1242: Christopher Whitcomb | A Life Among Spies Part One

1242: Christopher Whitcomb | A Life Among Spies Part One

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Christopher Whitcomb: The thing that sustains you is hope. You hear people talk about it, that everything is horrible, but maybe it's gonna get better. So I'm on the plane, the stairs come up, the engines start up, and I think we're outta here. I'm gonna make it out of this thing.

Then all of a sudden, the engines spin down. And you can see the light coming in from the stairs coming down, and I'm going, you know, it's bad.

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And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like [00:01:00] persuasion and negotiation. Psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show. Some stories are so wild you'd swear they were written for Hollywood except nobody in Hollywood's got the stomach to tell 'em straight. My guest today is Chris Whitcomb, a former FBI hostage rescue team sniper, who's been shot at, hunted, stranded in war zones, and somehow lived long enough to turn all of that into some wisdom and a heck of a book.

His memoir, Anonymous Male: A Life among Spies, starts in a warlord's compound in Afghanistan, and ends with a man trying to find himself again after years in the shadows. This one has a little bit of everything. The war on terror, secret prisons, black ops, moral whiplash, and a little bit of redemption at the end.

You ever hear those family stories and your mom's like, Hey, don't listen to anything your uncle says, and you listen anyway because you're just wrapped. It's fascinating. That is this episode. So let's get weird with Chris [00:02:00] Whitcomb right here on The Jordan Harbinger Show. So much like your book, this interview is gonna be all over the place because.

You don't write linearly. Have people told you that before? Yeah. Take pride in that. Yeah. Yeah. Some like it, some don't. I thought it was kind of fun, actually. But first I was like, wait, we're starting in Afghanistan. It's like a movie, right? Like flash over here, flash over here. But it's one of the a movie you have to pay attention to because if you zone out, you're like, oh crap.

Now I don't know what the hell's going on.

Christopher Whitcomb: It's tough to tell my story chronologically that it kind of makes sense. There's an arc. The arc, you kind of have to make sense of things 'cause it's so wild. Mm-hmm. My story is so disparate. It's tough putting the pieces together.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I was kind of, I don't even know what I was expecting when you walked in.

I was like, oh, that's him. 'cause I try not to look up what people look like if I Yeah, yeah. Make sense? Yeah, yeah. And you, 'cause I'm always like, am I gonna be right? It was not remotely correct. Really? Yeah, no, it was not remotely correct at all. Like what? How so? You know? I don't know. I think older probably.

Well, there's that. Yeah. But also I was like, oh, this is like a person who's. I guess maybe you do have the tats. I expected the [00:03:00] tats. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Buttoned down like shirt with a penguin on. I don't know. It just wasn't, didn't see that coming. You

Christopher Whitcomb: know what, you know, it's kind of crazy 'cause I've done a lot of meetings in a lot of situations in life.

Yeah. And uh, you never know what to wear. I'm doing a thing tomorrow with a club of founders, CEOs, and high worth, high net worth people. And I said, you want me to wear a suit? Uh, just outta courtesy. Right. But I don't care. And they said, uh, they quoted. Mark Cuban is saying, you gotta watch out for the worst dressed guy in the crowd.

Yeah. It doesn't matter anymore. Nobody cares anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Back when Tech Bros were new. Yeah. Not Silicon Valley, but Tech Bros. I remember being in New York and these, I used to be a corporate lawyer and these guys were like, look at this schmo. He comes wearing a fucking hoodie. And I was like, that's an $850 rabbit for hoodie from Neiman Marcus.

That guy's probably sitting on. Some kind of private stock from Facebook or whatever it is. This is even before Instagram existed. So I was like, this guy's, he, he's doing all right. And they were like, whatever. And then later on one of the partners was like, so you are right. That guy [00:04:00] has hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't know what he does something with Google in the nineties. And I was like, yeah. He doesn't need to wear a suit for us. I think money money's the freedom to do what you want. That's right. And who cares. Yeah. He's like, he does not need to wear a suit for us. We have to wear suits for him. Yeah. That's how this works.

Christopher Whitcomb: I've got very nice suits. I choose to wear them sometimes. Yes. But if I choose to wear the suits,

Jordan Harbinger: you know, listen, it's the same thing with you, right? I show up in joggers in a t-shirt and sometimes people in the YouTube comments are like, you need to dress professionally. It's like, and then what will happen?

My show will become more popular.

Christopher Whitcomb: You know? But you gotta go with the crowd. I mean, the only people I know that wear ties anymore on Capitol Hill, right? I mean, there's some old money that, uh, occasionally do, but I grew up in New England in old Money and people. Didn't dress toward it. Right. People wear money on their sleeve now.

Yeah. But it wasn't always the case. Yeah. So anyways, every everything goes now. It's really what you have to say and what you do in life. If you ask me, and I'm asking you,

Jordan Harbinger: the book starts with meeting a warlord in Afghanistan. Yeah. I'd love to get this story because there's a fun part where you're doing these calculations, whether about whether [00:05:00] you're gonna die and it's like four hours to the safe house by car, no guns, no backup.

There's 12 of them, two of us. If I go get that guy's weapon, I could shoot three of these. I am gonna die.

Christopher Whitcomb: So I like math, I like science. I like calculation because I like risk. Mm-hmm. So if you like risk and you build situations in your own life that are moving toward consequence, you gotta be able to do the math.

You wanna get up to it. You don't wanna go over the edge. So it doesn't matter. Like, I love this guy, Alex Hanal. Yeah. He's a rock climber. I was always a rock climber. Yeah. And I would look up these cliffs and say, well maybe I can do this, maybe I can do that. But you always have a belay. If you fall, someone's gonna catch you.

Yeah. But you wanna push it to the extreme. He's pushed it beyond what people even thought was possible because the consequence is death. And for most human beings, that is the ultimate consequence. So I got to a point in life, some people would say that I was addicted to adrenaline. I didn't have adrenaline, I wasn't addicted to it because I didn't have it.

So I would build constructs leading to significant consequence, and the consequence gets more and more. At that point in my life is [00:06:00] death. So I didn't wanna die. I wanted to get to as close as possible to it. When I thought I had a very strong statistical probability of survival. Right. Okay. So that's what took me to that situation.

You're you're talking about Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You've been there. I know you've been there in a slightly different way, I suppose. I mean, my. I remember talking to a bunch of motorcycle racers and I was like, I was talking about my trip to North Korea and they were like, you should just race motorcycles. And I was like, no way, man.

You can get killed on those things. Right. And they're like, you can get held hostage in North Korea and works to death. Yeah. That didn't scare you at all? I'm like, not really. I mean the, but I'm not getting on a motorcycle. Like we have pads. I'm wearing a helmet. Yeah. I fall off the thing. All the, it happens.

Christopher Whitcomb: I like motorcycles too. Yeah. I haven't been in North Korea. You're probably not allowed to. I'm not done yet. Yeah. You're not done yet. I'm not done yet. But it's the same thing. It doesn't matter if I think people in life, you can build the construct and you want The metaphor is risk. Yeah. Consequence and accomplishing something.

It could be money, could be sports, it could be military. It could be anything. It doesn't matter. Could be a soccer mom on the 4 0 5 [00:07:00] trying to get home with a kid in the back and, and that's her threshold. You never know. That's the threshold.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Everybody's got

Christopher Whitcomb: a different threshold.

Jordan Harbinger: What kind of kid grows up willingly running toward gunfire, essentially?

Christopher Whitcomb: I don't know. I didn't, I grew up a poet. I always wanted to be a writer. I had never had any interest in that world, didn't know anything about that world. And where I came from in Northern Hampshire, it was as far away as anybody could be. I never knew anybody in the military. I think my uncle got into West Point, but he had to go to like a prep school for a year to, to go, and he backed out.

I never knew anybody in the military. I did not think that was my path. I wanted to write, be a poet. I wanted to play music. I wanted to do things other. I went that way. So I don't know the answer because it wasn't me. I see. I found that in life it wasn't me. I wasn't born of that. You ended up becoming that

Jordan Harbinger: person essentially.

Christopher Whitcomb: I

Jordan Harbinger: definitely ended up becoming that person. Yeah. What did your upbringing teach you about danger or resilience? Because you didn't just magically become. This warlord chasing security contractor in Somalia, right? In [00:08:00] Afghanistan,

Christopher Whitcomb: yeah. I wasn't really a security contractor. I, I mean, I was trying

Jordan Harbinger: to find the industry term

Christopher Whitcomb: for this.

Yeah. But yeah, what would you call it?

Jordan Harbinger: Entrepreneur. I

Christopher Whitcomb: built a company, yeah. From scratch, and I had 4,000 people. So I would look at it from your perspective as an entrepreneur. The answer is kind of complex, and I think part of it is that I think, you know, I wrote in that book that I was born whole into a life fully formed.

We're not gonna get into a, into a conversation about philosophy necessarily, but I think that we open ourselves to certain things in life and certain things find us in life. My life took me places that I could not have possibly imagined at any stage leading up to it. And I've heard you talk about this before.

I think we set ourselves up for those of us that want adventure, those of us that want to go out and do things in, in the world. I don't think there's a path. There's not a linear path to finding the things I've done in my life. But I think the model, the question you ask about growing up is, when I was a kid, there was no tv, there was no internet, there was no phones, there was nothing.

It was the outdoors. I'd get up in the morning and I'd ski, I'd rock climb, I'd hike. [00:09:00] I would, uh, stay outdoors for long periods of time and it built an independence and it built an ability to survive in all kinds of situations. And those gave me the freedom, I think, to thrive in adventure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Some of it's wiring, I suppose too, right?

It's just gotta, it has to be, it's gotta be a little bit, yeah. Yeah. I mean, your version of a bad Monday is not spilling coffee. Right. It's dodging bullets. That's a different kind of office politics, I think, than most people are used to. The international ingredients have to be a little different,

Christopher Whitcomb: and I would say.

I think dodging bullets is relatively easy. Lots and lots of people go into law enforcement. They go into the military, they go into situations that could end up there. But for me, the dodging bullets was not the part. It was being in a situation where there were bullets and trying to find a way to create challenges within that environment and overcome those challenges that that was my gig.

People get wound up about gunfire at the end of the day. The probability of getting hit in a gunfight are so infinitesimally small. They say during the Civil War that it took a man's [00:10:00] weight and bullets before one hit him on average. So the trick is to be as heavy as possible. Exactly right. But the bottom line in my estimation is that gunfire is loud.

It's really frigging loud, and it becomes exponentially more when you put in bombs and everything else that goes along with it. So environments, combat environments are incredibly loud. They're loud because of percussion, and the percussion is overwhelming. When you realize that it's one tiny little pill going through the air and it's going straight based on gravity, it gives you a different perspective.

So if you can take the noise out of it, if you can reduce variability, in my experience, you've got much, much better odds of success. It's like that in life. Anything, if you can reduce the noise in a car race or a corporate office building or a sporting event, if you can reduce the distraction, the variability of noise, in my experience, it's much more manageable.

So it's learning those things.

Jordan Harbinger: If you wanted to be a musician and kind of, you know, the poetry thing, well, how did you end up in [00:11:00] the FBI? That's like the squarest. Place for a non square to be,

Christopher Whitcomb: well, it's not the case now, but when I was a kid, being a writer was a real thing. It was something you would aspire to.

Yeah, sure. People, it, it's not now. I mean, everybody can write everything and not, there's no grammar, there's no capital letters. My book agent, one of the best book agents in the world, he sends me these text messages. They're illegible. It was, it was a thing, right? I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway and all the guys in that era.

Sure. So my career path was to write, I mean, you could say you were a writer, but you had write. Yeah. So it took me through things. Newspaper reporter, English teacher at a boarding school. And along with that I like to play guitar. So you take poetry, guitar, you got music, then you've got, you know, you're writing stuff.

It all, it all goes together.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Man, your book is full of stories, like the kinds of stories you hear at a family party as a kid, and then yeah, your mom's trying to get you to leave the room, you know, stay away from that guy, and you're like, no, no, no. I wanna hear this. I wanna hear this. Yeah. Yeah. And then after everyone leaves, your mom and your aunt are like.

Don't listen to anything Uncle Chris says. No, he's, he's just kidding. Stay away from that guy. He's just kidding, honey. Yeah, that's right. Uh, that's [00:12:00] what this book, the book reminded me of. 'cause I was just like, uh, this is the, this is the one where all the kids are like, uncle Chris is here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my guy. He's gonna let us drink beer. I don't know. Whatever. Yeah, yeah. Uh, and tell us, you know, about the time he saw guy's playing soccer with this dude's head or something and like the mom's like, don't tell them the head thing again. Yeah. He had nightmares for three months. Of that. Don't worry. I got a lot of news stories, get a lot of that from my own kids.

Yeah, right. Sure. That's part of it. Yeah. Oh man. You were part of the elite hostage rescue team, so HRT, tell us what that is because most people don't even know that exists.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah, and thanks for asking the questions the way you ask 'em. I think the problem is when I talk to people, it's very difficult to explain things because like I was talking to my mother one time and she was saying something about racist military people.

And I said, mom, mom, what are you talking about? Racist military people? And she said, well, they all have guns, and guns and racism. It all goes together. But that was my mother. Okay. Who lived with these stories for all these years? My point is this, that explaining the way the world works takes a minute, and I use it as a [00:13:00] continuum.

So in law enforcement there's a crossing guard, and then you've got people at the far extreme at the other side. And this group, the hostage rescue team, is the far end at the other side. So in order to get into it, you've gotta join the FBI, which at the time was difficult when I joined. Once you get in, you have to try out for this team.

Yeah. At the time, there were about 13,000 FBI agents and there were 50 members of this team. Wow. And they have a selection once a year and sometimes they take one guy, sometimes they take five or or more. At the time it was very difficult to get in. Now it's harder. Yeah. They're extraordinary people. So they're very highly educated.

They're world class athletes. They're. World class shooters. There are all those things, but the thing that distinguishes them is their ability to make decisions under stress. So just to give it in perspective. You have police organizations, federal, state, and local. The LAPD, the uh, California State Police Highway Patrol, I think it is.

Yeah. Then you've got the federal agencies, one of which would be [00:14:00] the FBI. There are 18,000 of those organizations in the United States. 18,000. 18,000, yeah. Campus cops and all these different organizations. Geez, I guess

Jordan Harbinger: that makes sense, but it just sounds like a lot.

Christopher Whitcomb: At the end of the day, a lot of people would think, well, who's gonna come if everything else fails?

And many, many people think it's the FBI and that's evolved over time, but, uh, that's the way it was. So within that construct, if something really bad happens, it's likely it's gonna be the FBI that comes in and saves the day because they have the resources. Mm-hmm. It's not necessarily that they're better.

They have, I think the last budget was eight to $10 billion. Okay. Staggering amounts of money. And those resources give you the ability to do things. Within that framework, that's civilian law enforcement. Then you have the military, which is a war fighting capability for the United States government. The military has two organizations, seal Team Six or Dev Group, the guys that got Bin Laden and Delta Force on the Army side.

Those two groups were put together in the seventies as a terrorism mechanism, a violent mechanism to resolve terrorist issues [00:15:00] like the Olympic Games in Munich, right where hostages were taken and they came out of that. When the United States hosted the Olympic Games in 1984 in Los Angeles, the US government didn't want to have another Munich games.

So they said, well, who are we gonna rely upon if something goes bad? They went to Delta and Seal Team six, which would've been the likely choices. So the government, the Attorney General of the United States said, look, we gotta take care of this thing. They went to Delta at Fort Bragg, saw a demonstration.

And he said, fantastic. That's remarkable. But I don't see any handcuffs. One of the operators famously said, we don't need handcuffs. They all get two right here. Yeah, that doesn't work. In civilian law enforcement, there's a law called the posse com post Civil War that says the US government cannot use the military in civilian law enforcement.

So they created a third, more or less equivalent at the time group, and they had to put it someplace outside the military. They put it in the FBI. I see. So they took from the FBI [00:16:00] to staff, this counter-terrorism team, and they built it in a model of Delta at Fort Bragg. That's where the hostage address team came

Jordan Harbinger: from.

I see. So it's basically a special forces group that can operate domestically in the United States and under law enforcement as opposed to the military.

Christopher Whitcomb: Correct. But also internationally.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, it does operate internationally.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. Until, and this is why it's so difficult to explain. When I joined the team in the eighties and nineties, when this team was stood up, terrorism was considered law enforcement mechanism.

If a bad guy did something with a bomb or hijacked a plane, the US government would go after them. Arrest them, prosecute them, and put them in jail after 9/11. We just killed them indiscriminately in war. It's a different mechanism. Prior to that we did that and we under two laws from the 1980s, HRT, got all the gigs.

So if you've heard of renditions? Mm-hmm. Where we go into a foreign country and snatch somebody. That team, we did all of the renditions.

Jordan Harbinger: Really? Okay. Prior? Prior to 9/11. Oh, prior to nine. 'Cause I was gonna say the ones after 9/11 and the ones were all that everyone says, Hey. You can't just take [00:17:00] somebody from Egypt and put them in Syria as it turns to Africa.

You can, it turns out you can. You could.

Christopher Whitcomb: Oddly enough, yeah, you can. And if you have enough guns, you can do that. Right. And the first one that ever happened, you can Google, this is called Goldenrod. And it was 86, I think it was early eighties. And it was a joint agency, FBI operation for this guy named Fawaz Eunice, who gave up terrorism, took up drug dealing in Beirut.

Oh, okay. And they, they lured him offshore in a boat. Then scuba dive, basically up to the boat, snatched him and flew back to the United States. Oh wow. And it went from there. At the time, there were quite a few. Now it's now you use a drone to stick the boat. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: exactly. Yeah. I was gonna say, why bother going to get it?

But

Christopher Whitcomb: now it all makes sense if you wanna prosecute 'em. Yeah. You get a little nostalgic for the old days. But that was it. But anyway, so that was my era. That was a long time ago. They're an extraordinary organization that has evolved from those days. What I did, I probably wouldn't even make the team now.

You know, they're really extraordinary in ways that we didn't even know in.

Jordan Harbinger: Man, I stress eat nachos when life gets tough and this guy had, let's call it a slightly higher [00:18:00] stakes self-care routine. Speaking of coping mechanisms, here's one that won't get you. Court marshaled supporting the show by checking out our sponsors.

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Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course, so come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again for free at Six Minute Networking dot com. Now back to Chris Whitcomb. I talked to a lot of old special forces [00:21:00] guys from like the sixties and seventies, I guess not as many are around anymore, but some of them.

And they're like, oh, you would've loved it. And I'm like, oh, I can't run 10 miles with a breathing mask on in the snow with no shoes. And they're like, we don't have to do any of that. And we talk about, yeah, you have to shoot. You have to be able to make decisions. You have to be smart and think. I'm like, you know what the selection criteria is for some of these units now?

It's like 70 mile rucks, and they're like, Ugh, no thanks. Well, that's Delta. Yeah, but you've got to

Christopher Whitcomb: remember there's a continuum there as well. So you could go into the military, then you could go into the Army, then you go into the Rangers, and then you could go, eventually, you might make it to Delta, but they're the special operations community.

JSO is large. It's complex. But when you get to the far end of that, you do have to run 70 miles with an 80 pound pack barefoot in the winter.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Uh, with a

Christopher Whitcomb: mask

Jordan Harbinger: on. But at that point, the training is what, no longer really physical because they're just trying to break you and see if you can still function.

No, no,

Christopher Whitcomb: no. You have to function. The physical training is crazy. It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to stay that condition the entire time you're there. On this team that I was on, we would fast rope. Fast rope has just slide down a gym rope out of a [00:22:00] helicopter, you know, under bad situations. Sure. And, and a significant number of people have died just in training.

Yeah. It's a dangerous job day in and day out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. Yeah. My, another guest on the show, he joined the seals and he couldn't swim very well. Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. But he made it and then they were like, now we gotta teach you how to swim. Yeah. But it took him like four tries and he had. What is it called?

Like rhabdo, where you overtrain and your muscles start to so decayed you can't function and you get poisoned from the actic. Yeah. It's com.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah. It's complex. It's hard. There's a different type of person psychologically. Yeah. I mean, I think you can have a basic physical ability. It's gotta be better than basic.

Yeah. You gotta be fast, you gotta be strong at these things, but you have to have a mechanism that shuts off the quit mechanism. You've gotta have a different. Psychology. Yeah. It's, it's more psychology and decision making than it is shooting or physical. It's not about pushups and pull-ups and swimming and it's not about those things at

Jordan Harbinger: all.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I, I, one of my friends is Sue Ben Greenfield is like a really athletic guy, and that's an understatement. He wins these like tough mutters and all these [00:23:00] competitions, so he did like a. Special forces pseudo training thing. And they had to make it harder for him. Like they would dunk you in a tank of water and people would panic.

And then he was, you know, fine. So they were like, okay, well now you can only breathe through a straw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he is like, okay. And so he said it was a hell

Christopher Whitcomb: on earth, but you know, you get really good at being miserable. I mean, everything is miserable. Yeah. That element is, and then you go sleep under a rock for a week with no food.

I mean, it's, it kind of sucks, but there's, there are rewards as well.

Jordan Harbinger: It's like CrossFit with live ammunition and fewer Instagram posts, I guess. Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: No Instagram posts. Yeah, not back then.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned the firefights and the shootouts and stuff like that. I'm wondering what goes through your head in a situation like that?

Like what are you thinking when you're in a gunfight? Or

Christopher Whitcomb: is it, when I was a kid, you would fight all the time. It's just what you did. Somebody calls you a name, you punch 'em in the nose, you roll around a little bit, you buy 'em a Coke and go back to school. I lived in an era, in a place where fighting was not necessarily a really bad thing.

It was just part of the way you resolve things. Now we look at things differently, right? But I always said, it doesn't matter if you fight, if you're trying to hurt [00:24:00] somebody with your words, or if you punch 'em in a nose, or if somebody picks up a rock or a knife or a two by four or a gun, it's an escalation and you get a nuclear bomb.

So it's all a fight, in my estimation, the one-on-one intimacy of a fight, however that may be with a gun or with a fist, or whatever the case may be. It's very different than a war situation because in a war, I remember very clearly I had this perception that I didn't have a fucking clue who to go after first.

Like you're in a situation where you have more than one target and you have more than one threat, and you've gotta make a decision. On who gets it first. Like I always wondered what it was like to be in a D-Day or Gettysburg or something where you have thousands of people, or the Peloponnesian War or whatever, when you have large groups of people running each other and you gotta pick one person and you gotta go after that one person, that's difficult.

That's different. That's a whole different thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I can't imagine being also, they're basically sending kids into these situations too. Yeah, that's, that's right. That's the other thing is like, you're 19 and you're, they're like running [00:25:00] at the beach and you're like, no, I don't really wanna do that. And it's like, okay, well you're gonna get shot in this boat for sure.

So,

Christopher Whitcomb: I mean, imagine that kind of courage. Imagine the countless thousands of people, just Americans, not, not other countries. Yeah, just Americans in the last 250 years have gone to war at 18 years of age with no clue what to do or how to do it. Very little training. I mean, that it's, it is crazy, that kind of commitment, sacrifice and courage.

It's

Jordan Harbinger: wild. I hit a certain point, I can't remember how old I was, maybe like 30 or maybe I was 28 and I was like, oh, I can actually die. Yeah. And I was like, Ooh, this is an uncomfortable feeling. I didn't have that for the decade prior. Yeah. You need to find people who are in that decade and, and then they're like, oh, I've seen enough movies to know that I'm gonna make it outta this.

That's what happens to the main character. Well,

Christopher Whitcomb: that's, you know, that's the first thing I remember. We, uh, the training for this, that first unit that I was part of. They came up with this stuff called munition, which is using real guns, real bullets. Yeah. With the yellow plastic-y thing on it. Yeah. Yeah.

They shoot choke down paint pills. It's not paintball, it's real guns. But uh, we would start running [00:26:00] CQB with those. So you get tagged and then you go, oh, I would've survived that. I would've survived that. And it changes your thinking. Oh, that's interesting. It really dramatically improves your sense of survivability.

And if you think you're gonna survive and you're gonna accomplish the mission, you're much, much more capable of doing it. Once you take the magic out of anything. Yeah. I mean, whatever. People in life, they say, well, I don't know how to do this. I dunno how to do that. Once they learn the clue. A magic trick.

Yeah. You learn, you learn the key. All of a sudden it takes a magic out and it's a different thing altogether.

Jordan Harbinger: It reminds me of boxing. I took, took a couple boxing lessons and the coach was like, here's the problem. You're afraid of getting hit. Yeah. And I was, yeah, it's gonna hurt. He's like, wham. And I was like, ah.

He's like, you're still, you're fine. You didn't even fall. And I said, that's true. And he goes, that's gonna happen a bunch. It's fine. Right? And I was like, alright. And then he is hitting me and I'm blocking it. And he is like, now that you're not afraid you can go forward when somebody is gonna hit you, instead of just curling up and waiting for them to be done and get tired.

'cause that was kind of my strategy before was I don't wanna look at it. It's gonna hurt. You know? And he is. Batting me in the head and he is like, you should probably do something instead of just stand there and get hit. [00:27:00] So that sounds like it. With the Simunitions, it's like, okay, all right, you got shot in the arm, so now you know you should probably shoot back at that guy and you know, charge forward instead of just standing there while he is aiming the gun at you.

Christopher Whitcomb: Well, in fairness, these guys may ever watch this thing and say. Get this guy Whitcomb to stop talking about us. He doesn't even know. Yeah. But in the day, everybody was very good at shooting, fighting, and if necessary dying, that was it. But it was all about the mission. This team that I was on. This is interesting 'cause I wanna come.

I got a question for you. It was interesting because the first three years I was on this team, we never had, we had everybody, we had our own surgeons, we had our own, we had our a medical component so that when somebody did get hurt. We could deal with it. That's probably a good idea. In-house. Yeah. Yeah, it was.

Yeah, it was a good idea.

Jordan Harbinger: In-house. Fuck, we don't want this game, but listen to this.

Christopher Whitcomb: The first three years I was on this team, there was no immediate action drill for somebody going down. What does that mean? Oh, I see. I mean, if, if you and I go through that door at four o'clock in the morning and you take a flyer and you go down, I didn't stop to take care of you like a medics in the military.

I would jump over you and go [00:28:00] and accomplish a mission for three years. Right? Nobody ever talked about helping anybody. You would go back after it was over. So it was a different type of thinking. But one thing I wanna bring up, I watched the show where you're talking about the situation in Mexico and you're in the backseat of that car, in the backseat of the taxi cab.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And I think you make a really brilliant point that very, very few people look at in life wr large, that most people who are not familiar with a crisis don't know when to make the decision that it is a crisis and get involved. So many people through the history of time have pushed it up to the point where it was too late.

Yeah. And you made a fascinating statement about when you and decided to get engaged and you put yourself in a position where you could interact.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: With the threat. With no training whatsoever. Right. So I, I find that really fascinating.

Jordan Harbinger: That was, you're talking about, so for people who don't know, this is when I got kidnapped by the taxi in Mexico and I didn't, there was no smartphones, so I wasn't screwing around looking at Instagram chicks or whatever, and I was looking out [00:29:00] the window and realized we were going the wrong way.

And then I asked the guy to drop me off and he said, no, that was a big red flag. And I remember thinking. I can't be getting kidnapped because that's never happened to me before. And then immediately going, that doesn't make any sense. Right? Why would just 'cause it hasn't happened. Doesn't mean it can't happen.

And also if people get kidnapped and they get killed as a result, well then they're not talking about that. So maybe I should pay attention. That's what you're talking about, right? So I am talking about it because it,

Christopher Whitcomb: it, it applies to absolutely everything in life. I don't care what it's a motorcycle race and you brought up that, or whatever the, whatever the situation.

Many people. I think it's just built in to mammals. Get to a point, everybody knows fight or flight, but getting to fight or flight is what is a problem for so many people in society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you get to the point where it's fight or flight, it's probably too late. I mean, you're running or you're fighting, but you might be dying, so it, it doesn't matter, but it could be anything.

I mean, you're selling a house and you're negotiating and there's a moment where you go, this has never happened before. And you get engaged. When human beings can anticipate variability, [00:30:00] look at all that risk. Make decisions early, they're gonna be so much happier with it decision making. And that's true.

That's something I've learned

Jordan Harbinger: very early. There's so many times when I, I look back and I go, oh, if I'd maybe had not been so afraid to challenge this particular thing or, or engage a little bit more, dive in a little bit more, I do it again in a different way. That's for sure. People wanna duck

Christopher Whitcomb: their head, put their head in the sand most often.

It does not go well. Anticipation is very big.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you think is the hardest decision you had to make in the field under pressure?

Christopher Whitcomb: I don't know right off the top of my head, but I, I would say that thing I talked about in the book. For those who haven't read it. I wrote a book about my life in that world from basically from 9/11 until now.

Yeah. Yeah. Anonymous Male. It'll be linked to the show notes. The bottom line is this, I ended up creating these situations where more and more difficult, and I ended up on an intelligence community gig in Somalia, so I flew to Nairobi. I hired a Cessna 180 2 BI flew into by DOA Somalia when they stood up the government I was there for when they, literally, when they made Somalia a country.

Lasted about three weeks. [00:31:00] I think.

Jordan Harbinger: I was gonna say never heard of that city, but maybe because it's not under government control. It wasn't a city,

Christopher Whitcomb: it was a, it was a patch of dirt you could land in. Okay. And it was a, a warehouse that had been blown up so many times. They gathered the government and the United Nations in this one building and it only had half a roof because the other roof had been blown off, had a dirt floor.

And anyway, I was there when that happened. I got stuck there and I ended up about. I think it was about three weeks later in Mogadishu. Okay. Uh, this was after the first battle of Mogadishu, which was Black Hawk down and the US government pulled out and it was a, a very short time before the second Battle of Mogadishu, which I helped precipitate to a certain degree.

So I ended up in the second best airport in Mogadishu, which was called K 50 and K 50 had been a, an old Russian landing strip. I had to get outta the country and I couldn't get out the country. I was supposed to get out on one of the cot flights. They have this group called Bluebird Era in Nairobi that would fly cot or mirror.

It's like a Copenhagen type thing that everybody stays high [00:32:00] on

Jordan Harbinger: through West Coast. Oh, cot. Yeah. The stuff that you put in your lip like chew, but it like, it's super addictive and super able to tolerance and.

Christopher Whitcomb: And it's real bad for you. It's real bad for you. Yeah. It's real bad for, and then it gets to rots your teeth out.

Right? And if you get an AK 47 and you're 13 years old, it's even less good for you and the people around you, right? Which is the whole country. So I went in on my own. I was supposed to get a ride out on one of these cop flights. That didn't happen because changes were made with the people I that were paying me.

It went bad. So anyways, I ended up in mochi four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, whatever the case was. It was just me. I had a technical, I had a a team. I had my own army. Okay. It's a technical is a, like it's an old Toyota pickup truck. It's a Hil Lux. Usually it's a Hil luxe. They love those. Yeah, they love 'em.

Well, it's because they run forever.

Jordan Harbinger: They do. If you see a high lux, when I saw a Hy Lux, not in like a dirty war zone with a machine gun welded to it, I was like, oh. People actually drive. Oh, that's what that is? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, this is what it's supposed to look like. Like when it

Christopher Whitcomb: Toyota financing all these wars around the world.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: but they're [00:33:00] everywhere,

Christopher Whitcomb: right? Yeah. The Taliban vehicle of choice. So I had one of those welded in the back is a a, it's called A-A-D-S-H-K. Yeah. The dish, whatever. A dco, which means sweetheart and Russian. Yeah, they call it sweetheart. So I had a DKA and I had, you know, guys with AKs and, and whatever else.

I was actually in an old Toyota Corolla. That got shot up at a roadblock trying to get there. So I, anyways, I get to mog. I got 600 bucks in my sock. That's all I had left. 'cause there's no money, there's no military, no ATMs or anything. There's nothing. There's nothing. I mean, it's bombed flat. It's an inhospitable location.

I'd been there a long time. So I get to this airport and there's an old plane on the runway, like you see in the old DB Cooper thing where he jumped like the stairs come down in the back.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: And I could see it in the distance and somebody told me I could get on that plane. That's why I went there.

It was like two and a half or three hour drive from by doa. So it was over. My technical was gone, and I'm surrounded by all these guys staring at me going. Who the fuck is that guy? Yeah. Right. And that's kinda what kept me alive because nobody wanted to make a decision to take me. Right? If I worked for their [00:34:00] boss, like there's seven guys and they're all vying for whatever, right?

Jordan Harbinger: Who's gonna kidnap this guy and hold it for ransom?

Christopher Whitcomb: You, you might get a raise, you might get an extra dollar a month, but you might get your head chopped off for the butter knife too, so, right. And uh, so anyways, I end up there. Zero options. I had $600 in a passport. They came out, uh, this guy came out and took my $600.

When I say airport, it's not an airport. There was a a blue tarp that sold Nestle water and it's like Top Ramen noodles. You could eat dry and a bunch of starving. I don't wanna make it sound less worse than it was, but it was bad. And, and there's this plane, so I know if I get on a plane, I'm gonna survive.

If I don't get on a plane, I'm not gonna survive. I couldn't swim anywhere. You're right. That was it. So anyways, they came and they took the 600 bucks and now I have no money and. I don't know anybody. I don't have a ticket, you know? I don't know that I'm getting on the plane. Then the guy comes back and searched me to see if I had any more money and took my passport.

Now I'm in Mogadishu on my own, doing an A gig with an agency and. I have [00:35:00] nothing. No money. Yeah, no passport. You got shoe laces. No technical. Yeah, shoe laces. I could maybe strangle myself. Yeah, that's the do on myself. Maybe if I, you know,

Jordan Harbinger: that's the backup plan. So

Christopher Whitcomb: that was a bad day. So that was, I think that was probably a point in my life where I said, might wanna tune this up a little bit, but I, I did get on the plane.

That's the bottom line. Who, who's playing with it? It was just a charter. Somebody flew a charter in. I still have no idea how, why or how I have a ticket. They actually wrote up this little thing and I saved it. So I walk out and the, uh, staircase goes up. I think I made it, I'm looking out the windows. This plane was so old you couldn't see out the windows because the glass had been bead blasting from landing in the sand, right?

Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's all like, uh, the, what do you call it? Like opaque? Like opaque, yeah. Yeah. Almost foggy. 'cause it's been sanded down. Yeah. So

Christopher Whitcomb: just take sand paper to the windshield of your Porsche 9/11. And, and you know, and, uh,

Jordan Harbinger: so you're looking at, you see the army or whatever remains rolling up and you're like, please don't be coming from me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Christopher Whitcomb: yeah. But then the, so they, you go through this. Up and down, it's hope. Really the thing that sustains you is hope. You hear people talk about it that [00:36:00] everything is horrible, but maybe it's gonna get better. So I'm on the plane, the stairs come up, the engines start up and I think we're outta here.

Then all of a sudden the engines spin down and you can see the light coming in from the stairs coming down. I'm going, fuck me. Yeah, these guys came on. But they took the guy in the seat right behind me. Oh man. And uh, which was a bad day for him. Yeah. But it was a great day for me. Then stairs came up and I remember going down the runway, looking out and going, I'm really getting outta here.

It was interesting because when I go back to Nairobi, I had flown into Nairobi commercial. I flew out of Nairobi on a chartered plane that I paid cash for, so there was no record of me leaving. So when I came back in, I had to go back through the airport and I had nothing to show that I had left the country to go to Somalia.

They knew I came back from Somalia, so that, that was kind of complicated.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. What do you even do? I mean, how do you handle that? Make a

Christopher Whitcomb: phone call. Yeah. With a number in West Virginia.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. Yeah. I need a fake reentry visa for, uh, I've had plenty

Christopher Whitcomb: of those, man.

Jordan Harbinger: Plenty of [00:37:00] those. Yeah. Oh, look.

Oh, it's in my other passport that I'm also not supposed

Christopher Whitcomb: to have. Yeah, I'm not talking to you. Call this number.

Jordan Harbinger: Chris is out here wrestling with moral questions that end up in history books. Meanwhile, I'm just wondering if my laundry's still in the dryer. Anyway, while we sit with that existential dread for just a second, here's something a little lighter.

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Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. I honestly don't know how I made it through all those Michigan winters. It wasn't just the cold, it was the darkness by five o'clock, it felt like midnight and before long, I'd slip into that fog of low energy and just the blah mood that I now realize was seasonal depression, plus lack of sleep, plus everything else is a teenager this time of year.

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If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, go ahead [00:41:00] and email usJordan@jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Chris Whitcomb home man. Most of us panic when our phone battery hits 2%.

Meanwhile, you got, you got real decisions to make.

Christopher Whitcomb: Okay, so let's go back to the question you asked. Yeah. Why did I write a book that skips around? Yeah. Yeah. Arrest my case. Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, and it, there's so much stuff we haven't talked about, about the writing I worked on as a speech writer on Capitol Hill.

Yeah. Wrote for the New York Times and GQ magazine and I, I mean, there's just so many bizarre things. I don't, it's hard to figure out where to start.

Jordan Harbinger: It is, it's hard to make a through line for everything. It's a through line.

Christopher Whitcomb: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: If Hollywood made a movie about. The HRT or, or just these kinds of teams in general?

What? What was the first thing you would tell them to stop doing if you were consulting on that movie? Hiring Angelina Jolie. Just stop hiring Angelina Jolie. Just stop

Christopher Whitcomb: hiring her When American Sniper came out. Look, she's enormously talented. Yeah. And she's remarkable in every conceivable way. So it's not about Angelina Jolie.

It's the idea that you could [00:42:00] make a movie called American Sniper and take a book about a real guy who did real things, and all of a sudden, in the middle of a gunfight, he's gonna make a call home to talk to his kids and talk. I love you, whatever. There's not a lot of time to think about your kids when you're in a gunfight.

Yeah. So many of the things that make those stories remarkable, those lives remarkable to moviegoers. They don't resonate with the people making those movies. I've been in this town for a long time. You've been in this town for a long time, and there are things when you go into a studio and you talk about plots.

So what I would say is, if you wanna make one of these, make a story that resonates and there have been some remarkable movies. I'm a big fan of Katherine Bigelow. I'm a big fan of Peter Berg. I'm a big fan of, uh, many people who embrace the inhospitable core of what these things are about. Combat violence in general is ugly, so don't aggrandize it.

But by the same token, don't soft sell the reason you're making the movie.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: So I, I was not a big fan of American Sniper.

Jordan Harbinger: What's the dumbest injury you ever saw somebody get during [00:43:00] training? This is

Christopher Whitcomb: me because oftentimes I'm an idiot. But we were doing this thing with uh, ass, you know what an happens is?

Like a baton? Yeah. The the extendable baton. Yeah. You like, you're running and I keep one, so I tag dogs. If anyways, you run this thing out. So we're practicing one day and we're practicing some kind of, of a fighting thing and we had these asks and we had these blocks. Of wood. And you would swing at this thing.

Yeah, and we were doing the thing. We'd go up and he'd come down and you go faster and harder and it's a competition. Everything you do. And I remember somebody was going harder than I was and I went up and down. When I did, I came down on the top of the guy's hand. Oh, that was holding the thing. So that was one of the stupidest, ouch.

Oh, it was bad. Yeah, it was really bad. But listen, you get hurt. You know, people die all the time. So that was a stupid mistake. Not the worst.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If you're gonna get injured in that line of work, you want to have a good story, not just, yeah. My training partner thought was, it was just,

Christopher Whitcomb: it was just embarrassing.

'cause then everybody laughs and the poor guys lost two fingers and you know, it's just Right. It's unpleasant. Yeah. That's no good. So [00:44:00]

Jordan Harbinger: ke I'm sorry

Christopher Whitcomb: man.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sorry. You ever hit anybody with one of those sendible batons I've hit

Christopher Whitcomb: people with about everything you can

Jordan Harbinger: imagine. Yeah. When I was working security, I used to, I mean, I wasn't I carrying a gun?

I remember these Mexican gangsters, they would always get really drunk and start shooting, and I would hit 'em with a baton. Yeah. And they would break all the time. These batons are, you think you're such a insta, unstoppable badass with this metal stick. And then you hit somebody in the arm and their arm might break, but your baton is bent and you go, oh, this is only good for like one whack.

Well, these things are, are we had better quality

Christopher Whitcomb: ones than you did apparently? Yeah, I guess so, because I've never broken one. But I will say how you hit somebody makes a massive difference. Yeah. Because. They're designed for specific things to change behaviors. They're not designed to. The less lethal force.

Right? Yeah. Could they be used and kill somebody? Yes. That's not what they're designed for, but you've gotta apply them in certain ways and bone joints, things like that. Yeah. Change people's opinion. Yeah. But then you, if you put drugs and alcohol, if you

Jordan Harbinger: push on it, these guys were always coked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So us, we would try to choke 'em with it because I [00:45:00] couldn't often wrap my arms around the guys, 'cause they're big. Oh wow. Yeah. So I'd choke 'em with a baton or I would tap 'em. On the top of the knee because, or the shin, 'cause that hurts, but it doesn't have to do anything other than leave a bruise. But there was a guy who wouldn't let me go, and he was a little bit older.

I just couldn't get his arm off of me. So I whacked his arm and I remember it. I remember it broke. But then I remember looking at my baton like, oh shit, this thing is a piece of garbage. You're right though. It wasn't, the brand was not a SP because those were expensive. They're expensive. It was a knockoff brand.

Yeah. So I, I went out and bought an a SP after that. And you could tell, because the cheap ones, if you use 'em enough, they fall apart. They just fly apart. They're. Made out of shitty safety? No. If you're

Christopher Whitcomb: depending on something for your safety. Your wellbeing, buy good stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Generally, generally a wise, uh, choice instead of going to the, it's a good life decision, gas station, baton, or whatever I had.

Yeah. What's a survival skill everyone thinks they need, but is actually useless?

Christopher Whitcomb: Oh

Jordan Harbinger: wow. Survival skill that everybody thinks they needs. Uh, while you're thinking, I'll give a funny example. Gimme one. We were talking about earthquake survival and safety, and my wife is like, okay. [00:46:00] On it. I was like, you gotta get us an earthquake survival safety kit or something like that.

Can you research that? She was like, yeah, about a week later I said, what'd you get? She goes, I got a fire starter. I'm like, what? What? What are you doing? We need like water and food, you know, like, I don't know, like a crank radio or something. She's

Christopher Whitcomb: like, all right, back to Amazon. I got a story for about everything, so I'll tell you the story.

Yeah, so I lived in Venice for a long time, off and on for Italy or California. Well, I've been to Venice, but. In California Events. California. Okay. So there's a restaurant on Abbott Kinney. I'm not gonna say the name of it, but it was a very prominent restaurant at the time, and there's a garden in the back, and we'd have a lunch every Friday.

So we'd get some really interesting people. We'd sit around and have lunch and we'd tell stories and talk about interesting things, right? So these are very highly successful, well-known people this afternoon. And the topic was this. If the earthquake comes, if it all goes to hell in Southern California, yeah, what are you gonna do?

So everybody thought about it for the week. They came back and we've had the conversation. So it starts with this one guy and he said, I am going to take [00:47:00] $10,000 and I'm gonna have it broken into fives and tens. This is a true story, a hundred percent true story. He goes, well, look, if you know, nobody's gonna be able to make change.

So he went out and took 10 grand and, and he did this, this was not a hypothetical, and had twenties and hundreds and whatever converted to fives and tens because if the shit went hit the fan, they wouldn't have to make change. The second guy said. I went out and I got a motorcycle license and I bought an a d CCC scooter because everybody's gonna be trying to get out of la.

Yeah. You won't be able to get gas. I can go around them and uh, I can ride this scooter outta town. Yeah. And I said, well, that's okay, but you'll get like seven miles and then you're outta gas. Right. You're hitchhiking.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: So that didn't go very well. The third guy said, I went out and I bought a gas grill, a sleeping bag, and.

Something else. I can't remember. All I remember is a sleeping bag. So they're all very happy with themselves. Everybody's going right on. This is fantastic. Yeah. You know, good decision making, you're gonna survive. And they look at me knowing my background, right? And they say, what [00:48:00] did you, what would you do?

I would say, I didn't do anything. I'm gonna go to your house. I'm gonna take your motorcycle to your house and get your sleeping bag, and I'm gonna go to your house and take your $10,000 and then go on my way. Go on my way. Yeah. So the answer is people oftentimes think, what do I need to survive? These things many, many times are wrong.

I knew people at various times. I'm not a gun nut. I have guns because I think I should in society, if something happens, I'd feel badly if I didn't. Right. Um, for other people and, uh, just because I've had so much training and experience with 'em. However, I have these friends who at various times would go out and buy 10,000 rounds of ammo or whatever, and they'd say, why aren't you buying ammo?

And I'd say, because I don't want to carry 10,000 rounds of ammo. I need about three rounds so I can take yours.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, sure. So people

Christopher Whitcomb: realize you need shelter if it's cold. You need food and water and sleep. You don't need much of anything except a plan. And if you have that or a helicopter, you'll be fine.

You know that's helicopter's fine, but they run outta gas. That's, they get shot down. Yeah, that's

Jordan Harbinger: that's true. Yeah. I suppose. Oh [00:49:00] man. Getting shot down on a helicopter. How easy is it? You're the only guy I've talked to recently that might know this. How easy is it to shoot down a helicopter? 'cause one, you gotta hit it.

That can't be easy. Yeah, you gotta hit it somewhere. That matters. Which is. Probably also not that easy.

Christopher Whitcomb: Another great story, one of the guys on my team, because this team, I was on this social rescue team. It was some of the most extraordinary people you ever met. One of the guys name was Jimmy Yacon. Jimmy Yacon was in one of the helicopters in Blackhawk down.

When you see, I think it was like Jeremy PN, who I used to be friends with way back in the day, and Jeremy PN was playing Jimmy Yacon and they guy, I think it was Jeremy that was playing the role, they took an RPG. They're flying around Mogadishu in a black hawk and they take an RRP G. It explodes, I think it killed the guy in the left seat.

I think Jimmy was in the right seat and it knocked him unconscious. He wakes up as the helicopter's going in, wakes up, pulls back, saves the day, survives. He ended up being on my sniper team. After he left the army, he went to the FBI to the hostage rescue team and was on this thing. So I, I asked him that because I've been in helicopter crashes too.

You have? Oh wow. Yes. But [00:50:00] not as a result of gunfire. And I asked him that and as it turns out, it's pretty hard to shoot down a helicopter. Yeah, you would think. Yeah. You've gotta con hit a control. Mechanism of some kind. Yeah, right. You got fuel, like hydraulic or whatever, fuel tank or the pilot, I guess, right?

I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, maybe not the fuel, but you know what, uh, speaking of these things, how you talk about these Malcolm Gladwell Yeah. In one of his books talked about in World War ii, uh, the government wanted to. Try and keep their planes from getting shot down. You know this, did you read that?

Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. So they, and they said these planes were coming back and none of 'em were shot in the engine. So they said, well, we're gonna armor all these other things. And somebody said, well, they came back because they weren't shot in the engine. Right, right. So it depends on how you look at it.

In reality, helicopters go down for a lot of different reasons. They're remarkably resilient to gunfire. Vietnam's a perfect way to prove that. The old, uh, Hueys and we had 'em, I flew in one for years and years and years. They're pretty durable. There's not a lot in them. I mean, there's a lot of metal and some open space, but, uh, they're not as easy [00:51:00] to shoot down as you might expect.

Jordan Harbinger: What's it like going down in a helicopter then? Because I assume you're, you've not dropping like a stone or you wouldn't be here right now?

Christopher Whitcomb: I remember I used to be terrified of flying. I grew up flying on private planes. Another story, so I joined the FBI and I got assigned to the Springfield, Missouri office, which had a military base called Fort Leonard Wood.

My job was to do certain FBI stuff on this base. I went up there one day and we had to fly somewhere in a helicopter. And I get in this helicopter and I'm thinking I'm not all that excited about being in helicopter. And uh, it was a Vietnam era. Huey takes off. It was a bad day. And we're in this thing and through no fault of anything, this is not war.

This was nothing. The thing broke and it gets a master. Caution light. There's a light at the top of the circular panel. We had headphones on and it was one of those things where somebody said, oh shit, or whatever, and it was a master caution and it was, I think it was, uh, it lost the gearbox. I think that's what it was.[00:52:00]

And we auto rotated. So I say crash landing. Nobody got hurt. What is bottle rotated? What does that mean? It's a mechanism. Helicopters have that use the inertia of the blades. Sorry to helicopter pilots. I, you know, we always say stupid stuff, so I'm gonna get 700 emails about this, but it's okay. That guy's a moron.

He's know what he's talking about. He doesn't even know he made the whole thing

Jordan Harbinger: up. Yeah, right.

Christopher Whitcomb: Well, this one was widely reported. Yeah. Because it was, when you crash a helicopter in the army, there's a report. Yeah, I was on it. And uh, but anyways, I don't know the exact mechanism, but I do know there's an inertia thing and it, it was a hard landing.

Did the thing blow up and end up being in an Angelina Jolie movie? No, but it was classified as a crash landing. I didn't really know what was going on because the whole thing was new. It's like you in the taxi cab. Yeah. You're thinking are we really going down? And I'd never been in a helicopter before.

I didn't even know what that meant. Anyways, that was one of them.

Jordan Harbinger: So everybody survived then? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Everybody survived. The pilot must have been pretty happy about that. I don't know. That would be really scary. Yeah.

Christopher Whitcomb: Pilots are, uh, I went for a glider, uh, ride [00:53:00] a couple weeks ago. I was in New Hampshire, went see my folks, and I go up for a glider ride and I said something, whatever, and about death or whatever.

'cause I've had so many bad experiences flying, and the guy goes, we're not in the death business. Mm-hmm. And or we're not in the dying business. And that's pilots, right? Yeah. I mean, they dodge it every day, but it's physics.

Jordan Harbinger: What if your life depended on slipping past KGB surveillance, using nothing but a fake mustache and a latex mask.

Former CIA chief of disguise, Jonna Mendez, takes us deep into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage, where outsmarting your enemy meant mastering the art of becoming someone else entirely.

JHS Trailer: I worked for 27 years for the CIA. The office that I worked in was like Q. We had all kinds of techs. One half of the office was technical.

It was chemists and physicists and engineers, electrical and mechanical. People with such esoteric specialties. It was so important. It was the bottom line to a lot of the things we did. The other half of the office was my half, which was people who would deploy those [00:54:00] tools, who would take them to the field, who would hand them to James, sort of an inside joke.

All the case officers. We called them all James, and part of us didn't trust James with our gear, as we might've spent $5 million on a program to develop that camera system that fit into a Mo Blanc pen. We usually figured out how to go with him, so if he broke it, we could fix it. If he lost it, we could find it.

If he forgot how to operate it, we could refresh him. It was a little inside joke. If he left it on the subway, maybe we could go get it. So we traveled around with James. We not only equipped him and we trained him, but we also very often accompany him. A lot of our technical expertise would come into play.

People are very aware of the threat that that technology can play. How can you use it? What can it do for you? It's just given us opportunities to do things we never dreamed of. The real work in OTS [00:55:00]

Jordan Harbinger: was solving problems. To hear more about how spy tech disguise and raw nerve shaped modern intelligence as we know it, check out episode 1027 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

That's all for part one, part two, out in just a few days if it's not already. All things. Chris Whitcomb, of course, in the show notes on the website, advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. All at jordanharbinger.com/deals, please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser is something very specific and actionable that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions and your psychology and your relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday.

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It's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel [00:56:00] Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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