo, must speak. Yeah. Okay, so you had to say that to him, and then does he smile and go, ooh, you knew what I was doing? Is there like a little gamesmanship? There's some games... Not with Mossad. Mossad is business. The Russians, there's gamesmanship. Because the Russians are thinking this. The Russians are thinking, you say no today. But tomorrow...

- Game on. - And also we've been doing this for decades with the Russians, right? - It's a dance. - It is a dance. Okay, all right. Now I imagine you've also tried to do this with- - Others. - Others.

And did you do the same tactic? Do you guys have this victory? And then all of a sudden you pull them aside? No. So the American tactic is very different than a lot of other tactics. Okay. What's the American? We are personal right out of the gate. Meme share. You just share memes. All the time. Dick pics. Yeah. Okay. So wait, wait. You're personal all the time. What does that mean? So that means right out of the... Can you give us an example after CIA? You can talk about it.

Yes, actually, I can talk about it. So same private contract in the Middle East. I needed to bring over a reporting source for my contractor, for my contract holder. A reporting source means an intelligence source in the private world. So you need a private intelligence source from another contractor and you need to bring them over. From a foreign country. And they're professional. This is what they do for a living and you got to break them. Yes, exactly right. Woo!

Except oftentimes you're not trying to break anybody. What does that mean? Because you're not trying to, our way of doing things, right? The best practice in the United States is that you're not trying to break someone's will. You're not trying to trick them or dupe them. How do we operate? With incentives. Scratch my back, I scratch yours. Yeah, only my scratch is better. Yeah, I got you. Now, so they don't even think that they have become a double agent.

They are grasping with that. They are professionals, so they know that's what they're being asked to do. But at the same time, they're like, I'm getting this information, which my people might like. Or more importantly, they're thinking, I'm getting this other Benny that my people don't even have to know about. Oh, okay. So take us through. Okay, so you got your target. Are there multiple and you lock in on one? Or was it always one for the whole time? So usually what it is, is you have a target, but the target that you want is not reachable.

Because the target that you want is never going to convert. So you end up...

pursuing that target to find out who their network of close associates are. So then you can peel off. It's like trying to get a mob boss and then you just get the other guy to snitch. Right. So that's more of how it actually works. And then when you actually find your way to the associate, ideally the associate has the ear of the primary target. So now by influencing the associate, you influence the primary target. Okay. So tell me how you did it. So then when you approach the associate, the associate is trained, but the associate also has their own challenges because they give me the story. Can you give me the story of how it happened? Uh,

I can give you, it's still NDA, but I can give you some of it, right? So I approached my associate. You guys are already, have a rapport, you're already working together. Well, I mean, day one. Day one, as soon as I know this is the person that I think is going to get me connected to the main target, I'm not keeping it professional. I am making it personal. Different than Mossad. Mossad wants to keep it professional until there's a reason to make it personal.

Our process is different because our process has to fit our culture and what people stereotypically think. Okay, so what will you do? What would you... We've got to come over for dinner, come over for a barbecue, come meet my kids, come... You'll use your family? Your whole world is yours, man. And there's no guilt in that? There's no fear?

There's fear, but there's... I mean, you can control the fear. You can control your security, but the guilt part isn't really there. This is a foreigner. Okay, okay. Keep going, keep going. Right? So then right away, you're like, hey, let's find a way to bond over something easy and surface level. Basketball, football, golf, women, booze, whatever else. Especially when you're talking to a foreigner because foreigners have much less like...

They have less sensitivities than a lot of Americans do because we are a Christian culture, you know, at heart. Yeah. So it's much easier to be like, hey, what do you like to do? And they're like, I like to gamble. I like to bet big and lose big. And you're like, well, then let's go do the thing. Right. And then when you're there and they lose their ass, then you step in and you're like, man, you've got better luck than me because I lost my ass two hours ago. So let's put another 500 on you.

And then you start to show them that you're a good time. You start to do all the same shit that you were saying earlier. You were like, I like you now and I trust you now. Also, if you're bringing them to your wife, to your family, your wife knows what time it is. She's an operative too. So y'all are fired.

They're cooking. Right. So that's how you, and now remember, we're talking about a trained professional on the other side. Because they know. So that trained professional on the other side knows who you are and they know what you did, especially me. When I left CIA, I've been overt ever since I left. So they know I'm formerly trained CIA. So they knew when I was in Abu Dhabi that that's what I was there to do. I was there in an intelligence capacity. I was there supporting a private contract. How the fuck do you still get them? Because they want something more.

You keep in mind, secrets are a commodity. What they want something more, meaning it's a personal thing or they representing their country want something more? They personally. They want to gamble. They want drugs. They want women. They want. They have a vice. They want money because they've been busting their ass their whole life for a government wage. Hmm.

They've got kids that have medical issues that can't be treated in their home country. And you'll find out about all those things. Yeah, because what happens is when we take it, when you make it personal right away...

When you make it personal right away, you break down all those contrived barriers of what we can and can't talk about. And you just go to your employer and be like, yo, give me X amount of money and we can get whatever you need. Sorry, real quick. It can't be, hey, here's money straight up. They have to trust that you would give them money, no strings attached, right? It's not even just about money. It's about that you are the solution provider.

Right? Their kid has an illness. I don't have to give them money to have them treat their kid's illness. I can make a call to a buddy who's a doctor in Dubai. Oh, again. And you just have to take your kid. It's to what you were saying. It's not about the money. It's about what the money buys. What it does. So I've heard this with like different operatives where it's like, oh, they found out they're a huge football fan. And they're like, dude, I actually have a jersey, like a Patriots signed jersey. Like you should have it. Or like they'll give them something like that. Hypothetically, let's say you found out someone was a huge fan of stand-up comedy.

Let's say they loved Andrew Schultz. Okay. Let's say they loved Akash. Okay. How could you leverage that into getting what you want? So if I know they're a big fan... Well, first of all, if they're a big fan of your types of comedy... Yeah, they're good guys. But I know a lot about them. Yeah, yeah. Because you guys have a very unique style of comedy. Sexual deviance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big cops. So right away... Yeah, they're not going to see Sinbad. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that tells us a lot. But then...

What I can- That's interesting. Yeah, so that's super important. What we can do is I can say that I have a client

that has front row seats to Andrew's next show, but the client can't make it. So I've got these three tickets that are burning a hole in my pocket. Do you want to come? I'll come. And then do you want to bring your wife or do you want me to find like a cute lady to come with us? Ooh. Now, would you buy the tickets outright with the money or would you go to Schultz and be like, yo, can we get some tickets for the thing? Maybe do a meet and greet? Well, so the reason I wouldn't,

Right now, from today forward, from today forward. That makes me inspired too. Yes. The reason I wouldn't do that is because now I put a bookmark in his mind. Why did Andy want three free tickets? Right? Why do you want to be comped? If I come to him and I'm like, I want two tickets, he might be like, oh, it's for you and your wife. And then he's going to look for me at the show.

But instead it's much easier to just go to the fucking ticket office and buy three tickets on a throwaway credit card under somebody else's name. And then boom, I've got three tickets. He doesn't know to look for me that day. I can put on some lame disguise so he doesn't even see me. We're good to go. Right? But that's how it would work.

to the target. Yeah. If you asked me tickets, I would need information. Yeah. I'd be like, I want to know everything. Wait, so you got, you got the dude though. You got the information from him. We, so where I got is I got, I got the guy to understand that he was selling his information to my clients through the contractor and that it was a discreet relationship with the contractor and that I was going to leave. And that's, that's the ultimate goal for us.

In the intelligence world, the ultimate goal is to get your target to share its information directly with the institution so that you can exit. That's the ultimate. And that's the game worldwide. So you don't even want to know the information. You have to in the beginning. But the most everybody who knows the information is a liability in the what we call the chain of acquisition. Hmm.

The chain of acquisition of the information. Can you explain why it would be a liability? Give me a worst case scenario with it. Sure, sure. So the asset themselves give you a piece of information. Let's just say it's whatever. They give you the can of information. Well, now they have to give me that same can. If I take a sip or if I spill it, it's different. And then if I give it to you, you might take a sip or you might spill it. And then by the time it actually gets to the organization, it's only half full.

How often are guys like you doing corporate espionage in the U.S.? That must be a massive thing because information is everything in business and competition. So I want to be – I'm going to be very particular about words. Espionage is illegal. Okay. Everywhere in the world, espionage is illegal. The only reason that clandestine CIA officers can participate in espionage is because there's a carve-out in the U.S. law –

That makes it so when you're trained by the U.S. government and collecting secrets about foreign countries in support of the U.S. government, you won't be prosecuted for espionage. Corporate espionage, industrial espionage, always illegal. There's no carve-out to protect those. So what do you call it? So espionage, as you think of it, the definition of espionage is the stealing of secrets. Corporate espionage shouldn't happen illegally.

Most stand-up professionals in the intelligence world don't do that because the risk is too high, right? If I help Yahoo steal secrets from DuckDuckGo, I'm going to jail for a long time. Got it. So people don't participate in that. What they do participate in is private intelligence.

Private intelligence means finding legal methods in which to collect information that you can use to create an analysis or an assessment. So now if I want to do an analysis of Verizon in support of...

AT&T, I can find multiple ways to collect data about Verizon. I can then compile it using proprietary methods that creates an assessment for AT&T. Two very different things. Why don't you just target the higher ups at all the Fortune 500s and then do insider trading, get rich and sail off into the sunset?

That's a lot more work than you would think, first of all. And secondly, the higher-ups in a lot of those organizations, they don't actually carry the decision-making. I mean, well, target someone who would be the decision-maker and then trade like Nancy Pelosi.

So that is essentially who does that. It's the boards of directors in those large companies that usually have that kind of insight because they're the ones that make the decision what doesn't get approved that the CEO presents. But the people who have relationships with boards of directors are oftentimes politicians or other members of boards of directors. So that's how...

All right, guys, we're going to take a break for a second because, listen, let's face it, all right? We want a way to eat healthy, protein-packed meals, but spending hours in the kitchen to make them absolutely sucks, and we're not going to do it. We're just not going to do it. That's why you've got to check out the FlexPro Meals, okay? They cook high-protein, flavorful food and deliver it right to your door, ready to eat the next day. Tell me that's not amazing. They also have keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, all the options to fit whatever diet you're on. And if you're really hungry, their large meals come with 50% more protein.

Protein, if you're trying to pack on the muscle, then definitely I recommend. Now, we have an exclusive flagrant offer. Okay? FlexPro is now offering FlexPass to the flagrant audience. What is FlexPass? You get $600 of FlexPro meals for only $60. I don't know a better deal. I genuinely do not know a better deal. Savor the flavor of health with 90% savings. It's insane. FlexPass perk...

is monthly $50 credit for meals added on the first. Think about that. There's just more and more free things that you're getting. These delicious meals, packing on the protein, you're getting the growth, and you're not spending all your time in the gym. You spend, sorry, in the kitchen. You're spending more time in the gym. They also have a pay now, save later option. Okay, you can spend $60 up front just one time for a year savings of $600. Think about that.

This is way cheaper than Uber Eats. With this kind of offer discount, it's even more affordable than doing the groceries and cooking them yourselves. They found a way to make it more cheap and more convenient. This is almost impossible. They have next day delivery, by the way, and that's on us.

Okay? Here's another special offer for the flagrant fans. Order by 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Monday to Thursday. Okay? And FlexPro Meals will deliver the next day for free. Fast, convenient, and no extra charge. It does not get better than that. Act now. Don't let this deal slip away. Head to flexpromeals.com slash flagrant. Purchase a FlexPass.com

Up front for $60, they're giving you $50 every single month for this year. It's like 90% off $600 worth of meals. That's insane. Innovate how you eat with FlexPro Meals. Now let's get back to the show. All right, guys, we're going to take a break for a second. You see the light. You already know what time it is. Hard deck.

Hard dick. Yes. Spring is upon us. And you know what that means. Okay? Them summer dresses or sun dresses or whatever the hell it is, they are on the way. And you need to be prepared. You need to be ready. You meet the girl of your dreams. You need to move some shit on the inside. How are you going to move some shit on the inside with the hardest dick you've ever had in your life?

Very simple, okay? You deserve to deliver the greatest dick you've ever delivered, and Blue Chew is going to help you do that. Same act of greeting. It's inside Viagra's Cialis, but it's the chew. It's the one that we're rocking with. It's the one that you're going to rock with. It's the one that you're going to impress that new girl, the old girl, the side girl with. It's Blue Chew, okay? And you're going to get your first month free. All you got to do is pay $5 shipping. $5 shipping to deliver the best dick of your life. You're welcome. BlueChew.com. Use the promo code FLAGRANT. Now let's get back to the show.

How do you trust anybody's intentions when you meet them? I trust nobody's intentions. So do you think that I could potentially be working for some government organization? I think anybody could be. I think anybody could be. You're definitely smart enough. You're handsome enough. Thanks. Right? So you could do it. But the bigger concern with someone like you is not that you're doing it wittingly. It's that you're doing it unwittingly. That you are being used. That's what I think is happening now with you.

Like, I think you got me. Put that clip out there. Right. You responded to what we said on the pod. And then I took the bait, but I knowingly took the bait. So there's like this guy's baiting me and then I get him on the pod. But then maybe I wanted him on the pond in the first place. So you never know. You're the master. I could be. It's just show enough. What country do you think that I would be working for?

Judging by his nose, Mossad. It's too obvious. It's too obvious. It's too obvious. Because I've been doing all this rah-rah America stuff, but maybe that's just to throw the scent off the trail. That's true. You could be really good Latvian intelligence. Sick.

Yeah, he's got that. He's like a Division III country dog. Not even a basketball player. Is there a country that's really small but has, outside of Israel, that you were surprised by their level of intelligence? Cuba.

Really? Cuba's poor. Cuba's small. Cuba's ostracized. Their intelligence is amazing. And how are they getting their intelligence out there in the world? I mean, how do they even get it? Well, that's what's so impressive about it, right? What we've learned to do in the United States is leverage our economic incentive to get people to spy for us. Cuba leverages almost exclusively ideological incentives.

where people feel bad for the plight of Cubans. They feel like it's an injustice what's happened to the Cubans. And they feel like that poverty is being forced by Western democracy or whatever else. So what they're able to do is find sympathists

And then cultivate those sympathists to either take positions of government or they have found the sympathists already in positions in government. And then boost them up. And then boost them up. So, Ida Montez? Ida Montez. Yeah. Perfect example. The Ida Montez case is really interesting because Ida Montez was working for DIA and recruited by the Cubans at the same time as another gentleman named William, might be William Burns. Yeah.

who was working for the Department of State and also recruited by the Cubans at the same period of time. And this was during the Clinton administration when Clinton's, all of his foreign policy about Cuba was being dictated by two spies, by two organizations, the State Department and the DIA. They were already influenced by. And those were the leading experts on Cuba. So the entire Clinton administration was being essentially directed by the Cubans because of

of this perfect conglomeration, this perfect triangle of intelligence. And when do we find that out? 19... I think she was convicted in the early 2000s, actually. When was Anna Montez convicted?

Let me find out. So he's out of office. Arrested in 2001. 2001. Okay, now. Wow. Yes, so the damage had already been done. It couldn't be undone because he's already out of office. It was years that she was involved. All eight years, theoretically. Now, that's really interesting. You don't necessarily need to get your citizens in another country and then trick them into allowing them into government. You can get the sympathists in those countries into government. And, wow, you probably even see that happening now, right? That's why ideology is the most powerful of all the motives.

Think about all the things that fall under, like, religion, ideology, nationalism, ideology, academics, ideology, family, ideology. Ideology is a super powerful thing, man. Has any other country done that to us as well? Yes. So, I mean, the Russians... Oh, that's right, the Russians. What was that story? There was a guy who was like, he was the head of the investigation unit in...

I guess, what was it, in the FBI? Yeah, yeah, you tell the story. This is, I mean, I know why we haven't made a movie of it, but it should be every one of their movies. Robert Hansen and Aldrich Ames, again, during the Cold War period, one was FBI, one was CIA, and the Russians had recruited them both for upwards of a decade.

So they were able to collect information on what CIA operations were in Russia and what FBI operations were against Russia in the United States while simultaneously being able to influence what – because these two organizations were actually looking into. And on top of that, the people within those organizations that were hired to look for the mole were them. Yeah.

So then these two guys were so senior that when the mole hunt started, they're like, we'll take a look. They hired the mole. So how does, how does, we are the easiest. I mean, you would think that's such a powerful thing. That's like having a chessboard. How did that work? So how did, how did the, how did the U S essentially win the cold war? At least that's what I understand. The U S didn't win the cold war.

Russia imploded. If you remember, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the Soviet Union collapsing. Is that because communism is sustainable? I mean, the way the USSR was trying to run communism wasn't sustainable. And then you think China's worked out those kinks? I'm very worried about China, if you can't tell. Well, just to stay on this one real quick, I think the CIA had implemented...

like economic deployment. A block. No, not even a block. I think they were deploying resources to like American, what was it? Impressionist art? No, it was a postmodern art. Like they were deploying capital to bolster Western, I guess, ideology and artistic expression. So there was like, there was a move to, I guess, what supports certain cultural institutions in America that,

and make them seem more successful than they really were? Correct. So again, what you're getting at is a lot of what defined the pre-911 CIA. Got it. Which was spaghetti on a wall.

Oh, just try anything. Try anything. Oh, yeah. And it's very difficult to quantify the value of any of those things, right? Like pouring a bunch of money into postmodernist art done by Spanish artists in Barcelona. This is funny. Right? This is funny. Let's try it. In retrospect, we're like, it was the most genius. Yeah, it did nothing.

Not that we could measure. Maybe it was the game changer. MKUltra, same thing? Same thing. MKUltra is one of those things where it's like, hey, the bad guys are doing it. We should do it too. How do we measure the success? I don't want to end before 9-11. You have no oversight. So you guys could just throw anything at the wall. Project Stargate. Correct.

Remote viewers and trying to use LSD to be able to hack into people's brains. The bad guys are doing it. We should do it too. How do we measure it? I want to go into MKUltra and Project Stargate, but also real quick, just back to CIA spending.

That's what some people say the space race was about, right? Bankrupting Russia. And did that lead to the implosion of Russia? It was part of it. The thing that backfired is that Russia beat us in the space race in two out of, I think, four categories. Yeah, they got there at first. They had the first spacewalk. They did first spacewalk, but they didn't hit the moon. Correct. But they didn't get to the moon. That's right. And their spaceships were fucking insane. Did you see the thing? Like, it was a crapshoot.

The things that they were sending up there, the fact that any of them worked. The first guy, I forget the guy's name, the balls on this guy. Yuri, what was it? Yuri, I forget his last name right now. I mean, they're literally just going, we need to beat the Americans, send anything up there. Send anything. Trash cans with duct tape. Dude. Yuri Gagarin. Thank you very much.

But is that true that America was funding or the CIA was funding this space race in an effort to make Russia economically unsustainable? I don't, I mean, it is a very plausible theory. I wouldn't call that a conspiracy theory. I would call that a very plausible theory because it makes sense. CIA maintains a black budget. That's a covert budget. And the way that that covert budget is appropriated

is through things that, where there's extra money. There's extra money that the budget can't account for, that like your bean counters in Washington can't account for, so they put it into the black budget so that CIA can use it for national security reasons. Oh. So you basically have a big, deep black check, a big, deep blank check to do all sorts of crazy shit. That's the spaghetti on the wall. That's the spaghetti on the wall. Now, do you think that was more effective or less? Because I hear you say the new CIA isn't that great either. Right.

Or are there just elements of both? What do you prefer, the old pre-9-11 or post-9-11? No, post-9-11 I prefer much, much better. Because the post-9-11 one, you have checks and balances to confirm that what they're doing doesn't hurt Americans. Pre-9-11, all sorts of shit could happen. And you wouldn't have any idea if it's affecting Americans or not, right? So post-9-11 I think is far better than that. However, we've also lost our tolerance for risk.

And when you were asking, how do people in the CIA view me? Like it's a split decision because there's a lot of people at CIA who are trying their best to do a good job who know CIA is no longer taking risks. They're afraid to take certain risks because they're afraid that some congressman or some senator is going to say no and someone's going to lose their job and then they're going to lose their pension. So you've got a bunch of junior officers who are like, we need to try something new. And a bunch of senior officers who are like, we need to fill out the

box with exactly what we know that can send. But it is tricky because you're operating in the most high stakes game. So the risk requires incredible accountability. Right. And the risks are not even to you, right? Like in intelligence, I may take the risk to collect the secret, but

But the longer that secret is protected, all of us are at risk. It's almost like a miracle. Wait, wait, wait. What did you mean by that? Because if somebody else is holding a secret that they know about us that I can't collect, to collect it, I put myself at risk. If I don't try to collect it, we're at risk. So you're saying it's more beneficial. It would behoove us to take more risk because it actually keeps us all safe. So what would a risk be that you would have to take that people are a little bit concerned about doing? So...

for example, right? If you had a big negotiation coming up for agriculture, and I bring this up a lot because you'd be shocked how much espionage has to do with

being able to anticipate agricultural trading. If you think about what's happening in the Black Sea right now, it's all about agriculture. I was just about to say, with Ukraine, right? Yep. So when it comes to agriculture, the idea of, let's say, Obama got egg on his face because the NSA was caught collecting secrets about agriculture on Angela Merkel in Germany. That's right.

That's right. I remember that. And it was such a weird thing because we're like, why would we be collecting secrets from one of our allies? Because Germany is not being transparent about their trade policy with a common third country. So we have to collect from Germany secrets.

and collect from our target third country to see if the two countries are telling us the truth about each other. And they weren't. Correct. So he was right to do it. Correct. So he didn't really get fucking egg in his face. This bitch was lying. Except that it did massive damage to the German-U.S. pact. But to me, I'm like, that's on you. Like, if it... Go on, go on. I mean, I understand what you're saying. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. That's the American point of view. To NATO, NATO was like, what the fuck, man? How dare you spy on an ally? Germany is the economic engine of all...

all of Europe. And now you just pissed them off. Okay, okay. But continue. So that's kind of how it works. So the kind of risks that you need to take are the risks that there's going to be some kind of flap that makes a rift between the deck

the diplomatic relationships between two countries that are supposed to be strong. And everybody's worried about losing their fucking job because if it turns out that the intelligence doesn't really support anything, now we took this big risk to piss off Great Britain or piss off Germany or piss off Canada, one of our allies, and we got nothing from it, you get canned. Right. And that's Europe. When you're talking about Latin America or Africa, now you're talking about like we pissed off the warlord and now they're taking the BNI instead.

And now we've completely lost access to- And China's like, we're not going to do that to you. Right. Yeah, we're going to play nice, unlike America. Yeah. And then we lose all of our global influence. And not to mention- So there's a big risk. We force- I'm sorry, I just hit our mic. Go, go. And then not to mention, we force our ideology into the countries. So we're like, hey, Mogadishu, we'd love to help you. You need to have free and fair elections. You are not a democratically elected president, so you need to create a schedule of elections, and you need to find a way to make sure that your voters can all vote equally. Yeah.

And then meanwhile, that same warlord has the Chinese going up and being like, we don't need you to change shit. We just need you to sign on the dotted line here that we have access for the next 99 years. And why is that so important to us that we push our ideology? Easier to control? It is our post-World War II strategy. Coming out of World War II,

Remember, the United States was pretty much untouched during World War II. If anything, our economy exploded. Germany, France, Poland. Reeling. Destroyed. Industrially and architecturally destroyed. So we went in there and we were like, hey, we have plenty of money to give you loans. We have plenty of infrastructure to come in and start building immediately. But in order to get access to that money and access to this, you have to follow these guidelines. And then we became the...

leader of the democratic world, right? But why did we feel like that was advantageous? Proximity to Russia, maybe? So we thought it was economically advantageous because we knew that by rebuilding these countries... Oh, no, that part makes sense. But why pushing ideology? Why was the ideology... The rice thing? Where ideology is the strongest. Correct. It's partly... So we can control your ideology, we can control your country. Everything, right. Got it. I see, I see. And we're essentially...

programming into the new economy a reliance on the United States. Brilliant. And guess who's following that model now? China. They are programming into these economies that they are putting money that they are now reliant on China. That's what we've been doing. I love my country. I love the CIA.

This is how it works. This is best practice. This is the game. This is the game. If you don't like it, that's fine. It's still the game, whether you like it or not.

And it's the game that we mastered. And it's the game that that we have now been playing for so long that somebody else has been watching our tape, just like you watch the rival football teams tape. And now they're like, I think we know how to do it better. I'm listening to you. It's almost like, you know, you talked about when you're young, you have a big tolerance for risk. And then as you get older, not so much. It's almost like the U.S. as a young country took on.

On all the risks, CIA, throw spaghetti at the wall, here's your money, give us a fuck. As the U.S. gets older, more security. Now we're like, yo, chill. Everybody, let's just keep things the way they are. I don't want to take it to our detriment. When you've got the top spot, there's only one place to go. So everything feels like risk. It's true. When you're coming up, it's like, yeah, this is worth it. We could get the top spot. So again, so democracy, pushing democracy, pushing ideology is a form of control.

in that not only do we control what they believe in, but we can control the way that they operate commercially. Is that the idea? Yes. How does the democracy create the reliance on the U.S. outside of the loan? Because if we as America want a certain political power to win in an election...

We can come in and say, we believe in this person, not that other person. Yeah. Right. We've done that before. We will we will give more foreign aid because this person is such a strong Democratic leader. But if you vote for that person, we're going to have to pull back our foreign aid. Right. It's exactly what we did with Hamas.

in Palestine, right? We said we will support the Palestinian people in Gaza. And then we reclassified Hamas as a terrorist group again, right? We declassified them in 2019, reclassified them in 2024 as a terrorist group. And then once we reclassified them, we pulled money out. Because we can't support a terrorist group.

But we didn't define them as terrorist groups. No, what I'm saying is you do it in order to, and I imagine other countries also are like, well, I can't be supporting a terrorist group. That's what we, I think that's what our strategy in conjunction with Israel was hoping for. But instead what happened is many of our closest European allies were like, that's fucked up America. We're going to double down and put more money in Turkey, France, Spain. They kept it going. And now that's why you see the Biden administration where they are now bound up. Because now they're like, well, shit.

We called them terrorists. We took back money and people are still dying and Netanyahu is still going crazy. So what do we do now? Now there's a split between Netanyahu and Biden. Now they're talking to the opposition parties in Israel to see if they can find a way to make a ceasefire of some sort, right? I mean, today is the second day of Ramadan, right?

which is one of the largest Muslim holidays. And there was supposed to be a ceasefire that was orchestrated to help kind of honor this holiday. And instead, it's not happening. What do you think happens? In Israel-Palestine? So, I mean, for all the concerns that people had about Putin being ousted during his war in Ukraine, Netanyahu is at way more risk than Putin ever was. Really? Because Israel's a functioning democracy. Right.

Right? The people actually have a say. There's relative transparency there. They already have people calling for reelection. They already have opposition leaders being welcomed and acknowledged in the West.

Netanyahu's in a nasty place. Really? Is there not support for Bibi in Israel right now? There is support, but it's a very narrow far-right support where most of the country has taken a very moderate stance. I thought that the war kind of unified the country behind him. It did for the first... Probably temporarily, similar to 9-11. The protests are coming back. Oh, and now they're starting to come back. Interesting. So he's... Remember 9-11? How?

we all got along. And then eventually it's like, what the fuck are we doing? What the fuck are we doing? We split further than ever. So it's almost like you have a small window to get done what you need to get done where you have full support. And the longer that window lasts, the riskier your position is. And we learned that lesson after 9-11, which is why the Americans went out and said, hey, you know, Israel, you have had an injustice done. Don't do the air raids that you're planning. Don't make the mistake that we made.

Interesting. But it was a political opportunity for Netanyahu to... Consolidate power. In a time when there was already divisiveness about whether or not the country liked him or not. And as a result, to your point, Hamas is now more popular with stronger support in both Gaza and the West Bank than ever before. Because people... There is absolutely a difference between a Palestinian...

and a Hamas terrorist. They are not the same thing. But because the media for so long has called them the same thing, as you have used the two words interchangeably, now it's common knowledge. If you look at the news a week after October 8th, when the attack happened, you would see the news say,

11,000 people have been killed in Palestine according to Hamas authorities. And then you would see a little disclaimer at the bottom that says Hamas controls the Gaza. So the health, whatever comes from them, right? So basically saying, don't trust this information because it comes from Hamas. When you look at the same thing now, it'll say 30,000 people have been killed according to the Palestinian health authority. Oh, wow. Wow. So we have just validated that.

that Hamas, who we are also calling a terrorist organization, is a valid government organization. And it's tricky because they've always been the...

the appointed political power in Gaza since 2007. So they have been that, but because we've been so shitty with our vernacular and our terminology, we've let the waters get foggy. And now it's very difficult to teach people the truth. Well, I think we've questioned whether or not they were actually democratically elected, right? That was my understanding. Yeah. There's, there's very little evidence to say they were democratically elected, but it's also because they're because of the apartheid that's been practiced in,

in Palestine territory for so long, there's a question of whether or not they could even have a democratic election. But the fact that they're growing in popularity on the West Bank is the part that's so interesting because the West Bank has always been a US-backed coalition of the Fatah government. And now even that is falling apart. So what do you think happens? Do you think Bibi gets ousted? I don't. I would imagine in Israel, either a ceasefire is called that gets prolonged,

While some new normal takes place and a two-state solution comes back on the table Hmm, that's the most likely thing that's gonna happen whether that happens soon or not I don't know whether we're talking months or years but for Netanyahu to remain in power He's gonna have to call a ceasefire and then work through a ceasefire Same thing is gonna happen in Ukraine Ukraine and Israel are gonna look very similar from this point forward in what way because the the aggressor or the the

U.S.-backed country, Ukraine and Israel, have both made promises that they can't maintain. There's no way Zelensky is going to win this war to the point where all of the pre-Soviet era boundaries of Ukraine are returned to Ukraine. So now the decision is just how many people are going to die. Yeah, this is the decision is how many people are going to die before you call a ceasefire and basically cut the country in half according to the borders that are already there. Yep.

In Israel, Netanyahu's promised that he's going to occupy Palestinian lands once they are done clearing, cleansing the people of Hamas. That's not going to happen. You're not going to cleanse them of Hamas. You've created an injustice. Hamas is always going to be there. And then if you do occupy Palestinian lands, they're still Palestinian lands, and now you're going to have even more impetus for Palestinians to join Hamas and fight back against Israeli occupation. So both of those leaders are going to find they can't fulfill their promise.

The next best thing to fulfilling your promise is essentially to find some kind of prolonged stalemate that gives the world a chance to reset with a different disaster that takes the attention off of you. And then once that different disaster comes in, what do you do? Then for those countries, they're off the X now.

Off the X meaning not everybody's watching them. And then while they're not watching them, do they try to find some sort of solution? And then everybody's got their tail tucked between their legs, but it doesn't matter because nobody's looking. Frankly, what I think is going to happen is Zelensky and Netanyahu are going to get political sanctuary asylum in the United States. Wow.

Because think about the United States can't let Zelensky die. They cannot do it. He's the voice of democracy in Europe, and everybody knows Putin wants to kill him because that's going to be a fantastic win for Putin. Putin's killed at least two other opponents in the last three years, right? So Zelensky already, if he hasn't already signed the deal, it's coming his way soon. He will get asylum in the United States, and he'll be a leader excommunicado, right? And that's- And then who leads the country when he's gone? Yeah.

It's going to be a shadow puppet government for Russia or it's going to be a puppet government for NATO one way or the other. So Ukraine and Israel are begging China to invade Taiwan. Correct. They're like, do it tomorrow so that we could settle our ship without the X on our back. And China's sitting here watching the whole thing. Going. America's running out of money. America's already out of ammunition. NATO is torn on war in Europe. It's time to dance. Nobody cares about what's happening out here in the South China Sea. Except China.

Except one thing. The company that is putting the stock market on its back happens to be a Taiwanese company. And we will not let anything happen to NVIDIA. So what they got to do is get NVIDIA the fuck out of Taiwan. If China was like, I'll take the entire company and I'll just move it to Palo Alto, I think that it might work. So what's funny is NVIDIA is the AI company that...

But it's built on the back of TMSC, which is a semiconductor company. And that is? That's in Taiwan. Yep. So TMSC, it's the semiconductors in Taiwan that are the key to the future. And that's why we're protecting them. Correct. If China can find a way to get their hands on a functioning, working semiconductor industry...

then that's going to massively increase their ability to be a technological opponent, right? A tech alternative to the United States. And the first thing they do is cut off supply to the United States or start to heavily tax it or put tariffs on it. But Taiwan, for some reason, is just so far ahead of everyone else when it comes to the chip production. Did they do that on purpose? Yeah, like how did this happen? The United States.

So we, when we were doing these like experiments with newly industrialized nations, right? It was Taiwan. There's a few others out there in Asia as well. And what was, that was our foreign policy to show, hey, listen, if you're cozy with America, look how good it can be. And because what was our strategy? Create something that makes the industry of that country dependent on America. Oh, on us. So we create. Not on China, because that's how we have some influence and control out there. And at the time, who?

Who had all the demand for semiconductors? We did. We did. Who was the only country creating high tech? We were. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what could we not do in our country? Create like pollution and silk. Oh, there it is. So now we can do outsource all of your, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Outsource all of the issues Greta Thunberg is going to complain about. Yeah.

Build up the industry of another country right next to one of your potential adversaries. At the time, China was an ally. Wait a minute, really? Yeah. Oh, that's right, because they're making all the shit that we're buying. Correct. So we didn't even foresee... Do we have military bases in Taiwan right now? We don't have military bases in Taiwan. We have military bases across the South Pacific. But Taiwanese military bases, they're shared. So like American...

planes and jets can land on those bases with Taiwanese permission. So unplanned, unannounced kind of thing. I'm very impressed with your geopolitical knowledge. I don't know shit, man. I don't know anything. This is the smart guy. That's why Altman wants to raise a trillion dollars to catch up. To get the semiconductor production over here. So 2031.

China is like at the same level as America. And now that becomes... Chill, chill, chill, chill, chill, chill. When it happens... Knock on wood. Knock on wood. When all of our attention is on China, what do you think happens with the race relations here in America? Because we have so many Chinese Americans and you said Chinese people are China first. So like what's going to happen here? Some...

It's an interesting question. Alex thinks every Chinatown is a cell. Sleeper cells. Yeah, you're right. I mean, yeah. This man's a genius. Son, inside, what the fuck? How are you right about this? Every once in a while. You've been saying this for years. Go on, go on, go on. Nah, he's been dying on this cross, so this is going to be great to hear. I'm glad that you lived on that cross.

Tell us, tell us, tell us. So you're right. So essentially the way that diaspora communities insulate intelligence collection is that the intelligence collection facilities or the intelligence collection agencies plant themselves in the diaspora.

So a Chinatown is a diaspora of Chinese immigrants in a foreign country. So the intelligence community just plants its own operatives inside that community. It's not like the community is there for intelligence purposes. It's not even like the community knows that there's intelligence there. It's just a very convenient entry point. It's what we call a beachhead. It's a very convenient beachhead for...

for an opponent force to insulate itself from local law. And do we have beachheads in other places? It's tougher because first of all, in the United States, we don't have to, we don't create diaspora communities. We create expats who are, who, who, uh, acculturates the local community, but they're still Americans. Yeah. And we don't really have to hide because we can just be like,

hey, we're coming in to party. We're going to bring new business and American dollars and everything else, and everybody wants us there. Much harder for a foreign country to come in to another foreign country and be like, could you imagine if the Chinese were like, we're here to party, and we're bringing Chinese yuan with us. And we're like, convert that into dollars. And then, yeah. Look at TikTok. Yeah, I got to sell this. Who controls? China has a 50-year policy, right? Two questions. Does America have a 50-year policy?

Oh, so America has been you're saying for the last few hundred years, been curating its policy four years or eight years at a time. Correct. I mean, that is it's mind boggling that we've even been able to be impressive that we got this far. But and then what does that speak to? Does that speak to the power of capitalism or democracy? Like it is unbelievable that we've been able to compete at the highest level ever.

with a new dude in charge every four years. - You have to think back to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. What the Founding Fathers put in place was brilliant.

It was the reason that they're called government servants is because you're supposed to sacrifice four years of your life to go be a government servant because you were in industry or entertainment or business or something else. Especially true in Congress. I mean... And that's what it was up until like the 1950s. And then they became these career politicians. But you're right. It was like...

It was some local person from the community was going to stop his job for two years. I think that's why the what is it? The House of Representatives is only a two year term, right? It's because, dude, I can't step away from my farm for six years and do this. Yeah. And now that idea is completely gone to the wayside. Now we have congressmen in place for 13 years, 18 years, 24 years. And who sets the term limits for Congress?

So it's not even in like, that's one of the places where there's a lack of checks. There is no check and balance there whatsoever. They give themselves a raise. Yep. It's insane. This legislative branch is the least, the least checked branch of all of them. And the idea is that the check is built within it.

that not any one of them have this huge amount of power. Of course, I get that. Because it's a two-party system. Yes, but when they're acting as a collective and they're all incentivized by the same thing, there's no check on that. So maybe that was the one thing that they missed because I'm sure at the time when the Founding Fathers were creating, they're like, who the fuck would want to be in government? Even George Washington was like, dude, just owning slaves is way better. Yeah.

You know what I mean? He's like, fuck all this freedom shit. He said no. I need some new teeth. Yeah. So it's like, yeah. Oh, wow. That's so interesting. They couldn't fathom that people in a free world would want to govern. Right. So they didn't even put the check into it. Because it was always supposed to be a position for the most experienced, most elite, people with the most to lose. Because, again. That's a fucking great point, too. If you had nothing, if you were not a landowner. You couldn't even run for office. Mm-hmm.

Which sounds incredibly unfair, but understand it was supposed to be representative. So the people that were most affected by these laws were the people that did own land. Right. So in our own, this is why I call us, like, this is why I say that we're in the country, we're in middle school. It sucks. It's a childish problem to have. You don't even realize it. Yeah. But yeah. Hmm.

But we're not the youngest in terms of democracy. No. So there are other countries that are way older in terms of their culture, but their democracies are much younger. Do they have the same problems? They do, in large part because their democracies are modeled off of ours. Yeah. Because we were first, we didn't see this problem coming, I don't think. Right. Taiwan is a fantastic example. January, Taiwan had elections.

The president that was elected was part of the opposition party, the separatist party from China. And the whole world, like, rejoiced, like, oh, the new Taiwanese president is in opposition to China. The Congress of Taiwan is in favor of reunifying with China.

Wait a minute. The dominant party in the Congress is pro-China. The president is anti-China. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Is China influencing these elections? So there is a way where China can get Taiwan without even having to invade. That's China's way of doing it. Look at what they did in Hong Kong in 2019. Now, I would say that was a little more forceful.

The force happened at the end. But you're saying the lead up was there was like in was it ingratiation? Is that the China? China has some of the best legal capabilities in the world. That's why so many American law school graduates are actually Chinese citizens because people come to law school here.

Chinese people come here for law school and then they go practice law all over the world. So they learn international law or American law? American law, democratic law. And then they apply that. So in Hong Kong, what happened is over the course of maybe five years, China systematically changed the legislative values of Hong Kong using very legal methods. It's really smart. Until the time came when they pulled the dial and they were like, hey, Hong Kong now

All of your citizens are held to Chinese standards, Chinese laws. And then the people were like, that's not legal. And then China was like, actually, yes, it is. This is it. So this is really beating us at our own game. It's just really smart. It's like how you avoid hot water.

It's, wow. They don't have the military to win a hot war. Well, I think they could win a hot war against Hong Kong. Yeah, but maybe not against. On a global superpower scale. Right. So the same thing is happening in Taiwan and we may be paying attention to it now. It's been happening for the better part of a decade. And if you just look at Chinese influence on Taiwanese elections, if you just Google that and then put the word October in there, you'll see that the world woke up to it in October of 2023. Yeah.

for an election that happened in January of 2024. That's hilarious. That doesn't mean that the Chinese were building that pipeline for decades. Yeah. And it worked. And then now that the Congress of Taiwan is controlled by a pro-China team, it really doesn't matter what the head, the figurehead says. Chinese are exercising more in the international waters. The Chinese are, they've in the most recent national Congress that just happened like four days ago,

They stopped talking about a peaceful reunification with Taiwan. What'd they say? They said, we must take a forceful or rigid, they used a very different word, but it was like, it was something along those lines, approach to our reunification with Taiwan. I mean, what an amazing advantage that they would have on us. If we don't have time to build up a semiconductor business and they absorb Taiwan peacefully, what if they don't even have to be rigid or forceful? That's their goal, man. Their goal is they don't want to invade.

They want to – I mean we're using the word peaceful in American terms. Just as little bloodshed as possible. Cold war type shit. Yeah. I mean if you – Manipulate the people into thinking it's what they want. That's the next level to the game is you trick the people into asking for it and then you oblige them to do it.

China goes, all right, if you really want it, if the Congress really wants it and you guys all want it, fine. You get your cup of coffee. What does that mean? Coffee. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Someone's paying attention. That was good. Wow, that's great. So that is the game. That is the idea. That's the game. The game, and that is Sun Tzu's Art of War if you just look at it.

Yeah. It's been published since the 11th. It's not even you. Yeah. This is thousands of years old or whatever. This, this, um, this, the Gigi ping guy, how, first of all, there's no way the CIA lets you leave. You're out of your fucking mind. No, cause you're really good at this. I appreciate you. You're really good at this. You're great at communicating. You're really patient. Um,

I mean, if we ask you, are you allowed to say, like, are you a part of the CIA now? I am not a part of CIA. Yeah. The straight up truth. I am a former overt. My cover has been rolled back. I am not a member of CIA. Do you have clearance still? Nope. My clearance expired after two years, just like they're supposed to do. Right. I've had a private contractor re-up my clearance.

So I have a security clearance now under a private contractor, but not a federal security clearance. And I run a business that I'm planning on scaling into the tens of millions. Like, that's what I'm doing right now. I'm telling you without a doubt. It's really smart. If the CIA calls me tomorrow and says, we need your help. You'll do it. Without a doubt. Now, if they asked me to help introduce them to anybody that I'm on a podcast with, I'd say yes. But the CIA is the DMV.

They don't think that way. They don't work that way. They don't take risks. Yeah. The risk of me actually working for them and then that becoming publicly known is too great for them. So that's on them, man. I'm doing what I can do. I guess what I meant by when I said you still work for the CIA is not that you get a check. Yeah, yeah.

And the same with it, like a Mark Zuckerberg or whatever. Like, I think you reach a certain point as a business owner in America where like your business becomes, what is a gas or electric? What are those called? Utilities. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like a utility, right? And then once you're a utility-

If the government calls you for something, you kind of do it, right? You help them. And I wonder if people that are in your position, because I imagine you're kind of unique. I don't know if every CIA operative is like you. Would you say that you have a set of skills that also allows you to succeed as in like, let's call this entertainment or infotainment, whatever you want to call it? I've certainly developed this because it takes a lot of punches to

before you learn how to do this dance. Gotcha. Right? And it just so happened that I was, I had no other options except to take some punches for a while. Got it. And that's how I kind of found my voice in this space. Got it. Okay. Because, and I do want you to talk about your business because I think it's, put it this way. Maybe you should, maybe you should tell people what the business does. Because I think it's, after listening to you, incredibly effective. Yeah. Thanks, man. But I don't think CIA is letting you go. Yeah.

I don't think they're paying you, but I think that you could be incredibly useful to them. I honestly hope so. And that's the same thing every former CIA officer says is we hope that one day CIA will wake up and realize that we can do a great deal to bring the community back in support of the national security infrastructure. Because when there's nothing that bridges the community with the national support and national security infrastructure, conspiracy theory reigns and distrust reigns.

because we fear what we don't understand. I'm not sharing any national security secrets here. I'm just telling people like, hey, we're the DMV at CIA. It's staffed with a lot of hardworking, dedicated people who are young, who are trying to make a career and abandoning that career because of an old guard, an old way of doing things. We're running like the DMV and China's running like Apple. There we go. Like Apple sees they're always ahead of the game, it seems. And it's not necessarily because of innovation at China, like it was at Apple. It's just because it's either...

Planning. Play or get the fuck out of the way. That's how they work, right? Okay. So my company, Everyday Spy, our mission is spy education to break barriers.

So I teach people real world spy education, facts about CIA, facts about spy systems, spy frameworks, spy ways of thinking, spies way, spies way of keeping yourself safe. If it, if it has any grounding in real world espionage or real world spy tactics, my mission is to teach that to the everyday person so they can use it to keep their family safe, their business safe and their body safe. That's what we do.

But specifically in business, incredibly effective. It's incredibly effective in not just small business, but also in corporate business. That's where I saw it. And that's kind of how I assumed you were going to scale it. I mean, on the mom and pop shop, it's awesome. But like sitting down with these CEOs and learning how to effectively communicate with the people that you might be going up against.

how to pull them in as assets, how to extract information for them. I mean, yeah. And that's what I love what you guys are getting at. And there is value there. But what I found where the value really demonstrates itself is because it's hard, just like spaghetti on the wall, you know,

Post-modernist art funding in Europe during the Cold War, it's hard to measure that. Companies have a hard time measuring the real value of communication skills or negotiation skills. So instead, what we often find is that our clients call us in for very specific, discrete challenges. We had a CFO of one of our clients get deepfaked on LinkedIn.

And they didn't know who to turn to. But there's this deepfake video on LinkedIn of a CFO. And they're like, what the fuck are we going to do? Like, because this is all lies that's been created. So they call our company in. We use our network of contacts. And we're saying, hey, guys, we've got to follow the money to find out where this deepfake came from, who's behind it, who's funding it, and how do we shut it down. Sick. Sick.

I see. Okay. So you're also problem solving. That's like a crisis management thing. But that's where it all starts because really when it comes to adding value to people, just like that cup of coffee, you have to add immediate value. You can't add the promise of future value. You have to add immediate value. So when people are in their most, they're,

the position where they're in the most vulnerable. Yeah. And they come to you and they say, can you do this? It's very helpful to have a set of skills where you can do things. Nobody else can. At what point do you tell them you created the deep fake video so that they're not? That's actually fucking genius. Giving away CIA training, that's not going against like whistleblowing or giving away CIA training.

Tricks? So the thing that CIA protects is called their sources and their methods. And what they mean by sources and methods are sources of active current intelligence collection and methods by which those sources are being collected against. So when you teach a framework like understanding human psychology of reciprocity,

That's not a CIA secret. It's not specific to them. They're taking it from some book that, oh, the fuck is that guy? Chris Voss. No, well, Voss is a CIA guy, but there's a book called Influence by Cialdini, I think his name is. Cialdini, yep. Cialdini, how do you pronounce it? But yeah, so I imagine some of the tactics are coming from that. Right, so some of these things exist in the ether, and these experts have written about it for years, and the CIA have probably distilled it down to the most effective, like the sharpest tack.

Because they need to teach people fast. Yeah. And they need to teach people to use these skills in the real world under pressure. I mean, to me, I'm like, I'm looking at you. Let's say I have a business, right? I mean, we have a business here, but let's say I have a business with 100 employees and you need the management of those employees and the management with all those assets, if you will. How do you instill loyalty in them? How do you get people to...

I guess, commit to the ideology of this brand that you're all working for. It seems to me like it'd be incredibly effective to go to either military or to CIA training to get the best out of your employees and also make them feel like they're most committed to this belief system or this business. That's a no-brainer. Right. The place where, as much as I joke about CIA being as efficient as the DMV,

which is not very efficient. That is true. But what they have become very, very adept at is creating a hyper-loyal structure that keeps secrets. And really as a business, that's what a business owner wants is a hyper-loyal group that keeps secrets. We call that institutionalization and there's a model for institutionalization. It's a model that was developed by a psychologist, 100%.

over decades of being applied at CIA that now because I left CIA and learned these tools at CIA, I can now take what I learned at CIA, the distilled version of what this psychologist put in academic terms, and I can speak about it in layman's terms. Also like hiring, just imagine the value in HR. Yeah, I could see you guys having a lot of value outside of just like

singular tasks and singular problems that need to be solved, but really about building the infrastructure for the business. Hiring specifically, like if you know that you need somebody, like let's say you're hiring a manager or like an agent, and that agent is going to have to operate in some murky territory where that guilt complex is going to be an issue, not speaking about Dove at all.

But like, like for example, for me, like I couldn't do what some of these agents do. Sometimes these agents try to poach me for my agents. Right. And like, it just feels kind of icky, but they don't have that feeling of ickiness.

How can you screen for that? Yeah. You could probably develop something very easily that would help you screen for that. Right. And then that would distill the hiring process and make it so much more efficient. Automate the whole thing. I mean, we boil it all down to personalities. You could have them take a test. You don't even have to meet them until they pass all the requirements. You're saving weeks of time. You can have them take...

a short battery that gives you their personality. You can have an assessment for what type of personality you need for the position. And then you can also automate a step where they have to demonstrate that they're good for the position by carrying out a specific task. That's even a profit generating task or revenue generating task. So they're making money before they're hired. And then, and that's before they're even hired, right? Yeah. And then you can even pay them for accomplishing the task. Of course. And you can pay them a portion of the profit that they just earned.

Right. So now you're indoctrinating them right at the very beginning that if you're going to work for us, you must generate revenue and you will be rewarded based on a profit share of the revenue that you earned. Have you thought about trying to restructure the CIA like how it would look for you? One of my...

I have five-year goals and 10-year goals. And one of my 10-year goals for our company is to have a formal contract with at least five members of the intelligence community where we are bringing best practices of corporate America into the- Maybe we should make that a seven-year goal, 20, 30 goal. Just throwing it out there. It'd be nice. But so essentially, and what problem would that essentially solve?

So the big problem, the...

The lifetime problem, the personal mission problem that I have is I want to keep America as the dominant democracy in the world. We need to remain as the world's superpower. If my kids are going to have kids with American passports and American citizenship, I need to do everything in my power to make sure that the United States remains dominant, which means I need to make sure my business makes as much money as possible to feed GDP, and I need to make sure every client I service makes as much money as possible to feed GDP so we can keep this machine going, especially if we're going through middle school

And presidents are going to be fuck-offs and congresspeople are going to be dickwads. We have to keep funding this train until the voting public can mature past that. So that's my goal. Money is not what I want. Money is the tool that gets me what I want. What you need. But with the CIA and reforming it, do you have an idea of how the CIA could look? I think it could look like a very beautiful thing.

But that's intelligence reform, and that's the legislative branch and the executive branch working in concert, and that's them opening up to outside civilian organizations.

that it's a huge culture change for them if they're going to go down that route. But you do have an idea of it. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Just from sitting with you for a couple hours, I think you have it exactly. I appreciate it. I mean, thank you for the vote of high confidence. I would give myself about 60% vision because you've got to leave space in there for the realities of how things and how people work. How likely is it any of this happens in your brain? In forever? The things you think need to happen.

I mean, I think that in my lifetime, before I die in my hopeful late 80s, I mean, there's a 20% chance that we see significant intelligence reform without a disaster. But we had a disaster. 9-11 was what brought intelligence reform the first time.

So you're saying we need another one. Unfortunately, we are a country that has a very short memory. We're reactive. And until an enemy presents itself loud and clear, we don't unify. And China knows that, which is why they don't present themselves as a clear and present danger. Yeah, because they don't want our unity. They'll wait to the last possible moment.

They've read the playbook. That's part of war. That's our model. Yeah, don't engage in war until you know you can win. Wow. So be besties. Continue making all our shit. Wow. Because we already know that when you invade Taiwan, it's only going to take about 12 weeks for everybody to forget anyways. That is true. We have a short memory. So they know they could invade Taiwan.

We probably wouldn't do anything. It's like, are we really going to let American soldiers die for Taiwan? It'd be really hard to get American support for that. What's the public first response on that? Are the ships that are in that area supposed to make a first day response if there was an invasion? And that's the big question right there is what is the military doctrine for engaging Taiwan?

China. Day one. Day one. Because that's the thing. If you have a destroyer off the coast of southern China that launches cruise missiles onto mainland China... We're at war, baby. And that destroyer is going to be sunk because it's right at the gates of China. So what does that destroyer do? Does it just park itself in the Taiwan Strait? Or you park yourself in the Taiwan port and now any attack on Taiwan is an attack on American soldiers. As long as if

You can prevent from attacking that port. So they'll attack every port. But so now you need to ship at every fucking port. All you. Yeah. Yeah. Possible because China knows that you don't piss off Americans unless you kill Americans. And if you do, we just go crazy. Yep. So they will find every way possible to engage Taiwan without killing an American soldier. And that's that's that's the way that's the way to keep America fat and lazy is just don't

Don't hurt our people. And we have a shocking level of forgiveness after that. That is so fucking true.

Oh my God. Okay. Any, any other questions before we get you out of here? I had all these, but I didn't, I mean, I just been writing on the back of this fucking paper. I'm not sure what you can share, but I'm curious. Can you tell us any stories about extreme, like near death experiences on any operations that you were on or anything that maybe you were almost exposed? Because obviously this is high risk. Yeah. So, so with the one operation that I'm very proud of, the, that operation ended with my near capture.

Oh, fuck. And I'm trying to get all of those details cleared so I can publish them all. So that's my personal example. Wife involved as well? No, my wife was geographically separate at the time. So she was fine. Exactly. But that's the story I'm trying to get clearance to tell. And hopefully that clearance will come soon. But that's just me. And the thing is, my story was just about capture.

There are other CIA officers who were already captured, who were already imprisoned, who were already interrogated, who were used for political propaganda. I mean, the stories, the heroes of CIA, I swear to you, the heroes of CIA are still at CIA because they have chosen to sacrifice everything else to stay there.

I mean, I feel like I am proud to have been from there, but I chose to leave. Right? They are a different kind of hero for choosing to stay. Give it up for those guys, bro. Yeah, facts. I have a question. Yes, go, Miles. What sort of movie or book or piece of content do you think sort of best represents either your experience of the CIA or the CIA? It could be fiction or nonfiction, but like...

So, yeah, it is a very good question. So in the book world, there's a very dry read called Inside the CIA.

And it's one of those dry reads that is mandatory for every new candidate. So if you want to know what it's actually like inside the CIA, read the book Inside the CIA. It was published in like the 90s, I want to say. So it was pre-911 CIA, but it's still fairly accurate for how it's been reformatted since then, right? So that's book-wise. Film-wise, I would actually recommend the first season of The Americans. Okay.

If you watch season one of The Americans, you will see some of the most authentic trade crafts, covert communications, some of the real world stressors that they have trying to remain clandestinely engaged in operations while also operating in a cover life.

You and your wife watch that together or are you like, no, this is too close to home? It's too close to home. It's like being a surgeon and watching that like Grey's Anatomy or something, right? Oh, wow. So like you watch it and you're like, this is not entertaining because we were there or it's too fabricated to be real and that also loses our entertainment value. So my wife is a much bigger consumer of spy fiction than I am. But-

But periodically I'll watch something where I'm like, oh, that was pretty solid, right? Gray Man on Netflix. Why just season one? Gray Man's so good. Gray Man's also pretty good. I actually knew the creative consultant from CIA for Gray Man, and that's one of the reasons it was so good. And the person who is the most accurate in all of Gray Man, still comically created, is the private intel contractor.

That character in Gray Man is the most accurate of all the characters in Gray Man. But to answer your question. Yeah, you said just season one of The Americans. Why? After that, it became commercialized. After that, they got more money and more popularity, so they had to ramp up the excitement and adventure. Gotcha. Season one is still very clandestine and sophisticated and grounded. You said in an interview that you were talking about General Petraeus.

And you said that you're very complimentary of him and you're talking about your guy's relationship and the things that he shared with you. And it was really beautiful. But you said this sentence that caught my attention. You go, you don't get to be that powerful without making mistakes. And then you kind of just moved on. What does that mean?

So I don't want to characterize my relationship with General Petraeus as being like a close personal relationship. I was one of the few CIA officers that could keep up with his fitness regiment when he was the director at CIA. So when he needed a workout buddy and I was within a helicopter ride, I worked out with him, right? So he didn't have to work out alone. When we would work out, just like when you guys work out, you talk about shit. And the thing that I was always the most interested in talking to him about was family.

Because, I mean, everybody knew he was a great general and, you know, he was a hardcore director at CIA. But he had, I think he had two daughters, three children overall. And then, of course, everything happened after his mistress was outed. So I used to always ask him, like, these are the years in my time at CIA leading up to my child's birth. And I'm like, how did you choose to, like...

lead the Afghan forces versus be home with your newborn daughter. And he was always very honest about the fact that when he looks back, he regrets the sacrifices that he made for his children and

because of a fight in Afghanistan that ultimately policymakers abandoned. So now he's lost two legacies. Yeah. Because he doesn't have the relationship with his children and he doesn't have the legacy of Afghanistan. Yeah. Right? Right. But that's what a soldier does and that's how you, you know, serve and whatever else. But I took that...

Like it hit me heavy, man. Cause I'm like, you know what? When you work for the federal government at the behest of the executive, the executive changes every four years. If you're lucky, it doesn't happen earlier than that. So are you willing to dedicate a life?

and potentially lose everything you worked for because of a change in American leadership. So it was, so that's what I meant by that quote. Like to become as powerful as he did, he had to, he had to say yes to every operation presented to him, no matter how impossible the odds were or no matter how much sacrifice was required of him and his family. I interpret that completely differently. I interpret it as they knew he was having an affair and that's why he was put in a position of power because he could be controlled. No, it was, it was,

At the end of his career, as a 60-year-old man looking back, he made these massive mistakes. He prioritized career over everything, and that will be a mistake as you reflect. He already is. As he reflects it, it's a mistake. Yeah. Interesting. Because you know what you can't do? That's interesting. You can't win back your 18-year-old child that you didn't love when they were 10. Yeah. You can't win them back.

How often is it that you see this in the movies, there's like some young hacker kid or some linguist or something, the CIA reaches out to them and gets them. Is this fiction or is this actually happened? So it's a mix. It does actually happen. Super talented people are plucked up by the agency all the time. There are also super talented criminals.

that are arrested by FBI and plucked up by CIA. Is that right? Because that's one of the ways CIA can always stay on the cutting edge of- The prisoners who run the asylum. Of nefarious activity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Is learn from the best. And did you feel like they did that with you? That they recruited you? Were they aware of you? I think that for me, I fell into an automated-

You're in the Air Force. I'm in the Air Force. High clearance. High clearance. I have been in the Air Force since I was 18 years old. All I've ever known is military structure, and I came from a military household before that. They knew my grades. They knew my health status. They knew how many push-ups I did for the physical fitness exam. They knew everything about me, my languages. So when I applied for the Peace Corps, a federal government organization—

I just fell, I triggered some algorithm somewhere where they were like, oh, this person is someone we should talk to. Because if you think about it, what does somebody at the Peace Corps want? Adventure, travel, high risk tolerance. They have no problem with discomfort. That's funny. They want to change the world. Well, what does a CIA officer want? All the same shit, right? And you must've checked the other boxes as well. They already had character screening on you. Now here's, here's a question.

Did you have, they have all this information on you. The interview process, is it even necessary? It is. It is because. But you get what I'm getting at, right? Like. You got to keep in mind that information is always past tense. Ah, so you could have changed. So it's making sure that you're meeting up with the information that they have about you. Right. So they're not going, you're going to wow us. They're going, we're wowed.

Let's see if you live up to it. Also, sexual deviancy, all those questions that you have to answer, I assume is different than what we've seen. Yeah. This is like, I'm going to ask you about your past. How are you going to answer this? What are you going to tell me? Yeah. It's like a much more intimate thing than just what I can learn. You've got a polygraph that you have to go through, right? Like they have a lot of control as they ramp up the experience or the onboarding experience. Would you have weapons training? Did you get weapons? I had weapons training from the military. Of course. And then you get more when you're at CIA. There's different types. Did you ever kill somebody?

I cannot answer that question in great detail. I can say that I've never intimately killed anybody. Intimately killed anybody. What does that mean? That means when you kill somebody in personal range. But maybe intelligence that you've given ended up getting somebody. Or you've used some other kind of kinetic strike that's not person to person. Like a drone strike would fall into that category of non-intimate. Are there things that you... I know that you don't necessarily...

feel the guilt. You feel it, but it doesn't inhibit your actions. Are there things that you regret? Or...

Is there a PTSD that you feel from, you know, you hear all this stuff about people who have been in these environments that you've been in and it's pretty awful. Yeah. So I am confident I do not have PTSD because I've worked with plenty of people who have PTSD. I've been through some traumatic events, but a big part of the reason I started a business, to learn about business, I started by writing a blog.

And all my blog was, was my feelings, my stories, my thoughts, and how I'm trying to make something productive out of all these destructive skills. So it was in that process of kind of like a self-therapy. The blog turned into a podcast. The podcast turned into a product offering. The product offering turned into kind of

mastering the content, right? And that was all 2018 when it started. So fast forward to now in 2024, and it's much more evolved and it's much more developed. And I have a much cleaner understanding of my own thought process, but that was essentially six years of therapy.

that I was able to put myself through and do exactly what I wanted to do, create something productive out of the destructive past that I had before that. Did you use any of the skills that you learned on raising your own children? All the time, all the time. And my children know it and they don't know any alternative to it. So like our family uses code words.

So I don't know. Well, you don't, your kids are too young. Do you have kids yet? You're married. No. So one of the biggest challenges that parents have is teaching their kids when to open like a hotel room door, when the parents go downstairs to go get ice or something, or when it's safe to open the door to a stranger, especially because strangers can say they're police officers or say they're Amazon delivery people. So our kids, we teach them code words. So if a stranger comes to the door and that stranger is sent by us, they will know a specific code word.

So our children know to ask a question at the door. They don't ask, what's the code word? They ask a very specific question. Oh, wow. And they wait until they hear the response back. And if they don't get the code word back, they don't answer the door. Did you give them field tests? Yeah. I figured. But you need that now for AI. Everyone's going to need code words because we can just AI anyone's voice. Yeah, that's true. Do you have any other CIA parenting tips? Yeah, so another one is...

everybody wants control. So one of the things that you learn about psychology is that we're all vying for control.

And feeling control isn't the same thing as actually having control to your point about that gut feeling, right? So oftentimes what we need to feel like we have control is we just need to feel like we have a say in the outcome. So with my children, they started brushing their teeth, right? So I would always, and they never want to brush their teeth. Every parent knows children never want to brush their teeth. So we would say, do you want to brush your teeth now or in two minutes?

And just having that say in the outcome completely changes their willingness to do it. So we do have this like innate autonomy. We want to be the conductors. Is that human or American? It's human. Human beings want to believe that we have power over our future. Yeah. What we don't do a very good job of is defining what future we're talking about. So with my kids now or in two minutes, they're like,

I have two more minutes if I say two minutes and then I can go brush my teeth. Or if you're my daughter, I can say two minutes and then in two minutes negotiate again. Yeah. But either way, like they feel like they have some sort of power. And oftentimes that's what an employee wants. How many employees? I mean, I'll never forget. I went on a hiring surge this year. I had somebody who, who I made an offer to, and I think it was $80,000. I made an offer to them to come on as a junior level person in my company.

And they hemmed and hawed about it for a couple of days. And they asked to meet with me and my president so they could come up with a counteroffer. And they came back. And after a lot of like, I've got kids and I've got this and I've got ambitions and I've got whatever, they came back with a counteroffer of $85,000. And I was like, like your counteroffers $5,000. Like that's not a counteroffer. That's sure. That's an easy yes for me. If you think like $5,000 spread over 12 months of work, over 2,080 hours of your talent,

Like, that's easy. But to that person, they felt like they were taking control over their future. It's like, you know, I appreciate your counteroffer. I think it's very reasonable. Let's do it. What was your initial offer lower knowing that they would counteroffer? Always. That's a basic negotiation. Is that person still at your company? Because he's probably watching this right now. He's like, fuck. Should have came in at 90. I don't know why I just think I heard my friend got a job offer and then...

He goes, "I rejected it." I go, "What was it?" He goes, "I don't know. I just reject the first offer." He didn't even look at it. He just rejected it because he knows they're going to lowball. There's a negotiation tactic called always starting with no. It's something you'll hear some advanced negotiators talk about. Start with no because once a salesperson or that other person making the offer hears no,

then they at least know where the starting place is, right? Start with no, I think, as a book, actually. But no is the place that you want to go for first. Is somebody listening to this podcast and that's their job at the CIA?

Not because you're on it, but like when we do it regularly. Like, do we have a guy? No, you probably don't have a guy. Here's what most likely happens. What most likely happens is there's an algorithm. Yeah. There's an AI and any YouTuber with probably over a million followers falls into that algorithms watch list. And then that algorithm is looking for keywords. Like what?

Terrorism. Yeah, terrorism. A la Akbar. Terrorist attack. Yeah. You know, I mean, let's just list them out so that you make sure that you get flagged this time, right? That's what I'm saying. That'd be good. Because then maybe if we say enough, a guy has to listen to it. You know, there's like a mandatory like person. There we go. And then we get him like a great day. Like what an awesome day. So I'm a Chinese sympathizer. Yes. Chinese sympathizer. They've heard that a couple of times. They're listening. Yeah.

We'll hit all those words right now. I mean, just the idea to me sounds so funny that there's a dude who like he has to listen to podcasts. Like surely Rogan has one, right? There's somebody who has to listen to every Rogan. Oh, yeah. Well, the reason that it's so valuable is because the guests that you guys have on the podcast are insight into your network because they're connected to you. Right.

Their insights into the network that they carry with them, because once they've been with you, you can basically follow the trail to see what their network is next. And then you can see whether or not what they're talking about could be twisted into propaganda for a foreign country. You said after 9-11, all the government agencies share information now. Aliens, UFOs, real or not?

So there's a fantastic article that was written, I think, by the Wall Street Journal. The head of Aero, which is the DoD's UFO research wing, was a true scientist and engineer, just came out to basically say there is no truth, no grounds, no nothing that UFOs are real. My stance on this is that UFOs are real, but they're not aliens. Hmm.

98% of what happens in the sky we'll be able to rationalize and describe without a problem. The 2% of what happens in the sky that we don't know should scare us a whole hell of a lot more than it does. Because if it's not aliens, it's us. And it's some shit about us that we don't even know.

And that's scary. And why is that scary? Because that could be a next fleet of drones developed by the Russians. That could be a hypersonic cruise missile by China. Yeah. That could be some weird sort of joint new thing that's being developed by Syria and Iran and North Korea. And like it's being tested over Montana. Like that is some scary shit. When you take aliens out of it, we want to find comfort in aliens because maybe they're here for good reasons. Once you say it's a fucking bad guy.

there's no good reasons for it to be there. - You mentioned something with UFOs and earthquakes. What was that? Somehow they're correlated? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something called earth lights, which happen when certain gases are released from an earthquake and then they light. They have translucent appearances in the sky. So a lot of times people will see lights in the sky they can't define. Ball lightning is one of those very rare phenomenon. Another is these earth lights. So when there's an earthquake,

that releases gas, it can create these earth lights. And that's why a lot of times you see in the West, people spot UFOs the most out West where there's the most fault lines and there's the most earthquake activity. I still believe there's aliens.

And aliens. Yeah. I mean, there's some weird-ass people out there anyways, so. China. Don't talk about daddy like that, right? Anything else for Andrew before he gets out of here? No, this is awesome. Oh, here's a question I have some self-interest in. India, is that a threat to China? Is that an emerging superpower? Because we get told that a lot. So I was actually wondering about this. How close are you with your Indian people?

your Indian family, your culture? I don't know enough. I have a ton of family in India. I try to go back every year. I love India. I have been talking to my wife about maybe splitting time there when we have kids half the year in India, half the year somewhere else. So shameless plug. I want to go to India with you next time you go. Done. Or one of the times that you go, let's go. Yes. Because I'm getting secrets from you for this though. I need you to know. That's a good trait. That's a good trait. Here's the truth about India. India has two of the best intelligence services in the world.

One of them is the research and analysis wing, which is their foreign collection wing. The other is their internal wing. The problem is that nobody knows about India's intelligence capabilities because 80% of their effort goes into Pakistan. Pakistan also has a super powerful foreign intelligence collection wing called ISI. So, R-A-W in India and ISI in Pakistan are spending almost all of their resources and time- On each other. On each other. Wow.

India is, I was just talking about it earlier today, I think, they are so powerfully pragmatic that they have found a way to be America's ally and China's ally and Russia's ally. While they're increasing their GDP, increasing their consumption and increasing their population. All three things that make for a very stellar future, right? So India is doing, right now, India is doing everything right.

Nobody really talks about them except when the U.S. press talks about them. They talk about them in a negative way. Like, we can't rely on India. They don't back us anymore. And it's like, no, India's backing India, which is exactly how a country is supposed to operate. And as they become the manufacturing hub of the world—

then that's going to make everybody that much more dependent on them. But they will also run into a challenge when they choose to modernize, but they can put off that question for 20 or 30 years easy. I mean, America would be incentivized to really cozy up to India.

Given proximity to China, if nothing else, right? I mean, I think all of them would be. If China eventually isn't going to be manufacturing everything in the world and that passes over to India, India wants to be best friends with China. If they're best friends with Russia and then the United States, then perfect. Let it rip. Yeah, and not only that, but then that makes it so that Russia, China, and the United States, Russia's not really a player economically like the Chinese and the United States are, but now China and the United States both are incentivized to push production to India, right?

and try to lobby for tariffs against the other country. So India is in a position to have basically people say, we want you to have this business and we'll pay you even more if you'll increase your tariffs on them, which they're going to say yes to both, but they'll change the tariffs. So steel tariff against the United States, plastic tariff against China. Wow. Based on who pays more for what?

Okay, one more. Now that we have you. This is a military-industrial question that we were talking about a little bit before. But if we need the military-industrial complex, if we need war to get out of recessions, economically we need war, part of that industrial complex is human capital. Do you believe that the United States keeps people in some state of desperation in order to feed that war machine? Oh, fuck.

No, I don't think so. I do think that there is the part of the reason that economic disparity persists and that we don't attack that economic disparity. Right. And I'm talking about like average income in Alabama versus average income in New York. That's a huge economic disparity. Well, guess where most of your military recruits come from.

Alabama, Texas, Arkansas. So part of the reason that we don't prioritize fixing economic disparity is because it's a convenience for things like recruiting militarily. We also have the benefit of knowing that it really only takes one genius to make a billion dollars worth in tech money.

GDP or tech productivity, but it takes a lot of high school graduates to make $100,000. So there's a benefit efficiency-wise for us to find and cultivate the most talented people in our country because they will have exponentially higher impact at the end of the day economically than the lower talented people.

So we don't, we could prior, instead of focusing on healthcare and, you know, whether your name tag says they or them, we could focus on closing the economic divide. But that economic divide is way too convenient for the way our structured system works. So I don't think they, they make it happen, but they do let it happen. They aid in a bit in a way. Yeah. Okay. Last one. We mentioned earlier MKUltra and Stargate.

these programs have existed. Did, do you know if they used them to take out a RFK's dad? So I know nothing about RFK's dad, but here's what I will say. RFK Jr.'s dad. So RFK. Oh yeah. RFK. So what I, what I will say is I've, I have had firsthand experience with remote viewing with what they claimed about project Stargate. And in every experience that I've had with remote viewing, the, uh, the end result is,

cannot be separated from margins of error leading up to the original start of the remote viewing. So for those of you who don't know what remote viewing is, remote viewing is like, we're all going to think about nothing and then I'm going to say a word and you start to tell me what you associate with that word. And I'm going to hope that the word that I'm going to prime you with is going to associate with some piece of intelligence I'm trying to collect from somewhere else.

So obviously it's something that you do with trained remote viewers, not something to do with the average person. So then when they're all sitting there thinking about nothing and I say orange, they start talking about roofs and chains and there's a person and there's three horses around that person and I see something in the mountains and I try to align that with intelligence that says, oh, this is happening in the Himalayas, right? That's how remote viewing is supposed to work. That's what Project Stargate was. Everything that I've seen with remote viewing

you can't associate the outcome with the input, which means it's not reliable. And to my knowledge, there has never been a piece of actionable intelligence that came from remote viewing. So there might be information that was useful or there might not be information that was useful, but for sure there was nothing that led to a clear systematic confirmation that this tool works. What about MKUltra? MKUltra was when they started using psychedelic drugs to try to unlock different parts of the brain. Yeah.

Again, to my... To control people, right? To control people and to unlock hidden cognitive abilities. Right. Right. So in my knowledge, to my knowledge, neither outcome was ever demonstrative for the input that they put in. So they did... MKUltra's no secret. It happened. Yeah. It was done to people who were both willing and unwilling. Remote viewing always happened to people who were willing. But these are two...

Pre-911 CIA activities that were largely driven because our opponents in the Cold War were doing the same thing. And this is one major disadvantage we all have to accept as Americans is that because we have personal freedoms and individual rights, any authoritarian country will always develop a weapon faster than we will because they have fewer barriers and fewer hurdles to develop that weapon.

So they can just take someone off the street and torture them to see if that torture technique works. They can just take somebody off the street and pump them full of drugs to see if they can read minds. Where we have to have five forms and all sorts of approval and like a legal chop off from an attorney. We are always going to be slower. That's part of the power that our forefathers put into our democracy. When we were talking about why it is that we are so far ahead of everybody else, part of it's because we have to slow down.

Sometimes slow is fast. Andrew, thanks so much. Appreciate you. That was awesome. Where can they find you? What can they watch? Give us all the details. Absolutely. If anybody wants to learn more about me or my company, you can go to everydayspy.com. I've also got a link down in the description of this video below for people to follow. Yes. If you want to follow me on any social media, I'm at...

Everyday Spy. And I have my own podcast. It's on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere else you look for podcasts called the Everyday Spy Podcast. Awesome. Dude, thank you very much. That was awesome. Thank you. Best of luck with everything. I appreciate you guys. Stay alive. Peace.