Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA operative, details how personality profiling aids espionage while debunking UFO myths as advanced military tech or adversarial cruise missiles. He explains the "intel triangle" distinguishing unreliable information from validated knowledge to counter foreign influence campaigns exploiting social media chaos. Bustamante clarifies that Bob Lazar's claims lack evidence and that the U.S. maintains a decisive technological edge over China, concluding that perceived alien mysteries often mask sophisticated human engineering rather than extraterrestrial visitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Welcome Back Andrew Bustamante00:01:34
Hello, world.
Today, we're back with one of my favorite guests of all time, Andrew Bustamante.
Andrew is a former CIA intelligence officer and Air Force combat veteran who spent seven years in the CIA as a clandestine operative.
He has circled the globe gathering intelligence for the United States government, living in disguise and serving in the shadows.
Today, Andrew teaches international espionage tactics that benefit everyday life.
On this podcast, Andrew talks about the secrets once reserved.
For the world's most elite intelligence service officers, which are designed to challenge conventional thinking by improving cognitive performance, logical reasoning, and emotional intelligence.
Without further ado, please welcome Andrew Bustamante.
Andrew Bustamante, welcome back, man.
Thanks, dude.
Your first podcast went bonkers.
I was excited.
I have never seen that much.
Get a little bit closer.
Talk a little bit closer.
Can you hear yourself okay in the mic?
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, just make sure that you're like that close to the mic when you're talking so you get crispy audio.
You got it, brother.
Yeah, I was super stoked to see the response, man, because, you know, I'm not always out there in the public sphere.
And when I am, it's not easy for me to see engagement.
So it's really cool to see the response and it's really cool to contribute.
Yeah, my favorite comment was, so someone posted a comment and that said the title of this podcast should be Current CIA Operative Pushes Narrative.
I cannot.
You know how often I get accused of trying to recruit people?
Finding Energy in Introversion00:09:58
It's like, look, I am not out there.
I had a Reddit.
My second big Reddit AMA just went like it just tanked because it was full of these people who were accusing me of basically trying to actively recruit CIA spies to run drugs and run money and run women.
And it was, I have no idea where it came from, but I haven't.
And that's just people think that.
And if that's what they want to believe, that's fine with me.
But it's just not true.
You're going to be disappointed if you think I'm here to recruit you.
Do you get that a lot?
Do you get a lot of people disappointed in what you're talking about, thinking that you're going to divulge more secrets or something?
Yeah, it's funny.
I actually joke that disappointment is the goal for me.
I am out there to find and disappoint as many people as possible because they will never bother me again.
The people that want to hear what I have to say, I want to talk to them.
I want to hear their questions.
I want to answer their questions.
I want to give them information.
I want to enrich and give them knowledge.
All those people out there who are like, oh, this guy's a fake.
This guy's a phony.
This guy doesn't know anything.
Or this guy's just, he's part of a big government conspiracy.
I want them to be disappointed and frustrated with me.
So they never bother me.
Like they never subscribe.
They never comment.
They never reach out to me again.
That's the goal.
So on our last podcast, we were talking, after we ended the podcast, we started talking about the personality test and all the different personality traits and all that stuff.
And I went and I took the test.
Awesome.
And I think I'm an INTP.
Is that right?
Does that sound right?
Yeah, let's see.
You were definitely an INF.
I think you were an INFP, man.
Oh, yeah, INFP.
What was the F for again?
Feeler.
Right, Feeler.
Only because we had talked about Myers-Briggs beforehand.
I had made a quick, like, off-the-cuff assessment based on our conversation.
Yeah.
And then it came back, whatever, two weeks later, correct, and I was super excited.
So that Myers-Briggs thing was super interesting to me.
Yeah.
And it's crazy.
So that formula for, Breaking down someone's personality was a thing that you carried with you everywhere.
You use that as a tool for.
Still, right now.
Like what I did to you that day, which I hope you didn't feel offended or anything, but that's a tool I use with every business partner, with every possible, like every new collaborator.
When I'm getting coffee from a barista, right?
Like I am constantly assessing personality according to those Myers Briggs 16 personality type indicator options.
Yeah.
It's an awesome tool.
And everybody.
gets it wrong because you read Cosmo magazine and you read Men's Health, you read all this garbage mainstream media that tells you you're supposed to know your own personality.
But what the hell is the purpose of knowing your own personality?
Just because you know what you are doesn't make it a powerful tool for you to use.
It's like looking at yourself in the mirror and you're like, oh, I've got black hair and a beard.
Well, huzzah, you knew that already, right?
You found out that you fell into four Type indicator labels.
That didn't teach you anything new about you.
You were like, oh, that's why I like to sit and read.
And that's why it gives me energy when I do that.
And this is why, you know, I make a decision and I go with my decision.
It didn't tell you anything new that you didn't already know.
What's powerful is when you use personality type profiling as a tool against other people.
Because if you can identify their personality type through a conversation, now all of a sudden you know way more about them than they know about you.
We got one more sponsor for y'all, and that is Blue Blocks.
For a long time, I've had trouble sleeping through the night, and I literally tried everything from supplements, smoking pot, meditating.
And at the end of the day, all that stuff was just a band aid.
Blue Blocks actually fixed this problem for me with their super high tech lenses.
Blue light from our phones and computers actually damages our eyes and leads to digital eye strain.
You get symptoms like blurred vision, headaches, and the worst of all, you can't fucking sleep.
Unlike other blue light glasses, Blue Blocks are backed by science and they're made in an optical laboratory in Australia.
Most other blue light blocking companies are mass producing their shit in China with no understanding of how light impacts health.
They have over 40 frames that come in prescription, non prescription, and even readers.
I keep mine.
Literally right next to my computer all day, every day.
I even use them on some of the podcasts.
The podcasts that I do late at night, I always use these.
You can actually wear these things and not look like a friggin' geek.
Do I look cute?
Get your energy back, sleep better, and block out all that unhealthy blue light with blue blocks.
Get 20% off by going to blueblocks.comslash concrete.
B L U B L O X.comslash K O N C R E T E for 20% off, or just use the code concrete at checkout.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
I know it's twisted.
I know it's not often a popular concept for people, but that's how I use personality.
Yeah, it's just hard to remember a lot of it.
You know what I mean?
Like it's very nuanced with the different types of, like under each category, whether it's introvert, extrovert, feeling, thinking.
I mean, there's so many different variables to each one of those.
So, I mean, if you're down for it, I'll give you my quick rule of thumb that I always use to remember it.
Yeah.
Right?
So you got 16 letters.
Well, you've got eight letters, essentially, and 16 combinations of those letters.
The combinations, all the the big numbers don't matter.
All you've got to think about.
To understand a human being's personality, any culture, any age, any gender, any level of education, right backed by science all you have to do is remember four questions.
One, the first question is, where does a person get their energy?
Is it?
Do they get their energy being alone?
Do they get their energy being around other people?
That's your, that's your extrovert versus your introvert if that person spends time alone, and that and being alone makes them feel more energetic.
Like you, when you read a book by yourself, you come out of it feeling more energetic.
When I read a book by myself dude, I don't read a book by myself.
I fall asleep.
It's a huge drain on me to be alone in a quiet place doing something.
Ugh, it's miserable.
I am an extrovert.
So right there's the first question.
Where does a person get their energy?
Alone or in a group?
Knowing that about somebody else, right away, you know if you want that person's attention, if you want that person's trust, if you want that person's best ideas, you have to put them in the environment that suits them.
Take them away from people.
If I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with you, I would not take you to a bar.
That's just going to drain your energy.
It's going to suck up your time and your effort, right?
If I take you to like a coffee shop, a nice quiet coffee shop, or if we go have a private dinner in a private room at a nice restaurant, just you and me and a, and like good food, good drinks, that's, that's just setting you up for success, which setting you up for success is setting me up for success in the spy world, right?
So that's introvert, extrovert.
Make sense?
Yeah.
Before you move on to the next one, how do you tell if somebody, how do you tell after just meeting somebody whether they're an introvert or an extrovert?
So you can watch their cues as they spend time with you, but the real, Benefit, the real advantage is asking them questions about what you know is extrovert and introvert behavior.
Like, I asked you questions that day.
I was like, oh, what do you do when you have free time?
You're like, oh, I just love to sit on the sofa and just hang out.
I like to read.
I'll watch a movie.
Like, I like my me time.
My wife likes her me time too, right?
Everybody who is an introvert will have a concept and some definition of their me time, right?
My escape room, my she shed, my me time.
People who are extroverts, you will never hear me talk about me time.
You'd be like, what do you like to do when it's fun?
I was like, oh, I like to go out to the beach with some friends.
I like to go on a boat.
I like to go have some adventure.
Like, we always talk about adventure.
I have a good buddy of mine who's, Still at the agency.
And we used to just text each other on the weekends when we were single, be like, we need to go on an adventure.
I'm bored.
Like, we need to go do something.
And it was sometimes stupid stuff like mountain biking through Gettysburg in the snow.
But it was something that we would do together because we could and we didn't want to be alone because that just drains us of energy.
How do you do on long road trips by yourself?
I don't.
It's miserable.
I love them.
I have a good buddy of mine who's a sales coach.
In the area and he runs his primary like business is running ATM machines and all he does is drive around Florida restocking ATM machines right, and then he coaches people on how to run their own business and how to sell the same way he basically sells his ATM machines.
He spends like six hours a day in the car six days a week and loves it.
Every time I talk to him I'm like that sounds like torture.
I have to go to Miami in like three weeks.
I am seriously considering flying to Miami just because I don't want to sit in the car For three and a half hours by myself, listening to an audiobook.
Dude, I absolutely love road trips alone.
If I didn't do, like, if I could choose any other profession, I think I would choose being a truck driver.
Wow.
It's one of those big sleepers in the back going across the country.
It's a big part of why I left the Air Force, too, when I started flying and I realized how similar flying was to driving because it's, you're just burning holes in the sky.
All those pilots out there, those Air Force pilots, even if they're in like an F 16, they go on like a seven hour sortie.
Alone in a cockpit, just like you're alone behind a wheel, just driving, just flying, right?
That just sounded miserable to me.
That's so wild.
That's so wild.
People can feel so different about those things.
And that's what's so powerful about it, man.
Very few people stop to reflect on what brings me energy.
We're all too tied up in what does society expect.
So there's specific questions you can ask to figure out definitively what type of person that is, right?
Yeah, it's not necessarily specific questions as much as it's, you know, you're targeting specific areas with the questions you're asking.
Right, what do you like to do in your free time?
Is one of those questions.
Trusting Your Gut Intuition00:06:14
Um, you know, what do you remember as a kid really liking?
Like, if you talk to somebody like, Oh, I used to love drawing as a kid, boom, there's somebody who is probably an introvert.
I used to love reading, I used to love watching movies, I used to love playing by myself.
And then you're going to have those kids who are like, Oh, I loved playing soccer, oh, I loved going to the playground, you know, I loved school.
Most of the people who say they love school love school because of the social aspect of school, okay?
Right, it's not they don't say they love school because they love their geometry teacher, they love hanging out with their friends.
Basically, a bus delivers them to a social outlet and then a bus delivers them home at the end of the day.
It's a good deal for an extrovert.
Right.
Okay.
What's the next part of it?
All right.
So then you go from your E, your extrovert, your introvert, your E, your I. You go into your intuitor or your sensor, your N and your S. All that means is do you take data that has math behind it?
Like do you use your sensory organs, your five senses to collect data or?
do you just use your intuition to collect data?
So sensor, S, uses the five senses to collect data.
Intuitor uses intuition to collect data.
So if I believe something, I believe it when I see it.
I believe it when I taste it.
I believe it when I smell it, right?
That's a sensor.
I believe it because I believe it.
That's an intuitor.
So if somebody who's an S, you're going to have to prove it to them by showing them, letting them touch it, whatever, right?
If it's an intuitor, all it has to do is make sense to them logically in their own mind, in their own belief set, and they're going to believe it, right?
Intuitors are the reason that religions exist, right?
Because what is faith?
What is Islam?
What is Christianity?
What is Buddhism?
I believe it is true.
That's just intuition.
That's just you believing something.
Nobody can prove it.
You can't touch it, taste it, feel it, whatever, right?
Even when you feel like you're being moved by the Holy Spirit or when you feel like, you know, you have been touched by enlightenment.
It's just intuition.
It's something that you can't describe.
So when you talk to somebody and you hear them like referenced data through their senses, I went to this place.
The lights were low.
The walls had this cool yellow glow, right?
The music was the perfect level.
It was great sounding.
Those are they're describing their environment.
They're describing data through their five senses.
But when you go somewhere and they're like, oh, I felt like a million bucks.
They treated me so good.
I can't wait to go back there again.
Right now, that's somebody who's just talking through their own interpretation, their own intuition about what they experienced there.
Okay.
So that's the same thing.
When you and I were talking, I didn't hear you say anything about like I complimented your audio.
I complimented your video setup and all this stuff that had to do with five senses.
And you were unenthused to talk about any of those things, right?
But when we started talking about personality, you just lit right up.
And you're like, oh, that's so interesting.
Just because I could, like, you had intuitive cogs in your head just spinning.
And that's what a lot of folks are.
A lot of folks are intuitors.
It's hard sometimes to find sensors.
Interesting.
Yeah.
My wife, who is my total opposite, is a sensor.
I get excited about stuff just because it's exciting to me.
Right.
And then trying to convince her to get excited, it's like pulling teeth.
It's insane, dude.
It's like, oh, I got this great idea, babe.
We're going to go do this.
With the kids on the weekend, it's going to be sweet.
And she's like, Well, what are we going to do when we get there?
How are we going to get there?
What are the kids going to wear?
What's the weather supposed to look like?
What are we going to eat on the way there?
Like, what's the plan for lunch when we get there?
And I'm like, I don't have any of that.
We're just going to the beach.
Let's just go.
It's going to be sweet.
Yeah.
How could it not be sweet?
Yeah.
So that's the difference between an intuitor and a sensor.
Okay.
So how do they interpret data?
Your second question, right?
First one, where do they get their energy?
Second one, how do they interpret data?
Got it.
Okay.
The third one, if you want to move on to the third, your feeler versus your perceiver, your F versus your P. Feelers make, this is the question here is, how do they make their decisions?
Feelers make their decision based on their gut.
My gut tells me to do this.
My gut tells me to do that.
That is my feeling.
This is right.
This is wrong.
It's how it feels to me.
Perceivers are perceiving the best decision based on what's available to them, based on either intuition or sense it or sensory data.
Right, so both are looking back at their previous you know the data piece and then they're using that data to make a decision.
But what decision are they making?
Right, gut feelers make their gut decisions.
Perceivers make a decision based off of what they think is their processing, their analytical reasoning of the data.
Okay right, like that beach example for me.
I wanted to go to the beach with my kids because it's going to be freaking sick.
That's just me being a perceiver based on my intuition.
Every other time i've gone to the beach, it's been a lot of fun.
I think it's going to be fun this time.
I'm a P. Let's go.
My wife, who's a feeler, her gut instinct is like, I don't think this feels right.
And then she leans back on being an S and she's like, how's it going to look?
How's it going to feel?
How's it going to touch?
Like, where are we going to eat?
And all of a sudden it all falls apart.
So.
Wow.
And maybe it's not as simple as I promised you it would be after.
No, no, it makes perfect sense.
No, I get it.
I get it.
Especially the test took me like two hours to do.
Yeah, it sucks to go through it sometimes.
And that's a big part of the reason why people don't get a really accurate representation because you take these tests online or you take a test in a magazine.
It's got like 11 questions.
That doesn't tell you anything.
Like to really take a proper Myers-Briggs exam.
An actual eval psycho eval it takes hundreds of questions and the questions have to be like cross referenced whether automatically or by a professional.
The thing is, I feel like I can be both on both sides of those things.
Like sometimes I'm a feeler and sometimes I'm more analytical and sometimes I combine the two.
Like if I'm really thinking about a critical thing I need answered or I'm trying to make a critical decision on something, I use my gut and I use my analytical evaluating.
Yeah, absolutely.
How Stress Wires Your Brain00:08:04
You can, right?
Because this is what's powerful about personality.
Personality does not tell you what you're limited to.
Personality tells you what you default to, right?
So it's like when you are having a good day, when you're in your zone and you have all the resources you can imagine, you had a good night's rest, you had a good meal, you feel good, you've got like all the computers are running and they're all running at top speed, right?
You can use everything.
You can use your analytical side, your feeling side, you can use your sensory side, you can use your perception side, you can use historical evidence.
You can fight off the urge to take a nap if you're by yourself.
I mean, I can go for a long drive.
I can fight off the urge to sleep, but that's not what personality is.
Personality is what is your default?
When all the resources are taken away and thrown out the window, when you're under pressure, when you're under stress, when you are under rested, what's left?
What are you going to do by default?
That is your Myers-Briggs personality.
Okay.
That's why it's so powerful for spies.
That's why it's so powerful in espionage.
Espionage is a stressful, resource draining activity.
Like you, if you and I are meeting, you and I met today at 11.
If this was a spy operation, I would have left to meet with you at 11.
I would have been on the road since like 6 a.m.
I would have done a full surveillance detection route to make sure that nobody was following me.
I would have had to stop two or three different places to get different items to bring with me to today's meeting so that I was never caught with all of the items at the same time earlier in, if I would have been under surveillance earlier in the op.
You see what I'm saying?
Like, so I would have been draining resources.
for the last five hours in preparation to sit with you where you're coming in the door fresh.
And then after we do our spy thing, right?
I would go on another multi-mode, multi-hour SDR to make sure that I didn't pick up surveillance after meeting with you on my way back to wherever my own personal headquarters is.
Like hours of this of draining resource.
And that's when I'm meeting with you and you don't know that I'm a spy.
Once you start giving me secrets and we're both in this together, you've got just as much stress, more.
because you're not trained like I am, right?
And that's what's so crazy to me about when you're doing this in the field in real life.
There are some incredibly powerful people out there that you would never guess have the energy, the resilience, the creativity, the intelligence, the capacity to cope with the stress that they have.
And they are honestly like putting themselves on the front line of danger, giving us secrets about you name the hostile threat, whether it's terrorists, whether it's Russia, whether it's China, whether it's whatever, right?
Drug dealers and cartels.
People can manage that stress because the four code default personality indicators that they have, when all their resources are drained, they have the capacity because they have the right four letters at the bottom to commit espionage.
Wow.
Yeah, man.
It's powerful.
That's pretty incredible.
Now, is it possible for people to change for those, like, you hear about, like, plasticity, brain plasticity, like, you can change things, physical things about yourself, cognitive things, the way your brain functions.
Is it possible for somebody's personality to change over time if they really try?
So you're talking about neuroplasticity, which is a very real thing, right?
Being able to change the way you think, right?
There are different arguments out there about whether personality can change.
I am of the camp that personality can change, but it changes by shades.
It changes by degrees.
It doesn't change like a switch.
You're not born by default an extrovert, and then you can train yourself through neuroplasticity over time to suddenly become an introvert.
I'm never going to be happy being alone.
I will never get energy by being alone for long periods of time.
It's just not going to happen.
I can try and train myself that way all I want.
The agency tries to train us all to increase our capacity for being alone because it's a very lonely job.
Right.
But they never expect us to flip the switch.
Like you can't train yourself to change your default nature.
So it's a whole separate conversation that we can either jump into now or later.
But there's, there's an actual cognitive developmental process that your kids and my kids or your kid and my kids are going through right now that shape who we are as adults.
Right.
And that lays the whole foundation to who you become as an 18 year old adult, how your brain is basically wired at that point.
And then you can engage in neuroplastic exercises to change the way you think and to change the way your brain works.
But when it comes to that default personality that was built in those first 18 years, it's wired too deep to change anything more than just a few degrees left or right.
Really?
Yeah.
So what that means is going back to our original conversation, when you tag someone's personality type and you tag it correctly, you know, you know now and you know for the next 40 years that they're going to be the way they are.
That under stress, under pressure, with resources drained, they are going to be a certain way.
And that's important because most people, 99% of people out there, will do not have excess resources.
They're drained all the time.
I mean, how often have you met somebody who is like, I don't need more money.
I don't need more time.
I don't need more energy.
Like, I am awesome.
Life is great.
You never meet people like that.
Everybody's drained.
So if they're all 98% drained, if they're all running on empty, that core default personality is what they live on.
If you can figure that out, you basically now have a whole board of chess pieces, right?
I need an extrovert.
I need an introvert.
I need a sensor.
I need a perceiver.
I need a judger.
I need a feeler.
And you can just move them around on the board, ask them to do things with other people that you know they're going to get along with, bring them in for projects where you know that they're going to benefit you, take them out of projects where you know they're going to be a drain.
It's a powerful thing to understand.
And this is all wired into them at a super young age.
Yeah, it's wired into them and it has nothing to do with you and it has nothing to do with them and it has everything to do with their environment, the environment that they're raised in.
You mean it has nothing to do with their parents?
No, no.
It has nothing to do with them.
It has nothing to do with you.
It has everything with their environment.
So parents are a part of environment.
Teachers are a part of environment.
the physical location where you live, the environment, the physical environment that you live in, right?
Whether it's cold, whether it's hot, are you an indoor child, an outdoor child, right?
How much exposure do you get to sunlight?
All of that factors into those first core fundamental.
I mean, it's like, it's really 13 years of fundamental development before your brain is essentially shaped.
The last bit, the last bit from 13 to like 21, that isn't shaping your brain as much as it's kind of ironing the wrinkles into your brain that you've already.
Built right.
So then, if we use the whole ironing example, we all know what it's like to iron a wrinkle into something.
So you spend like five years ironing these thoughts into your head because you're 14, you're 15, your parents don't know anything.
You know the man sucks whatever else.
You're ironing ironing, ironing.
And then you're like 24 and you try to take the ironing, you try to take the wrinkle out.
That's neuroplasticity.
You know like oh, like you're pushing and you're pushing and it's really hard.
Eventually it will come out, but it takes time right right, that's the.
That's the difference.
And you're never going to iron out the wrinkle.
That is how you get your energy.
You're never going to iron out the wrinkle that tells you how you interpret data or how you collect data.
You're never going to iron out the wrinkle that dictates how you make your decisions.
Those are just fundamental, core aspects of who you are, that when you have resources and when you have time, when you have energy, you can apply extra resources to use the opposite, unnatural side of your personality.
But that makes sense.
But when you're drained, you're not going to do that.
The Blue Collar Information Source00:09:34
So when you were in different countries meeting with these people on whatever operations you were you were a part of.
What types of people were they?
That you were sort of like, deciphering what their personalities were and trying to get information from them.
Like are these people that are like wealthy people, that are a part of big organizations?
Are these just like everyday blue collar type people?
So I, I would change your, your kind of you.
You kind of lumped wealthy people and blue collar people into two separate categories.
What I would actually do is I would say there's everyday people And then there's exceptional people.
Exceptional people can be blue collar just like exceptional people can be super wealthy, right?
And everyday people can be super wealthy just as much as everyday people can be blue collar.
So I'm going to separate the two.
And you've got your exceptional people and you've got your everyday people.
Okay.
Our goal in espionage is to find everyday people who are actually exceptional and don't know it.
That's the whole goal.
To approach an exceptional person, they've already kind of identified that they are exceptional.
They've got high status.
They've got high social capital, what we call social capital.
They have high attention, high net worth.
They have lots to lose.
So they identify what they could lose as a risk that they're not willing to take.
There are some exceptional people who will take exceptional risks, but for the most part, they're not the kind of people who are going to be susceptible to, hey, I'm a spy.
Why don't you come spy with me?
That's not going to work on most really exceptional people, blue collar or white collar or super wealthy.
They are They have identified their value in themselves.
No spy is going to convince them otherwise.
Then you've got this huge pool of everyday people who have not yet identified what their true value is, who are seeking or searching or hoping for more.
That's your primary target set for all people in the world who are susceptible to espionage, whether it's becoming spies.
That's why you don't see famous musicians and famous actors who then go on to become CIA agents.
You'll see CIA agents who leave CIA and go on to do something else, but it doesn't go the other way around.
They're already exceptional.
All of the appeal of espionage does not appeal to them.
But your everyday person who just, the guy who works, I can't tell you how many people at CIA start their working lives as like busboys and like barbacks just, you know, in their local neighborhood or their local restaurant or bar, right?
And they just work their way up and they like all of their exceptional tendencies kind of go overlooked until somehow CIA finds them because they're looking for something specific.
And then all of a sudden you go through the application process that we talked about, I think, last time.
And that just filters you out.
And they're like, oh, nope.
He or she continues to meet this criteria of exceptional.
Boom.
Now we have them.
And the reason that works is because exceptional people can identify exceptional people.
So you go out there and you're like, oh, here's somebody that we've cultivated.
The agency has created an asset or created an officer who can cultivate other people to give secrets or give knowledge.
And they send them out in the world unsupervised.
You can imagine, like, that's how spying works.
Go forth, steal secrets, make spies.
Come back with intel secrets from other countries that nobody knows about.
That's basically like that's the list, that's the the honeydew list that CIA gives you.
They don't tell you how to do it, they just say, do these things.
So a big part of your job was recruiting spies, correct?
That is the job in human recruiting spies, to continue continuously give you secrets.
So would you tell these people that you work for the CIA sometimes.
Sometimes, if that's what they wanted to hear, if that's what they needed to hear for you to really drive that relationship home, you would tell them that you wouldn't tell them in the beginning.
You would tell them at much later in the process, right?
Like when you're really, when you're at a place, we call it recruitment, when you're at a place where you want them to commit to you, and more importantly, you want them to commit to spying for the United States, you'll have that conversation.
Some people can't handle that conversation.
You know them better than they know themselves because you've been spending so much time with them.
You know their core personality.
You know what they're like at their core, at the default when all resources are drained.
And you just, you know.
And you look at that person, you say, this person can't handle.
That much truth.
So i'm going to let them keep believing that I am, whatever my cover might be right.
I'm going to let them continue to believe that I am this business person, or I am this consultant, or I am this whatever international speaker, environmental engineer, whatever it might be.
Yeah, don't you ever get scared that they could compromise you.
If you did tell them you were for this from CIA.
And if you're, if you were just in a different country say you were in Russia or China and you told them you're like, okay, I work for the CIA, don't you worry about them exposing you.
You do.
There's a very real risk there.
So there's there's two outcomes that we're always aware of as intelligence officers.
One is an outcome where an individual might self-destruct.
And I'll explain that in a second.
The other outcome is where they'll self-distract.
So self-destruct, self-distract.
We call it a big red button on their chest, right?
And that's our terminology.
We just joke about it.
Self-destruct means you have been meeting with this person.
You think you have them figured out.
You're ready to take them the next step.
And you think that they're ready to hear that you're from CIA.
You go forward and you're like, hey, you know, Danny, it's been awesome sitting with you.
It's been great talking.
I want you to keep telling me this powerful information that's going to change the face of your country and give your family the future they deserve.
I want you to not just talk to me.
I want you to understand that when you talk to me, you're talking to CIA.
And then you might be like, wait, wait, wait.
I thought we were just friends.
You're telling me you work for CIA?
And I'll be like, yes, Danny.
I work for CIA.
You can trust me.
I've kept you safe this whole time.
You know, we're in this together.
We're going to change the world.
Hopefully you'll be like, that's awesome.
I suspected that.
And I want to learn more from you and I want to be around you even more.
So let's do this thing.
Some people probably feel like that's super cool and they want to be a part of it.
And then there's other people who are like, whoa, deer in the headlights.
That's not what I was expecting.
Like, you just took off your clothes and you're actually a man under there, right?
Like, and then they hit this big red self-destruct button and they're like, I got to go.
I got to leave, right?
And you know that as soon as they leave, they're going to go tell their wife.
They're going to go tell the cops.
They're going to go tell somebody because they're going to be thinking that that's going to help them, right?
Like, I got to get away from this guy.
This guy's CIA.
This guy's dangerous, right?
They're going to go tell the head of their terrorist group or their terrorist cell.
That's a self-destruct button because we know they're not in their right mind.
They're freaking out.
They're going to go basically get themselves killed or get themselves arrested.
And the blowback is going to come back to me.
So then we would start an evac process to get out of the place, to get out of wherever we were operating to make sure that we don't go down with the ship, essentially.
Wow.
Yeah.
But you don't have to, you never have to eliminate the target when that happens.
So that's, that's the movies talking right there, right?
If you're going to, of course, if you're going to eliminate a target, if you're going to neutralize a target, then they're not worth the time and the effort for you to put all the human resources into cultivating them as an information source.
You're just going to.
Drop a bomb on them, right?
A kinetic bomb costs a couple million dollars.
Right, let's say two or three million dollars.
To put a human intelligence, a human intelligence operation against an individual that costs tens of millions of dollars, easily you've got technical collection human beings flying all over the country, multiple people working on just one individual.
It's not just the person meeting them in the field wow, it's like all the supervisors and all the participants who are going up the chain, plus all the analysts back in headquarters.
Plus, you know you might have foreign partners like the Brits or the Canadians or the Australians who are helping you.
Like you're talking about a huge network of people.
And you're the one point of contact to that information source.
Correct.
And there's literally just a team of people that are behind the curtain.
And they have no idea.
That information source thinks that you're their friend.
That's the power of the relationship, right?
We talked about that too.
When you have a relationship that's that strong, they will convince themselves that it's just personal.
Like this is my friend.
He cares about me.
They don't realize like, well, actually there's like 35 other people behind me who also care about you, but they care about you as an information source, not as a human being.
How many times has it happened to you when someone's hit the self-destruct button?
I've been fortunate.
I've been fortunate because in my history, nobody self-destructed.
Never.
Nobody self-destructed with me.
Right.
But the other thing that we haven't quite talked about is when somebody starts to report to an intelligence service, when a human asset is created, that relationship is no longer a personal relationship.
It's a professional relationship that they have with the organization.
So your mission changes.
Your first mission is to just meet the person.
Your second mission is convince them to give you secrets.
Your third mission is convince them to give you secrets and know that they're doing it in a secret relationship with CIA.
And then the fourth and most important mission is be able to leave that operation and let somebody new come in and have that human source continue to give information anyways.
Right?
Because once they're giving information to someone new, they've become institutionalized.
Controlling the Human Network00:12:47
It's like a fast food joint.
Compare Starbucks to your favorite artisan coffee shop.
You go to your favorite artisan coffee shop because you like something specific about that place.
You like the owners.
You like the barista.
You like wherever they source their Colombian coffee, whatever it might be.
You go to Starbucks for a completely different reason.
You go to Starbucks because you need something quick and efficient and you trust that no matter where you are in the world, Starbucks is going to taste the same.
It's never going to taste great.
It's never going to taste totally terrible.
you're going to get pretty much consistent stuff.
So if you're ever stuck, you'll go to Starbucks.
When you're in France, you're not going to have your artisan coffee that you have down the street because it only exists down the street from you.
That's institutionalization.
As long as you go to that coffee shop here, you're not institutionalized.
You're going there because of something special.
As soon as you start buying from Starbucks, you've been institutionalized.
And they know, and that's what they're counting on.
Institutionalized customers who will go to any Starbucks anywhere at any time because they believe in Starbucks.
Even though there will be differences from the cups of coffee, right?
Like I've been to multiple Starbuckses myself.
They never taste exactly the same.
But you still kind of accept that Starbucks is the leader in convenient coffee.
Right.
That makes sense.
But why do you have to let them know that you are CIA?
Why can't you just keep them in the dark about that?
Awesome question, man.
So everything in intelligence boils down to the question of control.
Even when we start talking about personality, what we're really talking about isn't personality.
What I'm talking about is control, being in control of what's happening around you.
Part of what's happening around you are the people who are around you.
I would argue, and CIA would argue, the biggest part of what's happening around you is the other people.
So CIA officers look at everything as a question of control who's in control of the situation?
There's only three answers to that you're in control, or the other person's in control, or control is still unidentified.
Nobody, there's never a situation where nobody's in control, there's just a situation where control hasn't been established yet.
There's like a competition for control.
Right.
Right.
In an interview like this, you are in control.
You're asking questions.
You're steering the conversation.
You open the door.
Right.
You can turn this stuff off at any time.
Like you are in control.
But in the conversation, I might take control.
Right.
I might choose what I share.
I might choose to give you compliments at a certain time and challenge you at other times just to see how you respond or how you react.
Right.
That's what it's all about.
It's all about control.
So.
When an officer in the field chooses to reveal their true affiliation, they're doing it because they believe it will further their control over the individual and further their control of the situation.
Simple example.
If you're my human asset and you and I are just friends, you don't know I work for CIA, where are the kind of places we're going to meet?
Do you have any ideas?
Where would we meet?
We're just friends.
Each other's houses?
Sure.
Restaurants?
Yeah, coffee shops, you want to go to the park together, like we're gonna meet anywhere because we're just friends.
Yeah, soon as I tell you I work for CIA and we're gonna change the world together, are you still gonna meet with me in public places like restaurants and parks, or is that gonna make you feel uncomfortable?
Right if, especially if I have compromising information, I'm giving up, I won't want to meet in public exactly.
So now, all of a sudden, we're gonna meet in safe houses.
We're gonna meet in private places that are under my control right, highly secure venues.
We might meet in mobile venues.
Right, everything changes.
If I want to be in control, if I want to take our relationship to that level of advancement right then, i'm going to project on you.
Hey, let's let me push Danny a step further.
Tell him i'm CIA.
I think he can handle it, and that's going to put me in a more control of the relationship and put me in a better position so that we stop meeting in public, we start meeting in private.
That's just one example.
But telling somebody that you work for CIA man, there's all sorts of elements of control that open up.
That's the big advantage.
Yeah.
As long as I don't tell you that, I can still be in control, but my control is less than if you knew.
Right.
Because now I can tell you, hey, we're talking about sensitive stuff.
Hey, we're talking about secrets.
hey, we don't want to be in public.
Hey, you know, shouldn't we be more careful?
But that's not the same as saying, I'm CIA.
You're giving away government secrets.
Let's take this into a secure, safe house.
Right.
Now, you were always out in the field with these targets.
And what was your, you and your wife worked together on a lot of these operations, right?
Right.
So where would your wife be during this?
So there's multiple ways that we consider the field.
The field is kind of like a whitewash term that comes from movies and books.
Technically, there's forward operating.
which means that you are like in boots on the ground working in some other place, right?
Actually deployed to a foreign location or whatever to do your work, right?
Forward operating.
And then there's not forward operating.
There's just deployed, which could mean that you're deployed to a protected area.
Like consider Afghanistan.
You might be forward deployed into the hinterlands of Afghanistan, living in a tent, but you'll be deployed to a military base that sits in Afghanistan.
Both of those are technically considered the field.
Okay.
Right.
You could also be sitting back in Virginia waiting to be deployed or on a rotation where you're going to multiple locations and still technically be considered a field officer, even though you're sitting in Virginia.
Okay.
Right.
So.
Makes sense.
Yeah.
So from that perspective, my wife and I were what's known as a tandem couple.
We were always deployed together.
So we would be in some other location together, usually in a controlled, safe location, whether it's an apartment that we own or operate undercover, whether it's some kind of government-controlled facility, something.
Right, we would be deployed together in the field and then I would operate forward and she would operate from the field location.
She was what's known as a targeter.
She would be on base basically yeah, if you yeah, to use simple terms, she would be on some kind of home base, whether that home base is our apartment or that home base is her cover provider or that home base is, you know, a controlled facility.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, did you?
Was that?
Were you receiving like, any kind of special treatment?
Or is that something that a lot of couples would do in the CIA work together like that?
There's not a lot of couples in the CIA?
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, there's a lot of like there's a lot of divorced couples at CIA, right?
Yeah, I think we talked about that.
But yeah, so what ends up what?
The reason it worked for my wife and I is because we came from two different disciplines.
My wife and I are total opposites.
We talked about it with personality testing, right.
Um, we talked about it with like, with how we look at politics and how we approach problems of the world.
But my wife's specialty was something known as targeting.
My specialty was known, was known as operations.
Human operations targeters are basically like superminds that can find and access and come to conclusions about individuals based on available information, And then they can build a dossier.
They can build a package about a person that's so personal that they can essentially hand it to an operator and the operator can go meet that person and feel like they've known them their whole life.
Wow.
That's a special skill.
Not only is it a special skill because it takes intense determination to find and dig through that much data, right?
Because it's not easy to find that much stuff about a person.
But then also to be able to have the analytical mind where you can take 12 people, 12 potential targets. and boil them down to two good targets.
Right?
Because every step of the way, you're looking at dozens and dozens of people, looking at all their profiles, looking at their work histories, looking at their network of connections, looking at what they have access to, looking at whatever you can find about their test scores or their intelligence scores or their performance in college or whatever else.
Boil it down to basically like, here's two good targets.
You know, go forth and conquer.
That's what people don't know is that like case officers and ops officers in the field, the people that they make movies about, we're like a dime a dozen.
It's not hard to find people like us.
Right.
It's hard to find.
your targeters, your analysts, your imagery analysts, those people that the agency really protects.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So that was, I know my wife's value.
Honestly, I know my wife's value more than she knows her own value because of our core Myers-Briggs personality.
That's so interesting.
I love what you were talking about on that episode of your podcast where you're talking about how you guys are such opposites and it makes, it turns you guys into like a power couple because you guys, you succeed where she fails and your, her strong points are your weak points.
I can definitely relate to that with my wife.
So how did the agency, you talked a little bit about how the agency, or your wife talked about how the agency changed her perspective.
It changed her.
She grew up being very liberal, a very liberal family, very progressive family.
And the agency changed her to more center conservative.
I found that very, very fascinating.
Yeah.
And at the risk of, I'm not going to speak for my wife, but what I will speak for is my experience and what I've seen in people like my wife.
It's not that the agency changes the way that you view the world.
It's that the agency exposes you to the real world.
And once, especially folks, the farther left, the farther liberal, the farther progressive they are, like in their worldview, the more they're exposed to the real world outside of the United States, they're just faced with information that makes them ask very difficult questions about themselves, right?
So, for example, One of the things that my wife used to just be really passionate about was refugee affairs.
She was like, we need to take care of refugees.
These people are coming from horrible places.
They're relocating to the United States, and then we're not doing enough for them.
We don't give them education.
We don't give them effective cultural training to acculturate into the United States or to assimilate into the United States.
We need to do all this stuff for refugees.
This was her view prior to the CIA.
Correct, because she went to law school to do refugee law.
And then she worked in a nonprofit relocating refugees.
So she was very passionate about it, man.
It was something that was so important to her that she had basically dedicated her core adult years to learning how to take care of refugees.
Was there an experience that she had that made her feel that strongly?
Partly was growing up as a third country child because my wife was born in Venezuela, grew up in Japan, and then relocated to the United States.
Oh, wow.
And her parents are one Venezuelan, one American.
Her family is split Venezuelan and American.
And she lived. and watched her family go through all the Chavez years and all the demise of Venezuela from a first world city to a third world city.
Wow.
Or the city of Caracas and the country of Venezuela.
So she's got reasons, right?
But my point is, once she actually started seeing the world, like once she didn't just see Venezuela, Japan, and the United States, once she started seeing what life is like in Africa, what life is like in Southeast Asia, what life is like in Latin America, true poverty, true corruption, true genuine abuses of human rights.
Right.
Actual slave labor.
All of a sudden, her baseline for what is unacceptable shifted and it shifted a lot.
Right.
What she used to think was, how are we going to bring in refugees and only give them $35,000 a year and only give them a crappy one bedroom apartment for a family of three?
That's such an abuse.
And then she goes out into the real world and she's like, oh my gosh, like there are families in China living in hutongs, which are just pieces of aluminum leaning up against a wall.
And the only thing they use for fire is their own feces.
And there's whole families, generations of families living together in these hutongs.
And she's like, how is that acceptable?
So all of a sudden, that perspective increased.
And that's not just unique to her.
That's unique to everybody at the agency.
I was also fairly liberal going into the agency.
Coming out of the agency, I was like, oh, what I need to protect, what makes America amazing, isn't all of our social welfare programs.
Global Perspectives on Wealth00:03:36
What makes America amazing is our surplus of income and our capital, our ability to generate massive amounts of capital.
Because just a small fraction of that massive amount of money is what can fund a social welfare program.
Where in a foreign country, there like the whole country might be a social welfare program because they don't have enough wealth to just skim off a little bit.
And because all of the money is going into social welfare, there is no money that goes into infrastructure.
So nobody has clean water.
There is no money that goes into the electrical power grid.
So there's routine power outages, right?
There's no money that goes into public health.
There's no money that goes into whatever else.
Here, by making sure that our core bull market succeeds, making sure that rich people have the capacity to make more money, bigger businesses, more jobs.
Right.
More taxes.
Making sure they have that ability is what funds everything else.
And the thing that made it possible for CIA to go out there and be the highest performing intelligence agency in the world is because it's got a ton of money.
Why does it have so much money?
Because we support this market.
We support this, this world, this economy that just drives to encourage and incentivize people to be more than they have to be right.
You want to be a.
If you want to be a doctor that makes 25 000 a year, you can go be a doctor in Mongolia, Right.
You can go be a doctor in friggin' most parts of Europe.
You're not going to make a lot of money as a doctor.
Right.
You come here, you make a bunch of money, you become a doctor, you start making millions of dollars a year.
That's great for us because the government's going to tax you for like 38% of your net worth.
Sucks to be that guy.
Right.
But you're still making 10 times what you'd be making if you were a doctor in France or if you were a doctor in Italy.
Right.
Right.
So like that's what makes the market work.
And the fact that you can incentivize those people by, Few percentage points of taxes.
Right.
I love that.
I love the fact that we're making more doctors, more lawyers, and more billionaires than ever before.
And that we're incentivizing people who are coming out of college to pursue those really difficult.
It's not easy to build a business.
It's not easy to become a doctor.
We're incentivizing them for like two percentage points of taxes.
Right.
Like, oh, we'll decrease your taxes from 38% to 36%.
And we won't tax capital gains.
Like to them.
That's hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially millions of dollars.
And all of that money just goes right into the United States tax base that allows us to have roads without potholes, an electrical grid that runs 24-7, 365 days a year, and clean water that literally comes out of our toilet if we chose to drink it.
That's insane.
There's parts of the world, there's parts of the first world where you can't trust the water that comes out of a water fountain.
We have it so good here, you don't realize it until you start to travel and see the world through the eyes of a spy.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's how she shifted.
That's how many of us shift because you start to see the real outside of America world and you start to have a whole different sense of your left and right boundary.
Inside the United States, our left and right boundaries are like this.
Right.
Once you get outside, you see like, you know, presidents who can just kill people at will, like what happened to the, like when the crown prince of Saudi Arabia decided to just have a reporter killed in the UK.
Like, boom, they can do that.
That's never going to happen.
You're never going to hear that phone call from President Biden.
It's not going to happen.
Creating Chaotic Outcomes00:15:04
Have you ever been to Cuba?
I have not been to Cuba yet.
It's one of the places that's on my list.
I was active with the agency when it was still a denied area.
So it's not smart for me to go there yet.
That's a fascinating place.
Have you heard about a thing called the Paquete?
No.
So in Cuba, obviously all of their internet is regulated.
I think they now just recently installed like 200 Wi-Fi towers throughout, but the government strictly regulates all the information that comes in.
Everything's curated.
But there's this thing called the Paquete, where there's this one kid, and in his team, he's a small team of people.
He's found a way to get all of the movies, the TV shows, the news, the music from around the world, uncurated by the government.
He gets it, puts it on a hard drive, and he has one drop off point where he'll take this hard drive, he'll give it to one guy.
This guy will make.
Certain amount of copies give it to his contact points.
Maybe he has five and then those people it branches out and out and out.
And so it's like this underground system of information that's passed through hard drives underneath the government.
Wow, and that's how they get all their fucking information.
It's crazy and it's all it's all fixed right because it's not it's not updated real time if it's just being basically copied from a single point in time.
Yeah, so it's so this guy updates it every single day though.
So he gets all this new information, all this new news every single day, and it's how people get.
All their information.
Wow, it's bonkers.
I found I watched this documentary called give me future um, about this band called Major Laser.
It's a group, it's like a uh, it's like a Caribbean electronic music group and uh, they went down.
They did a show, a live show in Cuba, and in order, they were going to do this, this big show.
But they're like well, if we go down there, they've definitely never heard our music before.
I mean, they're huge in the United States and around the world, but in Cuba they're kind of like stuck in time, you know yeah yeah so, especially with the embargo and everything.
So they're like, they were talking to one guy who has like connections with the government there, like doing some shady stuff.
He's like, just, just, he's like, give me 1500 bucks and give me a thumb, chummy his thumb drive with all your music on it.
He did that and he somehow got that to the kid who, the kid who runs the Paquete.
And now they got there and like a half million people showed up.
Wow.
And it was just, it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
That's pretty awesome.
That's worth checking out.
Yeah, it's wild.
There's always going to be a way around, right?
And there's always going to be those creative people.
That's an exceptional person.
Remember how we were talking about everyday people and exceptional people?
Everyday people would be faced with a challenge like, oh, we can't get information.
Oh, that sucks.
Like, somebody should fix that.
And then they go about their everyday life.
But somewhere in that pool of everyday people, someone like the guy who built this Paquete, right?
Here's an exceptional person hidden among all these everyday people.
Yeah.
All you got to do is just find that person, give them a few resources, give them a little bit of knowledge, and then let them do what they're born to do.
That's crazy, though, having that much power.
Well, I mean, when you look at it that way, right?
When you look at it one way, you realize how much power they have to basically shape information.
But then when you look at it a different way, is it better or worse to have that one person in that one position?
Or is it better for there to be no person in that position and everybody's just living in that historical time loop where they have no information at all?
Well, the risk is him being corrupted, right?
And him, you know, just selling information for money.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And if that happens, then another Paquete would probably pop up, right?
Somebody else would pop up to offset that problem.
Right.
Some other exceptional person would rise to the challenge.
Yeah.
Do you know if there are any CIA operatives that are operating in Cuba?
I can't answer that question.
Even if I had details, that wouldn't be a question I can answer.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, that's wild.
I think it's safe to say that any place that's a potential threat to America, you've got CIA actively engaged.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Any place that's a potential threat.
Like, that's what national security is all about, right?
So they're trying to find current threats.
They're trying to assess future threats.
They're trying to resource all of them.
Like, that's their job.
So I would never worry that there's especially not if it's something massive like a country.
I would never worry that there's a country that's not being actively covered by someone at CIA.
It might not be covered by many people.
It might be one of four countries that fall under one dude or one lady in one office with no windows.
But somebody's looking at everything.
It's just so wild how there's this place that's so close to the U.S. Cuba's closer to where we are right now than Texas.
And it can be so closed off from the world.
It's just so mind-boggling.
What do you know about Russia and China using social media as a weapon to sort of like seed discussions and tear people apart and kind of create this dissent online?
So it's interesting that you bring that up because I would say that it's not new, right?
With the invention of social media, it feels like it's new, but foreign adversaries trying to influence and drive dissent in their against their targets is that's age old.
The Brits were doing that against the colonialists back when we were still, you know, pre-American Revolutionary War, right?
That's a very common influence campaign.
It's what we call it in Intel terms.
It's a covert influence campaign.
The fact that now we have tools, now we have platforms that are digital platforms like Twitter or Parler or Instagram or Facebook, just because those are the current forms of mass media doesn't change who's playing or how they're playing or what tools they're using.
It's all the same, right?
So is China and Russia messing with Americans through covert operations to influence through social media?
Absolutely.
But so are dozens of other countries that you're not even considering, right?
The Saudis are doing it.
The Israelis are doing it.
The French are doing it.
The Brazilians are doing it.
The Mexicans are doing it, just like we're doing it.
thousands of countries too.
We do it to them.
Of course we are, because that is intel, right?
That's how intelligence works.
That's how covert influence works.
You're trying to influence the outcomes around the world that benefit your national security.
So does that mean that we're driving dissent?
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe it just means that we're trying to like coax or encourage or lift up some message or some candidate that we want to see succeed in some foreign country, just like foreign countries are lifting up candidates and messages that they want to see succeed in our country.
That is the game.
That is intelligence, right?
When Twitter and Facebook and social media evolves into the next great iteration of whatever it might be, whether it's whatever VR or augmented reality or whether we have chips in our brains because Elon Musk plugged us all in, who knows?
There will be something new that will become the new platform for traditional covert influence operations.
Before social media, it was newspapers and flyers and pamphlets and magazines, right?
Before print media, it was word of mouth and stories and people traveling and, you know, drawings and pictures.
The ancient courts in Egypt, right?
The courts of pharaohs would play this game too, where they would try to influence each other's courtesans and each other's heads of state so that the right relationships or the right trade agreements would be reached early.
It's an age-old game.
Influence is an age-old game.
It's just played with different tools.
That's so crazy.
I don't understand what would be their goal to just drive.
like outrage within the American people.
Like there doesn't seem like a clear defined path to where this goes.
Yeah.
So that's what's in this is where we start getting into this like the science and strategy of Intel and people don't think that way.
Instead, you've got people who are just kind of following the narrative of whatever media source they listen to, whether they listen to conservative news or liberal news and they just parrot whatever that media source is.
In covert in covert influence operations, there's only two objectives.
There's either a specific outcome that they're looking for.
Or there's a chaotic outcome that they're looking for, right?
That's it.
It's either a specific outcome or a chaotic outcome.
Okay.
In a specific outcome, it's very, very difficult to get a specific outcome because when you're creating influence, when you're basically using ads on Twitter and Facebook to reach people, it's hard to know how those people in mass are going to actually respond, right?
Are they actually going to vote for the candidate you want them to vote for?
Is the whole thing going to blow up in your face somehow?
Are they actually going to believe the message is out there?
Who knows?
So specific outcomes are very rare.
An example of a specific outcome is when the CIA went into Iran in 1949, 52 to basically unseat the current governor or the leader and then put the Shah in place.
That was a specific influence outcome they were trying to shape.
What is the word for that?
Where they get people to go in there and incite riots?
Provocateurs, agent provocateurs.
Provocateurs, yeah.
That is another popular pop culture term.
Okay.
But yeah, so like that's a specific outcome.
Those are super hard.
And then it didn't work, right?
Like the Shah was there and then the Shah got kicked out.
There's a whole Iranian revolution and history has written itself.
Specific outcomes are not really the bee's knees anymore.
Nobody's trying to make that happen.
Instead, they want chaotic outcomes.
Chaotic outcomes are the key to all covert influence operations in modern day.
What you see Russia, what you see China doing, what you see North Korea doing, what you see Iran doing, what you see everybody doing who's messing with our social media, all they want to do is feed.
the flames that already exist.
Feed both sides equally and just cause chaos.
Because the more chaos that ensues, the more people question the fundamental values that make us Americans.
How does a democracy survive when there's so much anger and hate?
How many conspiracy theories have crept up because people just don't have answers to why people are doing what they're doing?
Right?
Democrats, we just had a whole coronavirus relief bill that got passed.
And I have yet to hear about it being bipartisan.
I have yet to hear of a single Republican congressman or senator who participated in voting yes, right?
It was pushed through on the Democratic side.
The same thing happened with our health care reform under Obama, pushed through by a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Democrat-controlled Congress.
When that happens, half the country gets pissed off.
They're like, this isn't democracy.
Half of us don't want this to happen, but because a few people hold a few seats right now at this point in time, it happens.
Well, then what happens as soon as the Senate and the House become Republican controlled?
The exact same thing happens again, but in the opposite direction, right?
All of a sudden, these very conservative programs get passed.
And again, half the country is furious because they're like, this isn't democracy.
How does this happen?
That is all our adversaries are looking for.
They would rather put money into existing messages, existing hate messages, existing fear messages, existing messages about women, existing messages about minorities, existing messages about immigration, about gun laws, about everything.
They would rather feed that world.
Because it's easy for them to just cause more chaos and let us question democracy.
Let us undermine ourselves from within.
That's the chaotic outcome.
It's a much easier outcome than a specific outcome.
Because the more a country like us goes into chaos, the more a country like China or like Russia, in comparison to us, looks strong.
They look powerful.
They gain international influence.
That's the whole magic behind covert influence that nobody seems to understand or talk about or even want to accept.
No one was trying to make Trump win.
No one was trying to make Biden win.
All they wanted to do was make Americans hate Americans and doubt our own process to elect a president.
And I would say that they've been fairly successful.
Where does it go from here?
We either grow up and we start to learn from conversations like this.
We start to recognize that we are our own worst enemy and that basically our enemies are just, they're just enabling us to keep like rotting ourselves from within.
So we either grow up and recognize that's the way it works or somehow we find a way to mature so that we are bigger and better than the messages that we all fall behind, right?
So it's kind of like high school.
I compare everything to high school because I feel like high school, we were talking earlier about when children develop.
High school is kind of when you start really practicing the skills, the life skills that you have.
It's when you start testing the foundation that you've been programmed to believe is in high school.
And then everything after that is basically just the next iteration of high school.
College is just high school without parents, right?
And then your day job is just high school with money.
So it goes on and on.
But yeah, so my point being that eventually you just have to grow out of feeling like there's bullies and feeling like things are unfair in order to get past high school, right?
You can't keep hating the football quarterback for getting the pretty girl in the cheerleading squad forever.
You have to grow past that eventually.
Someday we're just going to have to grow past the fact that politics are petty.
And that we have no power.
The truth is, we have all the power in the world to take petty politicians out of their seats and put new politicians in their place.
We're just not mature enough yet to want to admit that.
Do we have the power to do that, though?
Oh, yeah.
Or do the billion dollar corporations have the power to do that more than the people?
Why do we think the billion dollar corporations have the power?
Lobbyists.
And what do the lobbyists do?
Pass laws that benefit their companies?
Yes, but that doesn't impact voters.
That impacts the companies.
Growing Past Petty Politics00:16:37
The voters are the ones who decide who actually gets elected.
So what actually influences the voters?
Media.
Media messages about the candidates.
So your billion-dollar corporations are what fund the campaigns that shape the messages that we get about the candidates themselves.
Those lobbyists and those billion-dollar companies shape the people who get elected into an office.
And then once those people are in office, it's in their best interest to change laws, to gerrymander and whatever else.
Right, right, right.
control laws and make things, make voting easier, make voting harder.
That's what they do.
Everybody does it.
Just like you see the grand old party right now trying to make it difficult to vote for the last like two years of the election in 2020, you saw the Democratic party trying to make it easier to vote.
Right.
And that's just the big voting thing back and forth.
Who are they trying to make it easier to vote for?
People who lean Democratic.
Who are they trying to make it harder to vote for now?
People who learn like you lean Democratic.
Everybody wants to support their own side.
We do this to ourselves because it's just another version of a popularity contest.
It's the high school race for who's going to be president of the class.
It's all high school politics.
The rest of the world doesn't need to.
They don't need to mess that up.
They just need to put more money and more conflicting messages out there and let us keep messing with ourselves.
Just pour gas on the fire and watch it burn.
Exactly.
That's exactly what they need to do.
And in a country like ours where everybody has rights, everybody has the right to vote, Everything's transparent.
We have a healthy culture that doubts the government.
Most places in the world, if you doubt the government, you're going to jail.
You'll get disappeared off the street.
Here we have a healthy, vibrant culture where we're allowed to dissent if we choose.
So it's super easy for the rest of the world to mess with us.
You pour gasoline on that.
I feel like the problem is just some people I've noticed too, I feel like as older people are just so much more gullible to things they see online.
You know what I mean?
Like their bullshit detectors aren't as strong.
Not when it comes to things that are online, I would agree.
But then the flip side of that, the flip side of that coin is in person.
I've met dozens of millennials who can't comport themselves in a personal conversation.
Gen I, right?
Anybody under the age of like 28, maybe struggles in an in-person face-to-face confrontation to hold their own.
And that's like, that's not great.
Right.
Someone's phone ringing?
I hope it's not me, man.
I'm getting facetimed.
Sorry about that.
I was like, that is my phone.
My phone's on silent, but my computer's over there and it's connected, so it's going through my computer.
So, yeah.
So what I'm getting at is you take any 65-year-old out there, put them face-to-face in a human interaction that has some point of contention or confrontation, they'll hold their own all day long.
But you're right.
They're quite a lot of people.
What's the problem, though, when they're sold something online, sold some narrative on social media, and then they get into the real world and they're fist-a-cuffs, you know, defending whatever headline they read, whatever summed up.
you know, narrative that they, that got shoved down their throat on Facebook or something like that.
And then it comes into reality.
I mean, that just goes to the, like, brings us right to the Capitol riot thing with Trump.
Oh, yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
So it's what I find so interesting about it is the messaging, don't ever mistake the messaging with the media that message that with the delivery tool, right?
Facebook doesn't shove messages down anybody's throat, right?
They just, There are people who consume everything they can on Facebook, and Facebook gives them more of what they want to consume.
So if they see Joe Blow, old man, reading XYZ article every time it comes up, right?
Every time a related article comes up, they're just going to keep feeding him the same stuff.
He's the one eating it.
No one's shoving it down his throat where they're just serving it up.
I love vanilla ice cream.
Put another bowl in front of me.
I'm going to keep eating it.
Here's vanilla with chocolate chips.
I'll try that.
Here's vanilla with mint.
I'll try that, right?
But I'm doing it to myself.
The flip side of that is how is it that we had record-breaking voter turnout this year?
How did that happen?
It didn't happen because all of the old people who always vote every year voted again.
We had record-breaking turnout because millions of new voters, not millions of people who just turned 18, millions of people who could have voted at any time finally voted.
Why did they make that decision?
Was it because voting was easier?
Partly.
Was it because voting was, they had options to do it via mail?
They had whatever else?
Yeah, all of that is partly true.
But it also happened because all of your all of your younger generation targeted social media, like if you were, I don't know if you use Instagram.
For months, the first thing you saw on Instagram was a button that took you to a place where you could register to vote.
Right.
Like that was it.
That is so powerful.
Where was that button four years ago?
Why wasn't it there then?
Like why was it there now?
And are they really trying, like who are they targeting?
Your 65-year-old's probably not on Instagram, right?
And if they are, they're not opening it every, you know, two hours.
65-year-olds are on Facebook.
Yeah.
Right.
So you've got, it's just they're targeting the message is being delivered to the person who's susceptible to the message to get the outcome they want.
Millions of young people voted that never voted before because they made it easier, because they put it in their face.
You could see commercials about go out and vote.
I saw on almost any youth based platform, whether it was TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat, like you just saw tons of advertising to vote.
Go out and vote.
That's if it takes the average person has to get hit with an advertising message six times before they take action.
Like the odds are millions of people were hit by those ads and finally took action that they never took before because they were never advertised to as strongly before.
And were they also being fed a fair and balanced like narrative about who the two candidates were?
Right.
Who did who does Instagram and who does Facebook want to win the election?
I mean, essentially that's kind of like they they had the potential to decide, which is why.
Two years before that, they started promising how they were going to change their algorithms for sharing information that had to do with politics and media.
Well, Trump was a direct threat to them, to companies like YouTube and companies like Twitter, because he wanted to get rid of Section, I think it was like 223, the Communications Decency Act.
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to specific policy and like what Trump was for and what Trump was against, it gets sticky because you don't know how much of it was Trump, how much of it was some aide in the Trump camp how much of it was some lobbyist who had Trump support same thing with Biden Biden's not the one deciding everything right He has a team of people who are deciding things on his behalf and they might just have five minutes of conversation with him where they say hey This is important.
Here's why we're gonna pursue it and he might be like okay sure Well Trump I think he had a personal beef about it too because all the things that because he was tweeting and then Twitter was deleting his tweets They were putting like flagging his tweets saying this is this could be wrong.
This could be false information click here for the right information, right?
So he was like, he was in almost a war with Twitter and social media, big tech.
And, you know, he wanted to get rid of a law that was put in place that shielded, it was something that shielded the social media companies from lawsuits for what publishers like you and me would post on their websites that could, you know, alter someone's thinking or that could be potentially dangerous.
Instead of being able to sue the social media platform, you had to sue the user who uploaded that content.
And he wanted to remove that shield.
So, I mean, that would make sure.
Which could put them out of business.
Yeah.
But it would also, I mean, it also kind of shows that evolution of social media, right?
Like if social media can choose to quiet the president because of rules that they set in place, they could choose to quiet Biden if they wanted to too.
They could choose to quiet anybody, right?
It's essentially the digital version of what foreign countries do when they just make a descendant, like when they make a dissentful voice just disappear when they put someone in jail.
What is your opinion on Twitter completely getting rid of Trump?
It was interesting.
I did not think it was a smart move.
I didn't think it was a smart move.
for a lot of the social media companies to start getting involved in politics because that's not their charge.
They are there to create user-generated media.
That's what they said they were going to do, and that is what they do.
Once they start deciding which voices get heard and which voices don't get heard, and it's not up to the users themselves, now it's not user-generated anymore.
Now it's being cultivated.
Now it's being shaped.
Once you open the door to do that once, the door is open to do that any time.
Now what's to say that they don't just start shaping us all to listen to one politician more than another politician or shape us more to follow one IT company more than another IT company.
What's to say that like, where's all the effort that they're putting into quieting, you know, if you want to, if there's anything that you want to quiet, I would be open to them quieting the extremes, the 5% of most extreme left leaning and the 5% of most extreme right.
They're always the loudest.
Yeah.
Quiet those.
If you want to have a filter in place and gives us a more moderate. balanced view of user information.
I think that sounds better than selectively choosing who to quiet.
And then who's the one fact checking what's actually being said?
Like when a little thing pops up, this may be untrue.
What's the algorithm doing that research?
What are the sources that it's citing?
Right.
It's just, it's all sticky, man.
It's all really, really sticky.
And when I start going back to who are the users of these platforms, the average Twitter user looks different than the average Instagram user who looks different than the average Facebook user.
And those users change over time too.
So they look different than a TikTok user.
Right.
So it's like now you can actually shape the messaging on the platform for the audience that's on the platform majoritively.
And that's just crazy, dude.
Like there are people out.
It's something like 70% of people see Facebook as a news source.
Right.
Like they use Facebook as a source of news.
It's not a journalistic platform.
Right.
It's a user generated platform.
Right.
So what that means is, yes, there are people who.
Pull articles off of Facebook right they're scrolling through and they see an interesting article and they read it and to them that's news They have no idea if that article source is a tabloid because it's not sitting in the tabloid section of grocery store.
It's on their feed They don't know if it's a real legitimate news source or not, but then they've also see people who just make a comment people who just people who just post something that says the CDC just did this no article no citation no nothing But they read it and they're like that's news right the same thing happens on Twitter freaking news organizations cite Twitter Like they take pictures of Twitter like tweets and they cite it in an article.
That's just a travesty to me.
How are you a journalist citing a social media locate like how are you doing that and considering that a valid citation of a source?
It is social media.
Unbelievable.
But they use it like to comment it to comment on right.
They'll use it as like part of a bigger story.
They'll use it as part of a bigger story.
But then if so, what I have found, especially when it comes to media, they'll cite like three different politicians, usually, or two politicians and a celebrity, whatever.
And they'll, they'll put the screenshot of that tweet into their article.
And then through the article itself, they're just using those to defend their arguments inside the article, whatever analysis or whatever conclusion they're trying to reach.
Like what you and I and anybody else has to say on social media is not sourced information.
We, it's, it's not.
Journalistically sound information, but it's very easy to use that and create an article to meet a deadline and get it out the door right, right.
Yeah, it's much harder to get you on the phone and say, hey Danny, I saw that you made this tweet on this day.
What did you mean?
Yeah, would you stand behind this?
Can I?
Can I quote you on this?
Completely different?
Yeah, it is totally so.
That's that's just.
What's challenging to me is, in my world, information is invaluable right, and I talk oftentimes about how information has an evolution into knowledge.
Knowledge is something that you test to gain experience.
Experience is something you use to gain more information.
And it's this loop.
It's a triangle.
Yeah, it's a triangle in the Intel world, right?
What I'm finding, what happens so often now is people skip knowledge and they just absorb information.
They don't vet it.
They don't test it.
They don't question it.
And then they use that information as if it's knowledge.
And then they think they have gained experience.
And you're like, no, that's not how it works.
You are not. a more experienced person because you read something on Twitter, right?
You're not a smarter person because you saw something on Facebook.
It's just, it's not how it works.
But social media has become so, so central to our culture and it's so accessible to everybody that it has taken on that, that role when it shouldn't have.
Can you explain to people out there what more, like this triangle of information, knowledge, and experience?
Yeah.
How do they work together?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, uh, In the Intel world, we're always trying to find intelligence.
The equivalent of intelligence in the everyday world is knowledge, right?
Knowledge of things that are essentially forbidden for you to know.
That's intelligence.
Intelligence is really secrets that you're not supposed to know.
Knowledge that you're not supposed to know is the closest thing that we have in the everyday world.
The way that we get there is you know it, meaning it's truth.
No, you're not allowed to know it because it's a secret.
That's what Intel is, right?
Right.
So knowledge is essentially the equivalent of that except that it's knowledge that you otherwise wouldn't have known to be true.
Okay, got it.
There you go.
Absolutely.
So the cycle, the cycle that we're taught is a triangle.
And at the top of the triangle is information.
Everybody has access to information.
And information is everywhere.
Everywhere.
We talked about sensors when we talked about the Myers-Briggs personality types.
You can use your five senses to pick up information from anywhere.
What you see, what you hear, what you read, what you taste, whatever, right?
Information is everywhere.
But not all information is true.
Not all information is valid.
Not all information is trustworthy.
You know, some information is straight up malicious, right?
So information is not enough on its own.
It has to be refined into knowledge.
The way that you refine that information into knowledge is through multiple different tools.
You can find multiple sources that corroborate information.
So if can you define knowledge?
Sure.
So knowledge is stronger evidence-based information that has the predominant predominantly is probable to be true.
That is knowledge.
Okay.
Right?
If it has a low probability of being true, it's not really knowledge.
If it isn't heavier, weightier than information, then it's not knowledge either.
So knowledge is something that gives you an advantage.
Knowledge is a fundamental truth or a high probability of being true that you can use to leverage yourself.
Like knowing that your car is currently in the parking lot right now.
You have knowledge of the location of your vehicle.
Right, that you may not have.
You don't have that knowledge right now.
You have information because you know I'm here, therefore my car must be here.
But where is it parked?
Is it parked here or across the street or somewhere else?
Let me give you an example that comes out of COVID headlines, right?
Finding True Information Sources00:09:12
China has said that their COVID vaccine has a 79% efficacy rate, right?
So it's 79% effective according to efficacy.
The UAE, who is also running a parallel test of the same vaccine, has claimed that it has an 89% efficacy rate.
China, who created the vaccine, says it's 79%.
The Emiratis say that it's 89%.
That's a 10% discrepancy.
Nobody. has filled in the gap as to how these two countries using the same vaccine have reached such different conclusions, right?
That information, if somebody were to read a headline that said that the Chinese, whatever it's called, coronavirus, sinovaccine or something, whatever it's called, the Chinese vaccine is 89% effective.
That's not really true, right?
That's just one source of information from one country that has said that.
Once you kind of continue researching, continue collecting more information, you see that another country who actually developed it has said something different.
So now you have the knowledge to know you can't trust either number.
Right.
You see how that works?
Yes.
Otherwise, you would just be moving forward with information.
Okay.
So that is the difference between information and knowledge.
What you see, what you hear, what you think isn't always true.
Like there's more information to be gathered.
The more information you gather that vets and validates something to be true, the closer it is getting to being knowledge.
Got it.
So once you have, multiple pieces of information that confirm that something is true, now you have knowledge.
Knowledge is a tool.
Knowledge is a genuine advantage.
Tons of people out there making decisions based on information.
They're making the wrong decision.
Wasting money, wasting time, right?
Making mistakes.
You make your decisions based off of knowledge.
You don't waste your money.
You don't waste your time.
You don't make mistakes.
That's why knowledge is like intelligence in the Intel world.
CIA doesn't want to invade a country or launch some, you know, launch some offensive because of bad information.
So they're going to vet it.
They're going to test it.
They're going to make sure it's true.
Intel. true knowledge before they take action.
Okay.
So we need to do the same thing.
If we do the same thing, we have a significant advantage over all the other people around us who are just acting on information.
Right.
Once you have that knowledge, you take action.
Once you take action, what does action do?
You gain new experience from the action that you're taking.
Right.
So you using that same China UAE study on how effective is the Chinese corona vaccine.
Right.
There's plenty of people.
There's a whole country.
The entire country of UAE and all the foreign residents in that country were mandated to take the vaccine as soon as it came out in like December.
Government mandate pushed down by the royal crown prince, right?
To me, that's crazy.
But now, three months later, we look back on that and we're like, how immune, how vaccinated is that country really?
Is it 89% or is it 79% or is it something else altogether?
We have the knowledge now to know not to take that vaccine.
and not to trust the numbers about that vaccine from either of those countries or from any other country that's probably going to report it.
But instead, we're going to pay attention to the discrepancies in each of their reports.
That's going to give us experience, experience that we can use to collect more information, right?
What are the other countries that are using the vaccine?
What are their reports?
Now we have a whole different range of questions that we can ask.
How did UAE test this?
How did China test this?
How will Paraguay test this?
How will Somalia test this, right?
Like all the countries that are involved, we now know the right questions to ask to gain information that goes back to the top of the triangle, right?
And the more information that we gain that confirms.
Validates and proves to be true, the more knowledge we get, the better the questions can be.
And there we have what we call an intel triangle.
What everyday people, what I teach as a knowledge triangle right right, and it's a self fulfilling like it's a self, a feedback loop that you keep using to refine yourself over and over again.
Right better, better information is never available.
Information is garbage everywhere.
You can always use garbage information to find true knowledge, though.
Knowledge gives you true experience, which is going to give you more garbage information, But you can cull through the garbage information to find more true knowledge.
Instead, people are trying to find true information.
You're never going to find it.
No.
But the thing about information is that it's just so, it's clickbait.
Clickbait is just the slew of crazy headlines that are out there that people love to share and get clicks and get comments on and respond to it, which essentially just makes more money.
Yeah, exactly.
There's a push-pull relationship, right?
Information is always going to be pushed.
It's always going to be pushed out, pushed to you, pushed to everybody because information is used to make money.
Like you said, clickbait, advertising, attention, dollars, ratings, whatever it might be.
So there's always an incentive to push out information.
The only way you're going to get knowledge is to pull.
You have to pull from the information the pieces that corroborate, the pieces that validate, the pieces that are true, that vet.
Pull those out, and now you have a much smaller pool of genuine knowledge.
What I do with Everyday Spy, the whole core of my business method is to basically create knowledge and share that knowledge with corporate clients, with individual clients, with training personnel, like with other Intel services, right?
Anybody who employs me, my goal is to cull through information, create knowledge, teach people how to cull through information, create knowledge, because the knowledge is the real value.
The information is just a distraction.
What kind of people contract you to do this kind of work?
So I've actually served in UAE.
I actually had a contract with the UAE government to go out there and teach them how to do this because where they had learned before was not. accurate or valid.
So I've worked for foreign governments.
I've worked for US DOD.
I've worked for major military contractors here in the United States.
Really?
I've got Silicon.
I'm currently, I'm sending out a proposal today to Silicon Valley, like massive companies out there that like NDAs, but that have an interest in the same skill set.
There's a huge demand out there for being able to keep up with conflicting information and making something valuable out of it.
Because there's so much information out there.
It's the same process as like making iron ore.
You've got to dig a lot of dirt and pull a lot of iron ore out before you can smelt it into iron.
It's the same process happening now.
There's a ton of information.
You've got to dig through a lot of information and have a process to pull out the little bits that are ore and smelt them into something useful like iron.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like a huge problem that would be great if we could solve it with people just digesting tidbits of information and not getting the full picture.
Right.
And it's what kills me is that it's not the people who recognize the problem, the more money they are worth, the more net worth an individual has, what I have seen, the more aware of the problem they are.
Because the more net worth you have, the more money you're investing, the more you're trying to use money to make money, right?
So you see it as a big problem because you want to make the right investment because you don't want to waste your money, right?
Your money is your biggest asset.
But that's only like 2% of the population.
I think the top 10% of income earners earn $190,000 or more.
Really?
That's not that much money.
Right.
That means 90% of the country earns less than $190,000 a year.
The less money you make, the less you think information is a problem because you're not investing your money to try to make more money.
You're just trying to survive day to day, right?
You go to work.
You work eight hours.
You come home every week or every two weeks.
You get your paycheck.
You spend almost all of your paycheck on food, daycare. basic entertainment needs, whatever else, you're not saving it, you're not investing it.
So you're looking for information to just be a distraction, to be an escape from the humdrum routine of life.
Right.
So they don't see that as a problem.
So there's nothing I can do for them.
But the people who recognize that people have enough wealth or enough insight to realize like information is a problem.
And where there's a problem, there's a hidden advantage because the companies that can solve the problem first will make the most money.
The investors who can solve the money, solve the problem first. will make the best investments.
Like the countries that can solve the problem first will have the most security.
Do you see any sort of remedy to different countries like using social media, like weaponizing it to create this chaos?
Do you see any sort of light at the end of the tunnel or any sort of solution to it?
I think that there's always a solution.
We just have to be willing to consider all the options.
Weaponizing Social Media Chaos00:15:20
So just as an example, right?
With Google Ads, you can now choose not to look at an ad.
Like you can press a button on your computer screen and it'll say, don't show me this ad.
And then it'll ask you, why don't you want to see this ad?
And you can tell them why.
Now, right now, another ad just fills up in its place, right?
Or it leaves a big blank spot where there's no ad.
Could you imagine social media where you basically can click and tell something why you don't want to see it, right?
So something pops up and whatever.
My mom sends another, you know, update about coronavirus in Pennsylvania.
I would love to click on a button that just says, don't show me this, right?
And then when it says, why don't you want to see this?
I don't like the user.
I don't like the content, you know, whatever else.
I can click on it.
So now I just, I'm telling, I'm shaping my own algorithm through my choices instead of making the algorithm feed me what it needs to feed me so that I keep scrolling through.
Now, why will social media probably never do that?
Because if it's not feeding me what my bias is, I'm not going to keep opening it.
And if I don't keep opening it, I'm not going to keep getting.
Exposed to the advertising.
If i'm not exposed to the advertising, it's not going to make its money and eventually i'll just stop using the app or my phone altogether right, and i'll just call my mom when I want to talk to her, right?
So it's.
That's the problem.
Is any company going to self-destruct like that?
No, they would rather like.
I guarantee you.
Some analyst at Twitter did the math and was like, based on our user base, it's in our best interest to like censor the president, Because our liberal base is so large, people will like that and we won't lose that much money.
Right?
Like somebody did that math and they made that conclusion and that's how it happened.
If that same person would have analyzed it a different way, if they would have been like, censoring the president is going to cost us 70% of our business, they would have never censored the president.
Somebody made a business decision.
It wasn't a moral decision.
They made a business decision.
Right, right.
The world does seem, though, ever since he's been banned, it seems a lot more relaxed.
Or at least the country.
So one of the things that I thought was funny is I actually, for a client, I had to do a study into how much media coverage President Trump was getting.
And they were like, is this abnormal?
Is this a normal amount of media coverage?
Is it abnormal?
What does it look like?
And the results of my findings were that President Trump did get more media coverage than other presidents, but not by much.
Really?
Yeah, he got like maybe 6 or 12% more media coverage.
But what he got that was so different than other presidents is like 90% of it was negative.
He had tons of negative media coverage.
And of the negative media coverage, more than half of it was attacking his character, not his policies.
I find I loved that study because it made me go back to the eight years of Obama and I looked at Obama's record, right?
Obama had tons of media coverage.
Almost all of the media coverage was about his policies, even if it was negative, right?
And it was predominantly negative.
There's a lot of negative media coverage about Obama, not as much as Trump, but a lot.
But the negative media coverage focused on his policies that people didn't like.
The negative media policy, the negative media attention on Trump focused on his personality, his.
Like zeal, his craziness, right.
That's what they focused on.
And now we're seeing the first few months of the Biden administration.
Biden's in the headlines every day.
Trump was in the headlines every day.
Biden is in the headlines every day and they're talking like you can see how confused media is because they want to talk about his personality, like they want to talk about his dog and they want to talk about like his courage and they want to talk about him like they're comparing him to fdr, like there's all this funny stuff where they're trying to talk about his personality, really compared to fdr Biden.
Really?
Because of the, he's like the largest coronavirus relief package ever put in motion.
And there's, it's, it's pretty funny.
If you go out there and you see it, because it's, he's like three months in office.
You can't compare him.
Right.
But my point is media is so confused right now because if they can't write about the president's personality, what are they supposed to write about?
Policy?
Right.
They've been four years out of practice writing about policy.
Policy isn't clickbait.
Right.
So you still see him in the headlines all the time and you see more about policy.
You see just as much negative as you see positive, but it's just completely different.
How it's broken down.
Yeah, and people and my client was just as surprised as you were when they were like he's only 12 covered more than like that's not much.
Like it feels like everything's about Trump.
Well, it's interesting like uh, just a couple weeks ago, when Ted Cruz went to Cancun, oh yeah, like that's all I saw anywhere on twitter one day trip yep, and and at the same time uh, Biden's bombing Syria.
You barely saw anything about that.
Yeah, and that's how that's how it works.
That's exactly our culture.
That's why it's so easy for China and Russia and Iran to flood our news feeds.
Because what do we care about?
Do we care about bombing in Syria?
We should, but we don't.
We care about, what do you mean Ted Cruz went to Cancun while chunks of Texas had no power and were freezing to death?
And that's what we read.
That's what we click.
It's not China's fault that they see a glaring, gapping hole in our consumption of information and they fill it with something twisted.
That's strategically sound.
That's a tactical move.
Yeah.
Ted Cruz got to find some new friends.
Well, he went out with his wife's group chat.
Someone in his wife's group chat sold her out.
Oh, and he gave the screenshots of the text messages.
That's so fucked up.
Yeah, that's politics, man.
So what is the deal with Syria?
Do you know anything about.
Syria's been going on for a long time.
So, I mean, unless there's something new that you specifically want to cover.
Biden's airstrikes on Syria.
So I think a big part of that is an extension of him wanting to show that he's invested in using American power to solve foreign conflicts, right?
Which was something that.
Trump was always very vocal about people were afraid that if a Democratic president came in like Obama, they wouldn't be that way, especially after Obama's whole faux pas with the chemical weapons in Syria back when he was still the president, right?
Right.
So there's, I mean, all of that goes into play.
But what you're seeing with President Biden is he is willing to, he's trying to carve out his own presidency.
He doesn't want to be, and even though we all secretly expect him to be a carbon copy of Obama.
Right.
Like that's just, that's what people are expecting.
That's, he's the, he was the vice president.
Obama basically supported him every step of the way.
Like they're close personal friends, whatever.
So people expect him to just be another Obama.
He doesn't want to be an Obama.
He wants to be a Biden for political reasons, for reputational reasons.
Does he really want anything?
But does he, is he just being told what to do?
Everybody, everybody, including Trump was told what to do.
There is no, the president does not make unilateral decisions.
Well, it seems like Trump at least is going to do, has ideas of what he wants to do.
He has, at least he has, I feel like he has a direction he wants to go in, whether it be for his own personal gain or if he actually is trying to help the country, who knows?
Right.
That's fair.
He definitely always has a vision and a direction.
Right.
I don't feel like Biden has a vision or a direction.
And I think that's symptomatic of the fact that Biden is trying to be a member of the party.
Trump was never trying to be a member of the party.
Trump was trying to be the people's president, right?
He didn't want to be the Republican figurehead.
Biden's trying to be the Democratic Party's figurehead, right?
The guy who heals the nation or whatever, right?
Like he's trying to represent that.
So because of that, he's stuck in the bureaucratic cycle of having to get everybody's opinion, hearing everybody's thoughts, and then making decisions.
Trump basically came, Biden goes into a room to hear everybody's thoughts and make a decision.
Trump came into a room with a decision, willing to hear everybody else's opinion to see if they could convince him otherwise.
Two different types of people.
Trump was also like, he is not a and was never a career politician.
Biden is the definition of career politician, right?
So Biden has built his entire career on this type of behavior of being able to listen to multiple people to make a decision that serves the purposes of the party, not necessarily the purposes of the United States, but he needs to make sure everything he does makes the Democratic Party look organized and strong and successful so that the next president and the next House and the next Senate will be democratically controlled.
The traditional presidential game.
It's never been about America.
It's always been about the party.
The party decides who runs for president.
The party decides who gets money.
Remember when Hillary Clinton and her campaign was undermining Bernie Sanders?
Yeah.
The party decides.
Fucking Bernie.
He keeps getting fucked.
Well, we're not that different from the Chinese Communist Party out there, right?
Except they're just one party.
That party decides everything.
Here we have two parties.
Those two parties decide everything.
We kind of get to vote.
When we choose to show up, but even then, only like 66% of the voting population shows up at most, and that's a problem.
Yeah.
Well, we're going there.
We're heading in the direction of China, right?
That's what we basically became to on the last podcast.
Well, I think that, I mean, they've got thousands of years ahead of us, right?
So everybody is going in the same direction, that evolutionary direction.
That doesn't mean we're all going to end up the same way.
But yeah, everybody's got to look at themselves in the mirror someday and say, what are we really trying to be here?
And one day we're going to realize we're just trying to be a two-party country that really just wants to be a one-party country.
Right.
One day, the one party is going to be so powerful that the other party just becomes dissidents.
And then how do we handle dissidents?
It's not impossible to see.
And I'm not saying which party it is.
Both parties want to be the one party.
So we've got to ask ourselves someday, is that what we really want?
Or do we want a third party?
Do we want to give independence a chance?
What do you think?
I would love to see us give independence a chance.
I would love to see us revamp the whole.
Election process.
Like the fact that you have to work so hard just to get on a ballot, to even have a chance of being seen as a presidential candidate, is kind of crazy, right.
Like it shows that we aren't really that vested in giving everybody equal opportunity to become president.
We're vested in people following the press.
The process that is kind of a bastardized British process of becoming president.
So I don't know if it's going to happen.
I would love to see it happen.
What what I loved about president Trump was that he essentially proved that there is a way for you to not be liked by either party, but still have a chance to run an election that gets you voted into office.
He just, I mean, he did it independently with a bunch of money and a bunch of private contacts and a bunch of like friends.
But if you recall in 2016, he pissed off the Republican Party.
Oh, yeah.
He pissed off the Democratic Party.
Like you, I can guarantee you there were people like pulling their hair out when they had to nominate him as the Republican, you know, candidate.
Right.
But he proved that it can be done.
So.
Technically, if an independent can be independently wealthy enough to run a political campaign, like they have a chance of potentially upsetting the whole process.
You think he's going to run again in 2024?
I don't know.
I always, so the way that the thing, the second thing I liked about Trump is kind of like what you said.
It's not that hard to predict what he's going to do because he's always doing what's in his own best interest.
Right.
I don't know today that him running again in 2024 is in his best interest.
Why?
Because what's he going to get out of it?
Like, I don't see what he's going to get out of it that's going to advance his own desires, obligations, and needs.
Right?
Like, running again and losing again makes him a double loser, which I don't think he really wants to be.
Right now, technically, right now, he's still a massive winner.
Right?
Half the country thinks the election was rigged.
Right.
He is still pulling the strings of major players in the grand old party.
Right?
There are tons of Republicans out there still spouting, and supporting Donald Trump.
Why?
Because they still want access to him and his network of money to fund future campaigns for the Republican Party.
So he has tons of power, tons of influence.
You don't see him in the headlines as much, but don't be fooled.
The man is so central to the Republican Party because of the influence and power he possesses.
And he's a former president that was never successfully impeached, that was never successfully convicted.
The dude in history, I guarantee you, if he does not run, I promise you, I hope people are still listening to this 10 years from now.
If he does not run in 2024, he will be a hero in history, guaranteed.
Really?
Guaranteed.
Because the whole 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when your kids are in college, they're going to read about a country that tried to impeach a president twice and failed.
And why did they do that?
Because the country was divided and it was split.
And who knows what we're going to look like in 24 years.
But right now, 20 years from now, what we are in right now is going to be embarrassing.
For sure.
Whoever they are, whatever our kids look at, they're going to look at us and be like, you guys were alive in 2020.
Like, weren't you embarrassed?
And we're probably going to say, yes, we kind of were.
But my point is, If, if, as long as he plays his cards right, he's going to continue to be super influential in the Republican Party.
He never has to take on the mantle of president ever again.
He's going to be rich, even richer than he was before, because the name Trump is still super famous and still super positive.
Don't forget, more people voted for Trump this year in 2020, more people voted for him than ever voted for any Republican candidate ever before, right?
Because it was record breaking turnout.
Half the country wanted the guy to win.
It was, he is not.
washed out.
He has not failed, right?
He is still just as powerful and just as celebrity as he ever was before.
Right.
So it's important to keep that in perspective because we think it's important who wins the presidency.
A party wins the presidency, not a person, right?
And the Democratic Party won.
Biden is their candidate.
He's doing his thing.
And I hope he does a bang-up job.
But like Trump is not going away.
He just may not be in politics directly like we're used to.
But yeah, I can almost guarantee you that our kids are going to look back and be like, what?
Navigating Mob Mentality00:13:20
why did everybody hate that guy so much?
Here's all the good things he did.
The economy was like banging before coronavirus.
And then like also this is the thing that freaks me out the most is every month that goes by, there's new information about coronavirus.
And arguably, the more information that we get, the more it looks like maybe we were doing the right thing at the beginning.
Maybe we weren't doing the right thing when we changed things.
So 20 years from now, all that's going to be hashed out.
Everybody's going to know what was the right decision, what was the wrong decision.
So they may very well be like, the only person in the world who was doing the right thing was Donald Trump when he decided to like.
Keep businesses open and keep the economy going because who knows what the future is going to say.
So many people hated him too.
Whatever he said, people just wanted to do the opposite.
Or it just made shit, whatever he believed in or whatever he pushed, it was the evil thing.
It's true.
But I mean, don't get me wrong.
There's just as much a chance that 20 years from now, people are going to be like, oh yeah, Trump was making all the wrong calls, but he's still going to be seen as a hero because he made any kind of call.
And they're going to be like, nobody had that information back then.
And the country still tried to impeach him and they still couldn't convict him.
Like he's in the history books forever because Nancy Pelosi decided to try to impeach him again.
What a stupid decision.
For a party that just wanted the guy to be forgotten, that's all they wanted.
Like we want this guy to just disappear and be forgotten in history.
And then they went and impeached him a second time.
It was unbelievable.
Why did they want to do it a second time?
So he couldn't run again?
So there were all like the narratives were all over the place.
Some narratives where they didn't want him to have the ability to run for president again, which being convicted of impeachment.
It means that you can't run for office.
Other narratives were that they wanted to set a tone for any future candidate that they couldn't act in bad and false interest to the United States in the last 100 days without getting penalized.
So that was another thing.
They wanted to try and set some precedent that if you tried to commit an uprising in your last few months in office, you will be punished.
So there was that narrative.
There was another narrative where they were like, we've got to show the American people that we never let up.
And that we're always fighting for our democracy.
So there are multiple narratives behind it all.
In the end, I think that the Democrats were just trying to beat Trump.
Everybody was just trying to make him look bad, which I don't know why we were working so hard.
It's not beneficial to the country for sure.
Yeah, it's not beneficial to the country.
I mean, who are they really fighting?
When I see elected officials who are supposed to be in charge of making all the hard decisions to keep my country safe and effective and working, and I basically see them wasting my time and wasting my money on a guy who's about to be forgotten because he was successfully outvoted in a fair and balanced election outside of, you know, outside of a few conspiracies.
Like essentially democracy worked, guys.
Like all the fire and all the money that Russia, China, Cuba, Iran have been putting into trying to make us look bad, it just failed because our democracy worked.
Voting worked.
People showed up.
The polls worked.
Like all the panic we had about whether or not mail-in votes were going to get there in time, it all worked.
There was an election.
Like we came out of it okay.
How much was it rigged?
Who knows?
We'll never know.
Yeah.
Like whether or not some of the videotapes that we've seen are real or whether or not they're fabricated and whether or not it was hundreds of thousands of votes or tens of thousands of votes, you know, we'll never know.
Do you think it was only on one side or both sides as far as fraud, voter fraud?
I mean, do you think both parties are trying to cheat to get more votes?
Absolutely.
I wouldn't call it fraud, but I do think that there's, underhanded cheating type tactics that are happening all the time.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it the fact that it was handled so differently than ever before is easy to say, oh, well, that's because of coronavirus.
Oh, there was coronavirus.
So we have to handle it differently.
Not necessarily.
Right.
You wanted to handle it differently.
Coronavirus became the excuse to handle it differently.
Like let's move on.
Like let's just call it what it is.
So yeah, I do.
There's always underhanded tactics, whether it's gerrymandering and creating.
Borders that benefit your party, or whether it's social media narratives that that intentionally influence and take advantage of an uninformed community or an underprivileged community that doesn't have access to information.
Whatever it might be, there's always underhanded tactics.
I just don't go as far as to call it like organized fraud that's.
That's a bit of a stretch for me.
It may have happened, but i'm not.
I don't have the information to say that it happened.
Yeah, it's just funny that so many people are convinced that the election was stolen totally convinced.
That's bonkers.
Yeah, I mean I, I People.
It shows me that people are super invested in the future of our country and I like that people are that invested.
I just don't like the fact that the information knowledge, experience triangle has become so out of whack that we're skipping.
I don't think it shows that they're invested.
I think it just shows that they, they just hate and they, they love Trump and they hate anybody who's not on their team.
I mean, you can, if you, I can see how you would think that I would also.
I would also venture to say that they, they want do you think, our country to look a certain way and they want it to look that way because they think it's the right way.
We've got to assume something called noble intent.
You have to assume noble intent if you're ever going to break out of the current information, the place where we skip knowledge.
When you assume malicious intent without demonstrable proof of malicious intent, you never give yourself the chance to collect all the information you need to make knowledge.
So you have to assume noble intent, which is the same thing as assuming somebody's innocent before proven guilty.
That's a fundamental pillar of our justice system.
If we assume noble intent, Put ourselves in the shoes of the person that we hate the most, the person that we don't understand.
Answer the question, why would they do that?
And then assume that they're doing it for some noble reason.
What is the noble reason behind why they are doing that?
So, what was the noble intent behind the people who stormed the Capitol?
So, the noble intent behind the people who went to the Capitol building, right, was to show that they wanted to exercise their rights as Americans.
That was their noble intent.
Once they got there and mob mentality took over, good decision-making went out the door, right?
Never mistake mob mentality for someone's intent, right?
You and I can go to a party.
With the intention of just having fun, you know, you and I, right?
And then who knows what could happen at the party.
And for all we know, we're going to end up trampling some innocent, whatever, kid or some person or whatever else because there's a fire alarm that goes off.
And now mob mentality sets in.
We're all survival instinct and we trample like three people and we're complicit in basically three people's deaths because we had to just we ran over them on our way out the door.
Yeah, it looked like they all just got in there.
They're like, What do we do now?
That's yes, exactly right.
So when you look at the imagery.
And I've seen some awesome open source analysis, right?
You go in and like storming the Capitol.
The first people that went in were taking pictures.
I've been part of storming operations.
You don't stop to take a selfie, right?
Like you're not snapping.
You're not taking pictures.
You're not sitting in a chair.
Like it was just, it's insane.
And you even see there's great articles out there that walk you through like the series of events as the Capitol was being stormed.
And it's exactly like there's a couple of like hillbilly looking guys standing in a big fancy marble courtroom.
as they first penetrate the building and they just kind of look lost.
They don't look violent to me.
You see security guards with no weapons drawn, step up to them and start yelling like, you need to get out, you need to leave.
There's no confrontation.
No one's like, there's no fists, elbows, guns, knives.
Like there's a conversation happening.
That is not the narrative that was so often painted of these people who were violently storming the Capitol building.
Terrible things happened.
Mob mentality makes terrible things happen.
People were killed, people were beaten, people were pulled out, like police officers were pulled out.
I'm not condemning the action at all, but I want to call it what it was, right?
It was a group of people who were hotheaded and passionate about something, and then a series of decisions were made that erupted throughout the entire mob.
And then as soon as one person saw someone else doing something, that was essentially permission for them to do the same thing.
It's common.
This is common human psychology.
And then it just took over.
For all we know of the 250 or something people that were there, a good half of them may have very well seen craziness happen and they're like, whoa, this isn't what I signed up for.
I'm going to back off.
For every cop and every security Capitol policeman who was beaten, it was some other rioter who pulled them aside and protected them and got them to a place where they could get help.
Nobody talks about that either.
We all remember the picture of the guys with the flagpoles beating the Capitol policemen as they're being dragged from the building.
But then nobody stops to talk about the 12 guys who pulled that Capitol policeman away from the guys who were beating him, stood in the way and said, hey, leave him be.
You know, are you okay?
Can we get you some help?
And took him to the outskirts where he could get help.
They weren't like pulled into some massive engine that just killed them.
Right.
There were good, decent human beings still there that were not taken over by mob mentality.
Nobody wants to talk about that.
That's why there was no conviction because it was difficult to prove that it was any kind of insurrection, especially organized or planned.
A lot of these guys are getting busted now that were in the Capitol and they're getting arrested.
And I think the most beautiful irony of the whole thing is they were anti-maskers.
So if they would have been wearing masks, they probably wouldn't have caught them.
Yeah, that's funny.
And I feel like anybody who broke into the Capitol building should be arrested.
Like seeing the FBI chase them down, seeing the local police chase them down.
Not a waste of money, not a waste of resources.
They broke a federal law.
If you and I decide to go like break into the local post office, we're breaking a federal law.
Right.
You've got to fulfill like law enforcement has to fulfill what they're doing.
I have no complaints about any of that.
What do you think the outcome?
Are we?
I think we're good.
We're good.
You get to what, 140 points?
1.30, something like that?
Yeah, 1.30, 1.45.
Okay.
What do you think would have happened if Trump would have been straight up just like, we need to take over?
Burn it down.
We gotta there's got to be a coup.
What do you think would happen if that if he would have done something like that?
Yeah, so I think that's I think that's really interesting so I Never think he would have done anything like that because I think he's way too sappy about right about risking himself right so not only do I never think he would have said that But if the people who were at the Capitol would have heard him say something like that I don't know that mob mentality would have ever taken over When something that directs when when violent action is directed before mob mentality is in place,
then it causes something called cognitive dissonance, right?
There's a, you have, you are doing something because of a set of beliefs in your head, right?
In your, in your cognitive brain.
And that's why you're there, whether you're at a concert or a party or a church, right?
You're, you're there for some reason.
As soon as somebody gives you guidance to do something that is in contradiction to the purpose of you being there, it causes dissonance in your mind.
That dissonance is kind of, it's like shaking.
It's like when someone shakes you.
It shakes you out of your current place of thought.
And then you become like, you become, what's the word I'm looking for?
Like focused for a second.
And you have to ask yourself the hard question, which of these two conflicting ideas do I pursue?
As long as you never have that moment of dissonance where you have to choose, it's much easier to flow into mob mentality.
Right, right, right.
I'm at this concert.
Now people are starting to mosh.
I'm close to the mosh pit.
I'm going to be in the mosh pit.
Mosh pit just got violent.
I guess I got to start swinging and kicking.
Yeah.
Right?
Something totally different when like you're at a concert and then they stop the concert and somebody's like, hey guys, we're going to start a mosh pit.
It's going to be super violent.
Just make sure you throw your hardest fists and your biggest elbows.
You might be like, oh, that doesn't seem like it.
Maybe I don't want to do that.
I'm going to step to the back now.
Right?
Like that's essentially the same thing that would have happened if he would have said, burn it down to the ground.
Take it down.
Maybe you would have had people who still stepped up and did it.
But there would have been, everybody there would have had that moment of cognitive dissonance and they would have had to ask themselves, is this what I came here to do today or is it time to go home?
And a lot of people would have gone home.
Yeah.
You're probably right.
I think you're right.
And the Capitol Police would have had a very clear picture of who's assaulting them at that point.
Yeah.
Instead, the way it turned out, they didn't know, are these peaceful protesters who have gone too far?
Are these crazy people?
Are these violent people?
The Alien Technology Debate00:15:08
We don't know.
And they approached it the way they were supposed to, right?
Nonviolence first that turned into security and just good work.
One of the last things I wanted to ask you about was, it's so funny how in these big you know, thousand page COVID relief bills, they always have these little things built into them.
Yeah.
And the last one Trump signed in December 2020, it had in there, they have 180 days for the CIA to release all information on UFOs.
Yeah, that was funny.
So what's going on?
Are you guys going to release that?
Why was that put in there?
I think it's already been released.
I feel like it's already been released.
I think CIA already released like 2,200 pages of UFO and, what was it?
unidentified aerial phenomenon.
Yeah, but there was nothing really in that.
Well, we don't know.
First of all, what's really funny is nobody knows what's really in it because all the complaints right now from the people who would be going through it is how difficult it is to page through all the documents.
Because these are like documents from the 50s and 60s.
Right.
Paper documents that have been basically just force-fed through a scanner.
It's difficult to sort through all that.
But yeah, on top of that, nothing has been found.
I would say that the reason nothing has been found is because CIA's authorities, CIA's mission is to collect foreign intelligence, like foreign intelligence that is foreign nations that the United States is in some kind of relationship with.
An unidentified flying object, an alien race that we are not in any kind of relationship with would not fall under your CIA's purview.
Most likely it would fall under DOD's purview.
It might fall under DOE's purview.
It would be totally wackadoodle.
So it makes sense that CIA does have some documentation on UFOs, because as the stuff comes in, and when you look at what has come in from CIA, it's like sightings in foreign countries by diplomats and whatever else.
It makes sense that they would have some files.
But the people who think that CIA is in charge of Area 51, I'm almost positive Area 51 is Air Force controlled.
Right.
Right.
And then you've got, like, it just goes on and on.
Their authorities have nothing to do with anything that would ever be extraterrestrial.
But that's not what people want to hear.
That's not what they believe.
That's not what they've been told by TV shows.
CIA must be in charge of UFOs.
They've got 2,000 pages of documents that are like 50 years old and they don't know how to organize it.
So I don't think they're in charge.
Do you think that there's alien beings flying ships to the U.S. and we have control of any of them?
I love this question because when people think UFOs, when people think aliens, they're still conditioned from our childhood.
We're thinking sci-fi, right?
We're thinking Star Trek aliens and Star Wars aliens.
We're thinking humanoid aliens, basically, right?
Right.
Why aren't we thinking about aliens like we think about zooplankton in the ocean?
Like tiny, minuscule little living organisms that you can't even see.
Why do we think that they're flying in ships that are visible to us?
Well, because we have reports of them, like detailed video reports of them, of these things off the coast, like the Air Force pilot.
The Navy pilots, yeah.
The Navy pilots in San Diego who literally have visuals of these things jamming their radars, which is an act of war.
and going from point A to point B in less than one second.
Yeah, it's an amazing technology, right?
But it's all something that's within the realm of what we can imagine, which to me, whenever you come across anything that's conventional, the most logical conclusion is that it was made by a conventional thinker.
So it strikes me much more likely that it's a weapon or some sort of device that was some sort of technology that was created by the U.S. or by some other first world adversary.
It makes the most logical sense that somebody else has created this amazing technology and and we don't know about it.
And the first time that we saw it was here.
Could it be alien?
Absolutely.
It could be alien.
But is it like 51% alien, 49% it's just developed some other weapon system in the US or some other weapon system in Russia?
Who knows?
There's not enough information to say that is extraterrestrial technology.
There's enough information to say this looks like it's something that our radar could even pick up, right?
It's something that's flying around in our atmosphere.
I think of it like if there's an alien race out there that has come to the Earth and come to the United States and has observed us, what makes us think that we're even close enough to their level of technology to observe them back?
Even accidentally, what makes us think that's possible, right?
I think of it like insects.
If you walk over an anthill, right, the ants in the anthill basically don't move.
They don't change anything because you're so big.
We as human beings are so far out of whatever they deal with day to day that they don't even see us as a threat, right?
We're just a thing.
So some massive alien technology that can travel through space at the speed of light and observe foreign cultures or observe other planets, they would most likely know how to observe us without us even knowing that they're observing us.
They would be this giant thing that just flies over and we don't even know it's there, right?
For whatever reason.
They would most likely not be some little tic-tac that we can pick up on our own radar scanners.
It's in the visual light spectrum.
What sense does that make, right?
Right, because they would have to know that there's Navy ships, Navy planes flying around everywhere, especially if they, I mean, I think the why would they risk it?
When he radioed it in, I think they were like, or when he reported it to his chief or whoever was above him, in the chain of command, he was like, right?
We've been seeing these.
So it wasn't the first time someone had seen one of those.
Yeah.
So I mean, it could be anything.
I am not saying it's not alien.
What I'm saying is, why are we pointing to it being alien?
So what's the other option?
The other option is scarier.
And I think that's why we point to it being alien.
Because the other option is that either American military technology is so advanced that we don't even know we can do this stuff, or one of our foreign adversaries, their technology is so advanced that We didn't even know they were able to do this stuff.
That's the scarier alternate.
The scarier alternate is that that little tic-tac flying around at super speed is a Russian-controlled cruise missile, and they now have that technology, and we had no idea that it existed.
That's even scarier than thinking that some alien lifeguard is observing us peacefully.
That's the truth of it.
Almost all of your major UFOs have always tied back to military aircraft or military developments of some sort.
Anything that's been exposed, whether it was the SR-71 or the B-2 or even the B-1, cruise missiles, drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, all went back to weaponization.
They were first seen by some innocent bystander in the desert in Nevada or whatever.
And they just proved out to be American weapon technology.
Well, now have you heard the story of the guy Bob Lazar?
Oh, yeah.
What do you think about all that?
About him back engineering these crap.
I mean, he vividly explains these things, them flying around, like zooming through this through the air.
Yeah.
And defying, like, what was it?
The crafts could actually, like, fold through gravity or something?
So the whole, the thing about Bob Lazar is that I do, I think that he's brilliant.
I think that he must be a genius.
But his story doesn't, it doesn't line up over time.
Not the details of the story, but the circumstantial evidence of the story, right?
So he gets picked to be the guy to reverse engineer alien technology.
And then somehow he's also able to like get free from the government and be allowed to talk about his history of doing this stuff, right?
The U.S. government would never bring in somebody even remotely unstable to take on something that sensitive.
And if they did, there would be all sorts of legal documents and whatever else to basically make sure that the guy never saw the light of day if he became unstable.
They wouldn't kill him or put him in a cell.
They'd have like, you have your own island in Bora Bora, and you're just going to live there, and we're going to take care of all your needs.
That's what they would do?
Yeah.
They wouldn't disappear the guy and put him in prison.
They'd pay a fortune to make sure that his secrets never get out.
Right.
But this whole idea that like the government went out and like publicly discredited him because he's really a brilliant engineer who can reverse engineer alien technology and there's nobody else out there who can do it.
I've seen enough spectacular people.
Right.
There's enough exceptional people.
He's not that exceptional.
Well, first of all, what makes you say they'd put him on pay a fortune and put him on a remote island and take care of him?
Do they do that?
They do that all the time.
They don't do that to Americans as often as they do it to foreigners, but they do it all the time.
Really?
You can make a problem disappear.
The CIA does that?
No, this is the US government can do this, man.
When witness protection is all about making people disappear by paying a fixed amount to basically make them go live a very comfortable life somewhere where nobody can find them, that is witness protection.
You amp that up, and now you can basically convince foreign generals and foreign politicians to work for the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, you name it, right?
And you're basically saying, hey, we're just going to make you disappear.
We're just going to take you to some glorious private place in Greece.
No one's ever going to know you're there.
You're going to have a new identity and new everything, and we're going to take care of all of your expenses for life.
You've got KGB, former KGB people living in the United States who basically signed a deal with CIA to say, we'll rat out the KGB as long as you let us have American citizenship and you give us an American name and American passport.
That happens all the time.
Right.
So as far as Bob Lazar's story goes, he wasn't compromised until they were spying on him.
His story at least goes.
They were spying on him.
They tapped his phone lines.
They found out his wife was cheating on him.
His wife was having an affair.
Then they're like, oh, this is a ticking time bomb.
As soon as he finds this out, he's going to be.
unfit to do this job.
So then they started phasing him out and then he started making himself public.
He did the interviews.
He did, I forget the guy's name who did the interview with George Knapp, I think his name was.
And then at that point, they tried to do many things.
Like they tried to hide where he went to college or like bury his degree, his college degree.
At least according to his story.
Right, according to his story.
So this is the problem.
Again, we're going back to that information, knowledge, experience triangle, right?
Single sourced information.
One person is saying this stuff.
We can't validate it any other way.
That immediately means that it can't ever be knowledge.
Single-sourced information just can't be knowledge.
It can't be intel.
Even if it's true, it has to be sourced.
It has to be vetted.
It has to be validated.
It has to be verified.
Or else we don't know that it's true.
The best it can be is just probable.
So then you have to look at the content of the information itself.
He is claiming stuff nobody else has ever claimed.
No weapons developer, no other engineer, no NASA scientist, nothing.
How is single-sourced information so highly specific about alien technology?
And as you watch over time, you can see the degradation in the story itself, like a cover story.
It just degrades over time.
It doesn't hold up.
Why would they be tapping his phones?
Why would they be tapping every part of his life if they trusted him enough to put him in charge of the project in the first place?
It doesn't make any sense.
And then why would they see his wife having an affair as the thing that would make him unstable?
Like, what would make them come to the conclusion that he's going to connect his wife's adultery with then becoming unstable with this program?
If he's so brilliant and so genius, then very likely he probably wasn't emotionally attached enough to keep his marriage alive, which is why it was falling apart.
Like it just doesn't match up.
Well, even though he is a genius or, you know, he seems to be extremely intelligent in what he does, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's as emotionally intelligent.
Exactly.
So if he was to eventually catch his wife, he could completely unwind.
Why do we think that, though?
If you think that he's not emotionally intelligent, why would he have an emotional reaction like that to the integration of that?
He wouldn't know how to handle it.
He wouldn't know how to handle finding his wife cheating on him.
He could, whatever, start to drink all the time or do drugs or whatever, and he wouldn't be stable.
That's true.
And it could also be that it doesn't even phase him.
It could also be that he's like, well, I don't really hang out with my wife anyways because I'm always in the lab.
You know we're not really the same person anyways right, but it's tasting, it is a risk.
It is a risk.
Well, it's just as much of a risk as putting taps on a person against like court orders, anyways right, like there's so many.
What i'm getting at is the only way you can connect the story is through a very specific set of points that don't consider any alternatives.
As soon as you start to connect alternatives, the story starts to break down.
You're like, well, it's not logical that this would happen if these other two things were possible.
And then if that still happened, like if the probability still happened, then it still isn't logical that this next thing would happen.
So how many illogical steps have to happen before we start to ask ourselves, like, well, maybe the whole story is just illogical.
Maybe the guy just lives in, like, Never Never Land.
Maybe he really was working on some super cool stuff, but it wasn't actually alien.
Maybe the guy was working on some super cool stuff that the government told him was alien because they didn't want him to know anything else.
Like, who knows?
Any number of viable alternative stories could happen in addition to his story.
But what's hard here is that because he's been saying his story for so long, he's been interviewed so many times, and the UFO community is such a dedicated, such a passionate community, they want to believe that other life is out there.
Just like they also want to believe that it's friendly, and they also want to believe that it's intelligent, and they also want to believe that it's humanoid, and they also want to believe that it's visible, right?
Nobody's going to feel very good if they find out that real aliens are actually like the size of other planets and could basically crush us accidentally.
Like nobody's going to want to believe that.
Yeah.
Or that there's some kind of like spiritual entity that's just made of energy and they basically have the ability to wipe our brains.
Nobody wants to think any negative stuff about it.
They want to believe that it's something that they can put into their little, their conventions of science fiction.
It's not.
The Reality of Space Warfare00:04:29
It's going to be much bigger than that.
If he did have, if what he says is true and he was working on some sort of crazy craft that works like nothing we've ever seen before and uses technology that we can't even comprehend, is it true that the government would want to keep keep it under wraps specifically for keeping us protected against other countries and threats from other countries.
We don't want other countries to know that we have this because we want to use this for weaponization.
Yeah, most likely, if what he was saying is true, the most likely outcome would be that we would siphon off little pieces that we understand and use them to advance ourselves.
It's the same thing that it's why NASA existed for so long because they created little things that were useful in space that then could also be used in everyday life.
So that for weaponization, for urbanization, for industrial purposes, for any number of reasons, right?
And to keep it out of the hands of adversaries, for sure.
If what he was saying is true, most likely we would take what we understand and siphon it off.
It would never go into some black vault to never see the light of day again because that's just a risk.
Putting it in a black vault where nobody ever gets to see it is just an invitation for someone else to steal that information and then use it against you.
So we would never do that.
We would take what we know and we would start to build on it and apply it and use it to to evolve ourselves as fast as we could.
That's just human nature.
That's survival instinct.
And to weaponize space, right?
Yeah, well, weaponizing space is a whole different story.
Some people think that we've been doing it for a long time.
Technically, ICBMs get shot from space, right?
What is an ICBM?
An intercontinental ballistic missile.
Okay.
A nuclear missile.
Right.
Basically goes up into space, does a half of an orbit, and then fires down a warhead, like a gun, shoots a warhead down.
Technically, according to the current space trees, nothing can be in orbit around the earth.
That is a weapon.
But things can go into partial orbit.
That are a weapon really.
Yeah yeah, that's the space.
I didn't know they went into space like that.
Yeah yeah yeah, and there's.
I mean that's why all of our like the radars, the lasers that can, that can uh, detonate incoming missiles, all those things can be triggered from you know, different parts of the atmosphere that could be technically called space.
So the weaponization of space is kind of a funny thing to talk about because It's kind of happening.
When China launched a rocket to blow up a satellite, that then just shattered a satellite and put tens of thousands of pieces of space debris.
That was essentially just a giant scatter bomb in space.
When did they do that?
2010, I think it was, when they blew up one of their own satellites with a ground-based missile.
Why the hell would they do that?
Well, they claimed that it was because the trajectory of the satellite was going to bring it into some dangerous zone.
It was going to land in a populated city.
At the time, there was an essential space GPS race with China.
So it was largely seen as a show of force that China was saying, we can shoot your satellites out of space, America, if we choose to.
And to show you, we're going to shoot one of our own satellites out of space.
And then it just created this gigantic train wreck of flying space debris that messed everybody up.
Yeah, it turned a bullet into a shotgun shell.
Exactly.
But that's the weaponization of space, all within the confines of the space treaty that we all said we would never put.
Orbiting weapons into space.
So what wasn't there just like a recent big show of force with China?
What was that in the news?
I just I don't know much I heard I just heard it recently that there was a big show like they showed like their Navy like there's a big naval show of force Oh that those happen pretty frequently I mean even amid even amid coronavirus.
I'm pretty sure China did like a military parade.
Yeah, but yeah, they've they're very proud of their Navy.
They're developing their Navy developing their aircraft carrying capabilities their forward deployed capabilities from the sea like their littoral capabilities are all on the rise They invest a ton In terms of a percentage, they invest a ton of the percentage of their GDP back into their own military.
But I'm still pretty sure that the portion, even though they invest like 8% back into their military infrastructure, it still pales in comparison to the 2% that we invest in our own military capacity.
So people get all wound up about China investing in their future military.
Investing in Future Capabilities00:01:31
They are, but it's still, they can't compete, you know, run men be per dollar against what we're spending.
And they're, you know, decades behind us in terms of innovation and technology.
So they're using old technology. to create new weapons, whereas we use new technology to create new weapons.
It's a completely different model, but one that still makes people nervous.
Cool, man.
Well, thank you for doing this.
I think we're almost out of time.
Yeah, absolutely.
We've got to get out of here.
No, it's all good.
I appreciate the time.
This was super.
Dude, this time flew.
I can't believe that we've been doing this for two hours.
And I feel bad because we never wrapped up on the whole Myers-Briggs thing.
So just to tell people, look up Myers-Briggs if you care about personality.
Because I'm pretty sure we cut that off.
I think we cut it off after four or five of the eight character traits.
Yeah.
Whatever.
I can't believe how fast this one.
Flu man, it was fascinating to talk to you.
I really appreciate you being here and doing this with me.
No, it's my pleasure, man.
I'm glad you find it so informative and interesting.
I love having real conversations with like smart people.
Where can people find your work and your books and your content?
Yeah, everything about me is on everydayspy.com.
I have a spy game for folks to come out and try their own spy skills right away, right there on the homepage.