CIA Operative Andrew Bustamante | PBD Podcast | Ep. 180
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PBD Podcast Episode 180. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Former CIA operative Andrew Bustamante and Adam Sosnick.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
0:00 - Start
1:30 - Andrew Bustamante background
9:41 - Andrew getting recruited to CIA
14:00 - How to hide your CIA status from family members
17:35 - Andrew's CIA recruitment
23:50 - Andrew Bustamante explains the CIA making him cut off his family
29:31 - The worst place Andrew has ever traveled to
33:51 - What Andrew Bustamante can reveal about the CIA
39:05 - Can you hide from the CIA?
42:55 - Has The CIA been infiltrated?
47:31 - Are the Federal Agencies compromised?
53:36 - Privatizing the CIA
1:01:25 - Are the FBI/CIA a 'net positive'?
1:06:55 - Does the CIA need more competition?
1:11:26 - Reaction to Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan Experience
1:18:16 - Was the release of Hunter Biden Laptop story strategic?
1:29:24 - The relationship between government & big business
1:34:08 - The Mar-A-Lago raid
1:43:34 - What institutions Andrew Lost faith in
1:50:01 - Joe Rogan claiming people should 'Vote Republican'
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Episode number one, 180 um.
Today's guest, a special one uh, he may look like uh, a Hispanic, Colin Kaepernick, but it's not Colin Kaepernick, okay then don't don't don't, you know, don't get too excited.
It is actually somebody way more interesting to me, a former covert CIA operative okay, who went to school at South Florida State, then went to the United States AIR Force Academy.
He's now a Fortune 10 corporate advisor and, at the same time, when he was in for seven years, he and his wife his wife was also a CIA agent they had a kid and they had to make a decision on what to do.
I think in 2014, they decided to get out and try the civilian life, which is a very strange adjustment if you've been living in that life to go to this life.
We'll find out about it today but, with that being said, Andrew Dostamante, but we're going to call you Andy on the podcast, if that's okay with you.
Yeah great, good to have you on, man.
Thanks man, I'm happy to be here.
What a story you got.
Well, I appreciate it.
So it's my story.
So, like all of us, we think our story is the least interesting story.
That's a good point.
You always want to know other people's stories yeah yeah, yeah.
So, for people that don't know, maybe share with the uh, the audience on.
And, by the way, if you're listening to this and and you want to know kind of what things we're going to cover, here's some things we're going to cover.
Obviously, we're going to cover the background.
I want to know some things about the credibility of the different agencies for me.
Uh, I I have a hard time believing that agents can um, you know, separate their emotional opinions versus actually seeing stuff like hey, this data says bad things about the guy support you I don't want to see that versus this data says uh, good things about the guy support.
Yeah, this is what we found out on the intelligence.
I have a hard time in the last few years.
I think a lot of people would probably agree that uh, the trust and I know you left in 14, so in 14 it still wasn't that bad, but since 16 it's been very, very taxing on any of the agencies CIA FBI, NSA, you name any one of them they lost a lot of credibility.
So how do you, you know, differentiate between emotional side, what your own opinions are, versus the data you're getting.
We want to talk about some of the stuff with the laptop.
You know an article came out from NEW YORK POST saying 79 say truthful coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop would have changed the 2020 election, which means Trumps would have been.
Trump would have been president today.
Zuck's uh guest appearance on the Rogan podcast.
A lot of stuff was said there that uh got people thinking he's talking to the FBI and you know how decisions they made with the laptop.
We'll talk about Mar-a-lagua, since it just happened.
A lot of talk about civil war and some of the media platforms just recently, you know Cnn's talking about.
We're trying to be Less of a Democratic mouthpiece.
They just let go of stelter.
They just let go of not just let go.
They are Cuomo was a year ago.
Lemon's on the channel.
Possibly Lemon.
You know, if they lose Lemon, they may go out of business, but that's the challenge.
And a few other things.
So we'll cover those things here.
But for the audience that doesn't know your background, if you don't mind sharing briefly how you went about becoming a CIA agent.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, that's a super exciting lineup that you just laid out there, Patrick.
So I'm going to try and keep my piece as tight as possible.
So I was at Air Force Academy for college.
I was a brown kid in Pennsylvania.
If you're brown and in Pennsylvania, I get you.
And all you want to do is get the hell out of Pennsylvania.
So that's where I started.
I was looking at any and all options, just desperate to do something that got me out of rural Pennsylvania.
What city were you in?
I was in Harrisburg, which is the actual capital of Pennsylvania.
Nobody knows that.
Everyone thinks it's Pittsburgh, Philly?
We all remember fifth grade when we got that one wrong.
Yeah.
Right.
In our fifth grade.
Harrisburg.
Sorry, you got 49 out of 50, buddy.
So I found out that there are these military schools that give you free scholarships.
And that's what took me to the Air Force Academy.
So I just kind of went all roads to Rome, try and get to a free military education.
I was successful.
I was the first one in my family to go to college and went from Air Force Academy into the Air Force, learned about nuclear missiles, learned how to fly, got a top secret clearance, learned Chinese.
It was a great Air Force experience.
And then when I tried to leave, because I was not a short-haired, clean-shaven kind of guy.
You were not, even when you were in.
Oh, no, I had to be when I was in.
Right.
So every day was one of those days where you're like, this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.
And when you're like 22 years old, 23 years old, like every year feels like a long time.
Now we're like, years just disappear.
But when you're the real you.
Long hair, Colin Kaepernick vibe, the beard.
I need to get rattier like dreads.
I need to get some sun bleach going on.
I want to have that leather skin that you see so often in Florida.
Go down to South Detroit.
They're everywhere.
I'm still endeavoring.
I'm still endeavoring.
But that was what picked me up.
So then CIA saw me trying to leave the Air Force.
And that's what.
CIA saw you trying to leave the Air Force and then they reached out to you.
Yeah, exactly.
And now let me ask you this.
Was there a like, was there a desire to one day want to be an FBI, NSA, CIA?
Was there anything like that?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I was one of those kids that grew up wanting to be a fireman and a cop and serve and keep people safe.
That's what I always wanted to do.
When I graduated from the Air Force Academy, my number one choice, we get to choose, we get to tell the Air Force what we want to do.
My number one choice was Air Force intelligence.
But then needs of the service, it's the military.
So they put you wherever they need you.
So they're like, well, you can fly.
You're the right height.
You had decent grades.
So now you're going to be a pilot.
And I was like, oh, well, I was hoping to do Intel.
And then, you know, going through my Air Force career, it was, I wasn't the best at anything.
And the Air Force had just told me that I couldn't be an intelligence officer.
So the last thing I was thinking as a 27-year-old is that I should apply for CIA.
They told you you couldn't be an intelligence officer for what reasoning?
Because they wanted me to be a pilot instead.
Okay, got it.
So I was like, I swang, you know, I took my swing of bat.
I got turned down.
Not going to keep wasting time on this one.
So when I got the phone call from Langley, I was like, maybe you didn't see in the records where I already got passed up for this once or, you know, I learned later on how Air Force actually, how CIA actually recruits, and then it all made sense.
But at the time, I was thinking, I've already been flushed out of this system.
Like, there's no reason to expect that.
I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the fact that I saw you say something to the effect of you were applying or you wanted to get into the Peace Corps and you had two main things on your mind, which very much so resonates with me.
You wanted to see the world and you wanted to get laid.
Yeah.
And you're like, all right, what else is out there?
And then something popped up on your screen that said, how is it out of hundreds of hours of content out there, that's the only thing you can do?
I mean, at the end of the day, some minds think alike.
Great minds think alike.
Well, can we talk about how nonchalantly you're like, yeah, I got into the Air Force Academy.
Like, that's nothing to shake a stick at, man.
You have to get two senators to sign.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Two senators to sign off, the governor to sign off.
Like, that's nothing to shake a stick at, man.
Plus, you flew for him.
Our 85-year-old shake a stick reference.
I've never heard that from anyone.
I'm an 80 at heart, baby.
80 at heart.
Old souls.
Old souls are the best.
Yeah, there's some challenges to get to the Air Force Academy.
But being a brown kid in Pennsylvania in 1998, I mean, affirmative action has its benefits.
It also helped that I was a busboy in a white, like a white person's golf club where the senator or my congressman liked to frequent.
So I was a hardworking busboy who actually had the ear of the congressperson.
And then my bosses backed me up.
They're like, hey, this guy's a busboy, but he's not going to be a busboy forever.
Right.
Back this kid up.
Back this kid up.
Yeah.
It's all about, I am, I mean, from the, my success is not because I'm smart.
It's not because I'm like lucky.
It's not because I'm anything other than just blessed by the fact that other people stepped up and lifted me up one more level.
So then when you're in it and you're thinking, well, this is not going to work out, you know, Air Force Intelligence.
I'm going to have to figure something out.
Was it an immediate thing that they contacted you?
Because my friend, he wanted to be Delta.
A friend of mine wanted to be Delta.
To become Delta IV, you're not going to be like, hey, guys, can you tell somebody from Delta to reach out to me?
I really want to be Delta.
You can do that with Special Forces.
You can do that with Ranger.
You can do that with a lot of things.
Not with Delta.
All of a sudden, he disappears for eight years.
And then years later, I meet up with him in Madrid.
He says, yeah, I was Delta the last 12 or 13 years.
But that was his dream from 18.
When we first got to the unit at Hunter and First, that was his dream to go Delta.
And it happened.
Was it the dream to become CIA?
Was it the dream?
Okay, so it wasn't.
That part wasn't for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was never a childhood dream.
I've worked with people who, just like, I mean, fit your story exactly.
Yeah.
Nine, 10 years old.
I want to be CIA.
Went to college, picked their major, did everything to get there.
And then they got there.
But that just wasn't me.
For me, it was, what can I do that lets me travel the world and get late?
I was very happy.
You said something popped up on your screen one day.
So I was applying.
Yeah.
When I was trying to leave the Air Force, and anyone who has transitioned out of the military knows what this feels like.
You're like, what the hell can I do?
In one way, you're like, the whole world is an option.
And then in the other side, you're like, I only do one thing in uniform.
And nobody needs that out there.
So in my kind of frustrated attempts to figure out where I fit in, that was when I just boiled myself down to, well, what am I?
Like, what are the things I really want here at 27?
I want to travel the world, not just the world, but like be armpit of the world.
I want to see the shittiest parts of the world because I was able to see some shitty parts of the world with the Air Force.
And it really made me proud to be an American.
So I was like, I want to see more shitty parts of the world because it's just going to make my confidence and my appreciation for my country that much firmer.
So I was looking for Africa.
I was looking for like hardship.
And I was looking for a lady with hairy armpits and hairy legs that wanted to get it on and attend in Africa.
Those are the two things I was looking for.
Peace Corps was going to deliver.
Wow.
But halfway through that application process.
I want to understand how the CIA works.
Something popped up on your screen.
Was that intentional or is that accidental?
You see what I'm asking?
So you've got to remember the government works like one giant organism.
And the Peace Corps is part of the government.
State Department is part of the government.
DHS is part of the government.
FBI is part of the government.
The U.S. military is part of the government.
My entire record going back to the age of 18 was on file.
My name was in capital letters, which means I'm an asset of the U.S. government, right?
That's what they saw.
So when I started applying to another government agency, I fell into some massive algorithm somewhere and happened to hit on what they were looking for, just like a keyword search anywhere else.
Got it.
And I got a warning screen that popped up in the middle of my online application to Peace Corps, a screen that said, hey, you may qualify for other opportunities.
Big red screen.
Please put this application on hold and we'll reach out to you within 72 hours.
If you were to have the same thing happen, big red screen says, hey, you may qualify for other opportunities and you're 27 years old.
How easy is it to click that button?
It says, yes, put me on hold.
And that's how they found me.
And then from that point forward, it's just that application was abandoned and a new application was created.
So it wasn't, it's not a word of mouth method of recruiting.
They have multiple.
CIA has multiple ways of recruiting.
There is word of mouth.
For sure, there's word of mouth.
And that's for a very deep cover kind of niche area because there you're looking for people with established credibility and in some special field.
So it's not easy to find business people who are actually running successful businesses.
And then you want to turn them into spies.
That's a hard thing to do.
So you look for word of mouth.
And then you have things like the government world, anybody trying to move from one government job to another government job, that can be automated.
That's easy.
And then you've got the whole world of college recruiting where you have either somebody who's a recruiter on campus or somebody who's a regional recruiter that visits multiple campuses.
And you will literally find CIA in a cheesy stall with a sign at almost every college recruiting event for big colleges.
Pat, you tell the story that your dad pulled you aside one day and he's like, you can tell me, son.
It's okay.
Just you can tell me.
You were in the army 101st, right?
And your dad literally thought you were doing something.
This was out of story.
This was five, six years ago.
He says, five, six years ago.
You're already running PHP.
No, no, no, no.
This is six years ago.
This is maybe five to seven years ago where he's like, you can tell me.
You know, we have people in the family.
I'm like, dad, I'm telling you, I'm not.
He says, I understand if you are.
I said, Dad, first of all, I'm not.
He says, I know even if you were, you couldn't tell me.
I said, I'm telling you right now, I'm not.
So till today, there's a 20% chance.
He legitimately thought you could have been something in the intelligence community, CIA, what have you.
I don't even know where to speculation for him.
He just one day came up to me.
We're having dinner and he asked me a question.
He says, I've been really thinking about this.
I don't know how to ask you without offending you.
He says, are you?
I said, I'm telling you, I'm not.
He says, I understand.
And he kept saying, I understand.
Yeah, like this.
No, I'm telling you, I'm not.
But he's your dad, man.
He's your dumb.
So your dad always thinks that you're the best.
Your dad always thinks that you're the most elite, right?
Like, that's an awesome dad.
That's an awesome dad.
Pat, the reality is, and I'm used air quotes, you're most likely not an asset, but you were at one point.
Did you have family members, people pull you aside and be like, Andy, I mean, come on.
I mean, just tell me.
I mean, I'm your dad here.
I'm your family.
I'm your friend.
Yeah.
Nobody was on to you.
Do you have those difficult questions?
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, one of the things CIA does train you to do is how to look and act like the most boring, forgettable person, especially to your own family.
So I didn't get a lot of those challenges.
How do you do that?
So one of the.
Because that doesn't look like a natural thing for you.
You don't seem like a boring, you know.
So how do you adjust if you're not?
You have my background, which is what makes me interesting.
I got turned away at the front door of your building.
They looked at me and the guy, the guy, no kidding, said, what are you doing here?
And I said, I'm here for an interview with who?
Yeah.
Patrick?
We don't just let anyone into this building.
I need to call someone.
I need to call someone before I can call it.
I saw him standing outside as I pulled in.
I usually come in the back door.
I saw Andy in the front.
I was like, oh, that's, I mean, I know who that is.
And he couldn't get in.
I was like, come on, buddy, right this way.
Sign in, please, though.
So that's how you do it, man.
Being discreet, and just not someone you know that someone would recognize.
So the human brain has two, has two elements to it.
Right, it has a fight or a flight response in its, in its paleomammalian brain, in the central cortex, in the back of your brain.
So you look at everything around you as either beneficial or threat right, or even, to boil it down further threat non-threat threat, non-threat.
The way that you get yourself forgotten.
You always trigger the non-threat side of the brain.
If you ever trigger the threat side of the brain, either because you're super attractive or because you're super ugly, whichever one it is, right?
If you trigger that threat response in any way, you're going to get remembered.
The brain will store that in short-term memory, move it to long-term memory, depending on what it thinks.
If you trigger the non-threat side, you don't even get retained in short-term memory.
So essentially, okay, so let's talk about it, how to be a non-threat.
Don't ask tough questions.
Don't ask technical questions.
Don't ask why questions.
Don't talk about yourself.
Don't talk about yourself.
Don't touch politics.
Don't touch world events.
Are those some of the ways you...
Correct.
Look put together, but don't look like you put effort into yourself.
Don't wear your money.
Don't wear money on your wrist.
Don't wear money on your fingers.
Don't wear money on your clothes.
Show up on time, not early or late.
Why is that?
Because if you show up early, then people remember that because usually you catch people by surprise.
If you show up late, people are usually annoyed because they've been waiting.
If you show up on time, you give everyone else a chance to either be early or late and they feel good no matter which way they are because either they were early and prepared for you or they were late and you were prepared for them which makes them feel good.
Interesting, but that's a little counterintuitive to what I hear about the military.
We have our friend, a couple of friends of the Marine here, Chris.
He says, if you're on time, you're late.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
That's like kind of cognitive dissonance between a CIA agent and just a typical military person.
Correct.
Because remember, CIA, when you're CIA, you're trying to be discreet and you're trying never to appear as a threat.
You're trying to be forgotten.
When you're military, you're trying to show obedience.
You're trying to be remembered.
Right.
So on time, early is on time.
On time is late.
Very, very standard military jargon.
Because when the commander shows up, the commander wants everyone there because who wants to feel important?
The commander.
The commander.
If you show up after the commander's there, everybody looks at you because they think you think you're more important than the commander.
That makes sense.
So going back to it with the recruiting side, hopefully we'll get to the bottom of this story on how you got recruited this time.
Let's see if we're going to get this guy this time around.
So you apply on this.
You set the pop-up, right?
I said it pop-up, exactly.
So you apply on this pop-up.
What happens next?
All I did on the pop-up, all I did was click, put me on pause.
So I'm inside the Peace Corps website.
I'll wait for 72 hours before, and I'll give someone a chance to call me.
About 24 hours later, I get a phone call.
And the phone call is to an old school flip phone, if you remember those old school phones.
And all it says is 703.
I don't know what 703 is, but it doesn't say blocked.
It doesn't say enlisted.
It doesn't say the full number.
It just says 703.
So I pick it up.
On the other end of the line is some nice person, a lady, who basically says, hey, are you Andrew Gustamante?
Did you apply for this position?
And, you know, I said yes to all those things.
She was like, hey, it seems like you might be a good fit for a role in national security.
Would that be something that interests you?
And then we have a very short conversation that basically just verifies I am who I said I was on the on online and that I would be interested in national security position.
They don't say who or who with.
Did you ask?
I did.
I said, who is it with?
And she said, we're not in a position to disclose that right now.
But she did say we would like to interview you in person in Washington, D.C. Would you be amenable to that?
And again, 27-year-old, 27-year-old single male, everything she asked me was yes.
Yeah.
Come down.
Let's go.
Let's do it.
Let's go.
So then she said, we're going to send you a ticket and a rental car reservation, a hotel reservation.
It'll be at your house overnight.
And then just follow those instructions and we'll see you in D.C.
To Virginia.
Oh, D.C.
So for me, I'm in Montana at the time.
And I think to myself, never going to happen.
Nothing's going to show up.
That was just a weird crank like whatever people are just trying with stupid people.
You legitimately didn't think it was a real thing.
Because I was a nuclear missile officer for the Air Force, too.
So this just seemed to me like a, this could have been anything.
There's not a lot of people.
I say that I'm a nuclear missile officer.
Oh my gosh, you're just a little nuclear missile.
Vinny did the same thing.
He was a nuclear officer in the Air Force.
I don't think he's as qualified as Airbnb.
No, no, no, but wait a minute.
Vinny was a nuclear officer in the Air Force.
Vincent O'Shaughness, the same guy who dresses up as Alfonso Ramirez and raids Nancy Pelosi's office, was a former nuclear missile officer.
In the Air Force.
In the Air Force.
We're going to have to verify that.
We're a cool bunch of crazies.
That's true.
Okay, so you're in Montana.
They send the car.
You're thinking there's no way this almost trying to pull a prank on you.
And then I get an overnight package that has everything she said it would have with a physical paper ticket that has me in D.C. like two months later.
And I go.
And I go and I follow everything.
The recruiting process.
The recruiting process kicks off.
Now, for most people, that recruiting process is somewhere between nine and 18 months because it takes so long for the security clearance to come through.
I already had the clearance.
So my interview process happened in about six months.
Not because, again, not because I was smart, but just because the majority of the work was done.
They had my whole military background.
They knew that I was a Chinese speaker.
They knew I had nuclear missile knowledge and they knew that I was and they knew that I was.
Let me ask you, you say because I'm not smart.
You know how sometimes we're kind of like, well, I'm not the smartest guy.
You know what I'm saying?
We're kind of playing that I'm not that smart to not be a threat because we want to be not a threat and you're naturally transformed.
You've mentioned I'm not smart multiple times.
I'm thinking, yeah, this Air Force nuclear scientist over here, not that smart.
Yeah.
But no, but a part of that is for me, I don't know if I want CIA to not recruit smart people like you.
I don't want them to go recruit like just anybody off the street.
So, you know, there's a, when I worked at Morgan Stanley-Dean Wooder, we went through a bunch of interview processes.
Of course, nothing like it.
In military, you didn't go through interview process.
I was a hummer mechanic.
So you don't become a hummer mechanic needing a process.
Just here's a wrench, go, right?
But when I did go through Morgan Stanley-Dean, what it was like one interview, two interview, you're not accustomed to that many interviews, and you're taking tests after test after test after test after test.
What were some of the tests you took with them?
Was it more mental?
No, I'm assuming none of it was probably physical because if you're coming from Air Force, they already know you're somewhat taking care of yourself.
What were some of the tests you went through?
Yeah, so it's a psychological battery.
It's a psychological battery almost exclusively.
So I had a 2.4 GPA coming out of college, which is well below what they say you have to have to apply to CIA.
They say you have to have a minimum of 3.5.
And then I went on and got a graduate degree at University of South Florida.
And I did well in my graduate studies mainly because I wanted to prove to myself that I was smarter than I was in college.
I was just chasing tail in college.
And we all suck grade-wise when you spend late nights on benders and tail.
But the application process for CIA looks like personal interviews, where they're basically pressure testing your ability to work under fire and be flexible with the situation.
And then they pair that with psychological interviews.
Some of those psychological interviews or some of those psychological tests test your personality.
Others test your cognitive reasoning.
Other ones actually quantify your ability to take disparate information and then combine it into something useful.
So I did well.
I must have done well enough in those tests to be moved forward, but I didn't expect at any point to actually make it to the next round.
Because in the back of my head, I'm thinking, like, I barely graduated college.
Yeah, granted, I went to a nice college.
I went to a challenge in college, but I still didn't get great grades.
And I wasn't a 4.0 student in high school.
I am the model, get distracted by things fun in life kind of person.
Just turns out, after I got in, that is exactly what CIA is looking for.
The undercover element of CIA, the Directorate of Operations, the National Clandestine Service, the people whose job it is to go out there, meet and recruit as sources and spies, those people need to be flexible, social, and up for the next big adventure.
Interesting.
Your analysts, your scientists, your tech wizards, you need those people are super smart and borderline Asburgers.
They don't always want to go outside.
They don't want to deal with people.
Hardcore introverts.
Great point.
That do a different job.
That totally makes sense.
So it makes sense where it is almost the non-threat as well.
It's a form of a non-threat based on how you're explaining it.
Okay, so then you go in, you're six months later because you already had the clearance.
So you're hired, you're working with them.
At this point, are you moving somewhere?
Are you staying where you are?
Are you constantly under road?
What are you telling your parents?
Did you have a girlfriend at the time?
If you did, what did you tell her?
Like, what were those conversations like?
Yeah, I mean, those are, man, no one has asked me these questions, brother.
These are, I'm enjoying and mildly uncomfortable by some of this.
I had a great girlfriend at the time who I hope does not follow me anymore because this interview is going to hurt her heart for sure.
But I had a great girlfriend.
She was a great girl.
And she was in Montana with me.
We were both nuclear missile officers.
And I got the call to come out.
And in that first interview, that's when they tell you you're being considered for CIA.
You're being considered for undercover work.
At this point, you can't tell anybody you're going to work for CIA, but you can tell them that you're considering government positions and that you're flying to Washington, D.C. for these multiple interviews as someone looking for government positions.
And then they tell you very clearly, you need to start breaking off contact with anyone you don't intend to spend the rest of your life with.
Oh, damn.
So that's exactly what I did.
I went back and she was a great girlfriend, but she wasn't someone I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
So I had to start breaking off that contact even before I knew I was going to the second or third interview.
I knew Peace Corps was my future.
She wasn't applying to the Peace Corps.
I knew that something around the world, something, you know, hard was my future.
She was looking for something different.
Yeah.
So I had to leave that behind.
Well, they say like a lot of in the Manosphere red pill community, they say chase excellence, not women.
It sounded that's like exactly what you were doing.
Yeah.
And I didn't, I wouldn't give myself the credit to say that, but it does feel right when you say it out loud like that, right?
And then my mom and dad, I come from a family that was in, my family was in the middle of a divorce.
My mom and dad were at 25 years of marriage and then going through divorce.
That was their thing.
It was the perfect, the perfect chaos for me to not even be a blip on their radar.
So, hey guys, I'm sorry about your divorce.
I'm going to leave the military and go get a job in the government.
Do you have brothers and sisters?
I have two younger sisters.
One was having a baby.
The other one was figuring out her own life.
Like it was really easy.
When you want to disappear, you would be shocked how easy it is to disappear.
Everybody's living in their own world.
And once someone just opens your eyes to the fact that we are all the star of our own movie, that movie is our life.
We are the star.
We are the hero.
We are the center of attention.
Except when you sit next to somebody else, you realize they're the star of their movie.
I'm not even a supporting actor in their movie.
They don't even know I'm here.
So when you just stop talking, when you just stop talking about yourself, when you stop trying to get attention, it's really easy to have no one give you attention.
Pat, let me ask you, you talk about this all the time.
Like you disappeared for a while.
You cut off all your friends.
You said, I got to change my life.
This happened after your dad had a heart attack.
I mean, you allegedly not in the CIA, so different stories here, but not everybody watching here is trying to get part of the CIA, but disappearing and recreating yourself.
That's something you talk about all the time, Pat.
Would you weigh in on that?
Yeah, I mean, but in this example, which is very, the way he's explaining it is the fact that even when you disappear, most people are not going to notice when you disappear.
Correct.
You know, there's only a few people that can disappear.
By the way, even sometimes big names disappear and you don't even know about it.
Like Jack Ma, who nobody barely even noticed what he was doing.
By choice versus by force, he's disappeared not because he's trying to be a hide-and-go-seek champion.
He disappeared because I think they disappeared by mad.
You're winning, Jack.
Yeah, but that is a big thing you talk about, recreating yourself and disappearing.
Well, it's the count of Monte Cristo, right?
Where the guy disappears.
He goes to jail, comes out, reads all these books, the mentor he has, comes out, his girl leaves him for this other guy, and all of a sudden he's putting the party.
The girl shows up.
Wait a minute.
I'd recognize the face.
That movie is a very, very deep movie.
So here, you disappear.
Now, are you in communication?
Are they hearing from you?
Are they seeing you?
Is there Christmas parties?
Are you going to family gatherings?
Are you going to Thanksgiving dinner?
Are you still doing those types of things?
Yeah.
So I'm doing the bare minimum to kind of stay a member of the family so that I don't become a threat by ostracizing the family.
I'm just, I'm the son that has an important government job somewhere.
And if you talk to most, most parents won't be able to tell you the details of what their kids do.
They'll say, oh, I think he's a salesman for some insurance company.
Oh, oh, I think he's a doctor in a practice in Tampa, whatever it might be.
They don't know the details.
So it was very easy for my family, my sisters, my cousins, everyone.
What would you tell them?
I work for the government.
And then I can't think that your families don't ask, what do you do for the government?
So I would tell them I worked in the Foreign Service.
What does that mean?
So Foreign Service is a subset of multiple government agencies that work overseas, right?
So there's Foreign Service and support FBI.
There's Foreign Service and support Department of State.
There's Foreign Service that support trade and commerce.
The Foreign Service is a sub-element of the U.S. government that basically is Americans serving abroad.
I have a hard time believing that nobody else would go a little bit deeper than that with the questions.
They do, but they do.
But one of the things that we're taught to do when you're undercover is you don't use you turn questions.
So if somebody starts digging into me, here's, you want to disappear.
You don't talk about you.
You want to appear as a non-threat.
You don't talk about you.
So when they ask you a question, you just turn the question around to let them talk about them.
How do you do that?
Give us an example.
Because Pat basically is saying, yeah, foreign service.
Come on, buddy.
What does that mean?
Yeah.
So foreign service.
So, so what does that mean?
What does that look like?
And I'll be like, oh, it just means that I get to travel the world.
Have you ever wanted to travel the world?
And then most people will answer that question.
Orcupine and just flip it on them.
Yep.
Where do you want to go?
I would love to go there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you said the shittiest places in it.
What's the shittiest place you went to?
Oof.
So Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, is about as shitty as the world gets.
Worse than Portland because we have a foreigner.
Only slightly.
At least Portland has beer.
Shout out to Will.
Yeah.
That's an inside joke between only five of us.
I ask people all the time, like if you had millions of dollars and you were quote unquote chilling, what do you want to do with your free time?
Everyone says travel the world, but nobody wants to go to shitty places.
You had this yearning to see the worst of the worst of the worst.
Hairy armpits.
Hairy armpits.
So you could sort of codify your love for America.
How did that even resonate with your mind?
It wasn't necessarily codifying.
So when I was with the Air Force Academy, they sent me to China.
So I was on a, I was learning Chinese and in 2002, 2002, I went to China to do a six-week language immersion with the Air Force Academy.
And when I was there, it was, I've been to Canada.
I'd been to resorts in Mexico.
Like, I've done the stuff that most Americans do.
But in China, I was eating dog.
I was.
Really?
I could, yeah.
It's a normal meat to eat there.
What about bat?
I didn't have bat.
That's less normal.
You were eating dogs.
Yeah, we ate dog meat, right?
There are stands, street stalls, just like you would get a hot dog in New York with scorpions and like different large beetles.
Like this is just normal stuff there, right?
And then it looks like New York, but the food stalls are not anything like we've ever seen.
I can't drink the water.
The water out of the sink can't be used to brush your teeth.
The water that comes out of a water fountain when you go to a restaurant, you always have to ask for the bottles of water.
Like these were little things where I was like, I don't have to do this in America.
Like I can literally go to any sink in the United States and like grab a glass and drink some water.
It might taste bad, but it's not actually going to give me a long-term permanent gastrointestinal issue.
You're not going to have Montezuma's revenge.
Yeah.
So just these things, when I finally left China to come back to the United States and I landed in the United States, I was like, ooh, this feels good.
So why would you want more of that and even worse?
Because one thing that I've always been is very proud of my country and it gives me the ability to drown out the noise.
There's so much noise in our country.
So much what I call first world problems.
People bitching and complaining and fighting about things that make us a half a percent, 0.01% better or worse than where we were yesterday.
Not realizing we're 35% better than other first world countries.
I took my executive assistant with me on a trip recently to Austria.
And we went to Austria to support Ukrainian refugee program and whatever else.
You're just going to get to that conclusion a whole lot faster in third world countries than in first world countries.
That is a very good point.
By the way, especially as a, I saw you and your daughter, right?
You have a daughter?
Yep.
You and your daughter were sitting there.
She was doing homework or studying world wars or different things and just watching how you're raising your kid as well.
Have you taken your daughter yet to a third world country?
And if yes, which home was it?
So my children have not been to a third world country.
They've lived in the United Arab Emirates.
They lived in Abu Dhabi for a year.
Got it.
And my son, especially, they both have very fond memories.
And UAE is a first world country because it's a collegiate Arab country, rich in oil wealth.
They basically overnight developed into a first world country.
So it's not a difficult life at all.
Except for the heat and the culture, right?
Arab culture is a difficult culture when you're a Westerner.
My kids have very fond memories, but they also are like, it's not like, I don't want to go back to UAE.
This was something they tell me often.
I don't want to go back to the desert.
I like the fact that I can, you know, be free to talk to whoever I want to talk to.
I don't have to worry if they're a girl or a boy.
I don't have to worry about classes.
They're saying that at what age?
My son is nine.
My daughter is five.
I love that.
I love that.
Basic stuff there.
So, okay, let's go back to being a CI agent.
So what can you talk about that you were a part of?
I've had a lot of CI agents here.
We've had Jonah Mendes on, which, you know, Chief Disguise Officer.
I think she was married to Tony Mendez.
Another story, like you guys were, they were also married to each other.
Nick McKinley.
We can go to Mike Baker.
We can go to so many of them.
And it's such an interesting space, right?
On what you guys do.
And then sometimes, like, I remember one time I was hosting a Vistage event.
I don't know if you're familiar with Vistage.
Vistage is a community for C-suite executives.
And every month, CEOs come together and there's a chair.
And then he brings a guest once every other month.
One of the guests we brought to our office was the former director of one of the directors of CIA for a region of it that he came to us.
Pretty powerful guy, well-known guy.
But he came up and for one hour, we kept asking questions.
And his answer was, I can't talk about that.
I can't talk about that.
What can you talk about that you were involved in?
Not necessarily details, but to say, I participated in this.
I was a part of this and I was a part of this.
So the rules at CIA are interesting because I love my CIA brothers and sisters who are still serving and everyone who's former, and they know that this is true.
We can talk about a whole hell of a lot more than what we choose to talk about.
It's just there's a culture.
Older gray hairs have a culture that they grew up in where you just talk less.
They've taken it too far.
So they've taken it so far that now they appear cagey and now they appear like they're trying to hide something when the CIA doesn't ask you to hide anything.
The only thing CIA tells you to do officially is to protect sources and methods.
Interesting.
Classified sources of collecting information, classified methods to collect information.
Everything else is fair game for the most part, with the exception of speaking in detail about where you served.
So I can say I was all over Asia.
I was often working in Latin America.
I was often working in the Middle East.
I was often working in Africa.
I can tell you that.
I can tell you some regions, right?
You don't have to stretch your brain if you know that I speak Chinese.
I also speak Thai.
Again, I can tell you what I speak.
You have to infer the rest from there.
What I can't tell you is what kind of operation, what kind of sources, what kind of methods I was using to collect information that the policymakers needed.
Every one of us can talk about that.
Nick can talk about that.
I know Nick.
Nick's a good dude, right?
He's running a fantastic operation with DeliverFund doing great things.
He can talk about that if he chooses to, right?
Jonah does a pretty good job of talking about some of her background, but she wasn't operational.
She was in the disguise space.
She was what we call support on our side.
Really interesting stories.
She can talk a whole lot more than what she talks about.
She can't tell you exactly how we create our prosthetics, and she can't tell you what adhesives we use to make sure that they stick in cold and hot weather and through sweat, but she can talk about a lot more than she chooses to talk about.
We all can.
So from maybe let me ask a question this way.
And by the way, is it true that you guys sign a lifelong NDA?
That's a lifelong NDA.
It's not an NDA.
It's a secrecy agreement.
It's a secrecy agreement.
So, okay, so let's say you break it.
What happens if you break it?
What do they do to you?
As soon as we break it, that gives CIA the legal jurisdiction to arrest us for breaking a law, right?
However, we still have a court of our peers that we have to go to.
This is where it gets tricky.
This is kind of the loophole in the whole process.
This is what makes it so that people write memoirs that the CIA never approves, but those same people never really go to jail.
In order for CIA to prove to a public court that you disclose classified information, they have to disclose the classified information to the court.
So if you say, like if you write a book and you're like, I was an undercover officer in Iraq, technically, you just broke your secrecy agreement.
So CIA can come out and say, now you're going to jail.
We can sue you for breaking the secrecy agreement.
But then they have to present the court with documents that show that you were actually in Iraq.
So there's no secrecy agreement then?
There's a secrecy agreement if you go too far.
Has anybody ever gone too far?
Nobody's gone too far.
People have had lots of different punishments that can be done through different types of court, but people have yet to go to jail for disclosing information without an intelligence service or disclosing information to a foreign government.
Is there a different method of discipline that we're not aware of that you guys can't talk about?
We can talk about, yeah.
So the other methods of discipline are that we can have wages get garnered often.
So I'm working, I've worked on two book projects.
My first book project made it all the way through approval processes and everything.
It was ready to go to publishers until a civilian attorney got involved and decided that they wanted to have an extra conversation with CIA.
And then that extra conversation, CIA was like, oh, you know what?
We don't want this book to go public.
So we're going to say no after they had said yes to all these other things.
When they communicated that to me, the way that they said it is, we know that we've approved for this book to go live.
We know that we've already approved everything you've said about you, but we have not approved what this other person who's involved in the book said about themselves.
So if you go live with this book, they'll go to jail.
Okay, so but let's let's stay on that.
So in order for a person to fully follow those guidelines, there has to be a public example of what can happen if you really cross the line.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Like if there's not a public example, it's like, yeah, but listen, I kind of know how to work in between the lines to still get my message across and I'm having this conversation here or there.
You know, like even, you know, the mob, right?
The mob is like, hey, we have Omerita.
Hey, and I've sat with God knows how many people in the mob world I've interviewed.
You know, it's in the mob, if you go through Omerita, you may get killed.
Your family may pay a price for it.
So it's the price is even bigger, but the CIA is not going to say if you do anything, Andy, we're going to come after your son and your daughter and your wife.
And they can't say that to you, right?
So what is bigger than taking your life and garnishing wages?
I don't give a shit if you garnish my wages.
Let's just say if I'm going through it, if I'm CIA, that's not that scary, right?
The only thing that's really that scary is family, blood, and other things that I don't get to do because you're a professional at hiding.
It's not like they're putting a chip in you where if you decide to go live in a place, if you really wanted to hide, you could hide away from CIA, couldn't you?
You could try.
Yeah.
We have the skills to try and to do a pretty good job of it.
But if they were to really use all of their resources, they'd find pretty much anybody.
So what's been a method where they've done something where other people are scared to not want to follow through with that?
So I think it's there's two things here, right?
So first, I would say that you don't have, I would disagree with your first point, that you have to have a public example of punishment to convince people not to do something.
You actually don't need a public punishment.
You just need to state and demonstrate some level of high probability that something might happen.
Most people are motivated by fear.
Fear, fear is a future state.
So if they just instill enough fear, fear is something that controls behavior.
So if you're coming from CIA, I mean, Matt, put yourself in the shoes of a person who has committed part of their life to working for this organization, and then they leave, and then they start writing a book or they start speaking out, they start coming on podcasts, whatever it might be.
They don't want to run the risk of crossing a boundary too far and then actually forcing the hand of the federal government.
You don't want to be that person because in my heart, I'm still very proud of serving.
The last thing I want to do, going to jail isn't the worst thing.
Having my wages garnered isn't the worst thing.
Losing the respect of the same organization that I served, losing the respect of the American people who I love, that's worse than sitting in a jail cell.
Yeah, but that's your character.
That's not everyone's character.
That's a lot of our characters.
I left.
Keep in mind, I left.
I had my first child and I left.
Many people have many children and stay.
Many people sacrifice their relationships, multiple divorces.
They sacrifice their health.
They sacrifice their fitness.
They sacrifice everything to continue to serve.
For me and my wife, 2014 came and we had to make a life decision and we decided to prioritize family first.
Now, you were exactly right.
That's 2016 on, massive attrition from the intelligence services.
We were at the front end of it, but what they've seen since 2016 is incredible.
And we were at the, we didn't start the trend.
We just happened to be on the first wave of leaving.
But you left like at the, it's like selling your property at a perfect time.
You sold at a perfect time.
And we're very happy of it too.
Yeah.
Oh, I mean, congratulations on selling your property at a perfect time.
So, so, okay, fair enough.
So I ask that because, you know, you said fear is a great motivator of what actions we take in the future.
I get it.
But I also think, you know, sometimes also when you learn a lot, you, you know, the three phases we all go through with parents and kids, right?
You have first phase, you know, kids idolize their parents.
Then second phase, they demonize their parents.
Oh, I saw what you did, dad.
You know, your mom, I said, they demonize.
Then third phase is they humanize their parents, right?
I'm assuming an agent, a CIA agent or an FBI or an NSA probably goes through those three phases with the agency as well.
You first idolize, like to others, you're like, oh my God, and the CIA, that's sick.
Oh, my, I be using that to get late every day.
You know, that's what I'll be doing.
Right.
So I'm assuming like phase one is, dude, I'm idolizing.
I'm part of the freaking CIA.
And second phase is like, damn, that's some dirty stuff right there.
Because there's stuff you know that we don't know.
Right.
So then you demonize, then you humanize.
And you say, well, these are not perfect people.
Everybody makes mistakes and every organization makes mistakes.
Corporations make mistakes.
Governmental agencies make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera.
So you go more into humanizing phase.
But while somebody's in the demonizing phase and they're seeing the dark side of the organization, that's a vulnerable area for somebody to come in and exploit that opportunity.
Absolutely.
Okay.
And many have from the outside, right?
Many, we've had agents that have been bought money, sex, women, all of that stuff.
For me, when it says a lifelong type of an end, you call it secrecy.
You know, I don't know.
Like sometimes I wonder if it's happening, we don't know about it, but they can't talk about it because it'll ruin the credibility of the existing agency.
Because how do some people know so much about us?
Where are they getting their intel?
Like you were talking about how Russia on another podcast, you were talking about how great of a job Russia's done against Ukraine, how they're actually getting exactly what they want.
Yes, you know, Ukraine has shown a lot of strength, but maybe Russia's strategy is working very effectively.
How they're getting their intel, I don't know.
Even you said, you said, I don't know how they're getting, how they're doing what they're doing.
So how are they doing it?
Maybe we have some people that are supporting them.
Could that be a possibility?
I would say it's more than a possibility.
It's almost a guarantee that the United States, in the world of intelligence, we all assume that we are penetrated to some level or another, right?
Penetrated means we have a mole among us or we have information leaks among us.
There's a technical operation collecting information from servers or databases somewhere, right?
You have to assume that you're compromised because if you assume that you're not compromised, you're even more exposed to risk.
So assume that you're compromised, compartmentalize from there and act appropriately, increase your security from there, right?
Just like I joked about the guy who didn't let me in the front door.
That's awesome security for value attainment.
This building is that much more secure because that guy in the face of doubt kept me out.
No problem.
He let me in eventually.
That's getting a promotion, by the way.
But that's how you have to operate if you want to maximize security, right?
When it comes to why we don't speak out of school, yeah, we don't want to dishonor our country.
We don't want to dishonor CIA.
We don't want to smear our family names, but we also, for damn sure, don't want to give our enemies information they might be able to use against us just so that we can talk about it on CNN or talk about it in the press.
There's an awesome example of Osama bin Laden from 2002, 2003, the Washington, the Wall Street Times, or maybe the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or New York Times was speaking to an intelligence service anonymous source, and they talked about how we were tracking bin Laden through his satellite phone.
That was a source and a method, right?
The one thing we're not supposed to talk about.
And then because of that, Bin Laden stopped using that satellite phone, completely changed his communication strategy, went dark, went black, and we had to start all over again.
I don't want to give China any advantages.
I want to give Russia any advantages.
I want to give the American people every advantage we can give them.
But I also want to be able to talk honestly about what my peers don't talk about because just like you're saying, I want to respect my secrecy agreement, but I also want to be able to shed some additional perspective on the awesome work that the men and women still inside get to do.
The privilege that I have as an American, being able to leave and still talk about it.
Because if I was in France, I wouldn't be able to.
If I was in China, I wouldn't be able to.
If you're an SVR officer in Russia, once you leave, you don't get to talk about it.
That's good that you're so pro-American.
Okay.
And I love hearing that.
But for me, I want to transition into this next topic and then we can talk about the one that I skipped over.
So Peter Strzok, okay?
James Comey.
James Comey parties with Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.
His wife, they've supported their campaign.
Okay.
Peter Strzok, hey, texts come out.
This is what we're willing to do, X, Y, Z. You know, there's no way we're going to let him win.
You know, and the texts, we can see the text, right?
Okay, you seem like a reasonable guy.
You seem like a nice guy.
You seem like a guy that you're like a trifecta.
I would have a blast having a party with you, going partying with you.
And we were 20s.
We'd have a blast together.
If we added in, maybe we'd go to jail, but we'd still have a blast together.
Number two, you're the kind of guy that I, you know, enjoy watching a game with and we're sitting there talking.
And, you know, and then three, I'd feel comfortable for my family and my kids to meet you.
And we, you know, you go to the house, bring you to my place.
You give that vibe.
Okay.
You're a man's man.
You give very peace, comfort, all that stuff.
I can't say that about everybody.
And we can't say that the CI is 100% bulletproof hiring process because you can't read in the minds of everyone.
And I understand how some people that are fully non-emotional, that can be also psychological, where a person can be extremely narcissistic or whatever, where they can manipulate.
That's probably not a person they want to hire as well.
But how do people like Peter Strzok?
How do people like that get in where they represent an institution that we have to trust, an agency that's essentially working to protect me?
How do they prevent from their emotions and their friendships and the parties they get invited to and the communities they live in?
How do they say, listen, we may be best friends.
I may support you, but you're going to jail.
Okay.
That's a very hard thing for a person to do once you're fully vested with someone, right?
There's a reason how they say in Hollywood, a lot of big celebrities that don't go on social media.
If you notice the big names, they're not on Twitter.
You can't find a Daniel Day-Lewis on Twitter.
You can't find any of these big actors on Twitter because for them is the moment we open our mouth and give you our opinions, it's very hard for us to act because now you see us in a certain way, right?
Okay.
That's very deep to me.
Like this guy that played Elvis Presley, I don't know what the guy's name is, incredible job.
I was watching all his interviews.
I was so flabbergasted by the guy.
I was really blown.
But there's nothing on the guy, right?
How, what kind of an artist he is.
But for this side, I have a hard time believing that even these agents on the inside can let their emotions get in a way where they help one side of the political party over the other side.
No, again, if we skip the idolized phase and we skip the demonized phase, we go straight to humanized phase.
You're explaining exactly why that happens.
Of course, they're swayed by their emotions.
We're all swayed by our emotions.
We go through specific training to de-incentivize our emotional decision making and increase our dependence on rational decision making, but it's still a process.
It has to be trained.
It has to be practiced.
It has to be exercised.
Oftentimes when you're making emotional decisions, you're not giving yourself space or time to train or exercise.
You're just in a moment making an emotional decision.
That's a very human thing to do.
We all do it.
I don't know Peter.
Peter Strzok.
So I don't know him personally.
I can't speak to his specific credentials, whether he was blue badge, CIA, green badge, CIA, related to CIA.
I have no idea what his role was there.
But what I do know is that the men and women inside CIA, when I was— He was FBI.
Peter Strzok was FBI.
Thanks.
Thank you very much.
So when I was inside federal government, inside specifically inside CIA, we are always taught to expect and predict that we will think and act emotionally and then try and take steps to limit that so that we can give ourselves the space to let our rational brain keep up.
If you're interested in the cognitive cycle, I can give it to you in about two minutes.
Go for it.
So every human brain, we call it pink matter.
It's like a computer in your head.
You have two sides, a left side and a right side.
We all know that.
What we don't know is that one side works faster than the other side, right?
Your left brain is your logical brain.
Your right brain is your creative or emotional brain.
Your right brain works faster than your left brain.
It's because your right brain depends on these things called cognitive biases or cognitive connections, these inferences that it builds over time so that it can jump from conclusion to conclusion, skipping logic.
That's why if you're a butt guy, right?
You don't even, you just, you are attracted or not attracted in an instant based off of the thing that you're interested in, right?
If you're a girl that likes a certain kind of shoe or a certain kind of purse, you're attracted to it immediately.
Your brain is skipping the logical step.
If your right brain, if your left brain was in charge, it would say, what is that?
Is it real?
How much does it cost?
Can I get access to it?
That's four steps compared to the one step that says, I like it.
I want it.
Salespeople understand this intrinsically, even though they may not be able to put words to it.
Make it so that it triggers a right brain reaction and the sales process will move faster.
If you're trying to sell through a left brain process, the sales cycle is going to move slower.
Try to talk about the features and benefits, whatever else.
So they train us to slow down our right brain and speed up our left brain.
And there's exercises and practices you can do that.
It's one of the things that I teach my executives now, one of the things I teach my sales teams now, so that people can kind of reprogram the pink matter.
For me, by the way, can we do a poll?
Can we do a poll to see which agency people trust the most?
Put FBI, put CIA.
What else you want to add to it?
Do you want to put NSA there as well?
Which of those three do you trust the most?
CIA, I have an assumption which one I think is going to be number one, but just put it in there.
I don't want to say it before people put it.
So FBI, CIA, NSA.
Let's see what people say in this poll.
But okay, so that's my discomfort.
So for me, when you're working like, okay, last night we're having dinner and we're talking consulting.
Our consulting business is growing very rapidly and we're getting more and more consultants that are coming over to us and we're getting more people that are calling us from McKinsey's bigger consulting firms that want to sell our product, right?
So they're reaching out to us.
One of the things that a guy was talking about how is a lot of lazy executives nowadays in Fortune 500 companies, they have an idea that they want to bring up to the CEO.
Okay.
So when they want to bring up this idea to the CEO, and Tom's talking about this last night, they say, the best bet is I'll go to McKinsey and I'll say, here's my idea.
Here's a half a million dollars.
Can you send me an analysis on why this idea is good or bad?
They send it to them and they'll say, here's why it's a good idea.
Then they'll go pitch it to their CEO or whoever the boss is that they're working with and they'll say, here's my idea.
By the way, I've already spent the half a million with McKinsey.
McKinsey already approved that it's a good idea.
Let's go ahead and test it.
So that's their insurance policy to say, if it succeeds, awesome.
I get the victory.
But if it fails, look, at least I went and got my insurance policy from who?
From McKinsey.
And McKinsey gave me a thumbs up.
Hey, you're doing a good job.
Go for it.
You know, kind of like backing them up.
Don't worry, we'll take the blame for it because of our and whatever research that we gave you.
So it's an interesting way of doing it.
So for me, intelligence, do I trust a government agency that's been there for years to do it?
Or would I rather use an independent agency that's more on the free market, free enterprise side, that has a reputation that if you don't hit it, negative reviews is actually hurts a private agency.
Negative views doesn't do shit for CIA.
I can't go on Yelp and find CIA.
I can't go on Glassdoor and find CIA.
I can't go anywhere and do anything with FBI and it.
They're like, dude, say whatever you want.
You can't do nothing about it.
So maybe what happens with this, with my opinion, is even if I'm a president that gets elected, say I become a president, do I really trust the guy that's been an agent for 22 years?
Because in a way, the agent that's been there for 22 years or 27 years or the director that's been there for 32 years, he looks down at me because in the back of his head, he'll say things like, dude, you're only here for four years.
At best, if you're lucky, maybe eight years.
You ain't shit.
I've been here for 32 years.
Who the hell are you?
You're going to come and put it on your resume that you became a president and you're out of here.
I don't care what you're going to be doing.
So me as a president who gets paid to be paranoid, I sit there and I say, why the hell would I trust you to do the intelligence for me?
Because your loyalties to people that came before me, I'm going to go use an independent agency outside, not in the government, because I don't trust you, to be honest with you.
And then see what we can get.
So do you see how there's a little bit of that, you know, distrust and the lack of respect the director of CIA or director of FBI has for whoever becomes a president and how the lack of trust a president could have for people that are currently in these agencies.
Yeah, and you're exactly right that that is what happens.
And then, but there's a second step that I think we're overlooking because all of those director positions are presidential appointments.
So I would say almost to a worse detriment, the president just brings in whoever he wants to put in or whoever she wants to put in and they become the new director, right?
Every president has the right to appoint who they want.
And that's why that's why directors at CIA and directors at FBI and directors at NSA change so frequently because they don't come up from the inside.
They don't spend 35 years at CIA and become the director.
They spend 35 years and become some lackey to the director and the director is appointed by the president inside the president's inner circle of friends or peers.
And then they get the chop off from the Senate.
So even I would say it's almost worse than what you're saying because the most professional person in that organization doesn't even have a chance of becoming the director.
They have to make friends with whoever the incoming president is or even worse, whoever the presidential party represents, and then they will become nominated for that role.
And so that's the truth of how it works.
And then to your second point, which I think is even more powerful, America is asking itself the question now, should we privatize intelligence?
We failed massively on September 11th, 2001.
Massive intelligence failure because we let the intelligence infrastructure at FBI and CIA run things the way they had always run things through the Cold War.
And we had completely closed our eyes to the fact that we were moving into a war on terror.
Afghanistan, massive failure.
Predicting Ukraine, massive failure, right?
And now with 2016, President Trump, when the CIA turned its back on Trump, Trump just dried up funding and directed this funding into a private intelligence organization.
So we have seen it work.
We've seen people do it.
The precedent has been set.
So now the government is asking itself the question collectively.
Do we even keep doing it this way?
How do we change?
How do we evolve?
How do we evolve closer to the speed of business and less to the speed of government?
It's not going to happen, though.
It's not going to happen.
It's going to happen.
That's why you see private intelligence on the rise right now.
Most of the people that sit inside CIA headquarters aren't government employees.
They're contractors that belong to Booz Allen Hamilton, Race Beyond, LADO.
more comfortable with that.
But that's the transition.
Yeah, I'm more comfortable with that.
And I'm glad I hope it goes that direction.
So my paranoia, if I'm in there, and even if we appoint a director of CIA, okay, what percentage of the guys that are on the inside, forget about the director of CIA, what percentage of the guys on the inside that are actually doing the legwork that are bringing up the report to the top are getting replaced with a new president.
Not many of them.
And you're right again.
So that's where, again, if you look at it through the humanized lens, the way that you get those people to fall in line is you have to incentivize them the right way.
But I don't even want it to be incentive because I don't want it to be incentive.
In sales, I understand the best thing that Jonamenda said to me was a follow-on.
I said, what's the quality of a great CIA agent?
She said, Tyler, we can't hear you, Tych.
She said, somebody that is extremely charming, somebody that can pull information out, somebody who is very competitive, somebody who is very curious, but when they save the world, they have no desire to share that big victory with anybody and they keep it to themselves.
Like to the level of the ambition isn't, hey, dude, you won't even believe what I just did yesterday.
I prevented World War III.
That part doesn't happen.
Because to most people in sales and Hollywood and sports, hey, so tell us, LeBron, 38 points, 16 rebounds, 12 assists, three steals.
How's it feel?
Well, let me tell you, you know, it's a form of a recognition.
CIA agent, so tell us, Andy, CI agent Busametes, how does it feel known when you went in there with Xi Jing and you found out that China's doing this?
Well, this was a team effort and we've been working on getting to tell him.
You don't have that kind of recognition, right?
So I don't want there to be incentive.
The only incentive I want, anybody working for the government is the truth.
That is the only incentive.
That's not the only incentive you want.
What other incentive do I want?
Form of recognition.
Because the thing is, no.
So I never said recognition was the incentive.
You said the incentive.
I said they have to be incentivized.
So how do you incentivize?
The same way you incentivize career.
That's totally fine with me.
That's what I'm saying.
Oh, I'm getting with that.
Yeah, you want to get with that.
You want the person in charge of Africa operations to be the most qualified, most experienced person who's done the most hard work, who's done the most whatever, to become the head of Africa.
And then you want to incentivize that person to tell the truth to the director every time.
So then you don't want to make it punitive.
You don't want to make it some kind of weird, you know, you only brief up good news and you hide bad news.
You don't want that to happen.
So you have to incentivize them to continue with their career, even when they tell you what you don't want to hear.
Yeah.
So for example, like, you know, we're studying, I don't believe in art.
Okay.
Like I believe 70% of art is fraud.
Okay.
I don't know that it's fraud, but I don't understand it.
So I'm with you there.
But check this out.
But I'm so skeptical that I did research.
Okay.
And we're sitting there going through the stuff with art, right?
Where today, total value of art in the world is $1.7 trillion.
And Deloitte says that by 2026, it's going to increase by $900 billion.
And there's a place in Switzerland called Geneva Freeport that holds $100 billion of art, 1.2 million pieces.
They hold $100 billion in one building.
You may want to show this building.
That's the building.
That building in Geneva Freeport holds $100 billion of art in that one building.
And this is people that buy the art, that send it there, who never see the art to prevent from paying the taxes.
And it's a form of a vault.
So they don't buy it because I'm going to show it off on my house.
They buy it as an investment purpose.
They put it in.
A lot of times, what a lot of billionaires and millionaires will do is they'll buy an art at a half a million dollars.
They'll send it there.
They'll get a new appraisal to say it's worth $10 million.
And then they'll give that art and donate to a museum.
And they get a $10 million write-off where they get to write off 30% of it.
So there's a lot of different things with art.
But I'm really trying to see, maybe, Pat, you ought to give the people in the art world a break.
So even this Salman Mundy thing that recently sold for Not Rushdie, no, no.
Salvador Dali.
San Salvador Dali.
You can pull up the piece that the art piece that sold for $450 million recently, the guy from Saudi Arabia that bought it, Leonardo, what is it called?
Salvador Mundi.
Salvador Mundi.
So this thing in 1958 sold for £45.
Then in 2005, it sells for $10,000 in New Orleans.
Then a person comes out and says this was part of the Queen of England's collection and it's a real piece of Leonardo and et cetera, et cetera.
Next thing you know, it sells for $450 million by a person that nobody knows about.
And then 80% chance it's a fake and it's not real.
So I really want to debate myself on this.
I really want to convince myself that the CIA and the FBI and these organizations do a lot of good, where the net net positive, you know, it's a net positive than a net negative.
I'm okay with, well, I'm not looking for perfection, but I want to be able to trust it.
But man, it's very, very hard to do with the last few years on what's happened.
My level of skepticism, it's so high, it's hard to believe how much good they do rather than how much bad they do to the world.
I can understand.
I can totally understand.
And I don't, I wouldn't disagree that I am also disappointed with what I've seen in the last, since I left in 2014.
So what is that, eight years?
There's a couple of things that are, you brought up two points, right?
You brought up your own questions about the productivity and the constructive use of the intelligence services.
And then you brought up the art thing, as I think, as a parallel.
This has a very interesting story or a very interesting explanation.
If we can get to it, I think you'd like it.
But when it comes to the value of intelligence services, it's hard to assess the value when you only see the cost of goods sold, right?
That's essentially what you're looking at.
The American people look at with any secret organization, they only see what they do wrong.
They only see the things that costs money.
They have no idea the lives that are saved.
They have no idea the tragedy that's avoided.
They don't get those stories.
I love Jonah.
She's a great lady, a great patriot, a great CIA officer.
But she embellishes sometimes what it's like to be a CIA.
That's an old school tactic.
We like to overreach in the, our gray hairs always overreach and idolize what it's like to be CIA.
Part of it's because that's how they were conditioned while they were there.
Part of it's because they always want to be pitching people back, right?
The more accurate, the more accurate way of saying it.
She was right about the curiosity and she was right about the competition.
She was right about all that.
But we absolutely celebrate our victories.
We just don't do it publicly.
We have margarita machines inside CIA.
We'll shut down offices for half a day.
We'll put them on skeleton crews just so we can celebrate the fact that we just avoided a civil war in Niger, right?
Absolutely.
There's high fives all the time.
People will sit in a bullpen.
We have a bullpen not too different from this.
And you'll sit together with a few people overseas and you'll be like, holy shit, guys, I think we just literally saved 10 American lives today.
We just brought down a terrorist cell that no one even knows existed.
Without any specifics, how many times has that happened in your seven-year career when you were there?
It happened probably three solid times in my seven years.
Where it could have been massively damaging to the world.
Where Americans would have been killed, innocent Americans would have been killed.
There's a very clear example of that.
There's a place where we would probably be 10 to 15 years behind where we are right now in terms of the global economic situation between China, Russia, and the United States had one of our operations not happened.
And then there was another one that was in Africa where it would have been like innocent non-American lives, but allied lives, Western lives, British citizens, Canadian citizens, a mix, just a group that was targeted by a fringe extremist group in Africa.
So we have those victories.
We celebrate those victories.
We love those victories.
We don't talk about those victories.
I guess my biggest thing becomes if there's a bigger push to go private than go public, because the challenge becomes there is zero competition for CIA.
You have a monopoly.
There's zero competition for FBI.
You have a monopoly.
That is not good.
There's a reason why we have monopoly laws when ATT went through it.
Microsoft went through it.
Even Facebook right now is going through, hey, we got to kind of break it apart.
You're too this, you're too that.
Okay, I actually understand some of those conversations.
But why have monopoly laws for free enterprise and not have monopoly laws for government agencies?
I think we need monopoly laws for government agencies.
How does a patent differ from a monopoly?
Patent gives you a timeline.
You don't have it forever.
Correct.
Okay.
Right?
Monopolies don't last forever either.
They incentivize people to create competition, and monopolies are intentionally attacked by the federal government, where patents are protected by the federal government.
So what I'm saying is that there's a place for everything.
There's a place for patents.
There's a place for monopoly.
There's a place for secret intelligence services.
There's a place for one-sided advantage.
Absolutely.
But there should be checks and balances.
There are checks and balances in our private intelligence world, in our secret intelligence world, publicly and privately.
But what we're also finding is that there's vulnerabilities that nobody talks about.
The vast majority of espionage cases right now are coming from private intelligence.
They're coming from Chinese, Russian, Iranian penetrations through the private intelligence network into a mainstream building.
There was just two, a husband and wife couple, I don't know if you want to look it up, husband and wife couple that were working, that were teachers in, I don't know where it was, somewhere in the Northeast, but they were caught spying, giving nuclear secrets about American submarine technology to an unnamed foreign service.
They were just arrested because they were contracted.
The husband was contracted as an engineer to go to go work with the Navy.
And now, because of that, in Maryland, thank you very much.
This just happened.
Nobody knows this happened.
This doesn't make headlines.
This is the kind of stuff where we're doing the right thing and nobody even knows it's happening.
This happens all the time.
Unpack the story.
So what happened here?
Maryland husband and wife arrested a nuclear submarine spy case.
The couple are accused of selling nuclear secrets, including a SD card concealed in a peanut butter sandwich.
This is classic human intelligence espionage.
I would suspect that the unnamed service that they're talking about here is the Chinese because this fits a Chinese model of collecting military secrets on American technology.
Right down to the fact that they were doing dead drops in Maryland in food.
But let's break that down a little bit because I think you could make the case that even though it may be a private institution, it's still technically controlled by the CCP, right?
And I think it's because it's tied to the Chinese government.
I think you could make the same case for Russia.
And I don't disagree with Pat on the idea that we should privatize intelligence agencies, but I think you mentioned Raytheon.
So like, how do we keep, if we do go that route, how do we keep from Raytheon making up false intelligence to sell weapons, right?
Or like going down that path to where they're no longer focused on the actual intelligence.
They're focused on the bottom line of the profit.
Well, that's one of the reasons that you want to have a national intelligence organization because one of the ways that you differentiate information from intelligence is through a process called vetting.
Information can be single source.
One time you hear it, you can't find it anywhere else.
Vetting means you have to find the same piece of information in multiple different unrelated sources, right?
So the difference between information and intelligence is specific.
But what I'm saying here is this penetration, these secrets were lost because of the privatization of intelligence.
Had this been a naval engineer working only within the Navy, it would have been harder for a foreign intelligence service to recruit them and get them to provide secrets.
But because this person was a civilian working for a private organization contracted by the Navy, it was easier.
So you're saying there's more risk to being privatized?
There's more risk to being privatized.
Just like there's more risk to any company hiring anybody.
Like, how do you know if you work in the number one company in pharmaceuticals that the number two company in pharmaceuticals doesn't recruit your top sales?
So let me tell you this.
I fully, fully agree between what you're saying.
Fully agree with what you're saying.
However, there's a big however.
So there is risk to both sides.
It's which risk you want more.
So which of the two has more of a risk to bully the American people?
I trust the market.
I'm with you.
Okay.
I trust the market.
Here's where I'm going with that.
See, the market cannot bully the American people.
They're going to eventually get caught.
But the government can bully American people.
That's exactly what they're doing today.
They're bullying American people.
And so although you're right, we're a person on the free market side because they're getting paid for the work that they're doing.
You know, they may be like, well, if you give me $500,000, I'll give you the information.
If you give me a million dollars, but we know a lot of government agency people have done that as well and sold their soul.
I can tell you stories.
There's plenty of articles of different names.
You know them.
I know them.
We've read about them.
But my bigger concern is free enterprise cannot take my freedoms away, but the government can take my freedoms away and bully me.
And a lot of times what they do is they use, you know, like Andrew Tate, this guy, never met him, never talked to him.
We're probably going to do a podcast together eventually.
But he said some stuff I agree with, and I love the fact that he's pushing the envelope.
All of a sudden, hey, let's silence this guy.
Okay.
Why?
Because he's got a case going on with women and all this other stuff.
Okay.
There is criminal activities that you have to, you know, be held accountable for.
And then there is banning because he's saying some stuff you disagree with.
On the criminal side, if I break the law, yes, I have to go to court.
And if I'm doing time, I'm doing time.
Big difference.
I don't know what he's done.
If he's done crime, hey, that's the level of accountability.
But banning somebody for things you disagree with, OJ Simpson is on Twitter.
The Khamenei is on Twitter.
Putin, who just killed a bunch of people, he's on Twitter.
He ain't banned.
How come they're not banned?
You're afraid of what this guy's going to be doing.
So that's the part where I wonder if government gets involved and saying that guy's been a little too loud.
Shut this guy up.
And free market can bully by saying, we don't want your customer.
Simple.
Facebook can say that.
Twitter can say that.
Instagram can say that.
But are they saying it because they're saying it?
Like this whole story going into Facebook where he sits with Rogan.
Yeah, Zuck sits with Rogan and they go through a bunch of different stories.
And here's a story from Fox Business.
FBI responds to Zuckerberg's claim on Rogan that Facebook limited Hunter Biden's story after agency's warning.
An appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan podcast last week, Stoke controversy after Medacio admitted that Facebook limited the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election because the FBI had warned about Russian propaganda after the release of the episode on Thursday.
The FBI said it routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information so that they can decide how to better defend against threats.
The agency said it has provided companies with foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influencer influence actors.
Okay.
You read this.
I can take this in a couple different ways.
One way I take this is Zuck did this intentionally because he's like, I'm so sick of you guys targeting me.
Leave me alone.
Okay.
I have two customers, the left, the right.
I have to kind of deal with both of you guys and both of you guys hate the other side.
I get it.
But let me do my job.
So maybe he said this publicly intentionally to get under FBI's skin and kind of have them be exposed a little bit.
Maybe.
10%, I believe it was intentional.
Did he do it accidentally?
He's too smart to do it accidentally.
Like, was Joe really cornering him and pressuring him?
You better tell me or else, and you know, here's...
No, it was just a basic conversation when we came out.
Could it be accidental?
But when somebody says something like this, this just keeps hurting more and more and more.
So the FBI bullied the American people through cornering a free enterprise company that made them silence because they didn't have the intel that the FBI claimed they had and they couldn't verify it through a private agency that's a competitor to FBI that they had to kind of take that position.
And because of that, we have the greatest motivational speaker of all time as our president Joe Biden, right?
So it's a kind of like a very weird situation that takes place here.
Yeah.
So what you're, I think that there's a couple of things that we want to keep in mind.
We want to keep in mind the context of the situation.
So if you recall 2016, first of all, let's be very honest with each other.
Russian meddling in the U.S. elections did not start in 2016.
Every election cycle ever has had people trying to meddle in the election.
What happened is that in 2016, social media got caught.
That's what happened in 16.
Before then, we could all kind of pretend it wasn't there.
It's like that uncle in our family that we don't want to talk about because they're kind of, maybe they're a criminal or maybe they went to jail or who knows what they did.
But we don't really want to, we don't want to, we don't want to be the one who calls the police and turns the uncle in, but we also don't want to be the person who admits that we know the uncle or that the uncle's in our family, right?
That's exactly what happens with espionage almost all the time.
People don't want to admit that it's there, but it's happening all the time.
It's that ugly wart on your butt you don't want anybody to know about, right?
What happened in 16 is everybody saw a wart.
Espionage became a household word.
Influence campaigns, covert influence became household conversation.
In 2020, everyone was expecting it to happen again.
Trump was back in the race.
Russia was still involved.
All the 16 investigations came to fruition in 18, and you had CIA basically telling us that they couldn't trust the president and the president saying that he didn't trust CIA and it was a disaster.
It was a total mess.
The social media companies did not want to get stuck in the middle of being accused in the future of being willing voices for propaganda from Russian meddling or Chinese meddling or Iranian meddling, all of which happens.
Saudi meddling happens, right?
Nobody wants to be on the X for that.
So the more cautious approach is to just shut it down.
If FBI calls you and says, hey, this is Russian meddling.
We think this is Russian meddling.
What does Zuck have to lose by being overly cautious and just doing what they tell him to do?
To a certain extent, you're right.
He's saying, just leave me alone, guys.
Let me do what I do.
I'm not a political mouthpiece.
I'm just a social media channel.
But I'm also a business owner.
And the practical solution here is if the FBI tells me that I might be being abused by the Russians, I don't want the Russians to abuse my platform.
So I'm just going to shut it down.
Two years later, we have the benefit of time now.
Now we can look back and look at all the information.
He had limited information in a short period of time.
I actually am really proud of Zuckerberg for saying it publicly.
Like, hey, I agree.
I had to shut it down, guys.
It doesn't mean that FBI is bullying me.
It means I took the more conservative decision.
And maybe that was the wrong decision.
Oh, by the way, that's publicly standing up to FBI.
Correct.
And then that's, we all as American citizens, we have the right to stand up to our own government.
That's what the First Amendment promises us.
He's already screwed up, by the way.
Like, you know, he screwed up the election because him and Dorsey, both of them, took the fear position, and it was so sudden.
Okay.
Strategically, can we all agree that that story was held till the week prior to the election because that's the bomb they were going to drop to flip the voting at the last minute?
We all know that would have been intentional.
It's not like they just got the story last minute.
If I'm a skeptic, I'm assuming New York Post had that story for a while and they were timing on when to drop it.
That's my skepticism.
I may be wrong.
So, and in politics, stories matter.
Timing matters on when they drop it.
So, he essentially affected the election.
So, Dorsey essentially affected the election.
The fact that he's saying it now, I think he's more doing this to say, don't come bothering me for 2024.
I don't disagree with you.
So, I will say that I don't necessarily agree that the Washington, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, whoever broke the story, I'm not saying that they dropped the story when they dropped it specifically to change the direction of the election.
They dropped it at a very intentional time, most likely to get maximum readers, maximum views of their advertisement, maximum press coverage and secondary viral coverage, not to sway an election.
But what I will also say is that there is only one person, or not one person, there's one entity that has the responsibility for the way the elections turned out, and that's the American people.
If you stood in line and you voted, you own the vote that you cast that day.
Zuckerberg did not change the course of the election.
Did he have a tool that could have been used to sway it?
Sure.
But ultimately, somebody went and stood in line, cast a vote, and that's the person who owns the responsibility for the outcome right now.
That's the person who owns the responsibility for every single outcome.
That's why you have to vote.
It's why you have the right to vote.
We just have to understand, especially if you look at 2020, 2020 was a freakish year.
I have a hard time processing that.
I have a very hard time processing that.
So you're telling me the person who voted has the ultimate responsibility for the results?
For the vote they cast.
For the vote they cast, I understand.
But the journalists have a responsibility for digging up and getting the information to the people so they can read it before voting to be as educated as possible.
Journalists and these virtual governments, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, have to permit that information to be released to the public so they can make the most educated vote, which they prevent it from happening.
So you can't, I have a hard time saying in this case that it's the voters' responsibility on the way they voted.
No, they did not have access to the entire information.
This article says 79% say truthful coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop would have changed the 2020 election.
And the numbers they gave is majority in both parties, 89% of Republicans, which is fine.
That makes, I'm surprised it's not 99% of Republicans, but 89% of Republicans.
61% of Democrats said they believe the laptop is real along with 74% of independents.
So if the difference between it coming out a week versus a week after that, that's a very big difference.
Let me show you a quick spy tool.
So what's our, I'm sorry, Tyler, Tyler.
Tyler, do me a favor.
Go to this article and then look up the specific survey.
I did this after I saw this article.
I want to show you exactly how spy is.
New Jersey, I looked at it.
Yeah, I saw that.
That's the first thing I did.
This is what New York Post is.
Did you see the population that they tested?
1, 226.
1,226.
Do you know what a statistical relevant population is?
What's that?
3,000.
Okay.
So this is not a statistical, not a statistically relevant representation of a survey result.
They could essentially have called 1,022 old Republicans in a single district to ask them this question and get this result.
Surveys are not polls are notorious.
I trust two polls.
Is this one of them?
No, that's not one of them.
So this is what I'm saying.
And what I tell you yesterday, by the way, what I said to you yesterday when I said, look up the poll who's a biochemistry.
I said, I tell you which two polls I'll pay attention to.
Gallup.
Those two, I'll pay attention to them.
I'm not going past the red.
Everything else, like when I hate Fox Poll.
Yep.
No, I fully get it.
I fully get it.
So these guys, when I looked at this, that's when I was like, well, they can shape their pay for it.
Forget about these guys.
Just the four of us talking right now and whoever else that's watching this, right?
You mean to tell me the story not being released didn't impact?
The story did.
So here's, I want to make sure that we're aligning responsibility in the right place.
Please.
Zuckerberg does not, Zuckerberg runs a business.
He does not run a second government, a federal, a commercial government, a shadow government.
He runs a business.
The journalists have a journalistic responsibility to report the facts.
Amen, 1,000% true.
Journalism is dying.
Journalism, some people say, is fully dead.
And the journalists who write from most of these mainstream news sources hate the way that the editors handle their journalistic responsibilities because the editor does not have a journalistic responsibility like the journalist does.
So they're forced to produce at a certain speed before they can do what's needed to meet journalistic requirements.
And then information is controlled by a business that wants to spend its time being protective of its own long-term business interests.
I'm sure you get that.
And then what's left is the human being, the person, the American on the other side, is scrolling through Facebook, only reading what they see.
And we have given that person, that American has got the permission now to think that it's okay to get your news from Facebook.
It's not okay to get your news from Facebook.
It's not okay to get your news from just one source of anything.
But what do you mean it's not okay to get your news from Facebook, though?
Facebook isn't a platform where I get my news from because they write it.
Facebook is where stories go viral.
Correct.
Twitter is where stories go viral.
Correct.
For you to prevent a very damaging story to not go viral for the public to know before they vote, knowing this is a very corrupt situation here, you're essentially manipulating the election.
And then the world paid a price for it because if the election was possibly in a different way, say somebody else becomes president, Russia probably doesn't attack Ukraine.
Lives could have been saved there.
We probably don't lose $83 billion of equipment in Afghanistan because that would have been handled in a different way.
And, you know, economy would probably be in a slightly different place.
Inflation would be in a different place.
Many things would be in a different place if it wasn't for that.
And the American people today are paying a price for it.
Yesterday a poll came out.
I don't know if you saw the poll or not on who they're saying the leading candidate is for presidency.
Did you see that or no?
So a story came out.
What page is that on?
Page seven.
So you've seen this.
I'll read it to you.
So page seven.
This is yesterday.
No, is it page seven?
Do you know which one I'm looking at, Tyler, or no?
Yeah, bottom of six, you're talking about Bernie Sanders?
No, it's not that one.
It's another one where it says Bernie Sanders is the leading candidate leading polls.
Yeah, it's page six.
Is it page six?
Yeah.
Okay, so if I go to Hill story.
Highest favorability.
So Sanders, Sanders has highest favorability among possible 2024 contender poll.
This is a Hill story.
This is not a Fox story or CNN.
Sanders clocked in with the highest favorability rating amongst the list of 23 potential 2024 candidate presidential contenders.
According to a new USA Today poll, 46% of the respondents say they had at least a somewhat favorable view towards Sanders, while 41% said they had an unfavorable opinion.
President Biden had the second highest at rating of 43%, although his unfavorability was notably higher than Sanders at 52.
And then, you know, Trump clocked in with the same rating as Biden.
So again, polls, USA Today, we know which side they're going to lean.
Of course, they're going to want a Sanders, you know, because it's going to be money.
Yeah, they're going to want to be able to use that part as well.
But at the same time, I think when you're saying Facebook, Twitter, these guys don't have a responsibility.
I think they have a responsibility of allowing the message to be released.
The populace, what the populace, you and I, the citizens, the voters, have a responsibility for is not to jump to conclusion, is to do our own due diligence before voting.
But that, the responsibility is for them.
So releasing of the information is on Facebook.
They got to release that part.
The information is out there regardless of whether it's on Facebook.
I get it.
They could just get it from a different news source.
I know, bro, but I can post the same video clip on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on TikTok.
And all of a sudden, one of them, like, for example, TikTok.
I'll tell you, perfect situation.
If you go back, look at my TikTok account.
I was posting videos and I was getting 100 views, 600,000 views, 100,000 views, 800,000 views, 5 million views, 2.1 million views, 1.8 million views.
I post two clips about China.
Find a clip after.
It's been 50 videos since that clip.
Find a clip after that if any one of them have ever done 10,000 views.
And I'm like, okay, content is content.
One of the clips posted by somebody else got 6 million views of the same thing I said on a smaller platform posted it, but I put it on mine.
It got 11,000 views.
So virality is about the gods of viral to allow an article to go viral.
Today, when an article is going viral, social media, they know when the trigger's back in.
Uh-oh, look at this.
This thing's going viral.
What is it?
Okay, let it go.
Uh-oh, this thing's going viral.
Oh, yeah, let it go.
Uh-oh, this thing's going wrong.
Shut it down.
It goes like this.
I've seen videos on November 22nd, five years ago, I did an interview with Jim Jenkins.
And Jim Jenkins was one of the four guys that held John F. Kennedy's brain.
He was in the autopsy room.
He stayed quiet for 50 years.
Christian man, quiet man, never wanted to talk to anybody.
He was afraid because they told him, if you say anything, we're going to take the Navy money away from you.
So this guy doesn't want to talk.
Finally, he says, I want to talk about it.
But he comes in.
If you ever see an interview, he was so nervous.
We put it out on November 22nd, which is the assassination day.
The video goes like this.
Boom, boom, boom.
Then suddenly it went like this.
That doesn't happen.
What platform?
YouTube.
That doesn't happen.
It went like this and then it stayed like this.
Okay.
So what does that mean?
Wait a minute.
Hold this thing back.
A person on the back end, when I look at my creative studios, I can see I've never in the history of my 1,800 videos, I've ever seen a video do that.
Why is this happening?
Sometimes these types of things happen because these platforms have the ability to prevent these types of topics to become conversations.
So that's my only concern with Facebook.
And I think I want to be able to be an optimist.
And I think what Zuck is trying to say is, guys, next time we're on FBI, we're telling the story and we're not getting in the way.
I think that's what he's saying.
Now, whether he'll follow through with that or not, we have no idea.
Yeah, there's an interesting relationship between national security and big business in the United States.
Hunter Biden's laptop is an excellent example.
The make and model of that laptop is an Apple.
How did they get onto an Apple without the user?
How did they do that?
You shouldn't be allowed to do that.
You know what?
FBI has long had?
A contentious relationship with Apple.
Big time, Tim.
Because Apple won't let them onto iPhones.
San Bernardino.
Yeah, the San Bernardino territorial sellers, yeah.
Exactly, right?
How the hell did they get on?
How did they get on this Apple?
What's your skepticism?
My point here is you can see that Apple does not protect your privacy like they promised that they do.
They choose which device to let who on when, right?
In this case, they let somebody onto this guy's Apple.
And in other cases, they won't let FBI get onto an Apple iPhone that belongs to a Saudi pilot who kills a bunch of people in Pensacola.
So there's a relationship between the government and Apple, and Apple chooses when to share and when not to share.
So this is this, this relationship that you're talking about with Zuckerberg.
Yeah.
It happens in social media.
It happens in all big government, all big organizations, all big companies in the United States, because companies will, if they get big enough, they have a responsibility to contribute to national security.
Some play nicely.
Others play inconsistently.
Others don't play well at all.
So what you're seeing is every company has to learn.
It has to mature and evolve its own position on how am I going to be, how am I going to plug myself in to this national security context?
I want to say we had the guy here who had the laptop.
John Paul MacIsa.
We had him here six weeks ago, seven weeks ago.
And I want to say when Hunter brings it in, the password to get into the computer was given.
I want to assume it was given because he let him log on.
Well, he was working on it.
That's what I'm saying.
So I want to assume.
So I don't think it was Apple.
I think the government can't stand Apple because they don't give the information that they do.
Because Tim Cook is a very interesting guy, by the way.
Tim Cook is a very, very interesting guy on how he works with the government and how he works with different presidents and who he is, first gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company to come out.
But at the same time, he had a good relationship with Trump and he had a good relationship with, you know, very interesting way he is.
But I don't know.
If it's true, it's true.
Maybe Apple gave him the information.
But from what I know from the guy that was here seven weeks ago, I thought he got the password to log into the system.
But you don't have an Apple phone.
You're not a fan of Apple, correct?
Correct.
All right.
You're a Droid?
Are you a Droid person?
I use Android mainly because it's the other option, right?
There's only like two major options that are out there.
There's other options when you get to super high levels.
And that's just a personal preference or there's a moral, political, expensive reason.
Yeah, it's because if people are killing, if terrorists are killing Americans, what business stance do you have as an American company to not let, to not help the FBI solve that case?
You don't have to help them solve every case, but how the hell are you choosing to not protect?
We can't investigate a Saudi Arabian phone.
We can't investigate a network of phones that belong to known terrorists.
Why can't we investigate those phones, right?
You obviously have a way to get into the phone because you guarantee service to all your clients.
So you already have a back door.
We don't need to know the code to the back door, but at what point do you decide when you're responsible for the security of Americans?
And when do you decide that you're not responsible for security of Americans?
But by the way, you know what you just made me think about?
You just made me think about.
So how many employees does Apple have?
400,000?
I don't know what the number.
It's a massive number.
You mean to tell me none of those guys on the inside who can't stand a president on either side won't somehow release the password to the government in a way that nobody will find out?
I'm sure they could.
I'm sure they could.
There's always leaks.
Yeah.
It's the wort on our butt that we were just talking about, right?
7,000 employees.
Yeah.
Well, it's like 400,000.
Yeah.
400,000 employees.
Yeah, it makes you kind of think about the fact that whistleblowers on the you're seeing what Project Veritas is doing.
I have to say, I'm curious to know what you say.
How does a CIA or FBI, how do they look at a Project Veritas?
What do they think about an organization like that?
So I am not familiar with Project Veritas.
Okay.
You're not familiar with James?
James O'Keefe?
What is it?
You've never heard of James O'Keefe?
The name is not ringing a bell for me.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm surprised because that guy is, well, you may want to look him up.
If you just look him up, you'll see because Project Veritas is everywhere with what he's got going on.
Okay, so let's talk about the Mar-Lago raid and what happened there.
Okay.
So at this point of the game, you know the story.
The people know the story.
It's gone back and forth.
Now they're saying, hey, former FBI official says Russian, Chinese, and Iranian spies could have tried to infiltrate Trump's Mar-Lago residence.
This is an insider story, which I believe is said by Peter Strzok, the same guy was talking to you about earlier, who was once the deputy director of FBI's counterintelligence division, said that it is likely that foreign agents from Russia, China tried to infiltrate former Trump's former President Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, considering the top secret documents that were being kept there.
Strzok was fired from the agency for sending anti-Trump texts on his work phone.
Absolutely the Russians, but not the Russians alone.
Any contempt foreign intelligence services, whether that's those belonging to China, those belonging to Iran, to Cuba, certainly including Russia, are all were very interested and are interested in gaining access to Mar-a-Lago, he said, especially concerning the lack of any sort of control or memorization, memorialization of who had access to Mar-a-Lago at any given time.
So when you hear something like that and what happened with Mar-a-Lago, first of all, just the position that they took where Biden says, oh, we had no clue about it.
This is not something we knew about it.
And then Garden is the only one.
I know nothing about it.
It's not my project.
Somebody else's.
Yeah.
Okay.
There is 8 billion people in the world.
There's only one other guy that's a former president.
If somebody raids that guy who was your, you know, he's your enemy.
He's the guy that you don't want to go up against.
You knew nothing about it.
None of that was disclosed to you.
And then when they give the affidavit, you saw what came out with all the black bars and nothing is wanting to be disclosed.
For someone like you who's in the world, how are you processing what happened here with Mar-a-Lago?
So Trump has been a target of investigations since the time he was running for president in 2016.
This is just the next, this is a predictable breadcrumb in that long-term trail, right?
There's a tool that we use at the agency called Haram's Razor.
And Haram's Razor tells us to never subscribe to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence.
So never subscribe to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence.
So do I believe that Biden knew that this was going to happen?
Probably not.
Maybe it was on a list somewhere that got buried on the bottom of his 10-page list and he just never got to it.
Maybe he was supposed to be briefed and someone didn't brief him.
Maybe the Department of Justice, which falls under the judicial branch of government, actually decided not to tell him because he is the executive branch of government and we have three different branches that don't have to communicate everything to each other.
So who knows how it turned out?
But I don't see conspiracy in this.
What I see in this is a continuation of the same sort of hunting behavior to find enough evidence to bring some kind of criminal prosecution against Trump that sticks.
And it's the same thing that we did for a long time against Hillary Clinton.
So this is just, unfortunately, this is the world of politics that Americans are going to live in for a while as we try to mix executive branch and judicial branch and keep trying to hunt down politicians and business people acting like businessmen and politicians.
How much is this is political incentivization versus actual, all right, let's figure out the truth here, in your opinion?
I think a lot of it is political.
I don't think the truth is something that the government is particularly interested in when it comes to Trump.
They either know the truth to a high enough probability that they can make their decisions moving forward, or they don't know the truth, but they also can't just ignore it.
To just ignore it would mean to basically let go of all of the time and all of the money and all of the effort that they've put into it so far.
And let's not forget Trump is still an extremely powerful player in Republican politics, extremely powerful player.
Whether he runs for president or not, what he says about a candidate transforms that candidate's opportunities.
You brought up Hillary Clinton, and I assume you're talking about the parallel between her email server and top security information and in this exact same scenario with Trump.
What's the parallel you're seeing there?
People hunt, people try to hunt down some sort of judicial criminal action to either eradicate or neutralize the threat of that politician.
It's just, I mean, whether we, the stuff that we saw in 2016 on just the Democratic side was horrible.
We saw the Clinton campaign.
We saw the Democratic National Convention undermine Sanders intentionally when he was running against Clinton.
Like that, that is manipulation of politics all day long.
The idea that the voter gets the ultimate say, yes, that's true.
But then you also have things like in 2020 when Instagram decided to start telling everybody as soon as you logged into Instagram, as soon as you opened up the app, register to vote, click here to register to vote.
It was pushing registrations to vote of the audience that they knew was on Instagram, which is a certain age demographic, a certain socioeconomic demographic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Which, I mean, that was common.
This is the world that we're living in now as everybody starts to get so heavily involved in politics.
And we start seeing conspiracy everywhere when what we really need to be accepting is like, this is America's adolescence.
We're not a mature country.
We're just over 200 years old.
We're not mature.
China's 4,000 years old, right?
We're coming into our adolescence, growing pains and hair in new parts of our body that we never saw before.
Remember how terrible that felt when you couldn't wear sweatpants to school anymore?
That's a horrible feeling for a dude.
That's where we are right now when we've got like 50 to 100 years of adolescence coming up.
And this is the kind of garbage we're going to have to deal with.
Yeah, I have, I, and by the way, I understand what you're saying on the truth conspiracies.
I have a very hard time believing that the president didn't know they were going to be doing this.
A very, very hard time believing.
Again, for example, like LeBron James, who were the people that he's going to know everything that's going on with those people?
Michael Jordan's probably one of them because he's trying to pass up Michael Jordan.
Okay.
Like he probably sees everything that's going on with Michael.
Okay.
All right.
Barack Obama.
Who was he seeing that's, you know, what's going on with anything with them?
He probably followed everything that was going on with the Clintons because, you know, behind closed doors, they're apparently big competitors.
And he was probably following everything what was going on with Trump.
Even when he gave that one speech from stage, you know, and he did the tweet and, you know, Trump said this about you on Jimmy Fallon or Kamino says, at least I will go down as being a president.
You know, you won't be a president.
So Trump becomes president.
Yeah.
So, you know, you know, hey, elections have consequences and Obama looks to the left.
He's right.
You know, so I have a hard time believing in the game of competition that you don't know that they're doing this.
Oh, I didn't know this was going on.
And when you say you don't know what's going on, do you know how pathetic you look as a leader?
Wait, let me get this straight.
You did not know that that's going on.
Yeah, man, what a kind of a leader are you that you don't know this kind of stuff is going on?
If you don't know what's going on with him, maybe you shouldn't be in office.
Because a person that should know what's in office should have known that this is going on.
Yeah, it's both ways, no matter what direction you say, I didn't know, I did know, it doesn't look good for anybody.
No, I agree.
I agree with that.
It doesn't look good for anybody.
There's a word that you used quite a bit in that explanation, right?
The word was probably.
And the core word in probably is probable.
The root word is probable.
Probable refers to probability.
So what the word probably actually means is there is a high probability that such and such is true.
I absolutely agree with you.
There is a probability that Biden knew.
I just don't know that it's a high probability, 51% versus 49%.
I think there's a very high probability someone tried to communicate it to him, but I don't know that there's a high probability he actually knew.
On all the things on that dude's list, the lowest presidential approval ratings in history, in history, the lowest presidential approval ratings ever.
That dude's got a whole lot of crap on his plate.
And maybe the Mar-a-Largo raid didn't make the top of his sheet that day, right?
I mean, I've seen the presidential daily brief, the PDB that they get every day.
They don't get through the PDB every day.
They can't see.
It's like 100 pages every single day, right?
About all the biggest threats facing America.
The Mar-a-Largo raid is not a threat to America, right?
So even if it was in there, buried under Iran and their posturing about nuclear weapons and North Korea launching a weapon and what's going to happen in China right now and what's Russia doing in Ukraine and what's Syria looking like right now and what's going to happen in Yemen?
What's going to happen in Libya?
Like think about the headache the president has every day.
It's one of the reasons why no matter how you feel about Trump, you got to respect the fact that he sat in that seat for four years.
Everybody who takes that presidential seat, that is a massive saturation.
They age.
Look at what happened to Obama.
Look at what happened to Bush.
They age so fast because that is a shit seat to sit in.
So going back to when you were an agent seven years and you're in it and you're seeing what's going on and both your perspective and your wife's perspective.
So when you're laying in bed and you guys are both talking to each other and you guys are still married to each other today.
So even after you get out eight years later, you guys still chose to be married because it's kind of tough when you get out.
Life is like a very different life.
So, okay.
So when you went in, where did you did any area of trust go higher?
You're like, oh man, I used to have no respect for those guys.
I got a lot of respect for what those guys are doing.
Used to go in and say, I never thought about those guys.
Damn, those guys are dangerous after seven years of being in.
And then you went in and you said, oh, those are the guys I was studying.
Those guys are 100 times more scary to the world than the media is even selling.
And then the media, yeah, I used to really trust the media.
Used to say, dude, I don't trust shit they say.
Or I used to not trust what the media says.
I actually trust what they have to say.
What were some of the things where you flipped where what you saw pre, and now you're on the inside, what flipped on you?
The biggest flip was media.
The biggest flip out there was news.
When I started seeing what real intelligence looks like and how real intelligence is collected, how information is vetted and processed and synthesized and turned into something useful.
And then I would read the news.
I realized that the news is garbage.
Like even the best news sources out there, the most centrist, the most highly rated news sources out there, they are still a far cry from what they were in the 1950s, when journalism was alive, when there were still laws in place that forced you to have fair and balanced news.
Right now, news organizations focus on feeding their audience base.
That's what they do.
And if they get too far off of their audience base, then they start to see a decrease in ratings and a decrease in ad revenue.
And they can't have that, especially not now that people don't buy newspapers.
So that was a massive flip for me.
Some of the other flips were the French.
I went, I was a military officer.
You were in the military.
Nobody says good things about the French in the military.
We make fun of them all the time, right?
This is how the French go to war, right?
We make fun of them all the time.
You get into the intelligence service, the DGSE is scary.
They are so well funded.
They are so technically adept.
They are hunting down corporate and economic espionage secrets from us and we don't even know they're there.
They are super powerful.
Had no idea that was happening.
No idea at all.
And then, you know, Mossad has a reputation.
Mossad is actually, when you deal with them in real life, they're pretty reasonable people.
They just have the authority to do some crazy shit compared to what we do in the United States.
But generally speaking, like you sit down, you have a beer with them, like you were saying about the trifecta, right?
You're Justin Timberlake.
They can dance, they can act, they can sing, right?
You sit down with a Mossad officer and you're like, you seem like a fair and reasonable person who is also protected by law and able to just kill somebody on the spot.
I have to ask five levels up whether or not I'm allowed to slap somebody in the belly when they're being interrogated in Guantanamo Bay.
Do you know what I mean?
And there's just, so there's all sorts of different things like that.
Then I also started to learn how scary terrorists actually were.
You know, the world knew about al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda, by the time that Al-Qaeda was a mainstream thing, Al-Qaeda wasn't actually that scary.
They did, they were well-funded.
They had organization and bureaucracy and reach, but bureaucracy slows you down.
ISIS was terrifying.
ISIS is still in a phase where it's recruiting what's known as lone wolf terrorists.
Lone wolves are basically people they radicalize and encourage to act and operate independently and alone.
So then there is no communication channel anywhere of anybody saying, hey, I'm going to hit this target this way.
What do you think?
If there's no communication, there's no way to collect intelligence.
These lone wolves can just go out and do whatever they think they're going to do.
And they've got the permission of the organization and they have the praise of the caliphate behind them.
That's scary stuff.
Exactly what happened with Selman Rush.
He was a lone wolf and his mother just disowned him.
Did you see what she said about him?
He just said, I can no longer support him being my son.
It's nuts.
That world is a terrifying world that the average American has no idea.
Let me ask you, because Pat framed the question with your perspective, what has shifted?
You've been pretty vocal about perception versus perspective, right?
Getting out of your own shoes and look into the eyes of others.
He also framed it with, you know, what you said, the media.
And you've been pretty vocal about perception, perspective, but you also talked about your wife, how when she kind of got red-pilled into the real world, how she went from being a progressive liberal to being more centered.
Same thing with you, I assume, is right?
Correct, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't, if you're a super conservative, you're not trying to go to Africa to like save children, right?
You're trying to build a business or do something that boosts the economy in some way, shape, or form.
So we were both moved very, very, very far to independent center once we started realizing, not necessarily that there was like a liberal narrative.
And it really frustrates me when I hear people go off the deep end up all these liberal conspiracies and these liberal narratives.
The truth is that liberals are just that that whole media is feeding its own base.
And it's feeding a base of people who don't make a lot of money, who don't have a lot of education, who are struggling to set themselves up financially.
So they want to believe that someone else should take care of them and they want to believe that someone else should help them and they want to believe that they, that a larger big brother government should be on their side.
But what ends up happening across the board time and time again is your 27-year-old liberal becomes a 32-year-old parent with a career or a business, and then their perspective shifts because now they got to protect what they have.
They got to protect their family.
They got to take care of their people.
They've got to make sure that the future generation, because now there's a child, you've got to protect your child, but you also need a military to protect your child.
So you know what?
If I have to pick between who lives and who dies, my child lives, somebody else dies.
So you're like a living, breathing case even with your wife of, you know, the famous phrase, if you're young and you're not a liberal, you have no heart.
And if you're older and you're not a conservative, you have no brain.
Is that kind of what the process you went through?
Yeah, it's like, I mean, those, every, all of these idioms and all of these, uh, all of these stereotypes, right?
They, they happen for a reason.
They happen because a normalized, statistically relevant number of people start to follow in these certain trends.
It doesn't mean it's right for everyone, but it's right for a majority of people.
So, you know, as a registered independent, I've been a voter Republican.
I voted Democrat.
I'm a registered independent now for, I don't know, 11 years or 12 years, something like that.
And Rogan, you see, he was libertarian.
voted for George Orgenson, which we had Joe Jorgensen on here.
I don't know if she'll ever come back.
I don't know if she'll ever come back.
I asked her back.
She was upset.
She didn't want to come back on.
You put a fork in her gut.
But the point being is the following.
He says with Aaron Rodgers, he sits there and he says, so what do we do?
And he says, vote Republican.
Aaron starts laughing.
What did you think when Rogan is a guy that you would have never thought Rogan's going to say vote Republican?
This guy pushed to legalize marijuana.
This guy pushed to, you know, talking about certain things that there's nothing about it would be Republican, but a guy like him is now saying voting Republican.
What was your reaction when you saw that?
So when I saw what Rogan said, it was very similar to what I had when I saw what Zuckerberg did.
I was like, good for you, Joe.
Like, that's like speak your heart.
If you're not, if you've got a voice, you've got an awesome voice, man.
If you've got a voice, speak your heart.
If you're speaking to anything else, you're kind of wasting your voice, right?
Joe spoke with his voice.
Zuck spoke with his voice.
I think that's really good stuff.
It's important to remember that human beings are not left or right.
Human beings are all a mix of both.
We just, we want what we want.
We are motivated by the things that are important and motivate us.
So you don't, you're not all red.
You're not all blue.
There's always a bell curve.
So at the fat end of the bell curve, people are close to center.
People believe in some things and believe in other things.
But unfortunately, media doesn't give you a chance to be supportive of both.
Media forces you to choose one or the other.
And then they feed you lines from one or the other and they move you closer and closer to the outsides of the bell curve until you choose to just stop reading the news or you choose to just stop watching TV or you choose to sit around and drink beer and watch sports games and bitch about the news all day, right?
But media is in the business of forcing you to one side or the other.
Human beings are not like that, right?
I believe a woman should have the choice to take care of her own body.
I do believe in the sanctity of life, but a woman should have the choice to take care of her own body.
But the government does not need to tax me at 40%.
I can spend my money wisely on my own.
I don't need them to police my money.
I don't need them to police like what I'm doing in my bedroom.
I don't need the government to police how I raise my children or whether they're homeschooled or private schooled or whether I'm dissatisfied with the public school, right?
We have, we're all a mix of all sorts of different positions.
And we are all getting frustrated by being forced to pick one side or the other.
Should the government have access to know if you have that word on your butt?
That's the question.
I think they're curious to know, knowing the way they are.
Maybe you should stop mooning people so they want to find out.
Obviously, that's an analogy.
Are there any news sources that they legitimately trust?
Like you're saying, you know, you don't trust the media.
That was like your biggest discrepancy with what today.
Like what outlets you say?
Okay.
Because Pat said that he, when it comes to polls, he said Pew and what was the other one, Rasmussen?
Gallup.
Gallup.
You trust that, all right?
They're not 100% accurate, but with a level of certainty, probability, like you termed the use.
What media outlets do you trust?
So I don't trust any of them fully.
I trust, at best, I trust about 85%.
The way that I handle the news is I will read competing news sources on the same coverage on purpose and see where they overlap, right?
Give us an example.
So The Wall Street Journal.
So The Economist.
The Economist is a great example.
We got two minutes, just so you know.
Absolutely.
The Economist is a great example.
CNN is a great example.
Fox News is not such a great example.
Yahoo News is actually a decent example.
USA Today is actually a decent example.
Al Jazeera is a decent example.
BBC is a decent example.
These are all places that I'm like 80, 85%, even though they consistently consistently lean one side.
I don't look at MSNBC.
How about CNN?
CNN is on my list only because they are very consistently left.
And when I started seeing them trash talking Biden about nine months ago, I was like, there's a change in CNN, right?
They still go with popular opinion.
They're still just trying to sell ad space, right?
But when it comes to who's going to get my time, I'll look at them.
I'll cross-reference them.
I'll see what's the same.
I'll see what's different.
I'll believe what's the same and I'll challenge what's different.
Interesting.
Okay.
This was great.
By the way, if you enjoyed this as much as I did, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.
And if you want to hear more content of Andy, Andy has a YouTube channel, which I want us to put that below in the chat box.
As well as description title, if you can put that down there so people can go subscribe to his channel and find more content of him.
And make sure to check out everyday spy.
Yeah, everydayspy.com is my homepage and that's where I teach all of this stuff to anybody who's willing to learn.
By the way, if it wasn't for time no joke, I would have gone two more hours because I have so many questions, but I have an 11 o'clock zoom.
Uh folks, we're going to do a podcast.
It was not scheduled.
This week we have the Vault conference for the entire week, which we've got a couple thousand people coming in uh, and we're going to be with parliamentary Kiyosaki, Connolly a bunch of guys are coming in, but we, We will do a podcast to cover a bunch of these stories that we haven't yet.
Tomorrow morning, we're going to do a podcast just to cover some of these.
So we don't normally do it.
I was out of town.
I was out of the country last week, but we're going to do it this week so we get our two podcasts in.
Having said that, brother, thank you so much for coming out.
