Ex-CIA Spy: “His Body Was Switched!” The 7 People Who Know Where He Is │Jack Neel

fx's american horror story returns for an unrivaled 13th installment with the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan favorite roles light your candles draw your pentagrams and prepare for a supreme surprise fx's american horror story 13 now streaming on hulu hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30 i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just 20 at bj's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save show button here football is finally back and prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the season giving out promos every day in september on prize picks you can make all the picks you want all in the same app and now prize picks is available nationwide so what are you waiting for lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks what you want download the app today and use code spotify to get 150 instantly in lineups if you win your first five dollar lineup prize picks run your game and win your first five dollar lineup game andy bustamante welcome back to the jack neal podcast thanks for having me jack yeah it's good to see you again a good place to start here andy you recently hosted a series on discovery channel called conspiracies and cover-ups where you stress tested various conspiracy theories using spy tradecraft expert interviews and hands-on experiments what do you think is the biggest lie we've been told in the last 10 years that is a hard question to answer because i think in the last 10 years especially we have been lied to more than we've ever been lied to in the past so to find the biggest lie is difficult to isolate in many ways i would say that what my experience both at cia and after cia has shown me is that we live in a world where misinformation meaning mistaken or errant information misinformation propagates much faster than we do in the past so i think it's a good question to answer because i think in the than fact. And in that misinformation, there's an opportunity to seed disinformation. Both misinformation and disinformation are wrong. They're not true. But the intention is different between the two. Disinformation is an intention to lie, to create incorrect information. Misinformation is accidental. It's just mistaken, incomplete, inaccurate, you know, something that changed over time and nobody corrected. But especially in the last 10 years, what we've seen is that disinformation and misinformation are very hard to separate, which just creates an environment for more people to lie. More people to lie because they have a perfectly good justifiable reason. They're trying to, you know, protect sources and methods. They're trying to prepare a legal case. They're trying to, you name it, trying to maintain a IP advantage over a competitor. So they lie to protect something valid. But then we're also finding lots of opportunities where the disinformation is not valid. It's part of an offensive shaping campaign for political reasons, for financial reasons, for algorithmic manipulation reasons. We're seeing more disinformation from foreign intelligence services trying to impact and shape social issues, political issues, military issues. So it's very, very hard now to even isolate what information is wrong on purpose and what information is wrong accidentally. So that's, I mean, that's a non-answer to your question, I fully admit. But I don't think I can even isolate the lies that are the biggest from the errors that are the biggest. Right. I guess as it pertains to the show, which of the lies you uncovered, or maybe half-truths, were the most shocking? Shocking? The most disturbing to you? There are a few. So I think for me personally, there were three that absolutely immediately jumped to mind. The first is the question of whether Epstein was murdered or whether Epstein killed himself. The second is whether the New Jersey drones incident was actually something that was coordinated across government or something that was truly, completely unknown across government. And then third, the idea that the MKUltra experiments from CIA in the 1960s and 70s, whether those were truly a failure or whether there was an element of those that were successful. And upon discovering that success, all the other experimental efforts were just shut down. I would say those three areas, under pressure, under active investigation with real-world experimentation from multiple experts, under pressure, those three raised questions that I had never seen before. In episode five of your show, you investigated the mysterious circumstances of the death of Jeffrey Epstein, rebuilding the cell to a T that he allegedly died in. After everything you found, what are the odds that Epstein deleted himself? When you stack up the actual experimental evidence, which is the only evidence I can really lean on, because the investigation that was done by the Bureau of Police, the investigation that was done by law enforcement, the investigation was done by the actual prison system. They all have too many inconsistencies, too many gaps, too many questions. So when you can't rely on that information, you can only rely on the information you control. So I only have the experimental information that I brought, the actual data from the experimentation that I brought to that very same question. And when you look at the question of whether he killed himself or whether he was killed, there is far more evidence that points to him being killed rather than him killing himself. There are just too many inconsistencies. And when you look at the question of whether he killed himself or whether he was killed, there are just too many inconsistencies on the side of, oh, he killed himself. And there's too many consistencies on the side that he was killed. But in reality, I think what bothers all of us is that neither one of those outcomes really sits well with us. Neither one of them really actually makes sense. And that was certainly what made the Epstein investigation something I wanted to dig into. And then after pushing my own experimentation, after investigating with people in my network, we recreated the entire cell, like you said. A third option presented itself that I had never taken seriously ever before, this idea that maybe he's not actually dead. And in the actual course of our recreation of the cell, I was shocked to find out that there is actually a way that he could have been hidden and a body double inserted and that he may actually still be alive. It seems ludicrous to say it out loud. It certainly seemed ludicrous to me when I first heard it. But then after actually recreating the circumstances of his death, whether it's a 2% probability or a 25% probability, the fact that there's any probability that he actually is still alive is amazing. That wasn't inside of any of the other cells in that prison. And I think that event was on one of the schematics, but not on the other schematics. It was on none of the schematics. Yeah. So we, my team, we built the cell based off of photographic evidence, not Department of Prison schematics. So photographs of the cell from all different angles, we recreated everything. Then we brought in a former inmate from that penitentiary to come in and fact check whether or not we had created the cell. And his response was fantastic. He walked in and he said, it feels like home. The paint was a little bit too bright. The floor was a little bit too clean. But otherwise, dimensions, sites, like where the window was, where the grating was, it was all accurate. So it was based off of photographic evidence. Well, when I compared the actual dimensions of what we built against the schematics created by the Department of Prisons, there was a difference. There was a gap, an inconsistency. The Department of Prisons makes the cell out as if it is a perfect rectangle. But the actual cell isn't a rectangle. It has a wall. It has an extra section that's available. And that section has a vent in the wall that goes into an open space on the other side of the wall. But that open space is about four feet by two feet, eight square feet on the ground. And then cubic feet, it's eight times 10. So 80 cubic feet of space on the other side of a vented wall. Vented means the free flow of oxygen. Without needing, like, an oxygen tank. And on the other side of Epstein's cell is a stairwell in freedom. So how in the hell, of all the accidents, of all the happy accidents in the universe, how did this guy end up in the only cell on his block that had a hidden kind of access area, and on the opposite side of that access area was an exit to a stairwell and out the front door of the penitentiary? How does that happen? If he would have been put in any of the other. I think there were eight blocks on his prison floor. If he would have been put in any of the other seven cells. he wouldn't have had that. But that cell did. And none of that made it into the investigation. None of that made it into the report. None of that was documented in any of the formal released documents related to Epstein. Does that mean he's alive? No. But what the f***, man? In terms of opportunity, possibility, probability, inconsistencies, investigative gaps and faux pas, it just exacerbates a giant sore in our existing trust of government. If Jeffrey Epstein were still alive, break down for me how you, a former CIA spy, would run that operation. Like, how would you fake Epstein's death? So there's a number of things that are more difficult than others, right? Finding a body is arguably one of the most difficult things to do just really because of the evidence. And I think that's one of the most difficult things to do. And I think that's one of the difficult things to do. And I think that's difficult things to do. And I think that's Epstein. It could have been anything. It's suspicious for sure. But this is why you hear in the intelligence world and the legal world, the shadow of a doubt. Shadow of a doubt is an important thing, right? Because without silver bullet evidence, you're innocent in the United States. Without being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, then you're innocent. So for lots of people, a shadow of a doubt makes it not beyond a reasonable doubt, which means you're safe. So that's an important thing here. With less than seven people, two or three people were the mastermind, two or three people were the actually engineers involved, one or two people kind of saw the face of the man they were helping. But otherwise, you put a man in a box and you turn him over three different times in three different shipping locations, nobody ever sees the man. They may not even know it's a man in the box. They're just told, here's a box, here's a couple hundred bucks, make sure nobody knows this box ever existed. And that's how you move somebody across a border. It's how you move someone across a country. It's how you move somebody across a country. You know, someplace where they can disappear forever. Where would you take him? FX's American Horror Story returns for an unrivaled 13th installment with the iconic horrors you love to fear and an all-star cast reprising fan-favorite roles. Light your candles, draw your pentagrams, and prepare for a supreme surprise. FX's American Horror Story 13. Now streaming on Hulu. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the save. Or would you hide him in plain sight with alterations to his face? Everything's hiding in plain sight. I wouldn't medically alter him. I wouldn't put him through that kind of thing because now you're involving too many more people. Now there's doctors, anesthesiologists, anything goes wrong, there's nurses, like holy shit, you don't want to deal with that. Just put the guy somewhere where he's not relevant and then just see what happens. Where? I mean, there's lots of great places to hide somebody where they have a comfortable life and they're not that relevant. Like if you just think about Europe, you've got places through Greece, Cyprus. You've got all the whole Mediterranean kind of areas and is an area where somebody can be famous and nobody in that region is going to even know who they are. You can't put him in Paris. You can't put him in Barcelona, but you could for sure put him in Tbilisi in Georgia. No one's going to know the difference. He's going to be quite comfortable for what? Two years, four years. Eight years? How long is it really going to take before the news cycle moves on to the next thing? And that's if you put them somewhere where nobody's going to recognize them. If you put them somewhere where you have power, like if it's the Chinese that helped him or the Israelis that helped him. Now you can put him in a city in a country that you control. You just pick a city that's maybe not a mainstream city. Put him in a small village outside of Jerusalem. Put him in a small town outside of Nanking. Like you can put him in lots of different places to hide him. All you have to do is kind of take him to a different place. And tell him, hey, don't fuck this up. We made this happen. You get arrested a second time. You're on your own. Now, this is essentially exactly what happened to Edward Snowden. They smuggled him country to country. And now he lives perfectly openly in Russia. And it's not a new method. It's just a new person. Now, there's common sentiment online that Epstein was an asset for Mossad. Mossad was working for him. Or it's common sentiment that he was involved in every intelligence agency around the world. Your rhetoric online has led me to believe that you think that he was an access agent for FBI. Something along those lines. But my question is more, like, why would Epstein fake his own death in the first place? Because we still see that Ghazain Maxwell is alive in prison. It's, uh, I don't really put a lot of weight between, like, in sentiment online. Because sentiment online is just a fool's errand. I have for sure heard and been part of the debate. Was he an access agent for Israel? Was he an access agent for somebody else? For the Russians? For the Chinese? For you name it. Was he a covert informant for the FBI? When I've looked at and considered them all, the one that makes the most sense to me is not the Israel one. It's not the fact that he was an access agent for Israel. And I understand that there are some people out there who are very strong, very adamant. He was an access agent for Israel. They don't know. They don't know. Nobody has that level of access. Nobody knows for sure. There are just as many points of evidence that say he was an access agent for a foreign power as there are data points that say he was an access agent for FBI, which is considered a covert informant. And when you think about his rise to power and the protection that he had against American law enforcement specifically, keep in mind, he's an American citizen. He's dealing with American politicians. Doing business in the American dollar, traveling across American borders, the fucking Israelis have no power in the United States. They have the ability to project their influence and they can project operations, but they don't have the power to protect an American citizen from being indicted by American law enforcement. But FBI does. FBI does. And one of the chief priorities for FBI at all times is uncovering corrupt politicians. So if Epstein does. He built his kingdom helping rich people hide their money. And that for sure included helping rich people hide their money as they paid off American politicians. And then you can look at the long list of both red and blue politicians that he knew that went to his island, that communicated with him. All of that criminal activity that we're all finding in the Epstein files ourselves, all of that is obvious to us. So it must have been obvious to FBI. So how in the hell was he not arrested 20 years ago? Or how did his first. How did his first arrest not actually stick? How did he get away with being in a Florida jail for 18 months or whatever it was? How did that happen? The only answer that I can really come to that fits my understanding of how our system works is that they found that he was just a small fish that could lead them to a bigger catch. How big could that catch be? Presidential sized? Senate sized? Congressional sized? Foundation, corrupt nonprofit supported by multiple presidents? How big could it be? How big could it really be? That's the kind of thing that shapes an entire agency's success, right? If FBI can bring down a corrupt senior congressperson, that's a big deal. Far bigger than bringing down one sexual predator. So if that is true, would it have to be true then that someone at FBI made some sort of decision that with his most recent arrest, that he decided he needed to be in jail again? Essentially. What makes sense to me is that they found out that the fastest way to get him off the radar was to put him in jail. Because you can't make somebody who's actively involved in a criminal investigation just disappear from their hotel. That's too suspicious. You can't make them die in a car accident on the way to the yacht club. There's too much of this that's what the media people call on the nose, right? Too much of it's like, no, that sounds like a movie plot. But you put some dude in a prison, where there's a history of him wanting to commit suicide, where there's a history of him being attacked, and then he gets killed or dies. Dies is a better word. He dies and you can say he killed himself, or he dies and you can say it's murder, but no fucking buddy says he was smuggled out. That becomes like an impossibility. What do you mean? That's not like I was one of these people. It's even ludicrous to suggest that he was somehow, his death was faked and he was smuggled out of prison. That's too hard. It's just when I see the evidence of a wall that's not supposed, of an open space that's not supposed to exist. I was in the cell itself. And when you're standing on one side of the wall, you can't even be seen from the front window. Why anybody would engineer a cell like that at all anyways, is a good question. But why the fuck would you put what is quite possibly the highest profile case in a decade? Why would you put him in that cell, where he can't be seen from the window, if he stands in a certain part of the cell? That's bad decision-making. If you had to give a phrase to describe how people in power stay in power, what would it be? Stupid people. Stupid people are what keep people in power. Powerful people aren't usually smarter than you and me. They just are able to anticipate the decisions that stupid people will make. And there's always a huge group of stupid people out there. Stupid people waiting to spend their money, stupid people ready to raise their hands, stupid people, like. And I know I'm oversimplifying it by just calling them stupid people. Sometimes they're desperate people, sometimes they're uneducated people, sometimes they're misled people, admittedly. But I'm categorizing it as stupid people. Whether you're talking about why Rome continued to let people kill each other in the amphitheater, why did that happen in the Colosseum? Because tens of thousands of stupid fucking people would come cheering to watch two people kill each other. That's why it happened. And somehow when the Colosseum gets shut down and when the Romans stop exercising the right for battle like that, now everybody wakes up and realizes, wow, that wasn't really ethical, was it? That wasn't really a great idea. Same thing with corporal punishment or the same thing with Guantanamo Bay, like after it happens, then everybody's like, oh yeah, that wasn't really a great idea, was it? So where the fuck were all those people beforehand? It's just because there's an ability for powerful people to be able to predict and understand what the masses will do. We give way too much credence, way too much responsibility, accountability, authority. We give too much credit to powerful people thinking that they're smart. They're often not smart. They're just smart enough to know that one or two smart people can't take them down when there's an ocean of stupid people to keep them afloat. Is there anything else on the Epstein case I didn't ask you about that you thought was particularly fascinating that you don't hear anyone? No, I think the Epstein case is going to be something that carries on with the culture that we're part of for a long time, because nobody likes the idea that somebody so vile doesn't have a nice, clean ending to the story. A nice, clean ending like, here's proof it was suicide. Here's proof he killed himself. Here's proof he is dead. And that's what all of us want from anybody who piddles kids, is we want that person to be a part of the story. And that's what we want from anybody who piddles kids, is we want that person to be a neutralized threat forever. And we don't get that. So that creates in our mind an open cognitive loop. And we keep coming back to try to close that loop and we never get to. So this topic continues to get clicks and this topic continues to be explored and this topic continues to be talked about and theorized and whatever else. Even though there are many smarter things that we should all be talking about and focusing on, this will continue to fester just because of that open cognitive loop. And this is one of those things that powerful, smart people do that dumbasses like us don't catch on to. There are better things for us to be talking about, but we're still talking about this. Does that make a rich, powerful person smarter than us? I would say no, but it makes them smart enough to know that if you leave one piece of crusty bread for people to fight over, they'll fight over it. They'll never ask, where's the fresh bread? But Andy, surely the Epstein files are the most important thing. That's what we're talking about right now, right? Surely. I've asked this question to two people, I think. I think it was Julian Dory and Tucker Carlson. And something along the lines of past year, we had the Epstein files, the Iran war, the UFO files. Some people say that everything, the UFO files and the Iran war were to distract from the Epstein files. Do you think that's the case or do you think all of them are a distraction from something else? It's a good question. When you use the term distract, it implies that there's a larger architecture. There's a larger plan. I don't think there's a larger plan. I think what happens is stories, news, incidences occur, and some of them are convenient because you can kind of amplify the noise that they make. And some of them are inconvenient, and you want to kind of dampen the way back to the Biden administration's support for Ukraine when Russia invaded in 2022. What was Biden looking for an excuse to distract people from? His failed COVID policies that were destroying the American economy and corrupting the U.S. dollar. So now all of a sudden Russia invades Ukraine. That's a very convenient incident. And then just you can kind of keep on going from there. Why was the COVID incident so convenient? Because three, to five months before that, China had just forcibly taken Hong Kong. But nobody remembers that shit. It's so easy for the masses to be redirected to focus on the new hot topic, the new burning issue. Let's not forget that at some point there were active indictments against our current president. Why did we stop talking about that? Because something else popped up. We're living in an era now where the news cycle is faster than ever before. I have a good idea. And we were working together in 2022. And I remember two or three things happened in quick succession. And he was like, Jesus, man, like, this is a once in a lifetime unprecedented news cycle. And then like three months later, three more things happened. And then three months after that, another important. And by the end of the year, he was like, I don't think this is so unprecedented anymore. Now this is just the norm. And then when you layer on to the real news, the changes of the world, when you layer on to that, all the commentary, opinions, speculation that's happening through the internet, whether it's podcast speculation, X speculation, you know, shorts, people talking directly to the camera, whenever you layer all that on now, it's just amplifying. It's just making more and more noise. At CIA, when we talk about influence operations, we always talk about two things. We talk about volume and pace, volume and pace. And volume means the literal number of stories. We have more volume than ever before. And we're moving at a faster pace than ever before. So I, I'm 46 years old. You're in your late twenties, 25, mid twenties, the world that you and I both grew up in when we were 10 years old, didn't move at this pace or include this much volume. So in just 10 years, just since I've been in my thirties and you were in your teens, we've had a huge increase in both volume and pace. And what does that mean is going to happen in the next 10 years now that AI is contributing to both volume and pace? And what does that mean 20 years from now when the next evolution of AI happens on top of that, or when X or Facebook or YouTube kind of acquiesce to the AI era and they stop trying to dampen it or prevent it? What happens then? What happens when whole new methods of communication have been created that we haven't even thought about? Yet. So we have so much coming at us all the time. It's hard to navigate. I do want to ask on media. In our last episode, you broke down the idea that major social media platforms will hire ex-CIA agents to ensure that no one is planning terrorist activities on their platform and implied that they might have the ability to limit unfavorable speech. A more recent claim by many is that the media is not able to limit unfavorable speech. And I think that's a is the idea that the CIA actually creates content to manipulate the masses, often in the form of ex-CIA or FBI agents that go on podcast. And within that idea, a lot of people have accused you of being a current asset on the CIA's payroll. You've said to this, CIA is not my friend. They send me legal letters. I'm most certainly not part of CIA. Okay. I believe you, Andy. But here's my question. If the CIA did want to manipulate people through podcasts, would they be so ignorant to do that through an ex-CIA spy? If you or your child grew up watching social media and have noticed that you have some kind of mental health issue from it, anxiety, depression, or body dysmorphia, you're going to want to hear about this. See, recently, a jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay millions for their role in designing and promoting addictive platforms. They knew for a fact that their apps could contribute to serious mental health issues, but did not disclose the risk to users, meaning that they were putting profits over people. And this recent historic verdict underscores the consequences of those decisions. Now Morgan & Morgan is stepping up to hold these platforms accountable for the harm they caused. So if you feel like this applies to you, you may be entitled to a potential recovery of over $1,000. And if you want to find out if you qualify, just take a short quiz at jackneil.com backslash Morgan. Again, that's jackneil.com backslash Morgan, or you can scan the QR code on screen to take a short quiz to find out if you qualify for $1,000 in potential recoveries. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. I like the way you're thinking here more than most people who ask themselves this question. So first of all, for CIA to carry out any kind of covert operation where the target is American citizens, that is a massively difficult thing for the modern day CIA to do. Now I say modern day CIA because under Director Dulles, the original CIA actively tried to shape Americans through influence campaigns to get them to be anti-communist. Newspapers, TV, TV shows, radio broadcasts, active, active, active CIA efforts. 9-11 changed everything because when CIA failed to prevent 9-11 from happening, the Senate and the Congress stepped in and basically said, hey, CIA, you are incompetent at your job. By the way, FBI, you are also incompetent at your job. You both let the greatest intelligence failure happen in history because you were too busy, you know, playing with your own toys in two separate sandboxes. So we're going to step in and force you to do that. And we're going to force you to do that. And we're going to create this new office called the Directorial Office. Director of National Intelligence, and we're going to put both of you underneath somebody else to make sure this kind of mistake never happens again. Since then, it's become incredibly legally complicated for the CIA to do anything that even comes close to affecting American opinion, American policy, American life. And I get it. All those people out there who love to hate CIA and love to distrust their government are going to tell me that I'm lying. That's fine. Stupid people do what stupid people do. The law is clear. The code is clear. Every FBI officer, CIA officer, military officer, NRO, NGA, they all will tell you the same thing, that it's incredibly legally difficult to get anything approved that could potentially impact an American life. Even if you have an American that you know is a terrorist, part of Al-Qaeda, planning to kill people on American soil, you still got to jump through hoops to collect on their cell phone, to talk to them, to talk to them, to talk to them, to talk to them, to talk to them, to talk to them. You still got to jump through hoops to collect on their cell phone, to talk to them, to talk to them, to surveil them at their address. It's incredibly difficult to track down an American citizen. That is why ISIS is now actively developing lone wolf operatives that are American citizens, virtually, because they know that it's very hard for the U.S. law enforcement agencies to collect against Americans. But it's legal for the CIA to run propaganda on American citizens. No, it's not legal for them to run propaganda against American citizens unless it is approved by a court. But the process to get that approval is nearly impossible. Nearly impossible. Now, what makes. That didn't change with Obama's legislation in 2018? I think the Obama administration made it even harder to go after American citizens. Or that wasn't 2018, sorry. I think it was 2014, maybe. John Kiriakou had talked about this, that there was something in Cuba where they were running like radio propaganda. Do you know what I'm referencing? Go ahead. It was some kind of radio propaganda. Maybe it was like Puerto Rico, but it was like on a U.S. territory and radio signal was going into the country. to Florida. Let me ask you this, because, you know, this is an important question that not enough people are asking. When did John Kiriakou go to jail? 2003. Why the fuck does anybody think he has any idea what's happening in the federal government after 2003? He has no fucking idea. He tells a great story. He's very opinionated. He has his strong beliefs, the beliefs of a whistleblower. But he lost access in 2003. I am fully admitting I lost access in 2013 when I left. I'm still 10 years more current than he is. And I never heard about any of this. Right. So was there a propaganda campaign happening in Cuba that was targeting American citizens? If it did, I don't know about it. And neither does fucking John. He just, for whatever reason, isn't saying it that way. The CIA that I left. Had a very difficult time getting anything through a court against an American citizen, even with the Patriot Act, even with proof, even with layers of documentation that are required to be approved, not only by leadership, but also by court systems. It's incredibly difficult. And then the stuff that did get approved still got turned back a second time because John, when he whistle blew on Guantanamo Bay and torture, torture efforts, same thing with Edward Snowden, when he whistleblowed on Guantanamo Bay, he still got turned back a second time. And he still got the public court had a different conclusion than the private courts, the secret courts. So even though secret courts, people went through the process, they spent years making a case and secret courts approved of the case. Even then it was overturned by public courts. Whether you like that or not, that's up to you. But the point is there's a process and the process is difficult. So if CIA wanted to run some kind of influence operation specifically on American citizens, that idea would be, you know, it would be a lot of work. And most likely the people who drafted that idea would have been like stuck into a basement, fired. The original requests would have been burned three different times. They would never want that kind of thing to ever reach the light of day. Right. Very different than the old school CIA that came up with an idea of like killing people in Florida and faking it as the Cubans. We live in a whole different era than what people want to believe. They want to believe that CIA is some rogue agency just out there doing its thing. No, CIA serves as a source of information. Under the executive branch. The only thing rogue about it is that it goes and does whatever the president tells it to do. And we're changing our president every four years. That's the problem with the CIA right now. You had a second part to your question. Yeah. Would they be so stupid to use a former CIA officer to be the one that was the voice of their propaganda? I think this is like an excellent sound point. Why of all the people that you think would be above suspicion, do you really think a former CIA officer would be above suspicion? No, it would be the worst person to choose to be the voice of pro-CIA anything. If one person would be a horrible choice to be the voice of any kind of propaganda operation because you're putting all your eggs in one basket. If CIA really wanted to run a covert influence campaign against the American citizens, they would run it the same way they run covert influence campaigns against foreign governments. They would find 12, 15, 25 different faces, different genders, diversities, ages, backgrounds, everything, right? Here's a one-eyed black guy. Here's a partially retarded white guy. Here's like a beautiful woman. Here's a short midget woman. And they would all go out and they would all promote on their platforms and campaigns with the same message. And then as each of them grew a million followers each, there'd be 10 million followers between all of them promoting the same message without anybody being able to point a finger at all of them. Putting out one former CIA officer like me, and being like, oh, we're going to put all of our money on Bustamante. Bustamante couldn't become a case officer. Bustamante didn't have a great career. Bustamante left early. Let's make him the voice of CIA. That's a fucking stupid idea. Same thing with Kiriakou. Let's find the guy who went to jail for whistleblowing on our secret operation, who still doesn't really believe in us, who can't get a job because he's a felon. Fuck no. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. When you're talking specifically about who would make the best influencer, that's really what you're asking. If you're trying to carry out a covert influence mission, you need someone who can create influence or somebody who has influence. So it's much easier to find somebody who already has a platform, somebody who already has a voice, especially if the voice and platform that they have are already in line with the message that you're trying to promote. That's who you want. And then you just amplify it from there. The way the Russian and Chinese covert influence works inside the United States, is that the Russians and the Chinese will find existing niche groups that already have existing conflict, existing issues, whether it's Islamophobia or whether it's women's rights or whether it's woke-ism or whatever it might be. They find it and then they create cutouts, corporate cutouts, sponsorship cutouts, you name it. They create cutouts and through those cutouts, they fund the debate. They fund the argument on both sides. And all they're doing is they're creating more volume of the existing issues. And because the people they're funding already have this zest and this zealotry for what they believe in, they don't even have to convince them. They're just like, hey, yeah, you know what? You already don't like the American government. We're just going to give you $100,000 over the course of four months to amp up your platform about why the government's so bad. And here's this other person that has a platform that says that anybody who hates the government is anti-American. So we're going to give you $100,000. Over the next four months, they just amp up your platform. So now these two people who maybe only had 150,000 followers, over the next four months, they triple in size. Their voices get bigger. The conflict gets larger. And all anybody who's listening is asking themselves is, oh, shit, do I trust my government or do I hate the people who don't trust the government? Which one do I do? Neither of those being the question we should really be asking. That's an interesting one. I think it's a really good point that people can get well-funded and support a cause without knowing who they're being funded by and what cause they're actually supporting. It's not even a thought. It's empirical evidence, right? If you just look at the Department of Justice records for the last 12 months, you're going to find about two dozen politicians from across, politicians from across the United States who have fallen victim to becoming unregistered agents of foreign influence. Meaning that a foreign country working through some kind of cutout was supported by the American politicians. And so they're going to be supported by the American politicians to reach their foreign goal. So whether that's like what happened to the former mayor of New York who secured a real estate deal on behalf of the Turks across the street from like a fire department in New York, he didn't even know. He didn't even know that the money he was being paid to close this real estate deal was originating from Turkey. And that happens all over the place. That happens with legislation. That happens with real estate. That happens with second and third round venture capital. There are not enough people vetting the source of the money that they're being offered. And when you don't vet the source, you become liable to wherever that money is at. actually coming from. And if you're an unregistered agent of a foreign actor, that's breaking law. Clearly, you don't think John Kiriakou still works for the CIA. But do you think it's possible that he's funded by some source that's not? 100%. From the time he left prison in 2016 to 2024, he was funded by the Russians. That's crystal clear. That's documented. That's overt. Russian state-controlled media wrote the checks for John Kiriakou until 2024. Who's writing the checks now? We don't know. Could it still be Russian state-owned media? I don't think there's enough people asking that question. But who is writing the checks now? And when I debated him on Julian Dory, with Julian Dory and Danny Jones in the room, when I challenged him on this fact, his response was, somebody's got to write my checks. So clearly the guy does not have an ethical foundation for what he's doing now. Maybe he left his ethics, you know, on the cutting board back when he whistle blew on CIA. But now he's a total unknown. We don't know who he's representing. We know he's representing, you know, his own case. But who else is he representing? We don't know. But he speaks with a shit ton of confidence about what he knows. He got on Julian Dory's podcast, what, four days before the Iranian invasion, and very clearly said that I have sources. In the White House, who said that they're going to attack on Monday or Tuesday. And then they didn't attack on Monday or Tuesday. They attacked on Thursday. That, or Friday. Either way, who in their right mind would have reached into the White House, get on the internet, and then disclose their access to White House secrets publicly? A whistleblower would do that, sure, if he wants to keep in line with whistleblowing. But he's not helping the American people by doing that. Remember, whistleblowing is all about highlighting a grievance and injustice against the American people. It's not about highlighting an injustice against the Iranians. So why is he doing that? Why is he saying that? How does he have that access? Where does he get that information? Is there really a White House insider who believes that John Kiriakou is trustworthy to keep secrets? Is John Kiriakou trustworthy to keep secrets? I mean, I think there's a reason that no corporation hires him, no government hires him, because he's proven that he's a liar. He's a liar. He's a liar. That he can't keep a secret. He will dishonor an NDA. He will dishonor a secrecy agreement if it's something that he feels is against his personal code at the time. So either he has reach in the U.S. federal government and he is publicly disclosing that reach, putting his friends and contacts at risk, or he's getting that information from somewhere else. Maybe the same place he's getting a paycheck. When you look at John's messaging and just his consistent themes in general, what do you think is the purpose of it? I don't follow John. I don't really know what his themes in general are. He's pretty viral because he always seems to have a new story to tell. I would say that's a large part of it, especially with the Gen Alpha, Gen Z audiences. They love some of his funny stories with his time at CIA. But do you suspect some of his stories may not be fully truthful? Let me do one better. I have a number of friends who run big podcasts. And not that long ago, somebody interviewed John Kiriakou and reached out to me. And I just want to tell you what they said when they reached out to me. I sent a message and I said, hey, man, I saw your recent interview with John Kiriakou. Great work. It was awesome to see his reaction to your questions. The person gave back some other responses. I don't want to throw them under the bus on camera, but here's what they said. True coming out of his mouth. That's not my words. You asked the question. Do you think that what he says is true? Which means you already have a question. And now here's another major influencer saying you never know what is true coming out of his mouth. So I would say that in answer to your question, you're not the only one asking that question. And my understanding of what made John Kiriakou viral was that a TikTok clip with laser beams came out of his mouth. And I was like, laser beams coming out of his eyes made John Kiriakou viral. And now he gets to go around telling stories, saying that he knows things about current politics and government that are current, even though he was in jail for 30 months, starting in 2004. It just doesn't add up. But I get it. Sometimes Gen Alpha doesn't really do the math. Can you tell a completely made up story? It's hard sometimes. It's hard because with someone like me, with John, with anybody who comes from a trained intelligence background, we are taught how to lie. We're taught how to lie convincingly. We're taught how to persuade. Persuasion being a skill where you just create emotion to distract from the lack of logic. So we're trained how to do these things. And it's very hard when you're going against someone who's trained to be able to piece those pieces apart. Fantastic example of this is Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin. That fucking interview was brilliant. Not for Tucker. It was brilliant for Vladimir. Putin did a spectacular job shaping the whole interview, directing the whole interview, controlling Tucker's American audience throughout the entire interview. Because Tucker is a trained journalist. Putin is a trained intelligence officer. He knows how to distract from logic by persuading with emotion. He knows how to tell a story. He knows how to weave a tale. He knows how to bring in history and make it applicable and exciting in the current day. Meanwhile, Tucker just sat there quiet. Tucker was just the channel for Putin to have access to 15 million conservative Americans at a critical time in the Ukraine war. We'll see you next time. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork, and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the Save. Open soon. BJ's. Home of the Save. Home of the Save. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. That's interesting. I think that's something people don't think about often is that world leaders often have a lot of the same training that intelligence officers have. Not a lot. They don't often have it, but some of them really do, right? Putin is a career KGB officer. Right. But Xi Jinping didn't come from a career in security services at all. He's what's known as a groomed princeling, meaning his family lineage comes all the way back to Mao Zedong's. He's the original inner circle. So his entire personal and professional history was shaped by this responsibility of cultivating the next communist regime. It's very different than here in the United States where it's like you start out as a teacher, you end up as president. One day you're playing the saxophone in college. The next day you're playing the saxophone, you know, on the floor in Congress. It's a whole different ballgame. You get four years. To do your best. And then two of those years, you have to spend convincing people that you get another four years to do your best. It's a whole different world. You said on the first day at the CIA, they tell you how the world works. And the next day and the rest of your time at the CIA is about learning how to operate within that system. Do you think the CIA told you the truth about how the world works? Hmm. I like, I like that question for the same reason. You like that question because that is a very cool twist. I'm going to say, yes, I think they told me the truth. And I don't think they told me the truth because I believe in CIA or because I believe that they would tell me the truth. I believe that they told me the truth because if what they told me was a lie, there's way too much evidence that I've experienced in my life, even to this day, that confirms what they first taught me. Because really what CIA taught me is that the world's not fair, that equality doesn't really exist. People make emotional decisions that if you command a person's emotions, you essentially command their person. You command their logic. You can control their decisions. You can for sure predict their actions, but that's. how it all works. And when you're not part of CIA, you see that everywhere. I mean, you saw that in your first job. You saw that in high school. Some people get really wise to it when they're in middle school and they learn to kiss the teacher's ass and do all the extra credit and they learn how to have top cover. They learn how to get a C on a test, stay after class, ask a few questions, do a little extra effort, not actually get smarter, but get that C turned into an A. Like some people, it just comes naturally. But I'm not one of those people where it comes naturally. I'm one of those people that was like, that's just unfair. I'm still not going to stay after class. That's some crazy shit. I'm going to go play in the river, right? But it's unfair. And I used to get so upset about it being unfair. And that's a big part of why I joined the military. I joined the military because the military message taught me that you can come fight for your country and you can fight evil and villainy and you can bring honor to yourself and your family. So I joined the military. Military didn't work that way. Military was just another version of high school with rank and camouflage and guns. That was pretty much all the military was, right? So I'm frustrated and frustrated and frustrated. And I joined CIA. And the first thing CIA does is validate all of my preexisting frustrations. They're like, yeah, world's pretty fucked up. It's not really fair. Honor doesn't really matter for much in the United States or most places in the world. Leverage is the most important thing. Human beings are dumb and predictable. If you can control the world, you can control the world. If you can control the masses, you can make amazing things happen. If you fight a one-on-one battle, it's very inefficient. That was what CIA taught me. And then they taught me the systems and the tools and the techniques to do exactly what they said would work. And now here I am still carrying the same techniques out, whether it's on a show like this or in my business or when I negotiate a deal or when I create a new product, I'm still using all the same tools, all the same techniques. And it works. So when I I don't think they lied to me that first day, but great question. They could have. I don't have a follow-up for it. That makes a lot of sense. And I guess your experience over time would validate everything that they would have originally told you. It doesn't validate everything they told me, but it validates that lesson, right? Because CIA taught me other things too. Like they taught me other things that were culturally relevant to them, but not actually relevant in life, right? One of the examples is CIA has a saying, nobody cares as much about your career as you do. And that's something they teach us because it's their way of saying, Hey, if you don't fight your hardest for an assignment, you're not going to get it. No, one's going to, you know, reach down from two steps up and give you a helping hand. And they tried to drill that into our heads. So when I left CIA, I was like, well, fuck man, nobody's going to care about me or my business or my success as much as I do. That is not the truth out here. There are strangely, there are always people who for no good reason at all really care about you. I don't know why. I haven't found, well, I guess I found one or two, but I haven't found many where I like really care about them for a completely selfless reason. But there are people like that in the world who really do care sometimes more about you than they care about themselves. And I don't understand those people. And I'm so glad that those people exist and I could learn a lesson or two from those people, but that's something that CIA was wrong about. Right. And there are other things too, but, I've had to learn that through experience that there's still culture in my system that is CIA culture that isn't correct, isn't helpful, isn't accurate. And I still have to kind of purge that from my system. Now, in the third episode of your discovery show, you tried to find out if the government can actually control the weather. Your team dug into cloud seeding, chemtrails, even space lasers. Does the government use space lasers to control the weather? This was one of my favorite episodes to, to explore because the whole idea of weather control is a terrifying idea. At first blush, everybody wants to just discount it, right? Like it's a ridiculous idea. But if you just take a second to just even entertain the idea, you can first see how strategically valuable it would be. If you could control even something as simple as an innocent rainstorm, if you could control that, you could make sure certain regions have drought and other regions are plush. You could use it as a negotiation lever for the Middle East. Guys want rain? We can make it rain, right? And that's just a simple, like, sprinkling rain shower. Now, when you start to think about things like tornadoes, hurricanes, you know, earthquakes, tsunamis, whatever it might be, if you start to think about that, that's a legitimate weapon. Well, then in the investigation, I ended up finding my way back into history and finding that there were already programs, especially during the And successful in extending monsoon seasons, in exacerbating existing weather. That's not the same thing as weather control, right? That's adding to something that's already there, but it's a whole step closer than I ever thought we got. And then I meet the CEO for Rainmaker and I learn about the cloud seeding operations and I go on site and I actually see an area that's actively seeding for clouds. And it's still doing the same thing that we were doing in Vietnam. It's still adding to something that was already there. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. But it works. It works so well that now people are suspicious that it works too well, that it creates floods, not just creates rain, that it creates exacerbates natural disasters rather than actually helping human beings. So yes, weather can be manipulated, but can it be controlled yet? I don't think so. But what's the first step that you would want to prove before you invest more money into controlling the weather? You would want to first prove that it can be manipulated. And it couldn't be stopped? I would be willing to bet that there's, if there's something you can put in the sky to make a cloud, it would make sense. There's something you can put in the sky to take a cloud apart, right? Not that different from you make something too salty. You add another ingredient to cut the salt down. So it would make sense. But with all weapons, nobody creates the defense first. They always create the offensive capability first. They create the nuke before they create a way to stop the nuke. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to nuke. They create the poison before they create the antidote, right? They create the bullet before they create the bulletproof vest. That's just the way it works. Because once you have the advantage, then you can leverage the advantage against an enemy who's completely unprepared. And while you're leveraging the advantage, you can be actively investing in the solution. In January this year, the U.S. captured Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro and pulled him out of the country with a few Americans getting hurt. There were reports that Maduro's own guards suddenly got violently ill that night. Many said they were throwing up, felt disoriented, and even reported having nosebleeds. On episode six of your show, you looked into directed energy weapons, even tied them to Venezuela. Do you think the U.S. used directed energy weapons to capture Venezuela's president? I don't personally believe there's enough evidence to conclude that directed energy weapons are being actively employed by U.S. forces. I know that sounds like a very qualifying, specific statement, and that's on purpose. Because to your point, I don't believe the reports that are coming from Venezuela are true. If elements of them are true, I don't believe it's because of a directed energy weapon. And Venezuela, it was and still is in many ways kind of a shitshow. You had the president, Nicolas Maduro, being protected by Cuban mercenaries on a Venezuelan compound that had Venezuelan military forces in like a support role. So who's really reporting, you know, bloody noses and blood from ears and falling to their knees and losing consciousness? Who's reporting it? Is it actually Venezuelan military? Or is it Cuban mercenaries? Or is it nobody? It's just a story that was made up somewhere along the line because some influencer in Cuba or Venezuela was like, oh, let's make a story up. What we know is that this unvariable unverified, unvalidated message was amplified by the White House press secretary. When that happened, everything went crazy. Because that was what that was the day after the reason that this whole story went viral was because the White House press secretary shared it on X. This is Caroline Leavitt. And she stepped down recently, right? I'm not sure on that status. But that's where it came from. That's what made this a viral message. It was unsuspecting. Unsubstantiated, unproven. And literally all she did was just share a post that some Venezuelan posted, some other American right wing influencer posted. It wasn't even an analysis. It wasn't a statement or a comment. It was just a repost. And her statement, her addition to the repost was everybody should stop and read this. So to your point about the speed of media and what to do with it, I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. I think it's possible that directed energy weapons exist I think it's possible that directed energy weapons are actively being employed by our adversaries, possibly even against us. I do believe many of the reports about Havana syndrome. I do believe that there are all sorts of strange ailments that are recurring in people in areas of sensitive information and sensitive access. I 100% believe that those things are real, that what they're reporting is real. But the source of where it's coming from is what I don't know. And I'm being specific in my mind down to the idea of a directed energy weapon. If it's just like almost, you know, if you put a box out in the middle of a street and you just turn it on and it's not directed, it's just emanating in all directions. That's not a directed energy weapon, but it is an energy weapon, right? If something uses microwaves versus radio waves versus something else, x-rays, that's an energy weapon, but is it directed? And then you've also got these ideas like, what if something is present in the workplace, right? What if there's an active effort to radiate a place with some kind of energy, but then at home, a separate thing triggers the radiated energy? That was presented in the workplace. Is that a thing? Anything's possible, right? Anything's possible. And what I know from my time at CIA is that it's very common for us to build a weapon by taking piece A from one country and piece B from a different country and then putting them together in a third country location. And now you have a weapon that neither country actually built. So it wouldn't be a new strategy. It wouldn't be a new form of tradecraft for them to do the same kind of thing with an energy weapon. It would be a new form of tradecraft for them to do the same kind of thing with an energy-oriented weapon. So could there be a directed energy weapon? Yes. In my investigation, I saw prototypes. I was taught the science by people who are much smarter than me and much more scientific than me. I heard eyewitnesses to Havana syndrome themselves explain symptoms that were in line with what researchers would tell me these directed energy weapons would do. The thing is, nobody actually saw a directed energy weapon that had the same effect. We can see them in, like, LRADs, and you can see heat weapons that the military uses for crowd control. We know they work. We know they exist. But by and large, they require so much energy, it's not practical to use them on a small scale. So what does that mean? That's the frustrating part about any investigation is when you don't get to a conclusion. You just get to the next question. And that's what people, they don't realize that when you're an intelligence officer, a police officer, when you're in the investigation world, when you're in the information world, you don't reach many conclusions. The best you get is assessments. The best you get is suggestions. The best you get is probabilities. This is a dumb question, but I think dumb questions are important. Do you think something like this has the ability, theoretically, to emit enough frequency, enough energy to be some kind of weapon? For sure. Not the energy part, but the frequency part. Absolutely. Frequency is something that's really fascinating. Frequency is something that really became interesting to me about four years ago when I started researching strange frequencies that occur around areas of alien abduction or reported alien sightings. Again, I'm a skeptic. So when people pull me into a project, most of the time I say, no, unless you pay me this much. And then when you pay me this much, I'm still going to come in and try to poke holes in everything you give me. Well, some people still take that challenge and they pay me and I come. I come in and I look and frequencies were a legitimate, strange, unexplainable event in areas where people reported seeing aliens, in areas where people reported being abducted, in areas where people said there were like historical demons and ghosts. There are also these frequency anomalies, frequencies in the radio spectrum, frequencies that can be picked up that change over the course of the day. Almost always they relate to some kind of thin area of crust in the planet. So I don't know whether something's like radiating out energy from the core of the earth or whether it has something to do with the magnetic poles. I have no idea how to explain it, but the consistencies are real. And the effect that frequency has on human beings is real. That's why some people get a little bit motion sick or get a little bit irritated when they hear a frequency. Nobody likes the sound of fingers. Nobody likes the sound of fingers on a chalkboard. Nobody likes the sound of a very high pitched wheezing in the background. My kids, my kids were with me recently in Tokyo and we were going through like a major Tokyo intersection and they could hear the frequency at a high pitch of all of the TVs and all of the media in that square because they have young ears. Well, I couldn't hear it. So as we're crossing the street, they start covering their ears and complaining about the frequencies that they're hearing and I don't hear them, but that doesn't make it any less real for them. So frequencies. Can absolutely bother you. And that little phone that can throw out a frequency that can throw out a frequency that's binaural that helps you or it can throw out a frequency that hurts you. Entertain that one for me. Uh, when you walked away from, I think you went to skin Walker ranch to investigate that and can't remember the exact Hertz that the frequency was emitting in that area, but 1.6 gigahertz, I'm pretty sure it was 1.6 gigahertz and 1.6 gigahertz is fascinating. It was 1.6 gigahertz. 1.6 gigahertz is also the same frequency, the same band that's used for satellite communications between the earth and space. So that's how Starlink is communicating. That's how, uh, military assets are communicating that are American assets, arguably that same band because it's got the right frequency to pierce through multiple levels of atmosphere. That would also be the same frequency that's being used for Russian satellites and Chinese. So essentially we've painted the whole sky with this specific band of frequencies. Well, if that frequency also is effective on the human biological system, then just like I was telling you about what if you irradiated an office, but then triggered the radiation at home, what if we're all walking around being exposed to 1.6 gigahertz, but in certain areas of the planet, there's also an energy that's coming from the core. A lot of the scary things that kind of went bump in the night back in the day. Well, these skinwalkers often get reported at high frequency in specific areas. One of those areas is in Navajo nation in an area called Satan's Butte. So I went to Satan's Butte and when I was on Satan's Butte, I found no radio frequency anomalies at 10 o'clock in the morning when it was me and one other guy. We go back. I meet with the team. I'm like, Hey guys, there's nothing. They're like, really? So many people report something. I was like, come on, grab the whole team. We'll all come prove it. We go back to the same fucking spot at three o'clock in the afternoon and there's radio frequency anomalies at 1.6 gigahertz. What happened? What was the difference between 100 o'clock and three o'clock? So time of day changed. Yes. Weather didn't change that much. Time of day changed. Maybe whatever was in the sky at the time changed. Number of people changed. So is this an example of like a collusion? Collective consciousness effect? Because remember, human beings are just batteries. So did 10 people being above this specific spot in the geo, like geological anomaly itself, did the number of people affect it? Two people wasn't enough power, but 10 people is enough power, biological, chemical power. Did something else change? Was it my human error with the machine itself? I don't know. But. Now, I'm going to sound like the skeptic here, but wouldn't you imply that a satellite? Was the thing that emitted that frequency so couldn't a satellite have just moved its location around that time on a cycle? Except, do you know how fast a satellite moves? How fast? Like tens of thousands of miles per hour. Right. So satellites passed us in fractions of a second. So I agree, like there's a part of me that wants to be like, oh, that's easy. There's just a satellite parked up there emitting a signal. But they move so fast around the earth, like they'll pass around the earth three times in a day. So that means they're cruising. They're moving fast. Way faster than a plane. So how do we see this consistent signal? Could it be 10 satellites? Could it just be that we're triangulating an area right now where that signal happens to be something that we can pick up? I don't have an answer. I don't have an answer, but I will tell you this. When I took three Navajo Nation natives who live in Navajo Nation to Satan's Butte when they didn't want to go to prove to them that there's nothing strange about the area. And then I show them, well, that's strange. Something weird's happening right now. They fucking create, like, game over. They're like, we told you. We told you there was something about this area that was evil, that was dark, that was villainous. And now you have your fancy machine that's telling you there's something wrong. thing about this area that isn't normal. And they were themselves the ones that were like, maybe it's just because you actually have Navajo at this spot right now. Maybe you white people don't have the same effect on our ancient burial grounds that we have as natives. Aren't you Native American? I am. I always thought I was Navajo until a Navajo medicine man was like, I hate to tell you this, you're probably Pueblo and not Navajo. Gotcha. The next episode of your series, after the directed Energy One, investigates the origins of COVID-19, looking at the potential ways a virus of its nature could spread into a general population. I don't want to focus on COVID too much, but just briefly, I'm curious of your opinion on this. Like, what was the biggest lie we were told about COVID-19? I think the biggest lie we were told about COVID-19 happened very early on when we were told that it had to do with some sort of natural spillover, that animals originated the virus and it spilled over to human contact. Biologically, that is possible. What's not possible is that it happened as quickly as COVID happened. It takes generations. It takes multiple species. I didn't realize any of that prior to my investigation. I thought, oh, it makes sense, right? Like a bat is eaten by a badger. The badger is cooked by a Chinese guy and eaten later on by a Chinese gal in some wet market and boom, we've got COVID. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what we were told. And that's what a lot of us believed. When genetic scientists actually looked at it, they're like, yeah, what happens is over the course of like decades or centuries, the bats that are constantly eaten by different varieties of badger start to mutate the badger itself. And then when that badger is later on consumed by yet another animal for decades or more, it mutates that animal as well. It doesn't just happen in rapid succession. And I was shocked because I remember not only hearing that explanation, but believing that explanation and then just kind of damning the Chinese wet markets, which I've experienced personally before as kind of cool and gross at the same time. And then being like, oh, well, shit, something that dirty is of course going to make us all dirty, right? It was like the simple elementary school, don't wash your hands and other people are going to get a cold kind of explanation. Right. Something you'd said in your book too. I can't remember the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of like lies are typically complex and filled with good storytelling. And then the truth is often more simple and boring. In that episode, did you say that it was from a lab leak most likely? I believe that it was from a lab leak. Coming out of my investigation, what makes the most sense is that it was a lab leak, not an intentional lab leak, but that a lower level biological lab, like a BSL level two, was carrying out investigations and experimentation that should have been happening in a BSL level four. Now in the United States, there's strict laws against BSL level two carrying out BSL level four experimentation, but that doesn't exist in China. And because that doesn't exist in China, American research institutes will pay for Chinese labs to carry out research that Americans want to use. And they'll send American researchers and they'll send American scientists, they'll send American dollars, and they'll say, we are not allowed to use a BSL two lab, which comes at a cost of whatever, $10,000 a day. They're telling us we have to use a BSL four lab, which costs $100,000 a day. So for that reason, we're going to partner with the Chinese. And have the Chinese carry out the lab results for us, because not only does their BSL level two lab allow BSL level four experimentation, but it costs way less than our BSL two level lab. So we have two reasons now to work with the Chinese. And then when something goes wrong, it goes wrong in China. Until something like COVID happens, when the thing that goes wrong in China becomes so viral, that it carries from person to person over oceans over land, and it comes back and bites you in your own ass. Did you have COVID? I've had, I would be surprised if there are people who still haven't had COVID. I've had COVID two or three times. I've never had COVID. You've never had? Or maybe you just, you had, but you were not affected by it. I don't, I don't think I ever tested positive for it. That's crazy. But your book talks about the, like trying to figure out what your own confirmation cognitive biases are. And I think one I have about COVID is the fact that I've never had it, but I, everyone around me has had it. So it's like, of course it's a thing. I just, it's hard to get over that bias, you know? Once you have it, you'll, you don't forget it. At least, I mean, it affects everybody a little bit differently. On your show, you investigated the series of drone swarms, which you said you think was the second greatest lie we've been told in regards to the work you did on your discovery show. What's the most surprising thing you learned about hunter drones and how advanced are they in 2026? I mean, are you talking about drones? That are like fire and forget and able to track some fire shots and like that. Oh yeah. Hunter drones. So drone technology is relatively, I mean, it's complicated technology, obviously, but it's a relatively simple concept. A device, an unmanned device goes up and carries out whatever orders you give it. If you give it orders to follow a certain signal, it will follow that signal. So you can send it to a certain signal and it will follow that signal. So you can send it to a certain signal. You can send a drone to follow a wifi signal. You can send it to follow a telephone signal. You can send it to follow a radio signal and it will just track to that signal. You put a camera on that thing and now it's tracking and recording whatever it sees about that signal until it runs out of battery or it runs into low battery and it comes home. You can send a drone to follow a certain target and crash into it. You can send a drone to follow a certain target and when it's within a certain range, drop a grenade. You can send a drone to park in the sky and just watch everything. Like a mobile camera, right? A drone can do a lot of different things. I think what I was so excited about in the drone investigation that I did was two things. One, drones have weaknesses and we never give them credit for their weaknesses. Their battery life is not long and they're still largely either programmed or controlled by a human being. So all the flaws of the human being still carry forward into the drone itself. So if they make a manual steering area, then the drone goes the wrong direction. Or if they program it wrong, it goes the wrong direction. So I had to evade a police drone as part of that investigation. And I was not looking forward to that. The police were very confident they were going to track me the whole time. The Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL who was helping the police, who actually controlled the technology itself, was very confident they were going to catch me very quickly. And then the team, the cameramen that deployed with me, were just waiting. The joke was this is going to be the biggest letdown in television history. Andy's going to go out in a car. Fifteen minutes later, the police are going to roll up on him because the drone is on top of him the whole time. That's not how it actually turned out. Because the drone is still only able to see what it can see. It can't see through walls. It can't see through garages. It can't see through concrete. And then CIA taught me how to evade a surveillance team. A surveillance team works just like a surveillance drone. So I was able to execute the same techniques that I learned at CIA. So I was able to demonstrate and kind of validate the limitations of drones in terms of their operational capability. And then when it couldn't find me, it also ran out of battery. So then the primary drone had to go back and a new drone had to deploy. And because I was aware of my own location, my own environment, I was able to actually see the two drones swap and use that gap in time to relocate my physical presence again. So it was a really validating experience to me because all of the fears that we have about drones are valid fears. They are transforming the battlefield in Ukraine. They will transform the future. But they're not all powerful. They are scary, but they're not as powerful as we oftentimes make them out to be. When you project that forward onto what happened in New Jersey and the New Jersey drone incident and the thing that had so many people concerned, it still had no explanation where you had Congress people saying it was a mothership from Iran. You had forest rangers saying that they could see hundreds of lights coming in from the ocean. You had everyday citizens saying that they saw, you know, giant aircraft hovering over military bases flying in formation. That was a scary, scary time. With a scary, scary technology that people didn't understand and they were getting broken, mixed messages about. We still don't have complete clarity on what was happening there. But in my research, what I believe was happening is that there was experimentation happening on the military base and it was not properly coordinated with local government. For sure, it was not coordinated across multiple federal government representatives. And then people just started panicking and people just started guessing and nobody had the need to know to actually answer the question. The last thing anybody wants to do is raise their hand and say we made a mistake. So it's not like the commander of the base is going to raise their hand and be like, hey, guys, sorry. We were flying classified aircraft that day. They can't say that because now people know there's classified. aircraft on that location and it's public knowledge. And now Chinese satellites are going to zoom in on that location too. So it was this kind of total clown car incident. So you would say that they're pretty much overhyped in their capabilities, but I want to ask on the death of Charlie Kirk, the mainstream narrative says that Tyler Robinson shot him with a rifle acting completely alone. Others speculate the shot came from another angle and some believed it was an exploding microphone. Based on what you learned about advanced drone technology, does the technology exist right now to do a hit like that and make it look like a gunman? If it does, I haven't seen it. The drone technology that I've seen, and I'm not privy to classify drone technology. Keep in mind that anything that we know exists, there's probably two generations that are actively being researched and modified. For military intelligence purposes. So if you and I are drinking water that came out of a water filter, somewhere there's technology that pulls water out of the air. No filter needed. But we don't even know that exists. That's science fiction to us, but to other people, it's their whole company mission. So for you and me, drones are being used by police to surveil us. In China, they're being used to make announcements down the street, tell people to, you know, wash their feet or pay their taxes or whatever it might be. So that's where we think drones are oppressing us. We're worried about flock fucking cameras on the street corner surveilling us. Two generations of technology above that is what's actually being developed. So could there be a classified drone that can fire a standard rifle bullet and then get off the X? Is it strong enough to stabilize itself, to handle the recoil for the time it takes for the bullet to actually pass through a long, barrel? Maybe, but I haven't seen it. The science of it, from my experience shooting and my experience in intelligence, doesn't make sense. Really? It just doesn't make sense. There would be too much room for error. And if it missed, the collateral damage would be tremendous. It would hit a civilian college kid in the audience. It would hit a building. It would be so wildly, inaccurate that the investigation into the projectile direction wouldn't even be attributable to Tyler Robinson. It's just too much, too much room for error. And what people never realize in all of their speculation and conspiracy theory is that government, military, and intelligence don't take high risk actions. They primarily take actions that are moderate or controlled risks that have minimum blowback. Something like that would have, massive blowback. Right. Because of the second, third, fourth order effects of using an advanced hunter drone, right? What if it falls out of the fucking sky? What if anything goes wrong? What if one of the blades goes haywire? And it doesn't even have to be anywhere near the college campus. What if a drone just happens to fall out of the sky in some poor bastard's backyard and it's got a rifle barrel on it? In a world where everybody's on Facebook and they pull out their phone before they even look at it themselves. The risk is too great. You want to test something, give it to the Ukrainians so they can test it in Ukraine, on the Russian border. Don't give it to some wild person who's trying to assassinate a largely unknown influencer at the time. Big in his circles. Charlie Kirk was massive in his own circles. But by and large, the majority of people didn't know who Charlie Kirk was. Didn't know what turning point was. Didn't know that there was a guy out there debating conservative values with young people at all. He became much more famous after his death. He became much more famous than he was before, but we forget that. You've said that take before, have you? I don't know. Something I talked about with people when it first happened was I was like, this is interesting. This is not who I would think anyone would see as the most influential of the right influencers. Right. But there's a lot of conversations behind the scenes that I don't have access to knowing in his life. That's the problem with all of us. There's conversations that none of us have access to. And we live in a generation where we distrust so much faster than we trust. So now when there's something we don't know, it must work against us. It must be nefarious. It must be evil. It must be malicious intent. Whereas I think our parents thought differently. My parents certainly thought differently. If it's something I don't need to know, I don't have to worry about it. I guess in a world of flock safety cameras, axon surveillance, there's software updates that allow them to purchase private cookies and metadata from our phones. Basically, flock safety cameras have installed updates that allow them to interact with some of the metadata from our phones that can be purchased from other companies. Do you think assassinations are even possible in the age of surveillance? Yes. Like to get away with, perhaps? Well, that's a different question, right? Getting away with it without evidence, it would take a lot of premeditation, preparation, training. It would take a team. It would take multiple people. The criminal activity isn't going to end. It's just going to change. It's going to adapt to whatever the law enforcement elements are using. That's the way it's always been. I will say this. I'm not against flock cameras. I think flock cameras are more in line with the future that we all actually want for ourselves than they are against the future that we all want for ourselves. If the United States intends to remain the most powerful, successful, wealthiest country in the world, the age of surveillance is virtually guaranteed. We will want a surveillance state. We are already giving permission to every app that we download on our phone to collect information on our location, on our contacts, on our app usage, on our sleep. We want it. We just, for some reason, are lying to ourselves. I'm thinking that, oh, it's bad if the government has it, but it's good if Google has it, or if Apple has it, or if a big tech company has it. Well, who the fuck is paying the big tech company there, you guys? The government. And what does big tech do with all your information? They sell it. Sell it to who? The highest bidder. Who's often the highest bidder? Not our government. Somebody else's government. So who are we lying to and trying to say flock is bad for us? Who are we lying to and trying to say that the government shouldn't collect our personal data? Who are we lying to when we say that we shouldn't have cell phone metadata be available to law enforcement? All we're doing is lying to ourselves, making ourselves not only less safe, but putting ourselves in an economically disadvantageous position than our adversaries who have long ago given up this fight. The Emirates don't even use police on the highways. It's all a camera system. And the camera system reads your license plate, and your license plate is tied to your national ID, and your national ID is tied to your credit card. So what happens when you're caught speeding? Your credit card is automatically billed, and your driver's license automatically has points deducted before you even get to your house, right? So think about what that does for the economic viability of a country. And meanwhile, what are Americans going to bitch about? It's not fair. It's not fair. Like, I was surveilled on the interstate. No, you were caught breaking a law, driving too fast. You can't bitch about the fact that you were caught breaking a law. When somebody else is caught breaking a law, you want them to be brought to justice. But when you break a law, now all of a sudden it's a violation of your privacy. Privacy that was actually not promised to you by the founding fathers, that was not documented in any kind of article, that has not been protected by the courts, but that has just become kind of common vernacular. Oh, we have a right to privacy, actually. You have rights to lots of things. You have no right to privacy. It's not written down anywhere. Benjamin Franklin recommended we write it down, and the other founding fathers took his recommendation and ignored it. Why? Because they didn't want the population to have a fucking right to privacy. The founding fathers, the beliefs of our country, they already knew if you give the people a right to privacy, you're going to have a right to privacy. They will abuse it. They will use it against the government. They knew that because that's exactly what they were doing to mount the Revolutionary War. They were privately conspiring against the King of England. If they would have had a right to privacy, their conspiratorial meetings would have been protected by law. The last thing they wanted to do was give future conspiratorial teams a chance to undermine the federal government in a legally protected category. That's why we don't have a right to privacy. We have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that reasonable expectation is essentially contingent on the fact that you haven't done anything else that allows them to dig into what you're working on. So if you break some other law, if you become suspicious in some way, shape, or form of something else that you're doing, then they can essentially violate your privacy. So you agree with predictive policing? I'm not saying I agree with it. agree with predictive policing. I'm saying that I believe that a surveillance state is inevitable for the United States to maintain its geopolitical dominance. Predictive policing, you can't arrest a person who hasn't committed a crime. If they've done something that creates reasonable cause, that's already part of how we operate. And I think reasonable cause is a sound effort. Dude, you're talking to the wrong guy, because I also believe in profiling. I'm a Latino. If I'm driving a nice car and some white cop pulls me over because he's racially profiling me, I don't fucking care. Here's my driver's license. Look it up on your machine. If I'm speeding, give me a ticket, but you're going to see that I'm not a criminal. But in my eyes, good job, Mr. White Cop, for trying to keep the street safe. I don't really care if you think that I'm the one you should be following just because I'm a Latino in a nice car. That doesn't bother me as an American citizen. It might bother me as an individual, but as an American citizen, that cop could have been doing nothing. Could have been jerking off, could have been, you know, scrolling through Facebook, but he wasn't. He was trying to do what he thought was right. So do you suspect to carry out something as grandeur as a political assassination, you would have to be someone who operates outside of the system of those being surveilled? Not necessarily, because surveillance is an active word. But what oftentimes happens in mass surveillance. You don't see what's about to happen. You don't see it even as it's happening. It's only available to you after you dig into the data. It's like somebody breaks into a jewelry store. There's a camera watching them break in. There's a camera watching them cross the parking lot. There's a camera watching them when they pull out the gun and point it at the teller. But nobody can do anything about it until after the footage is reviewed, recorded, scrubbed, and then brought to a court of law later on. In the moment, they're being surveilled. But in the moment, there's nothing you can do to act on that surveillance. Again, to clarify the question, that's super useful, actually, but to get away with it, is that impossible? No, not at all. Not at all. If you look at what happened with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO. Luigi Mangione? He was a killer. Luigi Mangione was the alleged killer, right? Brian Thompson was the victim. Did a very, very good amateur job of being under surveillance, carrying out a crime, and almost getting away with it, right? He had an ingress route. He had an egress route. He knew he was under camera surveillance. He kept his face covered. He kept his hair covered. He wore clothes that made it difficult to identify his body shape, build, height, etc. He had multimodal transportation, moved in cars, moved on foot. He was a killer. He was a killer. He was a killer. Moved on bikes. He crossed state borders. He stayed off the radar. It wasn't police that found Luigi Mangione. It was a person. It was a citizen, a do-gooder at a McDonald's that reported his location. That's what ended up happening. That's what brought down Luigi Mangione. In the modern day era, in the most populated city in America, he almost got away with it. So do I think people will be able to get away with it? Absolutely. There's going to be new technologies that are created that scramble Wi-Fi signals and scramble cellular signals. It's already possible now. If I steal your cell phone, I have the ability to use your cell phone for all of its functionality. I just have to turn off its ability to lock itself so it doesn't lock me out. But otherwise, in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the cell phone provider, I'm you. I can do whatever the fuck I want and then just drop the phone. There's a whole criminal case against you, not me. That's fascinating. In episode one of your show, you investigated the idea of an MK Ultra-style assassin. Basically, can you brainwash someone to carry out a crime, commit a murder, perhaps? In episode seven, you pressure tested whether AI models and algorithms have the ability to influence and manipulate human behavior. To connect these two ideas, you investigated the ability to influence and manipulate human behavior. To connect these two ideas, you Based on everything you know about AI, brainwashing, and human behavior, do you think an algorithm can brainwash someone to murder? FX's American Horror Story 13, now streaming on Hulu. $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Show button here. Football is finally back, and PrizePix is going crazy with the deals to start the season, giving out promos every day in September. On PrizePix, you can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, PrizePix is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff, because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. PrizePix. Download the app today and use code SPOTIFY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix. Run your game. I don't think you can rule that out. And I say that because brainwashing, while it's a term that's overused, is really nothing more than a persuasive argument. And algorithms can certainly create persuasive arguments. AI agents can already create persuasive arguments. Even simple AI agents can create effective persuasive arguments. So if the persuasive argument was just built in such a way to conclude on the logical inevitability that you need to kill him or her, fed to the right person, it would work. And here's why I say that. ISIS is actively leveraging the internet to find disenfranchisement. They've disenfranchised American youth and radicalized them towards not the ISIS cause, but similar ideological causes that are like ISIS. Because they understand that if they say ISIS, that same American isn't going to act. So instead it's about, it's not about we love ISIS, it's about we hate America. And they're radicalizing them through online forums that are backed by human beings creating persuasive arguments. I'm sure there's an AI element supporting that as well. But we've already seen that you can radicalize an American from abroad using a digital bridge to get them to take actual lethal action in their home country. Whether that's driving a car down a crowded street in Minnesota or whether that's, you know, doing something else. So it's already been proven that the process works. All you have to do is really just remove one human from the equation. And arguably that would make it a stronger equation. Because now anytime. Anytime that human being, that American disenfranchised youth, anytime they want to talk, the AI is there ready to talk. Whereas if they want to talk now, whoever's on duty is the one that they're talking to, right? So there's an inconsistency that exists in the current process that would arguably be even more efficient and effective with an AI bot. How long do you think it would take an AI chatbot to brainwash someone to commit murder? I think. I think it depends more on the person than the bot. If you're putting somebody in front of an AI engine who's already pro-violence, already feels disenfranchised, already feels desperate, already has a weapon, already has access to the target, somebody who's already compromised their moral and ethical values, you could do that quickly. I would argue, especially if the AI bot got a hold of somebody who had already had violent. ideation, you could probably get them to be brainwashed, convinced, persuaded for murder in five days or less. You can convince a person to kill another person, sometimes in less than 24 hours. All you have to do is find the right person and give them permission to hurt the right person, and you're just letting them do what they already want to do. That sounds crazy to a person who doesn't really want to hurt anyone. But, I mean. I don't think you'd have to stretch your imagination very hard before you know that there's somebody in your family, in your circle, in your peer group, somebody that you've met, who's already itching for a fight. And if they just had a drink or two and a little bit of permission, if they just knew the police wouldn't arrest them that night, would they punch somebody in the face? The answer's probably yes. We are a violent culture. Do you think it's at all possible that anyone has been. MKUltra'd by an algorithm? today like you know we said general energy weapon versus directed energy weapons. How about directed algorithmic control? I would almost argue that based on the question you're asking, we all have been MKUltra'd by an algorithm. Right. We all see what the algorithm wants us to see. We hear what the algorithm wants us to hear at the pace that the algorithm wants us to find it. We've all been MKUltra'd by the algorithm. Now, does it mean that we are fully shaped by the algorithm? For the majority of people, I would say no. We're not fully shaped by the algorithm. But we all know people who are. We all know people who are so zealous and so radical in their beliefs that even when the algorithm isn't feeding them echo chamber information, they're looking for it themselves. They're so religious. They're so political. They're so anti. They're so anti-establishment. They're so pro-animal rights. Whatever it might be. They are so into it that the algorithm just feeds them. And when the algorithm isn't feeding them, they're looking for it on their own, which is training the algorithm what to feed them. That's a fully MKUltra'd person right there. That person who refuses to believe that, you know, you name it, that anything Donald Trump ever says or ever does could possibly be right. Like, that's a MKUltra'd person. A person who fully believes. A person who fully believes that every homeless person should die. That's an MKUltra'd person. When you think about the hundreds of hours of content you filmed in your Discovery show, all the research, interviews, experiments you conducted, what's the most interesting thing that was deleted from your show? Oh, this one breaks my heart, man. Because for anybody who's ever participated in anything on television, so much gets cut. The rule of thumb is that you film, an hour for one minute of finished content. And that's just, that just kills me. So I was super excited to film the entire Epstein investigation with Julian Dory. So Julian and I put 12 hours into that investigation in just one of the five days that we were investigating it. And still the episode itself only came out to whatever, 32 minutes of which Julian was only with me for 28 of those minutes. But somehow. Some fantastic conversations with Julian. Some excellent questions that we couldn't answer that deserved a whole nother investigation on their own. And we couldn't dig into those. My evasion effort against the drones that were being put up in the air by the local police force, that was a three-hour exercise boiled into a minute and a half of television. During the COVID investigation, I had this incredible conversation with a virologist, who first blew the whistle on the idea that it was impossible for COVID to be due to natural spillover. And that it was highly possible and there was demonstrable proof that American scientists were collaborating with Chinese scientists and short-cutting the system by using BSL 2-level labs to carry out BSL level 4 genetic experiments. So she had all this evidence. She had all this proof. We had this incredible conversation. It absolutely. Brought me to tears to hear not only what she had discovered, but to also hear how the entire scientific and political community worked against her to undermine her and bring her down at the onset of the COVID crisis, only to then later on admit that she was right and only later on admit that her research was sound. All of this didn't make the final show. And what's hard about that is I got to do the investigation. I got. I got to advance my own understanding and the understanding of the guests that were with me and I got to meet the experts and I got to see the world that CIA taught me existed again. But Discovery Channel had to make a show. They had to make a show that told a story that a complete novice could start on minute one and leave on minute 59. That's the journalist's conundrum. They have to tell a story. The intelligence operator is very excited just to collect. Collect and collect and collect and collect and let me find my own discoveries and let me make my own conclusions. I don't need a story. Just give me information. But part of what made the Discovery Channel partnership so strong was I dug in deeper when they were like, we got the story we need. And then similarly, they said, here's the story from the mountain of information I collected. I couldn't have done it without them. They couldn't have done it without me, arguably. So that's part of what makes a TV project very rewarding. Yeah, that must fucking suck. It's terrible, dude. It's terrible. Did you get the rights to any of the content to use for your own show? No. Before you ever start filming, you actually, they have all, and it makes sense. They're doing, they're putting forth all the effort, all the talent. So all the content is theirs. Yeah. In chapter 11 of this book, you write, the best way to spot a liar is to give them an opportunity. to lie, then scrutinize their response. If you want to break down just, what are the four techniques CI officers use to catch a liar? There's many techniques. I list four in the book that try to help people realize it's not rocket science, right? So you can, they're all four, essentially, elicitation techniques. You can use something called a false statement. A false statement means you know the truth, but you don't know the truth. So you can use something called a false statement, but you don't know the truth. But you don't know the truth. But you say the truth incorrectly. And the reason that you make a false statement is because you want to see how they react to your false statement. Do they correct your false statement, which is a sign of what we call veracity? They're being honest and correcting what you just said incorrectly. Or do they agree with your false statement? Amplify your false statement. Essentially, blow up the lie that you said, but you don't know whether or not they're doing that because they are also trying to lie to you or they just don't know the truth. So false statement is one technique. Another technique is something that we have called false recap, which is they tell you something and then you say it back to them incorrectly on purpose. The reason that works is because if they're telling a lie, most likely they haven't committed that lie to memory. So when you say it back to them incorrectly, it was already not fact when they said it. So when you say back something that's also not fact, what their cognitive brain hears is I said something that wasn't true. That person said something that also wasn't true. Therefore, it's correct. So you can actually catch someone in a lie simply by saying back a statement that they previously said and just saying it back wrong. These are elicitation techniques to test them. The most effective tool that I've ever seen is something called the emotional question. An emotional question is a question where you ask somebody not about the fact, but about their feeling surrounding an incident, surrounding a moment, surrounding a situation. Instead of saying, did you come home on time? You say, how did it feel to be home on time? If they were late, they've already created a story to answer the fact about being late. But they didn't actually live the experience of being home on time. So because they didn't live through that experience, they don't have feelings associated with it. So when you ask somebody, how did it feel to be home on time last night? I wasn't home on time last night, but if I was, it would have felt good. It felt good. You can literally see the story being created in their mind because they haven't come up with the feeling of the falsity, but they've come up with the facts to cover the falsity. So there's all these different techniques that you can use to dig into a lie. Why can't liars fake an emotional response? They could if they put time and effort into preparing for the emotional response. What happens is all of lie detection really just boils down to reactions. It boils down to efforts. When you're trying to catch a liar, we logically think that catching a liar is a logical process. It's actually not. The liar always has the advantage in a logical process because they've had time to premeditate the lie, the response, the story. They've practiced it in front of a mirror. They've thought about it on their drive to come see you. You can't out-logic, especially not a good liar, because they've prepared for it. They're prepared to look you in the eye. They're prepared to smile. They're prepared to stay confident. They've prepared for it all. And all of that preparation happened on their left logical brain. The only way that you're going to beat the liar is by getting them into their right brain, their emotional brain, their creative brain, because all that preparation was happening in the left brain. The way you get them in their right brain is that you talk to them about how it felt. How did it feel when? How did it feel after? How did it feel right before? You know, did you cry? Did you laugh? Something like that. Because the human brain, when it rehearses something, it's living what you rehearse. That's what makes acting so powerful. They're reading a script, practicing a script, rehearsing the script, carrying out the emotions that they felt in the script. They're putting themselves in the role. so now when you ask Will Smith how did your character feel in that moment, he'll tell you the truth because he's thought through it all. He's lived through it all, really actually lived through it. But a liar hasn't lived through the falsity that they're explaining. That didn't actually happen. They didn't live through it. If they would have lived through it, there'd be automatic feelings, but they didn't. So the feelings are absent. So the superpower that we all have is finding the efforts that the liar is putting into the emotion. The problem with putting effort into a fact is that sometimes we honestly just forget. I promise you there's factual questions I can ask you and you can try your hardest to tell me the truth, but it's going to take effort. What did you have for breakfast yesterday morning? Nothing. Like you had to think about it for a second, but that doesn't mean that you're lying. It just means that you're actually trying to stretch your mind to remember what you actually had. Did I actually have nothing? Or did I maybe have a muffin? Oh, did I have a banana? I had coffee. Should I say coffee? Like all that's happening in your brain. Is that a reliable technique, observing how much people are thinking before they speak? It's only reliable if you're asking them emotional questions. Because if you're asking them fact-based questions, the effort they're putting into it is to come up with the truth. Do you get what I'm saying? Explain that to me slightly differently. Like I guess like as a interviewer on podcasts, like when I watch people, it seems like some people like think about my questions and some people don't think about the questions. Ah. That doesn't necessarily mean they're lying. So there's two, CIA teaches us that there's essentially two types of people. There are many types of people, but for simplicity's sake, there's people who process quickly and there's people who process slowly, mentally process. A person who processes quickly can hear information come in and they process that information quickly and they give you a response. That doesn't mean they're lying. It also doesn't mean they're telling the truth. It doesn't mean they're lying. It doesn't mean they're telling the truth. It just means that they're able to process the information and process a response. Similarly, there's people who process information slowly. They process the inbound, but then they take additional processing time to process their response. That doesn't make them a liar. It also doesn't make them honest either. So the first thing you have to do whenever you're trying to detect a lie is understand who you're talking to. It's what we call a baseline. Are they a fast processor? Are they a slow processor? Once you know if they process fast or slow, then you can start probing with questions like emotional questions, with efforts like false recap or false statements. You can use these techniques to start measuring the delta, the variation, in the effort that they now need when they're trying to respond. So a person who's a fast processor who responds quickly and then you ask a question and they slow down, that could be a sign of deceit. A person who processes slowly and then you start asking them a false recap, that could be a sign of deceit. That's a deviation that you should pay attention to. And then for sure, when you stop asking logical, fact-based questions and you start focusing on emotional questions, you should expect a liar will slow down because it's very difficult for them to create a false story around an emotion that never existed. So that takes effort and it slows them down, whether they're a fast processor or a slow processor. The challenge is, if they're a fast processor, if you ask a fact-based question, they're going to be able to answer it at their normal pace. So let's talk about something that only you know, right? Only you know if it's true or false. Only you know if you're playing, it's, you know, 90% true, 10% false. So this is, you have all the advantages in this exercise. You with me? Yeah. Okay. So first I'll ask, I'll ask fact-based questions. Just. So we can see how you lie, if you lie at all. Um, what time did you go to bed last night? So I'm supposed to tell the truth or I'm supposed to lie? You can do whatever you want to right now. I'm just going to ask fact-based questions. 302. 302. It's a very specific number because it's so specific. It makes me lean towards the fact that you're probably lying. There's a chance that you're telling me the truth because maybe last night it was just a lie. It's just a night that you were actually looking at the clock, but that level of specificity is very suspicious to me. Also, you are a slow processor and you answered the question very quickly. The entire interview is very clear. Every interview you're on, it's very clear that you process slowly. Right. For that reason, some reason you answered that answer, that question very quickly. So next question, what's your favorite book that you've read recently? You got me, Andrew. You see how you fucking process slowly though? Right. You're thinking about it. Mm-hmm. That gives me a lot of confidence. It gives me high confidence that you're thinking about the truth first. Maybe you're going to give me a lie, but right now this is very much in line with the baseline that is Jack Neill. Thoughtful, steady, stable. You're not looking all over the place like you were for the 302 answer. You're locked in, looking off in the space in chronological order, trying to decide, what did I read? Maybe you're embarrassed because you haven't read anything recently. I don't know, but you're running into fact right now. It would technically be true. I don't know. I don't know your book. We have here. That's why I said you got me. I was like, this guy's smart. Good marketing method. So another quick fact-based question, because these have all been fact-based questions, not feelings-based questions. All right. So fact-based questions. What car did you drive to get here today? I didn't drive. Seems like a factual statement. Maybe somebody else drove. Maybe you rode in an Uber. That seemed like an honest answer. Now, let's talk about feelings-based questions. All right. Did you wake your wife up today? Or did she wake you up today? Shit. Light your candles. Draw your pentagrams. And prepare for a supreme surprise. Home of the Save. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's. Home of the Save. Show button here. Football is finally back. And PrizePix is going crazy with the deals to start the season. Giving out promos every day in September. On PrizePix, you can make all the picks you want. All in the same app. Lock in for kickoff. Because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? PrizePix. Run your game. I probably woke her up. So you probably woke her up. You don't exactly remember. I don't think she would say I woke her up. But I'd say that. I don't think she would know that I woke her up. But I probably woke her up. How did it feel when you saw her this morning? Right now, there's effort. And I don't know why there's effort, but there's effort. For all I know, you guys had morning sex. And you just don't want to say that in front of the camera. But there's effort holding back. Your face went bland. This is great to play it on the replay. You can actually see the muscles in your face relax. Which takes effort when someone's talking about feelings. Because generally, if it's a happy feeling, you'll start to smile. If it's a sad feeling, you'll start to kind of furrow your eyebrow. Like, the face will react to the first emotion it feels. So the effort that you're putting into answering my question about how it felt to see your wife this morning makes me already distrust whatever answer is going to come out of your mouth next. There's something that you're covering up. Whether you're covering up that you don't know, you're covering up that you forgot, or you're covering up that you had morning sex. I don't know what you're covering up. But there's something that's being covered up. I was going to say confused was the emotion. 'Cause I didn't know if she was awake or not. But I couldn't tell if I was waking her up by doing it. But, huh. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Uh, did you eat dinner last night? No, I wouldn't call it dinner. So you didn't eat breakfast or dinner yesterday? Well, I had food. Yeah. Did you pick the food, or did she pick the food, or did somebody else pick the food? Did you pick the food, or did somebody else pick the food? She made me a sam-wich. I call that a sandwich. Yeah. How does it feel to not remember what you ate the day before? I don't give a fuck. Yeah. That's a lie. Really? Yeah. see it on your face it bothers you it bothers you you feel embarrassed you feel self-conscious for something you feel something negative about your schedule your lifestyle your habits your health there's something negative there because you completely broke your baseline to answer that question i would have guessed that that was just a strong belief that bled through maybe you do believe it but that doesn't mean that's true maybe you do believe that you don't give a fuck but you actually do feel differently about it so this is what makes lie detection so much more complicated than what you see in the movies and what you're told in an 11 minute youtube video you have to know the baseline you have to measure deviations from the baseline you have to have a strategy for that lie detection going in right now i'm just popping off random questions but for the people watching you they're able to see even better than you can how different your response is from question to question how some of those questions froze you and you couldn't even speak other of those questions you just spit out an answer and it seemed completely different from the persona that you are all the time so that does that mean i have high confidence in my answers no but it tells me that there's a there's clearly a deviation between when you are trying to come up with an idea trying to process an answer and when you're just spitting something up off the top of your head do i know yet whether or not the spitting off the top of your head is a lie or the processing is a lie i don't know for sure but the deviation from your baseline is very clear right that's interesting and something people don't realize too is that like the same thing that you would detect well like there's a straight up lie and then there's a half truth and then there's like what is it pottering parturing do you know that word there's different words that are used by different some psychologists law enforcement cia but we essentially think there are three types of lies there's white lies bold-faced lies and lies of omission white lies are innocent lies bold-faced lies are full fictional untruths and lies of omission are when you just leave out certain details and then there's like the manicured version of it that's like crafted with certain adjectives in a way to see else well it depends on whether or not that's a bold-faced lie right is it are you crafting something that's a complete fabrication or are you crafting something that's just a small deviation from that that would be a white lie but you are correct there's different types of lies there's different intentions behind lies right sometimes we lie just because we don't want to get into details we just want to move on sometimes we lie because we honestly think that we're smarter than the other person sometimes we lie because we think we're helping the other person by lying to them because they can't be trusted with the truth or they couldn't handle the truth or they won't be happy with the truth so we're not going to lie because we don't want to get into details we just want to move on so lying is a is a far more complicated thing than we give it not black and white um on like human intelligence uh is there any one technique you use regularly that is classified because it's tradecraft i don't think so and the and the thing that i'm really thinking about right now is the term classified i don't think anything i do on a daily basis is using a classified technique and i say that because one of the things that was always so shocking to me about cia is the techniques are not classified that's how i teach them now that's how i teach them to you it's how i wrote this book the foundation of so much tradecraft activities so many tradecraft skills the foundation for those tradecraft skills when it comes to how you engage with people how you engage with your environment how you keep yourself safe those are all actually based in academic research and as academics we're not going to be able to do that we're not going to be able to do that research is updated and changed tradecraft changes the stuff that's really classified are sources of intelligence the human beings the databases and the methods that we use to collect that information dead drops you know certain rfids or rf signals that we use to transmit on that kind of stuff is all what's actually classified the fact that you can use these different techniques to catch a liar that's not classified it's actually buried in some harvard journal somewhere in the you know medical school at in massachusetts or it's on the cutting edge uh research of what's being done at uc san diego and and it's published in some medical or psychological paper that nobody pays attention to but cia psychologists bring it in and make a tradecraft so so much of what tradecraft is is actually public knowledge that the public just doesn't see because they don't read it so is there any one technique that you refuse to teach because it's too dangerous i don't think so for that one either i don't refuse to teach anything that i believe will help people there are lots of things out there that will hurt people yes yes there are things that i don't teach because i think people will hurt others with them i know how to disappear i know how to get away with using my phone and not having it be traceable to people who are close to me still traceable to the cell phone network but i know how to take steps to purposely cover up my trail if i wanted to have a secret conversation with somebody whether it's on my phone whether it's in person i know how to set up meetings that would not be noticed so if i wanted to have an affair i believe with a wife other than my own then i'd have a good chance of getting away with it my wife has been trained in all the same things so it's very difficult for me to even think about pulling that on her but that is something i could teach i could teach men how to have an affair i could teach women how to have an affair and have virtually no chance of getting caught but that is not something that i will teach mainly because i don't see how anybody would use that to get better so what's the point right and you know speaking as a business owner marketer personality that's not what i want to be known for i don't want to be known as the guy that can help you not get caught in your affair that's not a good unique selling proposition not not to the mainstream that's interesting is there a technique around when you meet a contact for the first time presenting a different baseline does that make sense everybody presents a different baseline at first so cia teaches us that we have three lives we have a public life a private life and a secret life the vast majority of our energy and the vast majority of our time goes into presenting our public life this is what i want the world to believe this is what i want the world to see your hair is your public life that's not what your hair looks like in the morning it's not what your hair looks like when you come out of the shower that may not even be what your hair looks like when you go to bed but it's what you look like on camera right there's uh there's things that we all do what we drive how we dress the bracelets that we choose to wear that are all part of our public life then we have a private life and our private life is the life that only a few people get to see right that private life is where people find out whether you wear boxer briefs or whether you wear boxers or whether you go commando everywhere you go it's the people who understand it takes you 25 minutes to do your hair in the morning it's the people who know that you have like a bare spot under your chin whenever you try to shave that's your private life that's where people discover that you actually like to roll around on the floor with your dog your public life doesn't know that but the people in your private life do then there's your secret life the whole world might see your public life 12-ish people might know your private life but in your secret life you intentionally try to keep that number at zero but even though you try to keep it at zero there still might be one or two or three people in your lifetime that get into your secret life because your secret life is the life where you hide your shame it's where you hide your guilt it's where you hide whatever you think is a perversion it's the place where you put the things about you that you are hopeful nobody ever discovers but you can't just let them go because you care care about them care about them because they're humiliating or care about them because they were injustices that were done to you nobody knows except you and that's the part that you try to keep secret your wife doesn't know your kids don't know you might even go to a therapist and keep your therapist from knowing this shit that is your secret life we all have these three lives most of our time with other people is spent in the public space public life some of our closest friends make it up but we don't know what's going on we don't know what's going on we don't know what's going on but cia teaches us that the place where you become super powerful in somebody else's life the place where you can control them you can leverage them you can truly predict them is when you get into their secret life when somebody will share with you the thing that makes them ashamed of themselves you have incredible power over that person because by letting you into their secret life they have essentially said i trust you now and forever and once you're in someone's secret life you're never out of their secret life. There are people who got into your secret life when you were a kid and they're still there now. You still would love to talk to them. You still long for them. You still miss them. You even have their name and face coming to mind right now as I explain this to you. There are people, not many, one or two maybe. And when you're on your deathbed, you will still remember that person because you let them into your secret life. And likewise, there are people who are thinking of you right now as they hear this conversation about who's in their secret life. And on the baseline portion, I'm trying to gather how those two ideas connect with each other because I would imagine as someone doing operations in the nature that you did, you would probably be dealing with other people who were spies as well sometimes. Sometimes. And would probably want to be undetected. And maybe at first, or probably at least want to conceal your ability to lie sometimes. If you're going up against another trained operator, it's not about concealing anything. Really? Yeah. Because if you believe they're trained, or if you know they're trained, and especially if they also know that you're trained, then it becomes this game of almost avoidance. Or gentlemanly respect. Because the last thing. The last thing anybody wants to do is go up against another trained person and actually find out who's better. Have you ever met anyone that you felt like you didn't have control over the situation psychologically? Oh, yes. For sure. But there's multiple different reasons why you don't have control. So just briefly, to answer your previous question, what you're looking for in terms of a baseline is a baseline before you can confirm that you're traveling into their private life. And then when you're in their private life, you'll develop a new baseline for what private life looks like. And then you'll have to look for the deviations from that to understand when you're getting into secret life. And then you'll know the baseline for all three, so that when you're with them in a public place, when you're with them on a certain topic, when you're with them 15 years later, you can literally know where they are mentally based on the baseline that they're showing you. I have a very good friend of mine from college. He's got a baseline that's public. It's kind of a frenetic, busy, anxious baseline, because that's the life he lives all the time with his kids and with his wife and with his job. But then when I'm with him in private, he has a very different baseline. He has a more mellow, more contemplative, more kind of depressed baseline. But I'm also in his secret life. We're in each other's secret life. And when I know that one of that secret place, that's where I'm going to be. And I'm going to be there. And I'm going to his actual hope comes out. That's his baseline. And there is a baseline of just like transparency. And that transparency means, yes, I'm ashamed of these things that I've done in the past, but I am so lucky to have the wife that I have and the kids that I have. That only comes out in his secret life. That doesn't come out in his private life or his public life. In fact, when he talks about how much he loves his kids in his public or private life, it actually seems disingenuous because it's so different from the rest of the way he carries himself. So I say that because to your point about being in control of someone psychologically, if you're going to be in control of a psychological situation, you have to be in control of the other person. And there are some people who are very difficult to control because their public life is something that they don't even realize is like oppressively public. Let me just get a real quick story. I did a speaking event last year. Only two people spoke on the stage. Tony Robbins, who is the president of the United States, is the president of the United States. And Tony Robbins went after I spoke. And one of the things that the event coordinator had arranged was a private meeting between me and Tony and the event coordinator after the whole thing was over because the event coordinator was a big fan of Tony and a big fan of me. I had never met Tony Robbins before. So we go into the backstage or we go into the little private room where they arrange this happy hour cocktail thing with me, Tony, the owner, and all of us and whatnot. And Tony is an absolute force of nature. And I think part of that is him from 50 years of experience. And I think part of that is him by nature. There was no getting past Tony's public life, his public persona, his public presence, his booming voice, his giant body. And it's funny because I kept trying to be personable with Tony, trying to like get into shed some of this bravado and this loud, just rashness or brashness. And it just wasn't happening. He's just, he is who he is and that's who he's wired to be. And that's why it costs a million dollars to show up at your event at a minimum. Right. And that's, that's just the way it was. And then I remember I was not pushing, but I was trying so hard to be different from everybody else in the event that at one point he was like, I really enjoyed talking to you. And I shake his hand and as I'm shaking his hand, he's pushing me away. Right. Like get the fuck away because I don't want to talk to you anymore. It was crystal clear to me that that's what he was doing. Giant hand wrapped around my tiny hand, pushing me away. And I was like, all right, I can take a message. I get that something about me is making this guy uncomfortable or something about me is just not fun or interesting to him. And he doesn't want to be there anyways. Like he's just doing what he has to do to complete the contractual agreement with the event coordinator at this event. Right. That's a scenario where I didn't have psychological control. He had his public persona. His public life was so impenetrable that over the period of time that I was on target with Tony Robbins, I didn't make any progress. That just tells me if I'm ever going to make progress with someone like Tony, I need days, hours of a contact. I need a different environment. Being in a small room somewhere in Orlando, Florida is not where I need to be. I need to be maybe in Tony's living room, maybe in Tony's kitchen, maybe on the beach behind Tony's house. Maybe that's the kind of place where that public life might dissolve a little bit, but for sure it wasn't going to happen there. That doesn't mean he was in control of me, but it certainly means he was in control of him. I would guess Trump has that as well. I haven't met Trump in person. It's something that you'll find with many people who are very accustomed to being in the public spotlight. They know what it's like to have fanboys assault them. They know what it's like to have critics assault them. They know what it's like to have to worry that every fucking person could be hiding a gun or a knife. That's one of the things that people don't understand about Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins is, if Tony himself is not cognizant of his security, for damn sure his team is, because there's an incredible detailed agenda about the 10s. And that was projected not just on the event coordinator for this event, but also on me. I had to fit within the confines. My team had to fit within the confines of Tony's security protocols just so that we could complete our contractual obligations of being at the event, me being on the stage, me going to this after-event cocktail. On the Lex Friedman podcast, you said the CIA is still in demand for people with sensitivities to the ethereal world. What does the CIA know about the nature of reality that the average person does not? When I was at CIA, I wasn't actively involved in any kind of collection efforts or operations that were focused on anything other than traditional collection methods. Human intelligence, digital intelligence, surveillance, counter-surveillance, intelligence, counter-intelligence, the traditional world of spying. But there are always experimental efforts that are going on. And one of the things that was highlighted to me that I've never been able to shake was when one of my instructors actually pulled up the CIA website and scrolled to this section that was talking about, you know, if you want to apply for CIA and you have any of these skills, we would love to hear from you. And it was this ridiculous long paragraph and something that nobody ever reads unless you are somebody who reads every single word of every single sentence. Almost compulsively. And in the middle of one of the middle paragraphs buried was this sentence that was like, if you have the skill of, if you have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like problem solving talents, like traveling the world, friends of whatever, 30 different items down, there was this little phrase that said, lucid dreams, visions of the future or something else. Buried in the middle of this paragraph of hard skills. And I had never noticed it before. I had never bothered to read past the second or third word. I'm a skimmer, right? And he looked at me and he was like, why do you think that's in there? And I didn't really have an answer. I was like, I have no idea why that's in. It's a typo. Somebody in the administration, the administrative team didn't see it. And he was like, no, it's in there because the CIA wants that. CIA is looking for people who have lucid dreams. Visions of the future and whatever else was also in that list. He's like, but you being somebody who doesn't have lucid dreams and being somebody who doesn't have visions of the future, you don't read every single word. So you don't even know that that sentence exists in the application or on the desired talent list. You just skip right past it. And so do thousands upon thousands of other people who visit the website. But you know who does catch it? The person who has lucid dreams, because that person reads every single word compulsively. Really? And when they read, you need to have problem solving skills and you need to have focus and you need to have a strong attention to detail. They're telling themselves, that's not me. That's not me. I don't have that. I don't have that. But when they hit that line, lucid dreams, vision of the future, ethereal, you know, contact with spirits, whatever. When they read that, they're like, oh shit, I have that. And that's powerful enough to the right person to then get them to go raise their hands, submit their name in the inquiry form, whatever else. So if CIA didn't want it, it wouldn't be on the website at all. It's on the website right now? I haven't, I haven't checked it recently. The day that I was with him back in 2008, 2008, when I was going through training, it was still there. So for anybody out there, visit the CIA website and look for their list of talents that they're looking for. And if it's still buried there, that's why, because they're actively looking for it. And they know that the right person who has that talent will read that line where everybody else will just skip it. Or see it and laugh it off and move on. The other part of your question is, you know, whether CIA knows something about the nature of reality that other people don't know. And I think it's a mixed bag. When it comes to this idea that reality is somehow like a shadow of the real thing, this idea that there's like a parallel reality that you can only access by doing drugs or something like that. That's not my understanding of anything that CIA has ever taught us. Reality is reality. And if anything, people who, who question whether or not this is reality are just incredibly that much closer to being people that you can manipulate and control because they already have a doubt that this is real. So it's that much easier to kind of play on the doubt that they have that this is real. How much easier is it to get them to give you their money, give you their confidence, give you their time? They already don't believe this is real. That's an easy person to manipulate. But what CIA did teach us is that what we interpret as reality is oftentimes incomplete. What you see, what you hear, what you smell, what you touch isn't a complete picture of what reality actually is. It's a composite built by your brain in an effort to conserve energy. There's actually much more happening around you than your brain communicates to you. You and I can figure this out even right now, just as we sit here. This whole conversation, we've been sitting here for hours. Have you ever noticed the feeling of the ground under your feet? But you notice it now. Have you felt the temperature difference between your neck and where your hair is? No, but you're noticing it now. You haven't noticed how heavy your shoulders are. You haven't noticed the texture of your shirt against your skin. You haven't noticed the pain in your back. You haven't noticed the discomfort in your hips. You haven't noticed the noise that's happening outside right now. When the air conditioner comes on and turns off, you catch that when it happens. But the reason that you catch it every time it happens is because, after it's been running for a few minutes, your brain tunes it out. It stops dedicating resources to picking up that information. So the reality that you and I are experiencing at all given times is really only like 20% of all the information around us. It's our brain short-cutting to give us a composite of everything because everything is too much information. Everything you see in your periphery, everything you smell in your nose, the taste of the coffee from this morning or the tea or the whiskey that we took, 15 minutes ago, that bitterness, it doesn't need to bring that to the forefront right now. It's trying to minimize resources. So the reality that we're always living in is a composite created by our brain. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. We don't just alert. We stop crime before it starts. SimpliSafe. Plans starting around $1 a day. Save 50%. On your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com slash Spotify or with promo code Spotify. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe active guard outdoor protection plan starting at $49.99 a month. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2-0-1-2. I largely agree with that. Based on your spiritual beliefs or your understanding of the nature of reality, what do you think OCD is? Do you think it's simply what the DSM-5 or DSM-4 says it is? Or do you think it's something else? What does the DSM-4 or DSM-5 say? Obsessive compulsive disorder. Just compulsive thoughts, repetitive behaviors. Just something that people are born with. And I don't know, a tendency to do repetitive behaviors, have repetitive thoughts, or maybe they have the feeling that something bad will happen if they don't do those things. It's just about control. I think that's the standard definition of OCD. I haven't really put a lot of thought into it. I haven't really put a lot of thought into what I believe OCD to be. What I will say, though, is I believe that when people have cognitive cycles, cognitive patterns, that is a tool that they've developed to overcome something else. Overcome anxiety, overcome fear, overcome some recognition that they don't have control, something. But it's not just OCD. It's not just OCD or ADHD or anything else. I'm sure there's a chemical element that medical professionals will talk about. But what I'm talking about operationally and behaviorally is that when I see a person with any kind of tick, it tells me that there's something driving the tick. And not all ticks look like somebody who taps three times or washes their hands three times or washes their hands, you know, a hundred times a day. Sometimes the tick is the person who always sits down in the chair, always leans back, always opens their leg, always puts their right hand over the back of the chair. That's just as much of a tell, a tick to what's happening behind the scenes. The person who's always perpetually late, the person who's always asking you a question. And then when you answer the question, they pick up their phone. There's always something going on there. Right. And it's really hard to know what that is. It's just a tell that you can see. And from that tell, you can create a baseline to try to start to understand what is happening that's causing the tick. What's happening that makes them repeat themselves. You never have a thought that you feel as though is like divine? Or like, do you think anyone has like thoughts that are like from a spiritual source? I do believe that in my faith, in my Christian faith, I do believe that the Holy Spirit is acting on all of us. And I also believe that the enemy is acting on all of us all the time as well. I don't think of it as a active battlefield. Like I don't think the Holy Spirit is sitting here and the devil is sitting here or some demon is sitting here and they're trying to get me to say nice things or say mean things. I don't believe it's like that. I believe that there is an innate element in us as human beings in this world that we are always debating between doing good or evil, doing right or wrong, doing justice or injustice, putting ourselves first or putting other people first. I think there's always this balance that we're going through. And it's a spiritual reality just as much as it is a practical reality. If I give my $10 to a homeless guy on the street, it practically means I don't have $10 in my pocket, which means I may not be able to buy myself food later on. So does that make me a good person or a bad person? Does that make me more Christian or less Christian? Is that the demon or the angel? It doesn't, to me, it all blends together. That is the spiritual warfare. That is the struggle that the Father and the Holy Spirit want us to go through, is literally the struggle of asking, should I have given that homeless person $10 or shouldn't I? That's the moment of self-discovery, not giving the $10 away, not saving it, but the actual question that we actually wrestle with. That's the self-discovery. That's the spiritual challenge. That's what I believe through my faith is what happens to us of a divine nature. Somebody who has a tick, somebody who thinks that they hear angels, somebody who leaps up in the middle of a church and starts speaking in tongues. They might believe they're having a spiritual moment. But to me, that's not what I believe is happening. I believe that that's a response cognitively to something else that's triggering it. I just don't know what those are. Andy, in your book, you write about getting yourself invited to a translator's family Eid feast, one of the holiest days in Islam, because it kept him, a man you called Muhammad, loyal to the American mission. Now, I know the key purpose of this story was trying to set up a situation to possibly handle objections from the people who would tell him not to help out America. But I want to ask, on religion, you teach that ideology is the strongest lever you can utilize to change someone's behavior in a way that fits your own interest. In your time at the CIA, did you ever use someone's faith in God to get them to betray their country? The answer is yes, but it's a more complicated answer than that. that. Faith, religion, is just an ideology. Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam. It's just an ideology. Your ideology tells you that there's a real God, tells you there's a real Muhammad, tells you there's a real Messiah, but there's no proof of that. There's just your belief, which makes it an ideology. And all ideologies are fair game for manipulating human behavior. So when you say, did I ever use God as a way to get people to betray their country? I'm hearing that question is, did you ever use religion as an ideology to motivate someone to commit espionage? And the answer is yes. But the more honest answer is that they used religion as a way to get people to betray their country. And I'm hearing that question is, did you their God as an excuse to betray their country? They chose their religion over their national identity. They chose their faith-based ideology over their faith-based national identity. They believed that one was bigger than the other. A fantastic example of this is a spy that worked in the U.S. Navy for the United States who was Jewish and betrayed the U.S. to become a spy for Israel. The dude was a naval engineer, U.S. citizen, naval engineer, Jewish descent. But he started selling secrets to the Israelis about the American naval program. And then he was caught, he was convicted, he was tried, and he was ultimately resettled in Israel, given Israeli citizenship, where he still lives to this day. In fact, I think he's even running for office in Israel. Either he is now or he has recently. So, perfect example of a person who betrayed their national identity in favor of their religious ideology. He was American, but he was also Jewish. So, he put his God, his belief in Judaism, above his own national promises to keep a secret and gave secrets to the Israelis because he believed it was the right thing to do according to his Jewish faith. We could talk about that topic alone for a while. The dude got his son to do it too. Became a whole family spy ring. So, whether you want to call that the sins of the father, or whether you want to just call that a second person who's influenced, impacted, shaped by their father, either way, the same thing exists. I would love to talk religion with you anytime you want. It's a fascinating, wonderful topic. And it is absolutely something that has been used to make human behavior for generations. In your book, you talked about your father's grave. He was murdered when you were a baby. He picked a fight with a man who was high on drugs and it cost him his life. You told a story about driving to the grave, saying you broke down in angry tears like your body was purging. You talked about the anger you felt as well, that no one in your family told you where your father was buried because they didn't care enough to know him or didn't care enough to imagine to you. You wrote, fuck them. Family is just make-believe bullshit anyway. Is that honest? Do you think family is bullshit? I did then. I did then. And that's what's so powerful to me about the lesson that that story is surrounding, which is the lesson of emotional hijacking. That experience shaped my opinion about marriage, children, fealty for decades. That happened to me when I was 19 years old, maybe. I may have been 19. I'm pretty sure I was a sophomore at the Air Force Academy at 19. And it wasn't until I met my future wife and we had conversations about marriage that were very different conversations. I was completely anti-marriage. She was very much of a traditional family, was like, marriage is kind of what people do when they want to have kids. Completely different perspectives. But it was really being with my wife, hearing her point of view, falling in love with her and realizing what love could be, what love is, how powerful and completely illogical love does when it takes over. But that didn't happen until I was 30 years old. So from 19 to 30, there's 11 years in there where I was just like, fuck family. Don't talk to mom. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to me. Don't talk to my sisters. Stepdad's basically dead to me anyways. Like, whatever. My grandma matters to me because my grandma is the only one who ever actually helped me understand my dad. And she didn't say good things about him, but she at least talked about him. I was not in the right headspace. I was not healthy. And I know that people listening to this right now have been down that road, where family has been so disappointing to them that at some point they were like, fuck this. Family is bullshit. I'll pick my friends, any day. Friendsgiving, whatever it is, right? Like, it's a very real thing. Had you met me at 24, you'd have a very different opinion of me than you do now. Better or worse, I don't know. But it would be different for sure. Had you met me at 34, it would be very different. Had you met me at 54, it'll be different still. We all change over time. And for me, finding my father's grave, coming to the conclusions I had that day, and even now, so many years later, reflecting back on my decisions and conclusions then still shapes me today. I've only had two experiences in my life where I was so overcome with emotion that I felt like it was uncontrollable, where it felt like I was purging. Purging, like vomiting. Tears and sobs and not able to control my diaphragm, not able to control the buckling in my body, just trying to find a place to, like, hide because I didn't want anyone to come across me looking like this disgraceful, uncontrollable blob of a human being. It's only happened twice, both times. It was related to father issues. The day I found my father's grave and then, 20-something years later, when I went to go help a Ukrainian family flee Russia, I did it with a photojournalist who created a documentary about his own journey with his stepfather. And when I watched that documentary, it just triggered all of the pain and sadness and discouragement and depression about my own experience with my stepdad. And it just took me again. And I remember in this mountain town in Austria where we had evacuated them, I remember barely being able to stand up and make it to the back door, slide the back screen door open, get out on the back patio. Rain had just started and was getting worse. And I just, I just, like, crawled into the grass, into the rain, around the corner so they couldn't see me through the window. I don't think I even shut the door. And the rain is pouring and I am purging. Just like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, just tears and groans and sadness and depression and anger and just completely out of control. What were you purging? This, the feelings of, of sadness and depression and like, what my childhood could have been with my stepdad, that it wasn't. And that I've carried for so long, up to that point, that I'd carried for so long as somehow my responsibility, coming to the realization that it wasn't my responsibility. That I was just a kid. I was just looking for love. I was just looking for a father figure. I was just looking for connection. And I was trying everything I could, everything that a kid can try to connect with their dad, and none of it was landing. And that that shaped who I became. And, you know, in 2023, when I evacuated that family and those multiple families from Ukraine to Austria, and, and we had kind of confirmed and celebrated that success. And, and when I, the night that I chose to watch this documentary with the filmmaker, all of those families were women and children leaving behind their fighting men. Because the men weren't allowed by law to leave Ukraine. So we evacuated families and left to the men behind, those children were going to go back to dead fathers. And it just was striking to me that my father, my father had died. I had that purge in the book. But my stepdad was alive. And he was not anywhere near the kind of figure that these Ukrainian children were going to lose in a war that they didn't start. And it was just a, oh, I came back in and I'm so grateful that the filmmaker was an artist and a sensitive artist. So there were no awkward questions. He just saw me soaking wet with mud on my trousers and just shut the door behind me and let me go take a shower. And we didn't really even talk about it. He just asked me if I was okay. I was like, better now. I don't know. if you want to add any one takeaway from all that for people about their familial situations. But do you think that's useful at all, that family's bullshit? I don't think it's useful as like a tagline. Family's not bullshit is just as useful as saying family is bullshit. It's up to you. It's up to you to decide what's real, what's not real, what's valuable, what's not valuable, what's worth your time, what's not worth your time. What I want to say is that I try to be as transparent as I can be about my skills, my experience, my desires, my vision for the future. That's why I come out and talk to you. That's why I come out on stage in front of cameras. That's why I write books. It's because if there's value, I hope you'll take it. And if there isn't, drop it off at a secondhand bookstore. I don't care. If I'm not helping you, find somebody who is going to help you. Hmm. We only get one ride on this rock. Whatever you believe, whoever you believe in, whoever you take with you, you only get one chance. So use it. Love that. Well, everyone, this has been your guest, Andy Bustamante. This is the Jack Neal Podcast. Where can people get this book we have here? Outsmart Everyone is available everywhere on bookshelves around the world. Starting September 8th. You can buy it online if you go to the OutsmartEveryoneSpy.com website, or if you just go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you name it. It's available in print and, of course, in audio. And I'm very proud of it. Beautiful. Awesome. Guys, go check out Andy's book, Outsmart Everyone, Spy Skills to Gain an Unfair Advantage in Work and Life. See ya. Cool. Thanks, Jack. Yeah. Appreciate it, man. Absolutely, man. Thank you. Show button here. What you want? Download the app today and use code SPOTIFY to get $150 installments, only in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix. Run your game.