1065: Andrew Bustamante | The Psychology of Espionage Part Two

1065: Andrew Bustamante | Part Two

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Brooks running shoes for sponsoring this episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:04] Andrew Bustamante: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. I used to be one of those people that was like, oh, the American public can handle anything, like trust them and just tell 'em the truth. And then I got to CAA and I was like, do not tell the American public the truth.

[00:00:22] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional war correspondent, neuroscientist, Hollywood filmmaker or extreme athlete.

And if you are new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and of course I appreciate it when you do that. I. I suggest our episode starter Packs is a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more.

It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. Part two with Andrew Busante. If you haven't heard part one, definitely go back and check that out. We're gonna talk more about the CIA and its operations recruiting, how the organization works, lie detection and more.

Of course, a lot of geopolitics in this episode as well. Alright, here we go. Part two with Andrew Busante. Robert Hansen, famous Trader, FBI. One of the things, what he barely got paid, this dude threw his life in career away and got tons of people killed for like, I can't even remember, but it was a fricking pittance.

It was, it was like jack squat. It was something you would never. Dude couldn't even buy a house with the money. I mean, it was that crappy. So the idea is he did it for ego, but this wasn't a public facing thing. He did it for ego. From what? Like his Russian handlers telling him how he was a smart boy. No, I don't really understand.

He, he did

[00:02:04] Andrew Bustamante: it because the ego was himself. He felt like the FBI had rejected his ideas. Yeah, they had marginalized his career, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he wanted to get back at the FBI. When the Soviets came in, they were like, Hey, we know how you can get back at the FBI. You can spy and give us the secrets that help us, and then we know you are one of the best and you're gonna be operating right under their nose.

That shows their incompetence. They can't even catch the person. And then as he was promoted to being the head of the CI division looking for a Russian mole, who was him? It just magnified and amplified that ego. Right. That's how it works. Because, and you know what's really interesting is because he was so effective and understood how to reverse engineer a counterintelligence operation.

He knew if they paid him too much, it would look suspicious, and then people would be turned onto that suspicion. So instead he made sure that he was paid a very small amount and then he would be able to take the money and get away with it, which just further kind of stroked his ego about how good he was.

[00:03:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, he just died in a supermax rest, in piss. Um, the guy got so many people killed. How do you elicit what will motivate people in the first place? Like, look, maybe, you know, look, this guy is a simpleton. We can pay him. He's gonna look cool, the end. Or if you're like, this guy is immune to money, he doesn't care about that.

He just wants to make sure that his particular brand of, I don't know, fundamentalism is validated. I, whatever. How do you elicit this kind of thing from the target?

[00:03:37] Andrew Bustamante: So you're using the term elicit, which is a very specific term for me. The word elicit or elicitation is an actual term. It's a skill. So I'm gonna take it down that road because it's a very specific skill.

What you're talking about is, is how are you able to assess a person's motivations by meeting with them? That's how I would rephrase your question. Sure. And then using the skills of elicitation are just one of the ways that you would assess that person. So let's start with something simple, right? So environment is the simplest way.

Just by looking around this room and the camera that's on you is probably the best camera to actually show it. I can see that you have the pictures of your children on the back wall.

[00:04:18] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I thought you were gonna say, I'm using the best camera. I was like, actually, I can see that your,

[00:04:21] Andrew Bustamante: your home alarm system has pictures of your, of your children.

[00:04:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:04:24] Andrew Bustamante: Like it's very clear to me that you are motivated, that there's an element of pride and motivation for your children and your family and your status as a father. Just because in this very modern, beautiful home where nothing is really on most of the walls, there's like 12 paintings by kids right Over there.

So your environment tells you a lot of what you need to know about the person. So that's before you even ask them a question. And then the next thing you wanna do is you wanna start eliciting information from them by asking them questions. And you wanna try to focus your questions on things that will make them feel, remember how we said earlier, if you want to tell us someone's lying, you ask feeling questions, right?

Right. You ask feeling based questions, right? So you say something like, I say that you have an animal fan in your family. That emotional response right there just validated for me that some like you do and you know who it is. And right now in your mind, you're picturing whoever that child is, right? Well, now you're associating me with that child.

You're associating the fact that I noticed enough to care.

[00:05:21] Jordan Harbinger: There's a couple animal fans. Uh, the giraffe is my personal favorite. It's all neck. That thing would fall over in real life. Yeah, but my

[00:05:30] Andrew Bustamante: point is, but that's how you start to elicit. So you start from the environment. We call it macro to micro. I see the environment as a macro objective.

I then pull something from the environment and ask a question, add that pertains to that specific macro item. And then I get a micro response. I get a smile, I get laughter, I get you volunteering information. I assumed only one child. You just told me that you have a couple, well you only have two children.

So now you just told me without me asking that you have two children who like animals that is elicitation. Yeah. I didn't ask you. You volunteered that. And that was just because of us talking about the environment, talking

[00:06:05] Jordan Harbinger: for a living and getting people to talk for a living are very, well, I wish most hosts did this, but it's sort of two sides of the same coin.

And people really, they wanna tell you things. That's why I was wondering. If you really do even need to elicit things from people or if you can just wind them up and let 'em go,

[00:06:22] Andrew Bustamante: you can't wind up everybody. That's the thing. You, you have to assess them to know how to even get them talking. I guarantee you, you've had interviews here where it was like pulling teeth out of them to get them talk.

For sure.

[00:06:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:06:33] Andrew Bustamante: That just shows that you can, not everybody will talk. You have to find something that breaks down their barrier to sharing what's in their head. There are plenty of people out there who want to talk but don't feel comfortable talking. Mm-Hmm. There's also people out there who live so much in their head.

They think they're talking when they're really thinking. Yeah,

[00:06:52] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, yeah.

[00:06:53] Andrew Bustamante: I've met those, those people are very difficult to deal with

[00:06:56] Jordan Harbinger: very much so. You ever, you ever dated anybody like that? I, I, it's weird, man.

[00:07:00] Andrew Bustamante: That's why I have like anybody who dates a true artist. I

[00:07:04] Jordan Harbinger: don't know how they make those relationships work.

It's very difficult. I know exactly what you're talking about. And they'll tell you something and they're using a name and you're like, who's Bob? Mm-Hmm. Oh, it's the person who raised me. Your dad. Just say, dad, what are you doing? Like, it's just so there's, there's, I'm like are insane whole, yes, there's

[00:07:20] Andrew Bustamante: a whole running world in their head that you can see in their eyes that it's playing, but it's not coming out.

Like, and they don't even realize they're not communicating well, I know. I, is it ENTJ? I cannot

[00:07:31] Jordan Harbinger: deal with that shit. Um. It for me, like looking at like an ISIS guy for example. They will not shut the hell up about their ideology 'cause it's the only thing they have aside from a rusted out AK 47 and a slave and you know, chained up that they've kidnapped or something and, and raca.

Right. So, so those guys, it seems like there's certain types of people like that that are just really easy to read because their motivation, I mean, maybe it's a little bit more veiled, right? Like you think it's their ideology, but really they just want power because they were losers back in the uk that's why they joined ISIS and ran off to Syria.

Like it can be a little bit like that, but it seems like a lot of times the label on the jar is more or less accurate.

[00:08:12] Andrew Bustamante: I, I would disagree, honestly. Really? Yeah. I would just, I would say that the label on the jar is. The one thing you shouldn't trust really. Okay. Because to get to the place where somebody represents a larger cause Mm-Hmm.

Like think about your us, your typical US soldier, right? If you were to have any private from any military in the United States, any, any, if you had a brand new recruit from any of the four services, we'll throw the Coast Guard in. If you had any of them sit down in this chair and talk to you, they would all pretty much look the same.

They would probably all have, the first response would be almost the same to all of your questions, right? URA America, America's the best, yada,

[00:08:49] Jordan Harbinger: yada. Oh yeah. That's not what I mean by la. I just mean that the way that you detected, I guess you're right, that phrasing is garbage. If you were really looking at the label, you would say it's patriotism, but it's really, that's not what I would say.

[00:09:00] Andrew Bustamante: Same thing is true for isis. Yeah. You look at the label, you think it's all about ideology. Yeah. I wouldn't think that it's not, they've been radicalized and they were radicalized because there was something in their background that where they felt powerless most likely. But that thing that made them feel powerless could be different.

This person's dad was killed by an American soldier. This person's mother was blown up in a bomb by the Israelis. This person's sister may have been raped by, you know, the next door neighbor. Who knows what something led to the chain of events that then ultimately radicalized them. But when you first talk to them, you're all you're gonna get is ideology.

[00:09:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I, yeah, no, this makes sense. I, I wish I could rephrase this because I've talked with a couple of those guys and it is usually some sort of shame derived crap. Like, I guess I shouldn't feel guilty 'cause they're an isis, so I'll talk shit about them. But a lot of it is kind of like incel adjacent bullshit, where it's like, oh.

You literally were such a loser in life that you, you felt your best option was to escape to Syria, to get purpose, to maybe get, find a wife. 'cause the only way you were gonna find a woman is at the end of a gun. And then to find some sort of like way to feel. It's basically they're a, like a mass shooter except they traveled abroad to do it.

That's really what it is. It's almost the same thing.

[00:10:15] Andrew Bustamante: I'm gonna, I'm sure I'm gonna piss people off, but

[00:10:18] Jordan Harbinger: Good.

[00:10:19] Andrew Bustamante: But clicks. Clicks. You have to, you have to recognize the humanity of even a terrorist. Ah, yeah. Like were they a loser? Were they in so adjacent? Yeah. It's not a stretch to say yes, but you also have to understand they were just people.

Yeah. They were just angry people and we were all just angry people at some point. The difference was when you were, there's a literal thing called the radicalization ladder, and we're taught the radicalization ladder specifically so that when we meet a radical, I. We can reverse engineer the ladder. Yeah.

[00:10:47] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:10:47] Andrew Bustamante: The very first step in a radicalization ladder is identifying people who feel like they have had an injustice. All of us at some point in our life felt like we had an injustice. Mom, dad, teachers, whatever, grandparents, wealth, everybody feels at some point that they had an injustice. What ends up happening, especially in the third world, is that the people who have experienced injustice there, they are surrounded by other people who are suffering from the same injustice.

So for me, when my father died and I didn't have a dad, that felt like an injustice, but I didn't really have anybody else in my immediate network who could relate to that injustice. And just like I've had friends who were raped when they were young, there's not a lot of people in their circle who had the same injustice.

So what ends up happening is you're immediately reminded that your injustice is very personal to you. Yeah. You're shame as well. Yeah. And you might be ashamed of it, but you, you start to realize that other people don't judge you for it. But when you talk about like. Poor people in Syria like, like impoverished people in Syria, which again, the UK extremist who's converted to ISIS is rare.

He's an outlier. But the person who comes from Syria, who's radicalized to ISIS is common. And it's because everyone in their community has the same injustice. Once you identify people who have an injustice, all you have to do is direct their injustice at a cause and then you have an enemy. Well, this is

[00:12:08] Jordan Harbinger: why Hamas is so success.

I mean, everybody's been oppressed, get oppressed bombed by the US and Israel, and they all share that. And then there's one organization that is allowed to exist there 'cause they killed the uh, Palestinian Authority Guys off. You want revenge? We are waiting with open arms to help you give that opportunity, get that

[00:12:27] Andrew Bustamante: opportunity.

You're suffering because of Israel. Then of course all those ignorant masses are like, yes, we are suffering because of Israel. Yeah. That's the second step in the ladder. Direct against a common enemy. Well, once you have a common enemy, it's very easy to identify a common cause. Well, we are also against Israel.

We are Hamas. Right. And now that that radical, that individual who was just lost is like, someone sees my plight, the enemy is Israel. The cause against Israel is Hamas. And now all of a sudden, before they even realize that they're carrying a Hamas flag and wearing a T-shirt. Right. And that's the problem with extremism.

That's how Al-Qaeda grew so fast. That's how ISIS grew so fast. Because where it's similar to your incel example, is that they feel so outraged and so marginalized. Psychologically, they're looking for an explanation and that psychological explanation comes through the radicalization ladder. And it only takes a few, well-trained salespeople to basically create an extremist cause.

[00:13:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the recruiters are looking for that kind of thing. It's fascinating. There's this documentary that I don't think anybody has seen, but there's a journalist investigating online ISIS recruiters and she ends up falling in love with the ISIS recruiter. And the only reason that she didn't run off or end up in deeper, but maybe even run off to Syria and meet this guy, I think she was about to do that, was because he had thought, he had hung up a call and she was recording their calls for her documentary about ISIS recruiting, ironically.

And he said something in Arabic and she was like, that's weird. I wonder what that was. So she was like, I'm gonna ask somebody to translate it. And the person was like, he said, Hey, uh, Abdullah, I got you another one. These girls are so dumb, you're gonna owe me so much money after I'm done with all of them.

I'm Bria sending you a wife. She's gonna leave soon. And she was like, oh, I am being played super freaking interesting. And so it's easy for us to say, oh, only dumb people fall for this. But when somebody has enough of a baseline on you to figure out where your little holes in your soul are, and they know how to fill them because they've been trained by Iranian intelligence or to do that or whatever,

[00:14:36] Andrew Bustamante: it's a pretty good sell.

Absolutely. It's a pretty good pitch. Absolutely. You only need 15 skilled recruiters to create thousands of volunteer recruits. We're right back to the same topic we had earlier motivation and manipulation. It's very hard to manipulate people into joining an ideological cause. It's hard to manipulate someone into wearing a bomb vest and killing themselves.

It's much easier to motivate them when you connect the fact that their injustice is going to be righted forever and they can have a legacy impact on every Palestinian or every Sunni Islam or Shia Islam person in the future. Right? Like that's how it works. It's as frustrating as it is and as angry as people get it is the same way we recruit for the US military.

It is the same thing we do here. We fill new recruits heads with ideology. You know, army of one Marine Strong. We fill people with this ideology. So then this injustice, this poor child,

[00:15:32] Jordan Harbinger: is it Army strong? It's the few of the, the proud, the Marines. I know that much. Yeah. Thank you. Geez man. Come on. I know you're in the Air Force.

You should have this.

[00:15:41] Andrew Bustamante: But while you're doing is you're just, you're reaching into rural America for the most part. You're reaching into rural America. Yeah. Finding these people who don't know where they're gonna go. Right. And they feel lost. And mom and dad didn't save any money for college.

Manufacturing's gone. Yeah. For the most part. Again, there's a bell curve, right? And then you're basically telling them they can be part of a larger cause. And then that part of the larger cause is you can come fight for your country and fight for freedom. At the end of the day, what they're saying is, if you die in service to America, that's a life well spent.

Mm-Hmm.

[00:16:09] Jordan Harbinger: That's why they always show those funerals, man. But it salutes and the flag, and then the folding of the flag and giving it to the person. It's like they show, I know they show that all the time. In part, it's really impressive, but one of the reasons it's impressive, the whole design is, I, I think if you sort of, maybe I'm paranoid, but I feel like if you backwards rationalize why they make that impressive, it's because it's all propaganda.

Yeah. Yes. And,

[00:16:32] Andrew Bustamante: and there isn't a veteran out there who won't tell you they fell for it once, and then when they actually saw their buddies die, they were like, what a waste of Yeah. A good life, right? You wanna know what's honorable, having a long, fulfilling, productive life that serves a family and the American dream, and that's what's a long, productive, successful life.

The most honorable thing you can do is live a fulfilling life, serving your family and the people of the country. By being productive and being a contributing member of society. That's the most honorable thing. Dying in service to your nation is not the most honorable thing. It's just another honorable thing.

The challenge is like, and that's part of why you're seeing a recruitment crisis right now. Because today's generation who has, has lived with information at their fingertips, they know there's alternatives and they know that no matter how desperate they might feel, there's still alternatives. And once you sign that paperwork, you're locked in for a long time.

Plus you have a whole generation of people like me, veterans of the years past who now that we have children or we're mentoring teenagers, we're like, you don't have to join the military. Yeah. When I was a teenager, everybody in my sphere of influence was like, you gotta join the military.

[00:17:41] Jordan Harbinger: Really? I, and we're gonna end up doing, if we haven't already, some program where it's like, you wanna move to the United States, you have to join the military, you have to, we're in a bad place.

Yeah. For

[00:17:52] Andrew Bustamante: recruiting. We are in

[00:17:53] Jordan Harbinger: a bad, bad place. It will not surprise me if in five years. It is every single immigrant who's under the age of, I don't know, whatever, 33, 36, man or woman must at age 18 or something serve for seven years, and you get your blue passport after the fact. It's gonna be something like that.

I mean, we already have to do that for labor. So it's just, it's a natural extension of that. A lot of people say things like, trust your gut, trust your intuition. I don't know what you think, but I hate that because I. Your intuition is made up of a bunch of your feelings that are like based on other things that have happened to you over your life or things how you feel like it's just not reality.

[00:18:33] Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, I completely agree. Trusting your gut does not account for what we call cognitive bias. Like yes, it's bad enough that you're just trusting your emotions, but there's actual science that shows that the human brain leaps to conclusions. Yes. And then after it's leaped to a conclusion enough times, it just wires itself that way.

So I mean, you see this every time you talk to somebody who's like hyper religious or somebody who's hyper political, there's no space for any kind of new information because they just leap to a conclusion that is essentially trusting your gut.

[00:19:04] Jordan Harbinger: I see this with, one of the worst examples I've seen recently is a doctor made a video.

I don't do a lot of social media, but I saw that someone sent this to me on Instagram, a doctor made a video about, and I can't remember what it was, but it's not relevant. It was just something like, Hey, here's a medical thing that you might not know about your child. A lot of the top comments were, no way.

My mama gut says this, and I will always do that. Mama knows best. And I'm like, you are arguing with a doctor, a physician, an md and she is saying, don't do this. This is bad. And it's like, well, my mama knows best. Why would you know best you gave birth to this person? Good. You have a good baseline on your kid as per our previous conversation.

That does not indicate whatsoever that you are qualified to give medical advice or even make a really good medical decision. It's terrifying to see stuff like that.

[00:19:57] Andrew Bustamante: And it happens all the time. And what's worse is because we live in an age that where information is so available, it gets reinforced because now in your algorithm, your algorithm looks for how you respond to things, and then it feeds you more of what you already believe.

So you end up in this echo chamber that gets smaller and smaller and more hyper niche to you. And then we all end up wondering how that other person end up so crazy before we think, oh wait, maybe I'm equally as crazy in my own echo chamber of what social media and media and entertainment is telling me.

[00:20:30] Jordan Harbinger: I know fear has some wisdom in it. We've talked about the gift of fear with Gavin de Becker, and you know who he is. Yep. Yeah. Most of the time though, it's just a bad idea to go with subjective emotion. Right. It it seems like, do you train that out, people at the ccia a is that something they train out of you?

You know, it's funny, the the answer

[00:20:48] Andrew Bustamante: is no, because the gift of fear is very real. Oh. Not the gift. Sorry, I'm, I know what you're saying. I know what you're, but here's what I'm saying. Right. The gift of fear is very real. So you don't ever want to undermine the value of that gift.

[00:20:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Okay. Because

[00:20:58] Andrew Bustamante: that's what keeps us alive.

Right? Not only what keeps us alive, but oftentimes when it comes to a field operation, you're keeping yourself alive and the other people on your team. So you want everybody to have the gift of fear. But what we try to do is we try to reprogram how the brain and body connection reacts to fear. So I'm gonna try and do this in like a Reader's Digest version.

Fear always comes from an external stimulus. So if you picture like a diagram of like connecting lines, you've got an external stimulus that is picked up by one of your five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, feel, right? Mm-hmm. So somewhere in there, one of your five senses picks up on this external stimulus.

That is then just information, not in emotion. Just information is then sent to both your left and right hemisphere simultaneously. Your left is your logical center, your right is your emotional center. So when is

[00:21:51] Jordan Harbinger: that real? I, I thought that was sort of like not a thing. The left and right. Left and right is totally real.

The left and right hemispheres are. But is it true that our emotions are really located in one hemisphere? Uh, that's not, I

[00:22:00] Andrew Bustamante: mean, scientifically they cross pollinate and there's like central, there's central nodes inside the brain, so it's just, okay. But as a, as an example, okay. There's essentially two pathways through the brain that are conveniently described as left and right, but the pathway of your brain that is emotional when it sees the stimulus through the five senses, the emotional part of your brain immediately triggers your survival instinct, right?

Fight or flight and threat or non threat, really. Right? And then it feeds, it can immediately tell your amygdala. Which is the physiological response of your body, how to react, because it's a one step connection, right? It's literally stimulus goes to brain, brain reacts emotionally, fight or flight, tells body, sweat, panic, increase your heart rate, get ready to run.

That's your emotional pathway. Your logical pathway has two extra steps. The information comes in, the information is shared with your brain, but the first thing your brain does is it says, have I seen this before? So it, it goes against an index of previous experiences and then after it processes through that index and it says, yes, I have seen this before, or No, I haven't seen it before.

It then goes to another part of your rational brain that says, when I saw this before or when I, when I've seen something like this before, what was the outcome? Well, then it comes up with a response that is measured and rational, and then it goes to the amygdala, and then it tells the body how to react.

What I'm saying there is that the left and right brain are these, the emotional pathway and the logical pathway in response to the same fear. Stimulus one happens faster than the other. So have you ever had a moment where you've been startled by something in the corner? Of

[00:23:45] Jordan Harbinger: course. Yeah.

[00:23:46] Andrew Bustamante: You see something, socks

[00:23:47] Jordan Harbinger: on your floor, whatever.

Yeah. And you think

[00:23:49] Andrew Bustamante: it's a snake or a rat, you startle. But then like a half a second later you're like, oh, it's just socks, right? And then you come down, well, the startle is a physiological response. You actually had an increase in your, in your heart rate and your blood pressure, right? You had a very real physical response, physiological response.

And then when you came down, you had a very real physical response. That is exactly what's happening. So that is the gift of fear. The gift of fear is the startle that could have kept you alive if it was actually a rat. So what CIA trains us to do. This is a lot longer than Reader's Digest and yeah, we're good.

I can tell it from your

[00:24:23] Jordan Harbinger: face. We're good. No, no. I'm, now, I'm all paranoid, like how many of my kids' drawings are on camera?

[00:24:29] Andrew Bustamante: The, uh, this is not what CIA trains you to do is slow down the emotional side of your thinking and speed up the rational side of your thinking so that you startle less and you rationalize more.

But the impact to your amygdala, it levels out your physiological response. So now when you see something in the corner of your, of your house, you still see it, but you don't panic. Instead you see it and you're like, what's that in the corner of the house? Right? That's what it's all about. And that's exactly how you train a very successful case officer.

It's how you train a very successful field operator. That's how you, you train a successful shooter. You train them to not have a spike in their physiological response to a true fear.

[00:25:13] Jordan Harbinger: Stimulus. You know that next time I see you, I'm gonna jump out from behind something and be like, ha. Yeah. And I'll be like, I got you.

Yeah, yeah. I'll be like, Hmm. Oh, it works. I saw your hair over in the corner. Yeah. I didn't know what it was. How do CIA agents develop assets in other countries? You know, if you, let's say you're, you're stationed in Panama or whatever, like where I was, you're gonna meet somebody, you know that they're a narco trafficker because you've got background information on people that are gonna be at the party, at the Australian embassy or whatever it is, and you just know his, he's a real estate developer, right.

That a lot of these guys do. But he is really, he's a narco. How do you start to develop a relationship with this person?

[00:25:53] Andrew Bustamante: It's a great question. There's an actual process that we're taught, and it's a process very similar to the sales cycle, or very similar to like a leadership cycle. Very similar to a social cycle about how you make a friend or how you gain someone's trust, or how you make someone take action and buy your product.

Espionage is really nothing more than the selling of treachery. That's all espionage is. Right. You're, you're just pitching somebody on the idea of giving away secrets in exchange for something else. It's, it's a, it's very much a sales pitch, right? So that process to develop the asset, it's an acronym that we call SAD rat, S-A-D-R-A-T as funny as great acronym.

Yeah. It's a government acronym. Yikes. But the SADRA acronym stands for spot Assess, develop, recruit, handle. Even though handle starts with an H, it's a government acronym. I gotcha. Yeah. And T is terminate this process. S-A-D-R-A-T is just a process that's always happening. So you spot a target, you assess the target for whether or not they have access to information and whether or not they're susceptible to potential espionage.

Because remember, if they have access, but they can't be turned, you don't wanna waste your time if they don't have access and they're, they look like they're gonna be easy to turn. They're not gonna be helpful. So you're looking for that right person who both has access to secrets and is willing to share those secrets.

So the A is very important. And then you go into the term develop, which is the term you use. How do you develop the asset? Develop is a very specific term that we use that talks about cultivating and training and exchanging information and testing core behaviors to make sure that that person can truly engage in a secret relationship that nobody else knows about.

If you apply sadra to like getting married, it makes a lot of sense. You spot a lot of potential partners. You assess potential partners against, could I live with them? Could they live with me? Could they raise children? Could they be financially responsible? And then you kinda whittle it down to the ones who say, who are yes to all of those, but that's not where you stop.

Then you actually date them for a while. You test them for a while, you see how do they handle when I'm sick with food poisoning? How do they handle when we travel overseas? That's all part of the D and develop. Because you're developing relationship that ends, like the development period ends. When you actually ask the question, will you marry me?

When they say yes, they are now recruited. And then when they're recruited, everything changes. That's why it's so much fun to like be dating and it's not fun at all to be engaged. The sad part is the fun, the happy part.

[00:28:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And the rat part. Not not always. Not always smooth sailing.

[00:28:33] Andrew Bustamante: Right? So in the recruitment phase now, it's like they said yes, you've said yes.

You're in a relationship that is intentionally there to exchange secrets. Well, now there has to be like rules and there have to be actions that are consistent and there's responsibility and obligation and all this other stuff. And then through the entirety of that relationship, you are in the handling phase.

Handling is really more like what we joke about with marriage, where most husbands joke that happy wife, happy life.

[00:29:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:29:03] Andrew Bustamante: It's kind of real, but it's also, we joke about it because what we're really saying is we have to meet our wife's expectations to keep her happy.

[00:29:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like I'm pretty sure I was gonna say, I'm pretty sure I'm the one being handled, which is why this doesn't always hold up.

Uh, the analogy doesn't always hold up. Yeah. Correct.

[00:29:17] Andrew Bustamante: Well, that's how most husbands are. And, and we, we think that we're the developing officer until we actually get married and then we all realize we're being handled. Yeah. Being played by double agent. That's how it works. Yeah. And then, but the place where I hope you and I never get to Uhhuh is the t the Terminate.

Because in a true clandestine relationship, when the asset is no longer useful, you don't want to continue having meetings with that asset. So you terminate the relationship, not terminate the person. Right. Just terminate the relationship. And that means you find a reason to stop talking. In marriage terms, that would be like your typical divorce or your separation.

It's like, Hey, you no longer serve me, so I'm gonna let you go so I can go right back to the spot. Part of Sad Rat,

[00:29:58] Jordan Harbinger: I heard, uh, that when the Soviet Union fell, a lot of people who thought they were in relationships with Russian women were just like completely ghosted. I'm sure this number's relatively small, right?

But people who are being developed by KGB agents suddenly found themselves on the other end of, uh, not answering my letters or my calls or whatever it was back in the eighties, like what happened? And the the, the answer is their paycheck stopped coming and they were like, screw this. I'm going back to it was Beki Stan or whatever, and I'm done with this bullshit.

And so the diplomat or whatever that had been cheating on his wife is no longer in a relationship with anybody. It just brings up sort of an interesting, well, actually, let me ask you this. Sex espionage, I know you get asked about this a lot. I know this is a thing. There's a podcast about it. Have you've seen this at all?

It's called To Die for my friend Neil. You know Neil Strauss? Yeah. Yeah. So Neil did this podcast, and I love Neil, but I think this woman's story is bs, not that, because sex espionage isn't a thing. Nothing adds up, but sex espionage happens. I'm sure of it. I think I've known some people who I'm like, I'm pretty sure you're being played by this person.

I'm curious if you've certainly, they train you guys on how to avoid this. Tell me about it a little bit. I'm, I think a lot of people are curious about this. Yeah,

[00:31:14] Andrew Bustamante: absolutely. So sex espionage is a commercial term. We call them sexual exploitation operations, because essentially what you're doing is you're exploiting or motivating slash manipulating somebody on the basis of their sex, not their gender, but their sexual preferences.

Mm-hmm. So that can be homosexual, that can be heterosexual, that can be bisexual, that can be any number of the kinks that are out there if you exploit their sexuality. It is a sexual exploitation operation. And there's. Left and right boundaries, so to speak. In the United States, we have no problem with sexual exploitation operations, but we will not sexually exploit using one of our intelligence officers because what ends up happening pragmatically, is once you cross the boundary into sex with the Western mentality, you also cross a boundary emotionally in the West.

That's something that's very unique to the West. In Latin America and in Asia and in like India, people have sex all the time, and it's not emotional. Here in the United States, we are of a culture where once you cross the sex boundary, you can't help but by the conditioning of our culture also cross an emotional boundary.

Interesting. So we do not create operations where our officers engage in sex to withdraw secrets from a target. That does not mean that our officers don't facilitate sex for a target. So if you have somebody who's really into transgender men or transgender females, you might facilitate them getting a transgender prostitute.

Mm-Hmm. Or a transgender boyfriend or girlfriend, and you become the friend that helps them get the sex they want.

[00:32:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's an interesting little hustle right there. Huh? The left

[00:32:56] Andrew Bustamante: and right boundaries, right? Yeah. Whereas you consider SVR or MSS, the Russians or the Chinese, they very much let their own officers, they push their own officers to engage in sexual exploitation operations because they don't have freedom of choice in those countries.

They don't have personal rights in those countries. And oftentimes what they find is that in those countries, sex is already like not an emotional thing. So they can leverage that tool much faster. And it's better to put a trained operator in bed with a target. Than it is to put a trained operator in the room next to the target, and then after the target gets their rocks off, then you have a conversation.

But in our country, that's essentially what we're left with.

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Now back to Andrew Bustamante. By the way, the one of the other reasons I brought up Neil Strauss not to throw shade on his podcast, which I actually quite enjoyed, even though again, I think her story is full of holes. He was supposed to write a profile of Lukashenko, the President of Belarus. The dictator of Belarus, and he started getting these emails that were like, Hey, by the way, in preparation for your visit, we just want to know kind of girls you like.

It was very clunky and I thought, this is KGB training. You'll literally ask the dude what kind of girls he likes, I, what am I missing? Or you could just

[00:37:07] Andrew Bustamante: read, you could just read the game. He basically outlines his dream girl

[00:37:09] Jordan Harbinger: now, or like, look at the woman he's dating now. I mean, there's clearly, there's a type here.

Man, it was really kind of ridiculous. But he started to be like, what are you talking about? And the emails are comically clunky, man. It's like, we just want you to have a good time. Maybe you'll meet somebody and maybe there's a future in it. And it's just like you have read this entirely wrong. The budget cuts over there at the, uh, be rush and KGB must be pretty intense.

Uh, but it was just very, it was very clunky, but it was so funny to see this happen. Because he was supposed to go there and write a profile to the president. Obviously what they're looking for is to get him in a compromising situation, videotape it or whatever, and then make sure that the profile is flattering.

Mm. Or they were gonna do something, you know, otherwise, what's the point? If you wanna show somebody a good time and it's spontaneous, just wait till they're there and have a party. I mean, that's all you need to do. But they were like, no, we really wanna make damn sure that this person gets it in. It's, it was just so ridiculous.

And I'm imagining that most operations involving sex, espionage, sexual exploitation are a little bit

[00:38:15] Andrew Bustamante: smoother. It's not necessarily, uh, that they're smooth. It's that they are, they are very intentional. And oftentimes what happens is when you're, when you're dealing with somebody who can be sexually exploited, they don't want to be coy about it.

They prefer a bold approach. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So more often than not when like a true sexual exploitation operation happens, it's kind of like the smoking hot female. Or the smoking hot gay guy or the smoking hot whatever, walks right up to the person and is super bold and is just like, Hey, I saw that you're sitting here alone and what are you doing in town and do you wanna go up to my room and have a good time?

Listen, yeah, it's just bold. And what ends up happening is that for anybody who's listening and watching, and here's, here's a moment, here's what I call real talk, right? Let's have a real talk moment here. If sex motivates you, the only thing more motivating than sex is fast sex. So I suppose you're right.

So like there are plenty of people out there that, and the reason Belarus does it is because they learned it from KGB and MSS learned from KGB. Why Beat around the bush pun. It's better to just say great pun. Hey, yeah, hey, what kind of women do you like? What kind of wine do you like? What kind of this do you like?

What kind of that do you like? You bury it among four or five options, but what they're really saying to the right person who can be exploited, what they're really saying is, if you'll tell us what kind of women you like, we'll make sure you get them. To some people, they judge it wrong. But to most people that are actually exploitable sexually, they will answer that question and they'll be like, I like red wine, I like cabernet, I like rare beefs.

I like blondes that weigh 130 pounds or less. I like ex whatever. And they'll just, they'll put their list in

[00:39:55] Jordan Harbinger: there. They lost you there for a second, Andrew. Let's see what's on the menu. Yeah, it was, uh, it, you're right. It seems like it must be a filter. Like, Hey, look, basically proposition this dude as much as you can in writing and if he runs not the right target.

Not the right

[00:40:09] Andrew Bustamante: target. Because you know what, there are plenty of other journalists that we can have come out and do the profile.

[00:40:14] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Right. And if we

[00:40:15] Andrew Bustamante: can't get this one, there's nine others that we can choose from. Yeah.

[00:40:18] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. He didn't end up doing the profile. Obviously. He was afraid to go after that for obvious reasons.

It, yeah, it's Belarus. It's Belarus. I mean, even people who are from Belarus don't want to go to Belarus. It's for real. Yeah. Like

[00:40:30] Andrew Bustamante: everyone

[00:40:31] Jordan Harbinger: should be afraid of going to Belarus under any condition. Yeah. My brother is getting married. He's dating a girl from Belarus and this will come out after that. So I'm not afraid, right.

Talk about this. But one of the reasons he's getting, he's getting married in Georgia, and I don't mean the state, I mean the country of, and the reason is because her passport was expiring. She lives in a third country. I'm not gonna say where they live. Um, they live in a third country in Eastern Europe.

She wanted to go renew her passport 'cause they wanted to come here and visit her Christmas. Well, as it turns out, you need to go to the embassy and renew your passport. Okay? So she goes to the embassy, the Belarusian Embassy, and they said, you can't renew your passport, you have to go back to Belarus. So she goes, huh, okay.

Calls her family in Belarus. And they were like, do not come back. So-and-so's uncle came home and now he can't go work in Germany where he has his job because they won't let him leave. And they confiscated his passport. So they're like, don't come back. Crap. My passport's not gonna get renewed. So my brother's like, screw it.

I guess I'm proposing romantic, right? To get documents. So he goes, all right, let's get married. He's a citizen of another country. They have a couple citizenships or whatever, residences. Anyways, so in the country where they live, she needs a document that says she's not already married in Belarus. So she goes back to the embassy and the guy goes, I'm not giving you that.

You should marry a Belarus. And besides, if you wanna get married to that guy, go get married in Belarus. It's cheaper anyway. So they are just like, no, no, no, go back to Bella. And so she knows she's gonna get, there's just a non-zero chance she can never leave. So he calls me in a panic and he is like, where can we get married where you don't need documents?

And I'm like the United States kind of, and it's like Iceland and Georgia, Georgia. So he's like, great, I've already been to Georgia. We really like it there. So they're getting married in Georgia quite quickly, and she's going to then have a marriage that's valid to this guy who's got a passport from another country, which gets her da da da.

She doesn't need a beller passport anymore. She's basically abandoning that whole idea. It's quite a saga. I forget what the hell my original point was, but here we are.

[00:42:33] Andrew Bustamante: That's okay. Well, I mean it's gonna be tough, but point, your original point was about sexual exploitation operations. Yeah. And why nobody should go to BEUs BEUs.

Right. I think it was

[00:42:40] Jordan Harbinger: just

[00:42:40] Andrew Bustamante: why

[00:42:40] Jordan Harbinger: nobody should go to Belarus. I think that was just an anecdote about that particular thing, which is a shame. 'cause I would love to visit a place like that. The problem is I want to eventually leave. Yeah. And I think that's the trick.

[00:42:50] Andrew Bustamante: There's really nothing to see that I would wanna see in Belarus.

Have you been there before? So Belarus is on a short list of places where like I'm never, never really allowed to go and uh, and Russia is on that list too. Sure. But if anything you wanna see in Belarus, you'd prefer to see it in Russia anyways. Right. Hmm. Maybe because that's really the whole reason Belarus is a dangerous place is because it's essentially a shadow government run by Russia.

[00:43:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What is the term people use? Like not puppet state, which is also true, but, and not even fiefdom, but uh, there's a term. That they use. It's an antiquated term. Whatever. I'll look it up later. It's like a principality almost of, of Russia.

[00:43:26] Andrew Bustamante: Yeah. Where else can you not go? Cuba is on my list of places where I can't go.

China is on my list of places where I can't go. Hong Kong is now on that list. Taiwan will probably be on that list very soon. You think so? Yeah. I mean, it's not just me, it's really anybody with my credentials or background. Like I can't go to Ukraine right now.

[00:43:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:43:43] Andrew Bustamante: So there's just, there's places where we become a risk if someone with our credentials ends up being picked up in a place like that.

And these are not free countries, there's not,

[00:43:52] Jordan Harbinger: Taiwan is free, but there's a lot of MSS operating in Taiwan, obviously.

[00:43:55] Andrew Bustamante: And t and like again, when we talk about free, like the Taiwanese police could wrap us up and then come up with any trumped up claim and. It would work. Taiwan is a friendly state in so many ways.

Why would they wrap you up? The Taiwanese president is friendly. The Taiwanese legislature is not Mm-Hmm. The Taiwanese police divisions are different by principality. Hmm. And that's what people don't realize about most of the world. People don't realize that the, the way that laws work in the United States, uhhuh, where the federal law is similar, if not the same as most state laws like in the United States.

We have very, very little difference between state and municipality and federal law structure writing.

[00:44:35] Jordan Harbinger: You have superseding federal law and things like of that. And the rest

[00:44:37] Andrew Bustamante: of the world is not like that. Like you could literally. Enter one part of Cambodia cross through a police district where the laws are completely different and end up violating a law where they hold you in that precinct even though you have entered into a different precinct and you were just traveling through on a bus.

Who knows what. Right. It's not the same as the United States.

[00:44:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Taiwan, I, I'm still a little confused by that just because it does seem so friendly. I mean, Hong Kong obviously is part of China.

[00:45:01] Andrew Bustamante: Hong Kong was super friendly. Yeah. Until it suddenly wasn't friendly. Right. If you were there four days before it was suddenly unfriendly, it would've still been unfriendly.

Mm-Hmm. Since the Taiwanese elections in January, the pro unity with China government. Yeah. They control the legislature. The president is pro separation. Separation. Yeah. But that president is having a hell of a hard time getting anything done in Taiwan right now because the parliament, the legislature wants to go closer back to ties with China.

Yeah. So even sitting here having a conversation where we're like, Taiwan is free, Taiwan is not free. Hmm. Taiwan is split. Taiwan is torn. Right. The parliament, the legislature has representatives of all the districts of Taiwan. Sure. The majority of those districts are represented by somebody who wants to reunify with China, which means that, I mean, China spreads its hands everywhere anyways.

Sure. Yeah. It's definitely deep into those districts that want unity with China. So now more than half of Taiwanese districts we can assume, are influenced by, if not penetrated by China.

[00:46:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:46:05] Andrew Bustamante: And their police precincts in those districts will be heavily influenced by, if not penetrated by China. So when we say Taiwan is free,

[00:46:14] Jordan Harbinger: I just mean from a personal liberties stand, democratic standpoint, it seems quite democratic right now, but maybe not.

[00:46:20] Andrew Bustamante: I don't know. I mean, it's, I, I'm not gonna risk it personally. Yeah. Yeah. I

[00:46:23] Jordan Harbinger: mean, I don't blame you for that. I'm just saying it seems like I, this is something where I have to ask like an actual sort of Taiwan, China experts, because I know dissidents that freely travel to Taiwan, but can obviously not go to China.

And you know, they would never go to Hong Kong 'cause they'd be arrested immediately.

[00:46:40] Andrew Bustamante: Are they traveling after January of this year?

[00:46:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's a good

[00:46:43] Andrew Bustamante: question.

[00:46:43] Jordan Harbinger: I don't know. I have to ask. That's, I

[00:46:44] Andrew Bustamante: mean, every, the danger of traveling in and out is increasing every day. Yeah. That's interesting. And it's the same thing with Hong Kong.

[00:46:49] Jordan Harbinger: I'll have to ask Hong Kong. I can't go to China or Hong Kong, but I, I last went to Taiwan in October and now I'm like, well crap, should I not go back? I talk a lot about China on the show. I am not in their good graces by any stretch, but I'm no spy as far as they know. Um, you mentioned secret life before Sharing your secret life, first of all, I'd like to define that a little more.

Yeah. And then talk about how you pry your way into something like that.

[00:47:12] Andrew Bustamante: So we talked about this earlier when we were discussing the idea of judging people by the label, right? Like the label on the can, if you will, the label on the jar. The jar. There's three types of lives that we all carry. At least we are taught that everybody carries three types of lives, right?

There's a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The public life is the life you want other people to see. So going back to our example about the ISIS extremist who's. Parroting ideology or the brand new US military recruit who's parroting ideology, that is their public life. That's what they put on, so everyone around them can see it.

Right. I'm smiling. Not that I'm actually happy. I'm laughing at your joke. Even though it's not really funny. I'm pretending that my relationship with my wife is perfect, even though I know that it's flawed.

[00:47:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:47:55] Andrew Bustamante: That's all public life stuff, and we all have a very public life. We carry it with us to work.

We carry it with us on dates, we carry it with us at the gym. Mm-Hmm. We want people to believe that we're confident and capable. Right? That's all public life stuff, not real public. Then behind that, we have what's called a private life. Your private life is what's known to the people who are in your inner circle, the people who are your closest friends.

And in that private life, they know things about you that nobody on the public knows. Right. They know that I'm lactose intolerant. They know that your feet maybe stink when you take 'em outta your shoes. They know that you don't like to stay up past 10:00 PM Public and

[00:48:28] Jordan Harbinger: private

[00:48:28] Andrew Bustamante: life

[00:48:28] Jordan Harbinger: are crashing into each other right now on this podcast,

[00:48:32] Andrew Bustamante: but that's, that's all part of your private life.

Right. Your wife knows it. Yeah. Your mom knows it. Your close friend from college. These people know whatever it is, and it's more compromising than what the public knows, but it's not compromising enough that it makes you feel nervous.

[00:48:46] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Now my wife tells me I'm exactly like I am on the podcast, which is who knows what That really, I guess that means that those things merge together a little bit, but clearly there are things that I don't broadcast on this show.

Well, I

[00:48:57] Andrew Bustamante: mean, just a few minutes ago you were talking about how you were immediately distracted by the idea of how much else about your children is posted on the

[00:49:04] Jordan Harbinger: walls. Oh, just the drawings. Yeah. 'cause I, I realized how much, I don't really mind if people know that I, you know, they, my kids. That's a private life concern.

Yeah. It's a private life concern.

[00:49:12] Andrew Bustamante: Right, right. That's a private life concern. The third life that we have is called a secret life. Your secret life is the life that you keep secret from. Even your closest people in the private circle, there are secrets you have that your wife doesn't know. There are secrets that your wife has that you don't know.

Ugh, uncomfortable, super uncomfortable. But this is what's so powerful about espionage. When you learn that that's the truth, and then you validate, you're like, holy shit. There are definitely secrets that I have mm-hmm, that I don't tell anybody. Once you learn, you have a secret life. It's not that much of a stretch to understand.

Everybody has a secret life. The power happens when you can get other people to share their secret life with you. Secret life is all the things that you're the most ashamed of. You're the most guilty about the things that you're, you fear, judgment, and shame. Like it's the places, the things that you don't even like to talk to yourself about, but you know they're true.

All of that constitutes your secret life. What's so powerful about secret life is once somebody shares their secret life with you. They are forever wedded to the fact that you have been led into their secret life. Right. It's like the ultimate form of loyalty. Yeah. Because they, nobody knows this thing about them except them and you.

Well, it's like guys

[00:50:22] Jordan Harbinger: you've ever traveled with. When you go to Thailand, you just come back and it's like, remember when Thailand and I went to Thailand with you? It's like she's in the other room. You know?

[00:50:31] Andrew Bustamante: Like there, there's, there's, there's a few of those. There's a bond there. Yeah. And that bond is super powerful when it comes to the idea of using that bond for leverage and gaining secrets again.

'cause espionage is all about stealing secrets. Well, once you've been led into someone's secrets, it's very easy to get them to tell you more secrets that don't even compare to that secret from their secret. Like

[00:50:51] Jordan Harbinger: I used to teach, like share and then be shared with. It seems like if you're CIA, you would've share something that was fake and constructed.

'cause you don't really want them to have a leverage

[00:51:01] Andrew Bustamante: over you. You make a, so what you're talking about is elicitation, and this is what I, I mean, I always loved what you taught in your previous podcast. Mm-Hmm. Right. But it's still surface level. Yeah. It's still like introduction. That was like Neil Strauss.

Yeah. The stuff that he's teaches it is all very superficial. Sure. Surface level psychology. When it comes to actually applying that psychology against a wide variety of targets. Mm-Hmm. It gets more nuanced. Yeah. Makes, makes sense. So share to be shared with is an elicitation technique that's technically called give to get uhhuh.

I went to this university. Well it's logical for you to tell me where you went to university. Sure. When it comes to getting into someone's secret life, you can't give to get, because then you're giving your secrets. But that's my point. And if you give a lie, you're not showing that you're worthy of their secret life.

Because if they suspect or or think that there's a lie there, they're not gonna let you in. What you have to do is you have to make assessed guesses. Hypotheses that come with validation about what you already suspect is in their secret life. So you look at them and you're kind of like, I understand a lot of people have a hard time.

Mm-Hmm. Around seven years of marriage, and they start wondering whether or not their wife is a good fit. And I see the way that you and your wife argue sometimes, and I can't help but wonder if maybe you're feeling that way too. And I don't want you to feel bad. Yeah. If that's the way you feel, because I've had lots of friends feel the same way.

[00:52:16] Jordan Harbinger: This sounds exactly like what we used to teach, uh, not on the podcast, but in the programs that we were selling because I did teach it to MI six and possibly big question mark to CIA because they don't tell you what you're doing. There's a lot of like, film this training for our corporation in a room with one person who's just taking notes and quiet.

Yeah. Which was kind of how that, I think the MI six thing was, there wasn't like a room full of guys looking at me. It was like a video camera thing. And it found out more or less by accident. And definitely when you're teaching, I wonder, in fact, confirm this for me, if you can. Do you ever receive training where it's just like a person on video teaching something?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because there were times where I'm like, so I'm going to, I don't know, Northern Virginia to teach this thing in just like an empty room. And there's essentially a secretary or like one other person asking me if I need water or something to drink, turning off a video camera on and off comes back into the room after lunch with a bunch of random questions that I'm guessing she didn't come up with herself.

Clarifications do it again at the end of the thing. And I'm like, who's watching me give this training that doesn't wanna just sit in this room? Yeah. That's how a lot of our

[00:53:25] Andrew Bustamante: training works. It really? Okay. Um, and it's because we get, I mean, it's top tier training. Yeah. But it's still one sided. You have a need to know the content of the training, but the trainer does not have a need to know the people who are in the training.

Well,

[00:53:38] Jordan Harbinger: right. I just suspect I'm like, these have gotta be DIA or do officers that can't have me see their face.

[00:53:45] Andrew Bustamante: And there's also an element of, I mean it may just be a, a panel of HR people who are determining whether or not your training's even applicable because there's no benefit to letting you know that there's even real people there.

So if they had five different people coming in to talk about five different ways to apply psychology to relationship building, they have one person at 9:00 AM another person at 1230, another person at two, another person at five, whatever. Right? It's all recorded.

[00:54:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:54:08] Andrew Bustamante: And it's all assessed by an HR panel.

And then that HR panel could split and splice all the best pieces of all five together into one packaged video that then gets sent to the do. Yeah.

[00:54:18] Jordan Harbinger: This is multiple days. So either it was a really in-depth assessment or it was a training. 'cause I was so confused as to why I'm training this completely disinterested person and a video camera.

And I'm like, this can't be used for commercial use. You signed off on the thing. So what are you using this tape for? It was very, and then my friends from agencies were like, maybe it was this thing, but nobody's gonna tell me. So it's funny, you, you and I got in touch years and years ago, and again, we forgot how that even happened.

Uh, or at least that's the story we're going with. I was like, oh, call me when you have a book. It's easier for me to prep what is going on because the, the clearance process for these books, I made a joke about the clearance process, but it's, it was apparently That's really the hold up.

[00:54:59] Andrew Bustamante: Yeah. The clearance process.

So as a former CIA officer, I have a lifetime secrecy agreement. An NDA. Yeah. Where I can't disclose operational details about my past. I can talk about lots of other things, but sources and methods about intelligence operations that I participated in is one of those no-go lists to get that approved, I have to run it through CIA.

We wrote a manuscript. That manuscript has been with CIA. It has actually technically been approved by CIA. However, there were changes in the geopolitical landscape related to what we wrote about in our book that then CIA, exercised their right to deny the book. So then we had to change some of the details to accommodate CIA's requirements.

And then it's gone back in for another round of revisions. So we are hoping to have a book approved by CIA so that we can get it published on bookshelves by summer of 2025. But it was originally supposed to be released by summer of 2024 until CIA changed their mind. And it's really tied to the fact that my wife and I, our operations were so modern.

That the contents of the book is unlike anything anybody's ever seen before. And it makes CIA nervous. It's a

[00:56:09] Jordan Harbinger: great

[00:56:09] Andrew Bustamante: pitch.

[00:56:11] Jordan Harbinger: Um, yeah. Just, just telling, just spit and facts guys. My, my book is full of amazing things, no one's ever seen before. Uh, but are you gonna be able to tell where you would deployed in the book?

[00:56:19] Andrew Bustamante: Not in terms of specific countries. What about

[00:56:20] Jordan Harbinger: region? Region, yes. Yeah, good. Because I mean, I have my suspicions, but I, you know, can't talk about that yet, so I'm sure they're in a huge rush to get this cleared from you. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. They have

[00:56:31] Andrew Bustamante: nothing else going on. That's why every 30 days we remind them that they had a 30 day timeline to approve the book.

[00:56:36] Jordan Harbinger: We'll make the rules around here. Thank you very much. Yeah. You've got this cool, I guess, technique, for lack of a better word, which is two questions and one confirmation. And when you talked about this, I, it was so funny because I go, oh, I'm pretty sure that this is one, how I have most conversations in my life with new people.

And two, how, almost how I conduct this exact podcast. Because if I just ask questions. I've seen hosts do that. And it's weird. It's a weird vibe. It doesn't work well. And people go, you know, Jordan, I like your show 'cause it's a conversation. And I'm like, yeah, but I'm definitely controlling the questions, the question, question.

And then I tell an anecdote or something like that. And I think it works really well. I mean scoreboard, I suppose. But tell me about this. 'cause I never really thought about it as a, as a tactic that would make sense outside of this particular job. Oh yeah. So the, the, it does,

[00:57:26] Andrew Bustamante: it absolutely makes sense because what you're, what the tactic of two questions and a confirmation or a validation.

What the tactic does is it builds an artificial relationship. It manufactures trust between two people because it shows that one person's in control. But it also shows that the one person who's in control is actually interested enough that they're contributing, they're participating in the conversation, which makes the person answering questions.

Feel like they're special. It makes them feel like they're being listened to. It makes them feel heard. It makes them feel validated. Right? And that is a natural human response to being in a community where you are valued and where you are an equal player. So this idea of ask a question, ask a relevant follow-up question, and then volunteer, a congruent fact to validate the person is just a constant snowball that builds more and more momentum that makes the target feel comfortable.

[00:58:21] Jordan Harbinger: I will sometimes retain journalists and be like, how can I improve my interview technique? And I, I did that in years past especially. And what's funny is they go, well, this, it did work when I listened to it. However, at A, B, C, we were trained to. Only ask questions. So when you do an interview with them, if they ever interview, we do like mock interviews.

I'm just like, this is weird. You're just asking me questions. You're not adding to this at all. And occasionally on YouTube, someone will be like, I'm a journalist and I want to help you get better at this interview thing. And they're like, never talk about yourself. Never add anything. They just, they're like, just stick to the questions.

And it's always kind of funny to me. 'cause I'm thinking this is like how to make your show exactly like anybody else and make yourself totally replaceable and uninteresting 1 0 1. Yeah. It's, it's never add anything.

[00:59:06] Andrew Bustamante: Well, what's funny is like journalists don't realize that the medium of a podcast is not anything like journalism.

Right. That's you, you can say that again. Yeah. Right. It's completely different. It's a whole different media platform, which is why podcasting is so popular. Right. And journalism is going the way of the dodo. Uh, not to mention the fact that when a journalist interview somebody, it's because they want the attention to be on the subject and they're trying to inform the public about the subject.

With podcasting, what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a relationship between the guest and the audience. Yes. And the host is just the conduit to represent the audience to the guest so that the guest always feels like they have a conversation with, or the audience always feels like they're having a conversation with the guest.

That's the difference between the two platforms and, and for me, it speaks to why podcasting is not going anywhere anytime soon.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Andrew Bustamante, by the way, I wanna stick up for good journalism. I think it's one of the most important things in the world. There's a reason it's called a fifth State or whatever. I think it's super important, but you're right, the journalistic sort of interview, there's a reason those things are 5, 10, 2 minutes, because that's as long as people wanna hear somebody be grilled about, I don't know, their new music album or whatever, right?

It's. You have to have a conversation if you wanna keep people interested. Yeah. It's just how it, how it goes. And

[01:02:46] Andrew Bustamante: I, I also, I will always stand up for good journalism. Unfortunately. Good journalism is getting harder and harder to find. It

[01:02:51] Jordan Harbinger: is. It is. I wanted to go back to one of your earlier points about creating relationships.

I love the idea that this is, you said effective its sales. My previous company I sold probably tens of millions of dollars worth of services, essentially, but I had so much trouble hiring someone else to do the same thing. And part of it was because I was not good at all at training them on how to do this thing that we just discussed with the, I never really thought about it even until recently.

Is question, follow up question, maybe third follow up question and then a share or a confirmation as you called it. So when I, this is a high ticket item I was selling. I mean, it is a, like a large seminar, six to $8,000. And this is a decade and change ago. So that, that was real money. It is still real money.

I spent months just talking to people and it would be like, oh, I gotta check in, call with this person. Hey man. How did that thing go that you were doing? Did you end up switching companies? Oh man. Oh, did you break up with her? Uh, finally. She was driving you nuts. Okay. Well I gotta run, man. Are you still thinking about summer of next year when you get your new job and you get your bonus?

Cool. All right, well I'll talk to you in a few months. No, ask. Just like moving things along, kind of one increments at a time. And then one day I would call and go, ready man. Time to pull the trigger. And they go, here's $10,000. And then I remember people seeing those closing calls and going, how did you do that?

Well, 18 months ago I started this train, this freight train moving. 'cause it looks like magic. If you just look at the last phone call, it's like you just called that person and they gave you 8,000, $10,000. How did that happen? But it was like making friends. Having them tell me big problems they're having in life and then being like, here's a solution that I will sell you for a reasonable cause relative to the scale of your problem,

[01:04:36] Andrew Bustamante: right?

Correct. I mean, what, what sales should be that so few salespeople understand is sales is just a relationship. It's a relationship where you're trying to find the right balance of what we call rapport. Mm-Hmm. And leverage rapport is the back and forth exchange of not, of things that are not sales related, that build momentum for what feels like trust.

Right? And then once you have the rapport in place, you have built leverage. The leverage is what you need in order to get the person to take the action that you want. When you think about manipulation versus motivation. Manipulative. Leverage is something everybody wants to avoid. 'cause it feels gross and it feels sticky.

Yeah. Motivational leverage. People lean into like, we all love it when our close friend is like, dude, you need to get into the gym. We should start tomorrow. In fact, I bought you the first month at my gym. Yeah. Let's go work out in the morning together. We're like, hell yeah, let's go. That's motivational leverage.

Which better than, Hey, you're so fat, no one's ever gonna love you. Right. That's

[01:05:40] Jordan Harbinger: not that one of those is gonna be more effective.

[01:05:43] Andrew Bustamante: Yeah. Or I bought you your first month and you owe me. Right. Like can just, it's not the same thing. Yeah. What ends up happening is salespeople think that it's like this process of calls and getting enough information and Yeah, and like understanding the product details, like the features and benefits.

Features and benefits. They don't realize features and benefits don't equal purpose. The features and the benefits are there to compliment the purpose of the sale altogether, right? I need a car. I don't really care if the car has all weather tires and leather interior, right? I don't care that it comes with a warranty.

What I care about is the purpose of the car, which is transportation that keeps my family safe and is healthy for the environment and can go a long distance on a small thing

[01:06:26] Jordan Harbinger: of gas, right? Whatever it might be. This realization was so huge. This type of thing was so huge for me in early in my sales career.

'cause it was just like, I remember closing people and getting, you know, processing their payment and they would go, whoa, wait, what did I just buy? I don't even know. And I'm like, oh yeah, you're gonna get this and this and this and this. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what else? And I'm like, and you list the thing and you go, wait a minute, you just gave me all this money and you didn't even really know what it was.

And I remember being kind of confused, and then I asked some of my sales mentors and they're like, no, that means that this person trusted you so much that it didn't even really matter. They just knew that you weren't gonna screw them over, that you had a solution to their problem. The details were just not even at the front of their mind.

They had to call you back or email you to get the brochure that they never looked at, and you just start to realize like, wow, this is kind of a superpower. If you get good at it.

[01:07:14] Andrew Bustamante: We call it in the espionage world, we call it selling yourself like they sell themselves. And when you have a really good, well-developed appropriate intelligence source, and you go to actually pitch them on this idea of espionage, they sell themselves and you're like, Hey, I think we have an opportunity here for your secrets to make a difference.

In your financial life and in the future of your country. And they're like, yeah, I thought I might have that opportunity and as long as I work with you, I trust you and I think I'm ready to do this thing. And then you're like, I didn't even make a pitch. I just said, I think you have an opportunity. And they're like, yeah, I'm ready to do this thing.

Does

[01:07:50] Jordan Harbinger: the CIA ever use like celebrities to get something out of folks? 'cause it seems like someone with massive status would in some cases do really well. The problem is

[01:08:01] Andrew Bustamante: people with massive status are unpredictable.

[01:08:04] Jordan Harbinger: Well that's, yeah, that's true. How do you get them to keep a

[01:08:05] Andrew Bustamante: secret? How do you know who's watching them and who's not watching them?

How long before they brag about whatever else? Like the problem with celebrities makes sense. Celebrities to gain celebrity, and you know this too, 'cause you yourself are a celebrity sense. There's a certain element where you have, see what you did there, but you have to value yourself. Whereas the best intelligence officers, they are sacrificial.

They're like, the best thing I can do is die from my country. You don't think that at all. You don't think the best thing you can do is die for the United States. You're like, you mean right now. Yeah. No, exactly. So that's why when you want to train somebody to be a secret operative, a clandestine operative, you want them brainwashed to use your term in a way where they believe the best thing they can do is sacrifice.

[01:08:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no. If they'd caught me, if they'd actually caught me at age 25, totally different story. They would've had you. Yep. Yeah. No, I have a, honestly, before getting married plus kids, there was a chance not, not that they were trying. Yep, yep. By any, by

[01:08:56] Andrew Bustamante: any means. But once you're married with kids.

[01:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: Once you

[01:08:59] Andrew Bustamante: see what it's like to have people who unconditionally love you, there's no way to, like, the service to your country never compares to service to the people you love.

[01:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think it's quite fascinating. I've heard you say anxiety is a superpower. Obviously it keeps you alive. Are there a lot of Jews in the cia? So,

[01:09:19] Andrew Bustamante: I mean, yes, there are a lot of Jewish people in cia A yes, yes. There are a lot of Mormons at CCIA A. Okay. And there was something else that we mentioned earlier, but I forget what it was.

Oh, there's also a lot of law school grads at CIA A Yeah. That, yeah. Mm-Hmm. So clearly a very anxious group. Yes. But, but my point is, uh, CIA recruits knowing that they're looking for people that have the right balance of anxiety and risk tolerance for most of their positions. 'cause remember, most positions at CIA require heavy analytical, thought, heavy learning, heavy repetition or training, attention to detail, all of those skills.

Are built into somebody who has anxiety, right? Anxious people with their natural paranoia, their natural introversion, their natural distrust, their natural research curiosity are a fantastic fit for that kind of work. It's really only the field officers who have to go around the world and travel and try to meet people.

Those are the only people where anxiety could potentially be a detriment. And even then you want them to have some anxiety because you want them to always remember, they always need to have the gift of fear, recognizing that they're on the edge of getting caught at all times.

[01:10:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's weirdly, my anxiety works its way out socially.

Like if I'm home, that could be bad, but if I go to a party, I'm like, God, I feel so much better. Yeah. And it's almost like I'm working my anxiety out by having a conversation with somebody. It's, it's very odd. It's probably a flow state type of thing. Where I don't even have time to deal with it because I'm like really enjoying this, for example.

But if I had background stress, like a lot of it after this episode was over or after we stopped hanging out, I might be like, oh crap. Here's the anxiety monster once again. You know, it depends and, but it's something I've learned to tame on awkwardly, maybe unusually through the work that people are experiencing

[01:11:11] Andrew Bustamante: right now.

I find you to be a fantastic example of this, right? Because look at what you've accomplished. Even before you were accomplished in business, you were being assessed for work in a secret intelligence agency. Then you built a massive business, and then even after the previous podcast changed. Mm-Hmm? You rebuilt another podcast, right?

Like how would keep fluffing me up? I'm here for it. But, but think about it for a second. Think about it for a second. How does somebody achieve all of that? I. And then you also know that person has anxiety. Oh, no. It's the, the anxiety is the superpower. Man. I'm, I'm, yeah. I'm telling you. I agree with you. I, well, I just, I think it's so fascinating and I think it's such a detriment that socially we make anxiety out to be like a bad thing.

Like we publish news articles or, or medical articles that say that 25% or 30% of Americans have anxiety. Like it's a bad

[01:12:03] Jordan Harbinger: thing. Yeah. I guess it depends on the level of anxiety, but I will tell you now that I'm 44 family man, more chilled out. The growth of the business has flowed, and I like it that way.

The people that I know that really are like at the top, top, top busting their ass, all the, they're miserable, but they could be a billionaire one day. Good for them. I wouldn't trade lives with them though, I'll tell you that.

[01:12:23] Andrew Bustamante: Certainly not, but I just wanna make, like, to me it's, I loved working at CIA with such amazing people, and so many of those people had anxiety and watching how capable and talented they were at what they did.

And then coming into the outside world where somehow like people with anxiety felt ashamed and they felt like they were lesser or inferior. It's just heartbreaking because how much productivity and talent is being underutilized because we're letting people believe that anxiety is a weakness when in fact the people without anxiety are the ones who have less capability to really make a massive splash.

[01:12:59] Jordan Harbinger: Is there anything you learned at the CCIA that the American public doesn't know that you think was like disturbing or shook your worldview? Obviously you can't share what it is, but I'm curious because, you know, I feel like I ask a lot of these folks and they're like, eh, you'd be surprised to how boring it is back there, but you kind of, you know, unique access.

[01:13:15] Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, it is really boring out there. But I will also say that there are absolutely things that I learned that shook me. That I'm certain would shake the American public. In fact, before CIA, I used to be one of those people that was like, oh, the American public can handle anything, like trust them and just tell 'em the truth.

And then I got to CIA and I was like, do not tell the American public the truth. Like if my mom or my sister or my brother-in-law learned about this, they would lose their shit. And then they'd all have an opinion about what we should do about it. And then they would all start to like join communities of people who thought what we should.

And then all of a sudden shit would just fall apart. It's so much better to keep people who do not need to know, keep them blind and focused on the things that they can control. And that's really the important part here is there's so much that you and I and the American public cannot control. And we have to learn to be okay with that because we have a democracy that allows us to vote in the people that we trust to do the things that we can't control.

The day that you think that you should be given access to all the secrets. That's basically the day that you stop believing in democracy and you start thinking, I can do my job better than the people who are elected above me. If that's what you believe, then we are a long, we're a lot further away from our goals of successful democracy than we thought.

[01:14:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I could not agree more. I, I wonder if, are the things that you learned, things that we will learn about in our lifetime? Or is it just stuff that's probably gonna get swept under the rug forever? I

[01:14:44] Andrew Bustamante: mean, it's probably stuff that's gonna be swept away forever because it's just one of those things that, not in our lifetimes unless something unexpected happens, but it probably won't.

Right. And it's, some of those are secrets that were there before I was even born where I was like, really? That's how that worked? And it still works that way. Yeah. And it's probably never gonna stop working that way. Interesting.

[01:15:01] Jordan Harbinger: What about like JFK, for example? Like this is something where. I feel like Occam's Razor comes into play, and the simplest answer is that we just had a kooky communist dude who shot him.

[01:15:12] Andrew Bustamante: I would've said that, except that in 2000, what was it, 18? The time came to re-up the, yes, the,

[01:15:19] Jordan Harbinger: lemme just release all those. That's what I was gonna ask you about. I think it might have even been, I don't even, was it Trump or was it Biden that was just like, actually, we're not gonna release that CIA file,

[01:15:28] Andrew Bustamante: and that's whoever it was when that moment happened.

What that communicated to me, and probably to you, but maybe not to all the other Americans out there, was that there is something still relevant. There's a secret in that file, at least one that's still so damaging to national security that it can't be released publicly. That doesn't necessarily mean Americans shouldn't know it, but it means it can't be released publicly because publicly released information is also available to our adversaries.

So the fact that something 50 plus years old could still be so relevant that it requires reclassification, that's a big deal. That's not the only instance of that. There's a lot of. 25 x 2, 25 years times two. There's a lot of clandestine or confidential information. Classified information that's classified for 50 years, 25 x two that gets re-upped again because it needs to be.

[01:16:18] Jordan Harbinger: What do you think of guys like Assange and Snowden? Leaking secrets. There's a man of secrets yourself.

[01:16:23] Andrew Bustamante: Assange and Snowden are not even in the same park. They're not even in the same lane. They're not similar people at all. Snowden is a traitor against his country. He swore an oath, signed a paper that said he would not disclose secrets that put national security at risk, that could harm American lives.

And then he did exactly that and he released information that could harm American lives. The fact that a different court than the court that originally deemed the collection of metadata. Legal. The fact that a different court overruled that previous court ruling shouldn't surprise anybody. That is the entire judicial process.

That's why there are appeals. That's why people are convicted on one year and two years later they're released. That's why we're looking at a president who's been convicted of being a felon, but then at his next appeal could be granted, you know, release or whatever else, right? That's the way our court system works.

So we shouldn't be surprised that he whistle blew on a program that a different court had a different opinion about. That is not the argument. The argument is did he damage American security? Did he hurt American lives by whistle blowing to the Guardian, which is a foreign news source, which he then used as leverage to travel from anti-American country to anti-American country until he ended up in Russia, snowed in.

He did everything wrong. He is a traitor. He does not ever deserve to come back. Julian Assange is a completely different ball of wax. He's not an American citizen. Did he disclose secrets? Yes. Did he steal those secrets himself? No. Could he have been used as a covert influence parrot because he released certain information and not other information?

Yes, but he's not under American jurisdiction, so he didn't sign a, an agreement. He didn't swear an oath to protect the American people. Completely different person. Which I think is why what we are seeing play out like Julian Assange has, is making progress and kind of being granted citizenship or, or recognition for what he did without being a criminal.

But Snowden is a Russian citizen now, like as un-American as it gets.

[01:18:29] Jordan Harbinger: That's gonna be a great clip. And I don't normally say or think like that, but that that, yeah, that got you fired up on that one. I appreciate that. Do you know much about the MSS Chinese intelligence? I'm wondering what level of like familiarity slash respect you have.

'cause they seem like they have just gone leaps and bounds in the past few decades.

[01:18:44] Andrew Bustamante: I am willing to say that I have a very healthy respect for MSS. I have more knowledge than most people, but not the most knowledge of anybody at CCIA A. But when you think about the Ministry of State Security in China, you're, you've gotta look at them through a lens of not just their capability and their resources, which has grown along with Chinese resources, but also their foundation and their beginnings, which came from SVR and KJB before that.

So just like China has been on the rise economically, and they've been on the rise technologically, there's no reason to suspect that they're not on the rise through their espionage practices as well.

[01:19:19] Jordan Harbinger: I would say probably even more so because as, and I'm sure you know, look, tell me what you think, but states like Russia, right?

They're never gonna beat. Especially as we've seen now, they're never gonna beat a major world power in an armed conflict. It's just that is just not gonna happen. Look, nukes aside, whatever they have to rely on the cyber capabilities, intelligence capabilities. Israel's very similar, right? They're not going to be able to invade seven countries or whatever it is.

They gotta have amazing intelligence and cyber capabilities. Failures aside, China's very similar, right? Them building a Navy, eh, it's happening. But isn't it still kind of a joke space program again happening? Still not really up to snuff. They're making tons of strides, don't get me wrong. But it just makes sense that they would have a disproportionate intelligence program because if they can invest a few billion dollars in that, it's gonna punch a lot harder than another battleship.

[01:20:11] Andrew Bustamante: Well, the other thing to keep in mind is that China's intelligence program, it's not just about having a capable intelligence program, it's about having time. From 2001 to 2022, the United States was not focused on intelligence. We were fighting a war on terror. China was not part of that war on terror. So for 21 years they got to invest their growth in a different capability.

Military modernization, technological innovation, the spreading of the Belt and Road initiative, the spreading of Chinese influence around the world. They did not get distracted by a war on terror. So all the trillions that we spent in a war on terror, they invested somewhere else. And if we are not getting an ROI on our investment, just think about the ROI.

They are getting on theirs.

[01:20:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. I do of course, think and worry about that quite a bit. My friends who are operating in the Middle East told me there's a Chinese base near us and all they, I think it was Djibouti actually, I take it back, uh, in Africa. Still the Middle East. They uh, yeah, the Horn of Africa.

Yeah. They said that whenever they're out operating, there's just this Chinese base and they can just see they're looking at them. They'll drive around, they'll get close to what they're doing. They're testing weapons. The Chinese are just sitting there looking at 'em, taking pictures. When they were doing operate, they would even get in firefights, not in Djibouti of course, but in other areas.

And they said there were just the, like this Chinese unit that would de-conflict and call in and go, Hey, we're just Chinese guys over here. Don't shoot at us. We're just over here observing what's going on. Uh, because we have interest in the area. And they're like, what China interests are in the area?

Yeah. And they were just watching how America fights, how Isis fight, whatever, was just watching everything happen, just kind of just sitting over there videotaping the whole thing. It was, well, a wake up call that nobody's apparently waking up to, waking up to,

[01:21:51] Andrew Bustamante: because they're still, they do a fantastic job of creating a narrative that they're our friend, right?

That they're a trading partner and that we are economically tied together. And in reality, they are creating lots of economic divergence. That gives them the option of not cooperating with us anymore. Mm-Hmm.

[01:22:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. They have to because otherwise we can unplug them from the The markets.

[01:22:08] Andrew Bustamante: Exactly. And the whole world.

That's the problem is that the American MO of economic leverage and economic dependency, that thing that keeps us in control of nato, that thing that keeps us in control of our relationships in South America and Latin America. China woke up to that and then started duplicating and mimicking it. And then during the whole global war on terror, they were just making more and more people dependent and reliant on them.

And now we're at a place where Biden and Trump woke up and they were like, oh shit. COV happened. Had C not happened.

[01:22:39] Jordan Harbinger: I know. Holy shit, dude. Ironically, probably caused by Chinese incompetence and or malice and also certainly the. Xi Jinping overplayed his hand with Covid. All we can do, tell me if you agree.

All we can do is hope that Xi Jinping continues to overplay his hand. That's really the only thing that's gonna stop China, is if the man at the top and the the cult of personality screws up and makes a couple bad moves. Yeah. I mean, that's the, or bad moves. That's

[01:23:03] Andrew Bustamante: the soft underbelly of authoritarianism, right?

That's the same thing with Putin, and the same thing with Kim Jong-Un. And the same thing with, even with Netanyahu right now, when strong men, strong men, governments, authoritarian governments, when they overplay their hand, when they make a mistake, nobody says no.

[01:23:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, nobody says no. They wanna go. Whereas here

[01:23:21] Andrew Bustamante: in a democracy, lots of people might be like, I don't think that's a good idea.

And some people even put their foot down and make it a public offense and whatever else. But bad ideas, slow down, good ideas, slow down too.

[01:23:31] Jordan Harbinger: Tell me about, if we could do a quick comparison. Tell me about CIA compared to the FSB compared to. Mossad, for example. And also, let's throw out for honorable mention the ISI over in Pakistan.

Have you dealt with them at well, don't tell me that. Yeah, yeah,

[01:23:45] Andrew Bustamante: yeah, yeah, yeah. So for an apples to apples comparison, we have to compare them against the foreign intelligence collection capability in other countries. Right? So in Russia, the foreign collection is S-V-R-F-S-B is their internal collection.

So Russia's, SVR versus America's CIA. America's CIA is better funded. It's more modern. It's based in democratic principles, right? So it's more motivational than manipulative. SVR is more manipulative than motivational, however. They're ruthlessly pragmatic. They are also very well funded. They are less reliant on modern technology, but way more capable in the proven traditional tactics.

Like in CIA, if we think we can do something with cyber that we don't need humans for, we'll just do it with cyber. But in Russia, they're like, we will do both.

[01:24:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:24:36] Andrew Bustamante: Right, right. Why not? Uh, like compare that with something like Mossad. Mossad is the external intelligence collection capability for Israel, the internal police of the shin bet, right?

Internal FSB equivalent is Shin Bet when Mossad goes out. A big part of the difference between Mossad and CIA is, Mossad knows everything around Israel wants to kill Israel. Right. In the United States, we don't feel an imminent threat from all around us, so our risk tolerance as CIA is much reduced. The risk tolerance for Mossad is almost non-existent.

Yeah. If they need to ride a bicycle next to a car and stick a bomb to it, they will. Right. If they need to kill somebody in a public square to keep Israel safe, they will. So very capable, very well funded, very skilled, but also like very brazen.

[01:25:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I wondered why you thought that is. I mean, you see, I. I was reading an interview with like a, a nuclear scientist in Iran, and he's like, can you believe they blew up this car and how they're coming after me?

And I was like, yeah, yeah. You work for an enemy state and you're trying to get nuclear weapons. They will drone strike you with your family in the car. I'm not sure how bad any of us should feel about that. With a second drone to put the whole thing on Instagram, right? Yeah. Yes. They will do that to show everybody we did that.

People go, wow, I, you see this on like, uh, Instagram. They go, how do we know that Israel did that? They admitted it. Why would they do that? You know how good the branding is when you can be in Teran at a cafe and someone rides by a motorcycle and shoots every single person at the meeting and then gets away with it?

Or what was the other one that they did where they, the Mossad had like rigged up a truck with a 50 cal machine gun or whatever in the back. The truck drove next to this guy who was in a convoy. Shot the car into a million pieces, and then when people were like, who's in that damn truck? It blew itself up and they videotaped the whole thing.

It's just

[01:26:28] Andrew Bustamante: nuts. It's branding. It's exactly, it sends brand a message. It's covert influence, simultaneous with covert action. Mm-Hmm. It's a two for one. Yeah. It's a two for one. Right. But they're not the only brazen service out there. Right. Pakistani, ISI also, along with the India, RAW, the research analysis wing, ISI for Pakistan and RAW for India vary brazen intelligence services with a foreign collection priority that nobody even knows exists.

Mm-Hmm. Because they're primarily working against each

[01:26:55] Jordan Harbinger: Working against each other. Yeah, exactly. But the

[01:26:57] Andrew Bustamante: shit they do with each other is nuts. I mean, they basically carry out covert terrorist operations against each other. They sabotage each other. They, they steal from each other. They, they have no problem with assassinating leadership from each other's countries.

Like it's a nutsy world. Especially when you consider the fact that both Pakistan and India are American allies and somehow these two very talented services probably trained by us Yeah. Are taking that training to fight each other and using techniques that we would never sanction in a million years.

[01:27:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Very interesting.

[01:27:27] Andrew Bustamante: And then the last one I'll mention, we've already talked about MSS, but all throughout there that the MSS for China, China's foreign intelligence service is all the best parts of SVR. They've learned so much. They've been funded so well, but they're even less risk tolerant than CIA because where ccia A has no problem being the world's bad guy.

MSS doesn't want to be the world's guy. No. They wanna save

[01:27:49] Jordan Harbinger: face. Yeah. They're also, I've seen some clunky crap from them that I was surprised. 'cause I thought they tried to honey trap a friend of mine, very messy. I mean very amateur bullshitty kind of, but also kind of KGB ish, like really like out there, what kind of girl do you like?

Yeah. And it was just like the, it was a fake interview. With a journalist and then she wanted to do it in her hotel room. And I was like, are they just trying to get you to realize what this is? Or is it just really, really clunky? And I'm sort of on the fence, but I don't know. It could have been one or the other, or,

[01:28:24] Andrew Bustamante: yeah.

'cause they're also like decentralized in a lot of ways and Oh, interesting. They don't, they don't report up bad news very well. So it could have just been, it, it could have been sloppy or it could have been amateur, or it could have been just a junior officer making a bad call. Yeah. Because how do you get promoted right into China?

You're the son or the nephew of somebody else.

[01:28:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's what's gonna end up bringing China down is the bullshit sort of nepo baby crap that we definitely have here. But over there it's, and in Russia has it too, it's called, it's like. The way you get ahead is your uncle owns the factory. You literally have no chance of any doing anything other than assembly line work.

If you're on, if you're not really like all the managers are related, all the, except for the guy who's in the mafia and his uncle pulled the thing with the thing and then now he's working. You know, it's just the whole system works like that and it's why people are leaving China and coming here to work, uh, and moving to Canada the best.

And surprise. Not all

[01:29:16] Andrew Bustamante: Chinese agents. What's that? The surprise? They're not all Chinese agents. Yeah, no surprised.

[01:29:19] Jordan Harbinger: They actually really are stoked to be in the United States. The, the joke that a lot of us make about China who are like China watchers or hanging out with people who've immigrated here, is there's this certain group of people that have moved here from China and they nonstop complain about the United States.

But then the next sentence is how they want to bring their parents over here to live when they're retired. And it's like, didn't you just get done telling me how much you hate this place? And I, you know, you drink it a bit. And they go, yeah, but I can't say that stuff about China because my family will get in trouble with the police.

And you're just like, oh, it's almost cute at that point. It's like you're just sitting here complaining because you're not allowed to do that over there. It's kind of hilarious. I, I love China and Chinese culture, but you know, the I, ccp, I have a, it's not political. Yeah. Different opinion. Do you think the CIA's reputation has been damaged by news and events over the past few years?

I think CIA's reputation

[01:30:13] Andrew Bustamante: is and always will be bad, only because they have secrets that no one's allowed to know. And they will always have secrets that no one's allowed to know. And when you have secrets that somebody else can't know, the natural thing to do is to distrust and accuse you of all sorts of shit.

CIA is never going to be popular. It's never gonna be liked, it's never gonna be loved by the majority. But there will always be a group who understand that it's a pragmatic service and those secrets are required and they give us an edge. Would you recommend a CIA career? I would recommend a CIA career to people who are willing to accept the reality of what a CIA career means.

It means you aren't the most important. The service is the most important. It means you will lie to everybody. It means you will take advantage of people because somebody above you in the chain of command tells you it's what needs to be done. And most importantly, you have to understand CIA's mission is not protecting the American people.

It's protecting American interests as defined by policymakers. So if you go in thinking that you're gonna do something that keeps your family safe, you need to let that go. 'cause what you're actually doing is you're doing what the Senator of Wisconsin decides is important when they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and you just are, your job is to do what they say.

That is not the same thing as the nationalistic pitch that they use to recruit people into CIA.

[01:31:32] Jordan Harbinger: What's your favorite

[01:31:33] Andrew Bustamante: spy show? The one that I am building. Okay. Based off of my book, not the one that, there's really nothing out there that's that.

[01:31:38] Jordan Harbinger: Great. Okay, then we'll talk about that in a future episode.

Man, I, I. Have so many more questions, but I think we have to do a separate episode just about current events and, and rally up on that. Thank you so much for coming out to my kitchen slash studio slash living room. I really appreciate it, man. It's good to finally meet you.

[01:31:55] Andrew Bustamante: Dude, it was awesome to have this peek into your life and to finally get a chance to sit with you, and I'm excited for next time.

[01:32:02] Jordan Harbinger: If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to check out, here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB Spy who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie. This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union secretly becoming a real American.

We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture.

[01:32:31] Clip: I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport controls. So a young person, it really feels good because I never liked rules.

[01:32:42] Jordan Harbinger: How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that?

[01:32:47] Clip: They called me back as an emergency departure. They've done this in the past to call back an agent, and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are. Jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets.

And then one day they send one of their resident agents and he said to me, you gotta come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell 'em that I'm not returning. I will not betray any secrets, and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. And

[01:33:20] Jordan Harbinger: tell us how you got caught because the story's just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past.

I

[01:33:26] Clip: was stopped on the other side of a tollgate. It was a state trooper, just like to check your license and registration and could you step out of the car. I step out of the car still not having a clue what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself, he says, Joe Riley, FBI, and he showed me this badge.

We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no. Then I said, what took you so long?

[01:33:55] Jordan Harbinger: For more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that. Check out episode 2 85 of the Jordan Harbinger Show banger of an episode of two episodes.

In fact, all things Andrew Bustamante will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discounts, ways to support this show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, our newsletter. Wee bit wiser. This is so much good feedback from you guys on this.

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