Dicutes for my live audience with UFC superstar Padi Ribadi on the 7th of January in Liverpool are now available on Skiddle. Padi will be doing his first live audience and what a night we have planned. We have a meeting greet and photo opportunity with Padi. You also can get to ask Padi some questions. We've also got special guests appearing. This is going to be a night not to be missed and what a way to start off the new year. See you all soon. You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications bell so you are notified for when my next podcast goes live.  It's an ethically ambiguous job.  I think anybody who thinks that CIA would not be watching is silly because everyone is watching. Booze Allen Hamilton is watching. Deloitte is watching. Google is watching. Salesforce is watching. Everybody watching. Amazon is watching. Everybody. They'll bring in former criminals as part of their sentence to teach us how to cyber hack or how to rob crypto or how to crack codes and get into a vault or a bank. We're constantly learning from the criminals out there who have done it and been caught because they get to reduce their sentence by coming in and teaching us how to do it. I think the probability is too high that we have other species living amongst us that we can't we can't see we can't define we can't explain it's not always great to know your true security status because there's plenty of places that I go now with my kids or with my spouse where I can't get comfortable. Why? Because I know how dangerous it is where we are. I know how vulnerable we are when we go to a concert when we're standing at an airport when we're in when we're in line to go vote right like those are your most vulnerable points. Boom we're on and today's guest we've got Andrew Bustamati. Bustamati. With a Scottish accent man it sounds perfect. It sounds better than the original. I've seen many of your podcasts CIA agent very interesting people love those sort of topics because we're all unsure even things you might say we might be thinking true false we don't know that everything in this planet we're unsure of but it's fascinating stuff and I'm very excited to have you on today like I love that sort of stuff that chat. Yeah I know I'm happy to be here man and I love espionage I love the art and the science of spying so I mean that's why I'm out here talking about it all the time it's it's hard to be on the road I mean you're on the road building a podcast building a building a brand you know what I mean you're away from your kids you're away from your spouse you're away from your life away from your grocery store away from your gym it's hard work but it's it's awesome to be out there talking and teaching what I love you know loving the vibe bro loving the hair love the vibe love the crystals what's that in your neck you know this is funny dude like there's this this Tibetan guy that's in st petersburg florida he has a little shop just struggling to get by every every month and I love his stuff and I love supporting him so I actually have no idea what this stone is that's one of the reasons I bought it was because he didn't know what stone it was either he always knows the different stones and different crystals I don't necessarily subscribe to all the energy stuff yeah but I've always wanted to be long-haired and like this is the vibe I've always wanted to wear so after 42 years I'm giving myself permission king da fri king da just being you yeah man if anybody telling you what to do what to wear no ties no nothing stuffy it just you know I've always liked I've always liked fashion I've always liked good clothes but I've always preferred just you know the freedom to wear what you want kind of say what you want do what you want and be true you like to be true to you you know that's the way everybody should be I just think we're in a generation now we're all confused yeah we all think views social media following whatever watch or clothes we're wearing and it's difficult because part of me just wants to wear a robe and stay in fields with and grow the pubs and just grow the hair and and feel free yeah but part of me feels as if I want to win the game as well whatever they call this the matrix or whatever they call it like it is a big game to me I don't know how I'm playing it yet I don't know how I'm going to complete it but I just know what I'm doing is the right things for me now but I'm still wary of the external stuff because that can damage your soul it can damage your brain because we crave things that are irrelevant to us and I believe that's the way society is just now you know it's interesting like you're hitting on a couple of really interesting points here the uh the first is about conditioning right cultural conditioning and that's a very real thing from the time that you're a little a little kid your formative years from zero to five your your pubesant years from 12 to 21 those are foundational years for shaping how you exist how a person exists in society so you can imagine how much that that plays on somebody from Scotland versus somebody from Central African Republic or somebody from China versus somebody from the United States all that conditioning all the social norms the norms of behavior the uh the expected uh social acceptances and social rejections these these are these become part of what program us as people so your whole point about social media your whole point about being torn between doing what you want and what you think might be expected of you that's the space that's the space that frustrates people and that's the space where in in the spy game that's where you can kind of take control of someone else's behaviors it's why we it's why marketers market to us in those pain places it's why uh we get hired and we have salaries negotiated to us in those points of pain because inside that space you can be turned against your your best interest do you think that's why people are easy manipulated then because there is a bit of confusion of who they really are and who they should be there's a number of things that make people susceptible to manipulation for sure that's a big one but then there's also uh you know a history or historical tolerance of them letting other people manipulate them a perfect example is abusive relationships if you've ever been in an abusive relationship or if you've ever known someone in an abusive relationship what happens is they set a precedent in their own mind that uh that makes them tolerant of certain abuses physical abuses verbal abuses whatever else it might be and then as they as they continue to grow they're not aware none of us are aware of how we are aging until all of a sudden we're very aware that we have aged for the most part we're always kind of trapped in that same uh 22 24 year old mind that we had when puberty ended because that's kind of when our brain development essentially comes to a screeching halt unless you take active measures so uh we all kind of see ourselves in that 23 24 25 year old mindset even though our age is significantly different so you might be 45 years old 20 years older than you were at 25 but you've been blind to the progression of time and you're still letting yourself be abused the same way you were 25 before we get into old and I always like to go back to the start of my guest brother kind of where you grew up and how it all began yeah so uh I grew up in a state inside the United States called Pennsylvania it's a pretty rural state in general uh it's got you know Philadelphia and Pittsburgh two very large cities but neither of those are where I grew up I grew up in the farmlands where there were uh there were corn rows and there were soybeans and there were there were cows milk cows so I grew up in rural Pennsylvania a brown kid in a white state and then uh all I wanted to do growing up all through middle school all through high school was get out of Pennsylvania my best option to get out was the military and that's the route that I chose so I went into US Air Force was accepted the uh a military academy inside the United States called the US Air Force Academy and then from there started a military career I did well enough in my military career that when the time came for me to leave the military CIA tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I wanted to come over and and work clandestine operations with CIA well big family life so I grew up with a step dad my father was killed when I was very young uh in a criminal incident stabbed and uh and I never knew him so I was very young my mom and he were going through a kind of a painful separation so I grew up for the first five years of my life again going back to those formative years I was raised by tiger women my mom my grandma and my aunts they raised me until I was five years old my mom remarried now it was when my step dad entered my life uh my step dad and I were never very close so I'm like many many boys in the United States especially or many children in the United States I was raised by a step parent that that was never like an emotionally supportive parent so when I was 18 years old I was more than happy to leave the house and my parents were both more than happy to have me leave the house so I never really had a close family relationship do you think that's what conditions you who you become when you're older so I was a big partner yeah it plays a huge role right so part of the way it conditioned me was because I remember how much I didn't like that so when I went looking for my own spouse my own life partner I was very very committed to a family a family where I could be present I built a business I left the CIA I make every decision as an adult focused around the idea of not being like my family growing up being there for my kids being a present father being a supportive dad being a supportive husband being there for all the the messiness that is uh that is family because it wasn't there for me when I was a kid was much racism towards you and that's so much I mean there was a little bit it was the United States is a the United States has race awareness for sure but it is not nearly as racist as other countries in the world like Asia or Mexico if you go into southeast Asia there are some extreme the Middle East extremely racist places in the United States we think we have a race problem there's all sorts of studies that show that there's a discrepancy between races the discrepancy is is it pales in comparison to the discrepancy that exists in other parts of the world the difference is that the United States is kind of always on this uh this this challenge this progressive goal to improve so it always wants to improve every single year where most countries in the world are just trying to survive we have the benefit of being the the economic superpower of the world and just like when you have lots of money just like when you have lots of time or lots of resources you're always trying to optimize and always trying to improve so the United States is constantly trying to improve which is why we spend so much time kind of poking our own chest about our race issues I grew up in the 90s I was called spic I was called you know latino I was called wetback I was called all sorts of racist names I never really understood that they were racist terms because in my mind's eye I was just another white kid everybody around me was white so I felt like I was white it wasn't until I looked in the mirror that I realized I wasn't really white and then going into the military that helped me kind of start to gauge better what diversity looks like because then I could see Latinos and Asians and African Americans serving side by side with me in uniform I never really saw that when I was in high school ain't racism a mad thing yeah like Eastern Europe was very bad as well I had a boy on who he goes to the front line in wars as a journalist and he's saying that in Ukraine and it's all neo-nazis and so racist yeah and Eastern Europe like that's bad and I don't see it here in the UK I hear about it on the news I never see anybody being racially abused or beaten up because of the skin color I don't get it myself that I've never understood how somebody can hate on a skin color you know the thing that also kind of frustrates me about it is is uh we get so wrapped up around talking about it that we essentially empower it to continue happening right so even as I hear you talking about how you don't see it I am certain that there are people in the United States who would look at this conversation and say that you're so racist that you're blind to it and it's because you're a white male so what they would be doing in that kind of assessment is essentially empowering racism by it by underscoring or essentially assuming what you're saying is based on your skin color and based on your life experience instead of based on your true objective reality of what you've seen around you've seen the world I think Morgan Freeman says it best he was asked how do you stop racism he says stop talking about it stop talking about it exactly right I feel like the same thing is true about sexism the same thing is true about ageism about everything oh my gosh if you just talk if you stop talking about it you take the power away from it you can still legislate you can still pass laws but take it out of the mainstream vernacular and give people something more productive to talk about that's the mainstream for you they're going to force all agendas for whatever they want you to see the world like if it's they're speaking about it then people will then jump on it because people need something to speak about people believe what they see or they hear like when we talk about the human mind it is easy to manipulate it is easy to guide humans like sheep into what you want to believe I had a man called Mo Godat on the podcast and he created AI for Google one in a high high up and he says that within the next 10 years AI will be one billion times smarter than any human on this planet machinery so the things that you are seeing on your phone and technology now is they're conditioning your mind right now to whatever they want you to be in 10 20 30 years they're conditioning your mind I totally agree and it's not you know I I want to make sure that we draw a very clear distinction between conditioning your mind and brainwashing for governmental purposes versus conditioning your mind for commerce purposes our brains are always conditioned for commerce what's that mean it's conditioned to be able to become a buyer the world essentially breaks down into two types there's producers and consumers right people who produce something produce a podcast produce a product produce legislation produce whatever produce farm goods and then consumers the people who consume consume media consume food consume energy so the world breaks into producers and consumers all producers they have to consume also right but they understand the production side this is why if you ever go to a restaurant with a business owner or if you ever if you ever hang out with entrepreneurs entrepreneurs usually tip higher they have no problem paying the extra two or three dollars for a certain service because entrepreneurs understand the production side and they appreciate it so they're willing to pay for it whereas people who are not entrepreneurs people who are nine to five employees or people who live beneath you know a certain socioeconomic status I would say about $100,000 to $125,000 US when they live beneath that they're still kind of bargain minded they're still thinking about how do I get the best bargain instead of appreciating the value or the service that they're getting yeah money's an energy currency I believe anyway and it's how you use it it's just this society that we do crave it the majority people crave it like I've craved it I've got it I've lost that I've get I'm getting it back but I've now realised that that ain't the thing that makes me happy well what you've realised is the is the producer side of the mindset right you you know that you can make money and lose money and make it again so that's not the challenge for you anymore most people out there cannot make money happen the vast majority of people out there are dependent on someone else to pay them think about that so all they do for a living is consume that's it they consume their own time they consume the information technology of their business they consume you know client time they consume and they and they produce only what they're told to produce and many of them complain about the expectations placed on them to produce because they're set by someone else yeah what was a military leak the military was very interesting for me the military was uh was a time when I had to learn how to deal with authority I never dealt I've always bucked authority I've always had challenges with authority and that does not go very far in the military what did you do so I started as a as a as a pilot coming out of the air force academy when you graduate from the air force academy and you have good vision and you have the right seat height and you have good physical health everybody goes pilot first so I started out as a pilot I went through two phases of pilot training and then got cross trained into space and missile nuclear missile and satellite operations and then I went and I took the nuclear missile side of that track and ended up working as a what's called the 13 Sierra 13 s is our airport our air force specialty code and I served underground sitting there babysitting nuclear missiles for about two years so how when you talk about nuclear missiles when we talk about what was the missile get dropped on not China was it china in uh in world war two yeah in japan japan yeah as our missiles bigger than that now but it could kill half a million million or millions or even end the planet as is that just a myth is that just yeah as a missiles it can do a lot of damage so what was dropped in japan were bombs and how much Hiroshima yeah in Nagasaki and Hiroshima they were bombs I think they were little boy and or little man little boy and big man something like that I forget the the name of the bombs themselves but there were two bombs that were dropped and they were actually they were atomic bombs that were dropped which is different than the thermonuclear warheads that we use now the science is just different so to answer your question in simple terms though the bombs that we dropped on japan were enormous huge conductive atomic weapons that created huge reactions and huge explosions what the world uses now are warheads the difference is that the warheads are delivered via missile bombs are dropped from airplanes so in world war two we had to fly sub pilot had to fly those bombs in place and then dropped them out of the bottom of an airplane now somebody can sit 7 000 miles away 15 000 miles away and launch a missile carrying warheads another big difference is that the bombs that we dropped in japan were single yield bombs it means that either bomb carried just one explosive so you dropped one on Nagasaki one on Hiroshima and they exploded missiles carry multiple independently targeted warheads it's called a mirv m-i-r-v so when we launch a missile now if you can imagine it's like launching a six shooter like a revolver into space so it goes up and it's actually got between six and ten independent warheads on it like six bullets and each one of those is a thermonuclear warhead of its own so you could drop one on Syria one on Iran one on Libya one on turkey you could drop them anywhere you needed to drop them from their position in space see these missiles can people other people shoot them down could they track them shoot them down or did it fly under the radar so yeah where the there's two ways to answer that right so one is there's actively efforts to create technology that can intercept the warhead because the warhead is the most dangerous part the slowest period in the trajectory of a nuclear weapon is when it launches because it's a it's a rocket essentially right so it starts slow it gains speed as it goes into the atmosphere but once it reaches kind of space then it's moving very very fast and as it drops the warheads the warheads are dropped fast and they enter extremely fast if you ever get this chance to look at them up online they look like laser beams from the sky because they come in so fast and so hot it's very difficult to train a missile defense system or a laser on the warhead itself so instead everybody's focused on on destroying the missile carrying the warheads as it launches but we've never used they've never been used right they've never been used in real combat so we don't really know if anybody has the ability to shoot them down there's just technology out there that's striving for that goal so what's the point of them the point of nuclear weapons is not to use them it's to be the person that has them it's it's a strategic term called deterrence you want uh in the united states we have a very strong culture for guns again guns in the united states what most people in the world don't understand is that americans don't like guns because we want to go shoot people we like guns because having guns in the house having guns on your person make you it's a deterrent to keep a threat from choosing you a threats there's always going to be threats the choice that you have is not whether or not a threat attacks you it's whether or not you appear as an easy target because threats always want the easy target so if i'm carrying a gun on my hip and somebody beside me is not carrying a gun on their hip and you're sitting there waiting to mug one of us you're probably not going to mug the guy with the gun you're going to mug the other guy in the united states that's a win that's called a deterrent you were deterred from mugging me you were not deterred from mugging them they're the victim i am not that's a net win for me that's the same concept with nuclear weapons you want to have a nuclear arsenal so that nobody shoots nuclear weapons at you they'll choose someone else that's the big challenge right now in ukraine because ukraine does not have nuclear weapons russia does some countries in nato have nuclear weapons some countries do not and everybody's concerned about nuclear uh nuclear use not because we're thinking it's going to be mutually assured destruction the world's going to explode there are enough where there are enough warheads out there to destroy the whole world two or three times over but there's so many countries that control those warheads it's very unrealistic how many people control the buttons for these weapons it depends on the country because every country has a different way of controlling their missiles russia for example the the actual control for the weapon falls on the senior ranking officer in it like within proximity of the missile so they have like a colonel or a very high ranking officer who has to put in a code to launch a nuclear weapon in the united states we have junior officers with with keys but those those officers don't control the weapon the president controls the weapon through a series of authentication codes so the two junior officers could turn a key all day long and nothing would happen in russia putin could say launch nuclear weapons and a commander in the field could just choose not to do it it's two different systems china has a different style israel has a different style the uk has a different style you know everybody has a different style for how they handle their nuclear weapons how many people do you think it would take if they decided to destroy the world to let these weapons go would there be a lot of people would only be like five six people yeah it would only be a few people that would have to make that happen and a lot of it's because of the policies around nuclear weapons so for example if if putin wanted to launch a weapon or even if putin didn't want to launch a weapon but some very hawkish conservative senior rechernal did they might launch a rogue nuclear warhead out of russia who knows where let's say they aim poland well then uh europe is going to have to respond france and the uk and germany are going to have to choose whether or not to respond most often the response is kind of predetermined if they see a nuclear warhead inbound they will respond in kind but it's very hard to coordinate who's responding so then you would have more you'd have warheads come from europe into russia and then russia would have another counter response where they would see warheads coming from europe into russia and they would have their own counter response that would go back and then the united states would see multiple warheads coming out of russia and the united states would launch back potentially israel would launch along with them russia would reach out to china or china would see an attack on russian soil and then they would get involved north korea would be involved iran would be involved right that's the the slippery slope of nuclear combat the history books kind of leave close for me anyway like what's the chances for by going by the history books probably a world war three within the next 20 10 20 years but what do you think the chances are being a world war three in many ways i would say that we're already in world war three that the problem the problem that people don't understand about war is that wars evolve over time they don't look like the previous war so if you look at if you look at world war one trench warfare chemical warfare uh just uh unsophisticated weapons uh balloon bombs right world war one just a few decades later was world war two but it was a completely different type of conflict almost no chemical weapons the introduction of nuclear weapons highly sophisticated vehicles highly sophisticated war machines the creation of an entire uh military industrial complex that didn't exist during world war one right so world war one to world war two completely different wars the problem is that when people think about world war three what do they think of they think of world war two war is not going to look like world war two ever again it's going to look it's going to look new now inside the military war colleges in the united states and most of europe the the current preferred style of war is something called proxy war proxy war is when you let you let a poor country become a battlefield where wealthy countries can fund opposing sides inside that third world country like what happened in syria like what happened in ymen like what happened in libia like what happened what's happening now in ukraine that's called proxy war very rich countries get involved in an effort to try to uh swayed or change the influence and the power of their competitor right so so russia's involved in ukraine china's involved in our united states is involved in ukraine specifically to fight russia china's involved in ukraine by helping russia specifically to fight the united states the same thing was in syria right russia was involved in syria america was involved in syria to fight russia russia was involved in syria to fight the united states and you got turkey involved in all of this and you got iran involved in all of this that's called proxy war if you look at the world through a lens of the evolving nature of war, there are many special, there are many, many people out there who would argue we're already in World War III or on the brink of World War III through this lens of proxy war. If there was a world war III, who would be the strongest nation? That's what everybody was wondering right now. It wouldn't be nations, it would fall to powers. And I don't know how much you're keeping up with what's happening right now in geopolitical space, but the world is dividing into powers again. Just like in World War II we had an axis a'r alluid? Something very similar is happening now. The United States has aligned itself with NATO fairly heavily. However, not all the countries in NATO are committed to NATO. Hungary is the best example to use. Hungary is kind of supporting the Russian side of the Ukraine conflict instead of the NATO side of the Ukraine conflict. And because of that, NATO and the United States are pressuring Hungary to kind of fall back in line with NATO objectives and NATO's point of view. How strong is Putin? Meanwhile, on the other side of the balance, you've got Russia pairing up with China. You have Russia and China supporting North Korea in the UN. You have Iran supporting Russia. So you're seeing these two sides start to form. Russia and China for me would be the strongest looking from the outside. I don't know all the ins and outs, but that's up a couple to me that where they've got the resources, they seem to have everything in place. It's scary to think that what should opinion on wars? What's my opinion on wars? So wars are terrible things. Wars are destructive. They're expensive in terms of lives. They're expensive in terms of dollars. They put these exclamation points in history that are interesting to study but terrible to remember. So I don't like war. I don't like military conflict. I don't like when people turn to shooting and killing as their solution for things. But I also understand that there are certain aspects of life that must be protected. And if that protection falls through all the different levels to the basis level where we have to start shooting and killing, then that's a legitimate way of protecting what matters. See, I believe in self-defense. I believe in defend yourself at all costs. But wars I don't know. I don't know how to pull the strings behind them. We can all go down the conspiracy route and say this and that because we watch a few videos on YouTube. But there seems to be a lot more to it. But for me, if there was people arguing over certain things, for me it should be the men in suits going and fighting, saying to their kids that there's so many innocent people dying. And wars from both sides like Russia, Ukraine can talk about Russia. But people dying in Russia, Britain's invaded nearly every country on this planet. We're the worst. We're the worst. So it's just hard to see. I don't know if it's certain families funding both sides or if there's real truth to behind what it says about wars. I genuinely don't know. I can only get it from, like I say, watching videos and reading some books. But for me, it's human beings like there's 8 billion people on this planet now. And it's just sad to see that how it's still happening to this day. And it seems to be getting worse. It's just it's a human conditioning to be a fighter, to want to be joining the army or wanting to kill people. Had a sniper on who'd killed over 80 people as a sniper. And at that moment he thought it was obviously the right thing to do. But now he's mental health's totally gone. That every man I know to serve in the army or the military or whatever. It's not a human thing to see their heads are gone. So that tells me as a human, that's not what we should be doing. That's not what we should be saying. But part of Scotland, I've never been alive for Scotland's ever been invaded. And no doubt if it was, I'd be the first one to grab a gun and try and protect the ones I love. But it's just sad to see when people's minds go and they think they're doing it for the right reasons. Because if everybody in the wars, when they step down and not do it, do you think then it would stop if all human beings decided okay, enough is enough? I think we need to recognize that human beings are conflict oriented creatures. Why is that? Because we're alpha predators, right? If you think about us just through the lens of animals, we're alpha predators. Alpha predators don't just eat to survive. Alpha predators hunt to protect and to essentially grow a resource pool around themselves. It's like your great white shark. They don't just eat when they're hungry. They eat to prevent themselves from becoming hungry. Or like your wolf pack. Wolves don't just hunt when they're hungry. They hunt to prevent themselves from being hungry. Lions create prides, right? These are all different alpha predators. Human beings are alpha predators. We're the alpha predator of the entire planet. The biggest threat to a human being is another human being. You said it yourself, you believe in self-defense. The only reason you believe in self-defense, brother, is because you know that the thing you fear the most are other human beings. So wars are just the manifestation of what happens when human beings organize themselves into nation states or a nation state is really nothing more than a more advanced tribe, right? And a more advanced tribe is nothing more than a more advanced clan. So there are eight again, eight billion people on the planet. There's not enough planet to go around for eight billion people. There just isn't. There's not enough resources so that eight billion people can live a comfortable lifestyle. There simply is not. So the way that we ensure the survivability of our own, again, just like you said, if someone invaded Scotland, you would go there, pick up a gun and defend the people you love. That is not someone who believes in self-defense. That is somebody who believes in protecting the clan, your family being your clan. And I'm right there with you. The reason I joined the military was because I wanted to protect what I cared about, my family. I wanted to protect my future children. It wasn't until I started learning how conflict is policyd because that's really what conflict is. We're not going to war because someone's invading us. Most of the time we're going to war over resources, over oil, over food protection, over maritime rights, over whatever, rice production. Exactly right. Because the Tony Blair's got a lot of blood in his hands. He was at a rack. He says weapons are mass destruction and there was no weapons found. My wings are people died. You've just got to question that then. Well, we have the benefit of hindsight to question that. At the time, it's not quite so big. Just look at what happened in the last four days.  Immediately, what happened? Everybody blamed Russia immediately. There was no question. There was no investigation that even needed to happen. The public outcry was Russia dropped a bomb either by mistake or on purpose across the border into Poland. Three or four days later, we have investigations that have taken place and now we know it was actually a Ukrainian anti-missile missile that went off track and landed in Poland. Not intentionally targeted, just the byproduct of war. It was collateral damage that was done outside of Ukraine. But at the time, people were calling for blood. People thought it was Russia. It's the same thing that happened in Iraq. At the time, blood was hot. People didn't trust Iraq. People didn't trust the Gulf. People were afraid of Islamic extremism and people were absolutely terrified of what would happen if weapons of mass destruction fell into the hands of terrorists. All of that just made a very convenient narrative for economics to also happen at the same time and make sure that the right people got the right contracts to do whatever was needed to combat these potential weapons of mass destruction. Yes, after the fact, there was no evidence of live ammunition, live weapons of mass destruction. Now we all look back on it and we say we were duped. In reality, we should be happy that there was no evidence found because had we not gone in, there's no guarantee that weapons of mass destruction wouldn't have eventually been produced there, or housed there, or stored there, or transited there. So it's a difficult thing. Do you think the wars now are just a lead-up to them, or do you think they're planned 10, 20, 30 years in advance? Wars are economic and there's a very strong mathematical model that shows how wars are economic. It's called the Kondratyev wave. Kondratyev was a Soviet era mathematician, economist, and he basically showed how there's a repeatable pattern in economic growth and decline. And when you follow that pattern, the natural outcome of an economic decline is a war. That's just what people do because when the economy starts to decline, resource demands do not decline. So they have to turn to an alternate way of securing resources. And if you can't secure resources by producing them, then you essentially have to go out and take them because the consumption still remains the same. So if you look up Kondratyev's wave, you'll see that his wave model aligns very closely to when the great conflicts of our time have happened dating back to World War I. Now, like one of the things that's very interesting about his model is that each wave actually stretches out. So it's similar to a light wave or a sound wave or a radio wave. The longer the wave gets, the further away it goes, it actually gets stretched out further and further. So his wave, what starts as a 20-year cycle, turns into a 27-year cycle and then a 32-year cycle and then a 42-year cycle. And that's what we're seeing. So it's hard to predict exactly when these things will happen. But right now, according to Kondratyev's estimation from like the 1920s, we are due for a major world conflict. And what we're seeing is that we all seem to be marching towards a major world conflict. So how does a man get involved with the CIA, like one of the top agencies on the planet, like how does, if you've got to be recruited, do you sign a form or do you put an application in? Like how does that come about? There's a lot of different ways that CIA picks you up. It's not that different from MI6 or Mossad or SVR or anyone else. Most people apply to CIA because most jobs at CIA are not undercover jobs. Most jobs at CIA are analysts or logisticians or mathematicians or engineers, and none of those people are undercover. Or if they are undercover, it's a very, very small percentage of people who are undercover. So their tax receipts say that they work for CIA, their address on their lease says that their employer is CIA. They work for CIA and there's nothing secret about it. And the vast majority of people apply through an online portal. Then there are some people who are, who apply slash are invited from college fairs. So your high performing college students or your bilingual or multilingual college students, they might get a visit from a CIA recruiter at a university. And then that recruiter says, hey, here's my card. Here's my phone number. Why don't you submit a resume? And then that recruiter can earmark the resume and try and get it streamlined in. And then you've got the classic military direct recruiting. So a lot of CIA officers are former military. The government has our entire profile.  So CIA really just kind of does a handshake with the government, with the military, and then they pull you over or they ask you if you want to come over and it's no break in service. It's a really simple transition. And then the last way is similar to the way that I got recruited where you're going about a life on your own and that life gets interrupted by CIA. For me, I was trying to leave the military and join another part of the federal government. I was trying to join the Peace Corps and my application was flagged and then I got a phone call. Some people have the same thing happen when they're trying to move from the corporate sector to a different corporate sector or if they're trying to move on the law side of the house. Some people get pulled out of FBI. But there are times rarely when CIA finds you in your daily life and then they ask you to come. And that's an invitation most people say yes to. But you've got to be cream of the crop then. So as a CIA watching then, universities, colleges to see who the top of the the top of the tree is to say recruit him. Yeah. Obviously they want the best of the best. Correct. And I think anybody who thinks that CIA would not be watching is silly because everyone is watching. Booze Allen Hamilton is watching. Deloitte is watching. Google is watching. Salesforce is watching. Everybody watching. Amazon is watching everybody. The top law firms in America. Everyone is watching talent in their industry and especially at university. So of course, CIA is there doing the same thing. Not because they're trying to steal people or ruin people's lives or lie to people and trick them, but because they're looking for elite talent, just like you said. So it's not like men in black sort of things. People coming in black. So it's secret handshake, listen, CIA, like secret tests and bunkers. It's none of that.  No, the movies have to make it look a whole lot more interesting than it really is. It is secrets, but here's the thing. Real secrets, really important, powerful secrets are very, very boring. They're not exciting. Most exciting things don't have to be secrets. The real secrets are extremely dull, boring things. Like for example, the nuclear yield on a warhead in one of the squadrons in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That is a classified secret. Like how much is the yield on the third warhead in the second missile in the fifth squadron in Cheyenne, Wyoming? How boring is that detail? Nobody cares about that. We want to know who's sending. Yeah, exactly, right? We want to know about drug smuggling in Panama to fund human trafficking in the United States. Real secrets are not sexy. Real secrets are not interesting. Real secrets are secrets that we're protecting from foreign governments. So all the stuff that you see in the movies, they could never make a movie about a real spy because the movie wouldn't sell. It wouldn't be interesting. And most of the time, everything the spy does would be completely overlooked and ignored because they are operating in secret. And if they're doing it well, nobody ever pulls a gun. Nobody goes by their real name. Nobody drives a nice car. Nobody wears a nice suit. And for sure, nobody gets laid. Totally under the radar then. Yeah. What about how many people are in the CIA? So I think that the total, I think the total population of CIA is like 10,000. That's a lot though. It's a lot. That's an army in itself. Yeah, but it's not as much as a Google or an Amazon out there where you've got 70,000 employees or 50,000 employees. But I think it's 10,000 people at CIA and I want to say that approximately 1,000 of them are undercover. So 90% of CIA is not undercover. People possibly in offices and just tighten away looking for new recruits. How does a man like yourself then top his craft in the military? That's a high-ranking job, is it not? Working with the missiles. So how does, what was the attraction for you in the CIA? Yeah, so the, I didn't like being in the military. I don't like having short hair. I don't like shaving my face. I don't like having shiny shoes. I didn't do well in the military. It wasn't a good fit for me. So I was trying to leave and I was trying to go into a place where I had more freedom. Like I said, I've been on a 42-year journey to try to express myself. So when the agency asked me to come to CIA, they're a civilian organization with government roots and they're largely, they let you be pretty independent as long as you operate within the confines of their rules because it benefits them. It benefits them to have a diverse workforce where people might go to Kenya or people might go to Bogota or people might go to Canada, who knows where. So they want a diverse workforce. So the appeal for me was I still get to be in the government and I get to say, even if I just said it to myself, I get to say to myself at night, I'm in the CIA. I'm undercover working covert missions for the CIA. All of that was very attractive to me compared to being in the military or compared to a low-paying job working in the Peace Corps in some of the hardest conditions in the world. Was it easier for you to get into the CIA because you're coming from military background or is it better being an unknown and nobody knows your history to get in? So it's hard for everybody. It's just different types of hard. So for me, it was very fast. I had a top secret SCI clearance, which is one of the highest clearances you can get in the military and it's the minimum clearance that you need to have as a CIA field officer. So I already had the clearance. That saved me 11 months of recruiting time because a normal person who's not military, they have to vet the person, review the person, interview the person, and then after all of that is done, then they can start the process to get them a clearance and the clearance process alone can take nine months. So I was done with all the clearance piece, all of the health requirements, all of the mental stability requirements, everything was in place. So when I got interviewed by CIA, it was really just a couple of interviews to make sure I was a sound fit psychologically, a couple of interviews to make sure that I could write a report and have enough social skill that I could get a secret if I needed to, and then essentially that was it. A few fit type of interviews, kind of like getting a job in a career field. They were very rigorous, but it was only two or three. Some people might come back five or six times and depending on how people do with a polygraph, again I came from the military, no drugs, no history of crime, easy for me to get through a polygraph. Somebody who goes to a normal college and someone who has a normal first five or seven years, they most likely have a misdemeanor somewhere and they most likely have done drugs at some time and that makes it incredibly complicated to go through the polygraph process. So when you're doing the tests and stuff, obviously you can go and lie down and do tests to see how smart you are or see what kind of letters you've got and these sort of things beside your name, but see when you go through it, see when you do the mental side of things for these tests, is it to see if you're sane and sane, and I'm going off course here, but see before you get recruited, do you think they already had a job for you or did they judge that once you've done all the tests? They judge it once you have all the tests done. That's for sure because you can't make a sound call, a high probability call about someone's capacities until after you've put them through very standardized stringent testing. So CIA knows that there are broad strokes that they're looking for, right? They're looking for people who are ethically flexible.  It's an ethically ambiguous job. It's not as easy as being a public school teacher where it's all very cut and dry and you know what's right and you know what's wrong. So they know for sure that they want to recruit people who are ethically flexible. They know for sure they want to hire people who are interested in international events, current events, geopolitics.  Once they have all of those tolerances, then they can kind of match you into a very high probability good fit job. Sometimes they're still wrong, but they have confidence, a smaller margin of error for putting you into something that's wrong. Why do you do the polygraph test? Because when you are at CIA, you know things nobody else knows. In many ways, you're the only one who knows it until you tell somebody else. So the way that CIA works is a field officer will go meet with an asset, collect a secret, and now that field officer is the only person who has that secret. He's the only person, or she's the only person who knows where the terrorist is going to be sleeping tonight, right? The polygraph is there because CIA needs to test every recruit to show that they are an honest person and a loyal person under the right constraints. So you can be lying to everybody, but CIA wants to make sure that while you're lying to everybody, you're telling the truth to them. That's why the polygraph is so pivotal. What was your first job in the CIA? My first job was kind of my only job. So I was put into a role it's called staff operations officer. So operations officer, you hear different types of terminology that's out there. But my role was essentially to collect, manage, and plan intelligence operations around the world, wherever we need to collect key intelligence that supported policymaker interests. And then to execute on those missions, sometimes I had to go in the field, sometimes I stayed in Langley, sometimes I deployed somewhere in between and managed an operation or managed a group of people who were operating. But all the changes isn't the job, but what changes is the missions. So sometimes that was in Africa, sometimes that was in Asia, sometimes that was in Latin America, that's what changes. What was it like going on your first mission?   So another thing that CIA does really well is they hire people who are not. So you've interviewed a number of Navy SEALs, you've interviewed a number of elite, elite military operators. There's a phrase that we use among ourselves, where we call ourselves too dumb to quit. And that is essentially what CIA and what Navy and what the Army does really well.  They're looking for people who will put themselves in harm's way. And when they're face to face with harm or face to face with danger, they don't think to themselves, oh man, I made a bad decision. Oh, I'm worried. Oh, I'm scared. They think to themselves, how cool is this, right? And that's exactly what it was like for us. The first time I went on a mission, I was totally blind to the risk of capture and the risk of torture and the risk of being shot. I was so amped to be in alias in a foreign country on my own, operating for CIA. It was like, that was the forefront of my brain. My training was there so that if I got captured, or if I got interrogated, I would be able to keep myself calm. But my personality and the way I was wired was such that when I was in a dangerous situation, all that was on the forefront of my mind was excitement and adventure. I was too dumb, essentially, to realize that I was in a position of such high risk. And that's the difference between people who do a job like what I do and people who do different jobs. Because an analyst at CIA might not feel as excited in the field as they do sitting behind a computer getting boatloads of information. Do you think your childhood plays a massive part in the adrenaline rush of being in danger? Absolutely. A lot of what happens in those core conditioning years, like we were talking about, when you're in puberty and when you're in your core first five years, that shapes everything. For me, an adventure was what I'd been looking for since I was 14 years old. Being a brown kid in rural Pennsylvania, you are absent of adventure. All I wanted was an adventure. And now here I was, 28 years old working for CIA, swimming in all the adventure I could possibly want. That's all I cared about. And CIA knew that, which is why they put me in that role. What sort of things are you taught in the CIA? It depends a lot on the type of operations you're running, the type of conditions you're going into. We're, of course, taught to drive and shoot. We're taught medical triage. We're taught land navigation. We're taught social skills. We're taught mind hacks, body hacks. We're taught survival and resistance. We're taught about geopolitics. We're taught about foreign languages. There's a number of things. We're taught how to pick pockets. There's a number of different elements that you're trained in, but the big thing isn't what you're trained in once. It's the training that you have to go back and get multiple times. For example, we have paramilitary units. Paramilitary units are units that do both intelligence and essentially kinetic combat type of operations also. When a Navy SEAL comes to CIA, they usually go paramilitary. When a Delta Ranger or a Delta Force Army guy comes or Army Gal guy comes, they go into paramilitary. That's a group that will probably do a lot more shooting than your standard CIA officer. So, if you're getting taught how to pickpock, are you getting someone who used to be a pickpocker to then teach you like a 95 being in college and studying to learn how to be the best at it? It's not just a case of one or two days, you're learning it consistently to become good doctor. Correct. There's a lot of times that they'll bring in former convicts. They'll bring in former criminals as part of their sentence to teach us how to cyber hack or how to rob crypto or how to crack codes and get into a vault or a bank. We're constantly learning from the criminals out there who have done it and been caught because they get to reduce their sentence by coming in and teaching us how to do it. Then, of course, when CIA executes the same criminal activity, it's sanctioned by the US government and we're doing it on foreign soil against foreign enemies. So, it's allowed. It's not illegal. That only kind of happened in films. You see the FBI going to get people out of prison. We'll give you a shorter sentence because I watched a film, Catch Me If You Can. I think Leonardo DiCaprio and I think they got him out of prison just how to force checks and how to... So, that's legit then. That's very real. The CIA hire people from prison to then teach them. They don't hire. They make deals. Yeah. They commute, right? So, it's essentially what they're doing is they're trying to take someone who has been a net burden on society, a criminal, and turn them into something productive for society. And then there's also the very real thing where there is no professor out there that can teach you how to pickpockets. There's no professor out there who can teach you how to hack into a cyber wallet and steal it. There's nobody out there that can teach you how to do that. The only people who know how to do that are the people who learned how to master it in the School of Hard Knocks. Criminals... I say it often and people criticize me for saying it. Criminals are the closest thing to a true CIA field officer that's out there. Their risk tolerance is shot. They thought it was a good idea to be a criminal.  They landed on the conclusion that the best option for me is a criminal enterprise. And it's going to be fun, right? When that's how you feel and that's how you think, you're already wired. You're conditioned the same way that a CIA officer is conditioned. That's why I get along so well with people who have a background in crime. So, see, people who are in the CIA, they never turn against the CIA with all the tracks that they learned to try and make money, to try and rob crypto, to try and... I'm not saying pickpocket, but they've had the tools and techniques to be a bit smarter than the average man to then fly under the radar that anybody would ever turn against their own. Yeah, there's a number of stories where CIA officers have turned against their own. It's not usually to go into low-level criminal activity, though, right? So, if you're a mid-ranking CIA officer, you're probably making somewhere to the tune of $95,000 a year, right? If you're going to leave CIA and you're going to take on the risk of making yourself into a wanted man, you're going to break American laws, you're going to break your secret oath with CIA, if you're going to take those steps, you're doing it for a massive payoff, right? You're doing it for half a million dollars, you're doing it for $700,000, whatever it might be. So, you have two types. You have people who turn against CIA because they become spies, and there's a whole history of people who have done that, whether it's Aldrich Ames or whether it's Jerry Shinching Lee or any number of spies through history. They take all the skills and all the things that they are taught, and then they sell them to the Russians or they sell them to the Chinese or they sell them to the Israelis, whatever it might be. So, they sell the secrets that they were trusted with. But then you have another group that's a much smaller group that then they go on and they start to apply their skills in organized crime, weapons proliferators, drug proliferators, human traffickers, weapons smugglers. Those are a different lot because they don't fall under the Espionage Act because the Espionage Act is what protects secrets that belong to the United States government. They don't fall under the Espionage Act and because of that, they're a lower level threat than a normal human trafficker or a normal weapons smuggler. So, the FBI is incentivized differently. When I was working at CIA, there was a very popular case of someone who was in the CIA doing nuclear proliferation, like combating the spread of nuclear weapons, and the person they were targeting, they went out and they just met that person and they said, hey, I've been targeting you for four years.  Super ballsy move, but then that guy became one of the guy's top generals and undid the entire case from the outside. So, we had to start a whole new case against the nuclear proliferator, and we had to start a whole new case against the guy who was former CIA with all the training and all the skills that he had to now cover the tracks for both of them and undo all of the tracking and the coding and everything else. Did you have to get clearance to then speak out and tell your story and stuff? So, I still don't have the clearance to tell my story, which is why you don't hear me talk about my story very often. I'm working on trying to get clearance for that. Everything that I publish in written form has to go through what's called the publication review board, the PRB, and that's something that's part of our lifetime secrecy agreement. When we come out and when I speak specifically on podcasts or when I speak on television, when I speak for corporate events, it's not the same obligation, because I'm not sharing anything sensitive. I'm sharing publicly known facts or facts that are not classified, so there's no reason to have those things reviewed and approved in the same way as when you publish something yourself. What happens if you did go free for all and just start saying everything like, do your life become at rest without a case that it's not prison, it's death? So, it's not that far fetched. That's pretty far fetched. That's more movie style. What is much more realistic is that I would fall under the court system. If I started speaking out about classified information, then the court would have a viable reason to come after me and arrest me for speaking out and breaking my secrecy agreement, because it's a breaking the statute of a law. However, to prove in a court of law that I was disclosing classified information, CIA would then have to classify or they would then have to share the same classified information and that becomes a technicality. Every former CIA officer understands that we're under an obligation with the PCRB and under an obligation with our secrecy agreement. We all understand that, and we all understand that there's no benefit to us sharing secrets, because all secrets do is hurt our own country and hurt our own peers. So, I'm not here to share secrets. I'm not anywhere to share secrets. The third reason that we don't disclose anything is because on top of it all, we also run the risk of losing our livelihood or going to jail or losing the source of revenue that we're generating from all the work anyways. There's no incentive there for us to do that. The real goal for us is to, the goal for me at least, is to get out and share as much as I possibly can, because so many of my peers, they don't share anything. They just, they don't want to have their face on a screen. They don't want to have a microphone in their face. They don't want to contribute to a larger narrative. They want to stay kind of hidden, because that's what they've been conditioned to do. So, your tests at the start when you first joined the CIA, do you think they had a rough idea that you would speak out many years later because the results are, again, is that a little far-fetched? Yeah. So, I would imagine that what the results of my tests showed CIA is that I would buck authority, that I would resist authority, that I would push the envelope, push the limits of what was allowed. And that's certainly how they used me when I was at CIA also. They used me in a way to create new things that hadn't been created before, to try new experimental operations that hadn't been run before. That was how they used me there. So, it was a risk reward comparison, right? But I also believe that they understood through those tests, through the polygraph, that I would always be reliable to adhere to my secrecy agreement. So, I may speak out. I may be a voice. I may become a threat to their mystique in the mystery of CIA, but I wouldn't put American lives at risk just to get a buck. And that was, I think, what their tests probably showed about me. And it is also what I believe continues to make it so that three years now I've been interviewing and talking about CIA and the only feedback I've gotten from them is positive feedback. Yeah, that's a good thing. But you're clearly an intelligent man and no doubt you would plant the seeds whatever you wanted to tell your story, that you're not going to be. I believe you would be solid and loyal to however you worked with at that time. But as you say, you're a free spirit. You want to be free. You want to not be hold down. And if you're in a box, like if somebody told you not to do something, I believe you would do the opposite. Obviously, if you're in the CIA, that can't happen. But so, see when you're doing like certain missions, like does it become so normal? Or is it always, if you always got that little bit of adrenaline?   See when you're doing that sort of stuff, like does adrenaline go? Or is it always a buzz? There's always a buzz, but what happens is the buzz, it's smaller. It's like smoking or drinking or anything else. You build up a tolerance to it. And that's good. You don't want to be shaky and jazzed with cortisol on every mission because that's going to blow your cover. It's going to put you at risk.  So that is a very real thing and it does decrease. It's always there because new mission, new place, new job, new cover. There's always this voice in the back of your head that says, I get to do this. This is my job. I'm getting paid to do this. The US government put me on a plane. The US government put me in the continental hotel or the intercontinental. The US government is paying for highfalutin food and top shelf drinks while I woo this North Korean general, whatever it might be. So it's always in the back of your head like this is awesome. But thankfully, the adrenaline spike is much less every time you do it. How do you get an end with people with the training that you've got? I don't know if you can't give secrets away, but is it easy to read people posture, the way they walk, the way they breathe? Can you read people easy? There's a lot of things that you can do to understand a person through their nonverbal cues, which is what when you say, read somebody, what we'd refer to that as is baselining on nonverbal cues. Verbal cues are anything you say. Nonverbal cues are the way that you act. So whether someone is fiddling with their fingers or whether somebody is scratching their face or whether somebody is obsessed with their hair, where they look around in the room, how often they breathe or how they sniffle or whatever else, all of those nonverbal cues help you understand a little bit about the person that you're sitting across the table from. But you don't really get to create a full profile of them until you also engage the verbal cues as well. So you're watching their nonverbals, but you're challenging them verbally, which then gives you a chance to see what their nonverbal communication is like and what their verbal communication is like and how they prioritize between the two. Because when you're thinking, it's often difficult to control your nonverbal cues when your brain is engaged. It's also difficult to control your nonverbal cues when you're speaking. So if you're going up against someone who is untrained, oftentimes you can learn a lot by seeing how they process information when they're listening, how they process information when they're talking and how they're nonverbally communicating at both times. When you're going up against the trained person, it's much harder because you can see that they're trained to control their nonverbals. You can see that they're trained to control their verbal and you can see that they're intentionally slowing down how they speak. You probably see it in me intentionally slowing down what I say and when I say it to align my verbal and nonverbal cues. So see, if someone knew you were CIA, could they, obviously you've picked up and say my fingers fidgeting, but could someone do that in purpose to try and throw you off to give you different sayings or can you tell someone's acting? You can tell people are acting because most, there's a high probability that you'll see when people are using what's known as a distraction technique or a distraction tell. It's not a real tell. If I were to like scratch my neck as a distraction tell, the whole reason I would be doing that is to try to make you think that I have a tell. But the problem is it takes a lot of cognitive demand, a lot of resources to make that distraction tell happen. So you would see that it wouldn't be consistent. You have very consistent fidgeting. The way that you, the fingers that you touch, the way that you break and connect, the way that you move your hands is very consistent throughout the entire interview. When someone has a distraction tell, it becomes inconsistent. You can see that it's inconsistent. And then especially when you pair that with the uniqueness of their verbal, nonverbal alignment, you can see that you're not just working against someone who's trained, but you're working against someone who's trained, who's testing to see if you are also trained, which is usually when people use distraction techniques. They're trying to see if you are noticing their distraction. So see when you speak with your hands and stuff, is that a technique or is that natural? So a lot of what I do with my hands is it's natural, it's also me. Confident? It's me trying to show energy because it's very hard whenever I do an interview with people to have energy communicate through the video itself or communicate through the microphone. So larger than life physical gestures, make it easier to communicate that energy both verbally and nonverbally. So that's why you see me do that quite often. If you and I were to go have coffee or have wine, I would be much more subdued. What about that MK Ultra and stuff? Is that true? Because I had a woman on call Barbara O'Hare and she spoke about this in the 70s. It was the evil doctors who were experimenting on kids and they called her crazy and it could come out that she was telling the truth. The doctors were experimenting with kids with MK Ultra. Some kids were getting sent into water and just keep walking, never turn back. Obviously natural instincts to swim and it turned out it was true, man. They were experimenting on kids like, how in depth do you use MK Ultra?  Is that legit or is again, could that be far fetched? So I've never heard of MK Ultra experimenting on children. If that's true or untrue it's beyond my realm of knowledge. But I do know of the MK Ultra program and that the MK Ultra program has been validated and verified as a true program. And again, I would highlight just like we were doing with the invasion of Iraq. Keep in mind the time. Keep in mind where we were in history at that time. We were trying to develop weapons that would be competitive with the weapons that were being developed. I believe what years was MK Ultra. I want to say that was World War II. Yeah, 1940s. Yeah, so we were trying to keep up with essentially Hitler's weapons research and one of the ways that you keep up with your opponent's weapons research is by researching the same type of weapons they're researching. Hitler was very much into researching some very esoteric weapon types from mind reading to psychedelics to ancient artifacts. So it makes perfect sense through the lens of time that if your opponent is trying to create a weapon that's basically based on remote viewing from psychedelic enhancement, the only way you're going to be able to compete with that weapon is if you do the same thing. And that's how something like MK Ultra is born. That's how nuclear weapons were born. That's how hypersonic missiles were born. That's how bombs, I forget what they're called now, bombs that drop bombs, bombs that drop bomblets, scatter bombs. They were all created the same way. Nobody wanted them for themselves, but they saw that their opponent was creating them and they had to have a tool to combat it. But what do you think about the brain? About the brain? I think the brain is the most powerful organ and muscle in the human body. It's the only part of the human body that is both an organ and a muscle.  Why do you say we only use like 7-8% of it? Like why can't we tap into the full existence of it? Is that with vaccines? Is that with the food that we eat? There must be a reason why we've not tapped into the full brain completely. The pine neocland in the middle of the brain, which is also a powerful thing. There's so many things unsolved about it and we're 20-22 looking at how far we've advanced, but yet we're still unsure how the brain functions. How powerful is the brain? Yeah, I think you're hitting on a number of really interesting things. We don't know how powerful the brain is. There's a lot of speculation about how powerful it is and there's some really solid empirical evidence that suggests that it is a much more powerful tool than we understand. However, you also have the problem of research. It's difficult to research the human brain. It's especially difficult to research the human brain when it's in a living subject. The brain works and we don't even understand how it works all the time. It does things that are beyond our understanding currently. If it works in ways that we don't understand, then it would make sense that we can't understand how it works. We can't understand how to make it work better. We can't understand how to change the way it works because we don't understand the way it works in the first place. What do you think of human beings and why are we here? What's your opinion on that? I believe that human beings are just, we are another type of animal. We're just another creature. Whether we were put here by divine intervention or whether we were put here through this infinitesimally small chance of evolution, we're here now. We are alpha predators not because we have sharp claws or sharp teeth, but because we have this tool called a human brain. If you think about it, we're actually one of the weakest creatures out there in terms of survivability. Small temperature variations can absolutely devastate us. We have a huge dependence on water that very few animals have. We don't have natural external layers that insulate us against heat or cold or water or anything else. If we get wet for too long, our skin starts to actually compromise. We're not a sustainable, resilient creature, but we become this alpha predator because we have logic and reasoning and innovation and we have these human brains that we can tap into that nobody else can tap into. The little things you just mentioned there with water and even the food aspect of it, we're still here. Evolution is getting older. I don't believe we've evolved from apes or monkeys, whatever it is, I believe this could be a game. I think this is a game. I think potentially we could be avatars. I think as the more I'm researching, the more people I speak to in life, that that's only my opinion. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor, but what I have got is good intuition and a good soul where I just think there's always something I miss. I genuinely believe an avatar. Look at the technology now where people have got metaverse in this. Is this some sort of game where I believe there's something higher than us? Even the universe, this talk about stars. I've never been outside of this planet. I don't know if it's round. I don't know if it's flat.  Why does it go dark and light and why are we talking? How do we connect and how do people come into your life and out your life and why do you feel happy? Why do you feel sad? There's just so many unanswered questions that people are so caught up in some sort of race. They're not asking the really important questions and for me it's what are they? So it's interesting. The fact that you're having those questions at all is what we call a first world problem. You have all of your basic needs met. You have more than your basic needs met, which is why you have the space to dedicate your time and energy to thinking through these ethereal questions. The vast majority of the human species does not have excess resources. They don't sit around pontificating and wondering about the ethereal nature of the universe because they're literally just trying to find clean water to drink right now. They're literally just trying to not get eaten by a lion or not get bitten by a poisonous spider or not sleep in a bed with a viper. That's the majority of the human race is constantly on the precipice of starvation, dehydration or death. So could we be avatars in some grand game? Possibly, but the game wouldn't be to live a life like you and me. The game would also have to include all those lives out there from tribal New Guinea to war-torn Libya and Yemen. Who's playing those characters and who wants to play those characters and what's the purpose of those characters? It could still be true. Maybe there's an alien species out there that doesn't know anything about emotions or maybe there's an alien species that has evolved over millions of years and they no longer have emotions. So the only way they can feel emotions is by tapping into us.  Maybe that's true, but my point is if I have excess resources and I have excess time I would rather use it to produce something that makes us all better rather than reflect on the what it could have about right now because again going back to where we started there's a producer mindset and a consumer mindset. Producers understand that the more you produce the more impact you make. Consumers will never understand true impact. They always strive to make an impact at all and oftentimes end up very depressed and discouraged about their life because they feel like they're not making an impact. When all they need to do to switch is start to produce something, right? Start to create something, a blog, a podcast, your own company, something, right? It's just it's not that hard to flip, but turn all that extra energy into something productive and what you find is that you no longer suffer from first world problems the same way that other people do. So see if there's eight billion people on this planet and like you say people suffering two thirds of the world starving, like the human beings that I know you talk about being alpha, but we're still good people as well. We still want to help people. We still want to see people do well that why is should why can't people rally together to then stop poverty to stop hunger to stop wars? Like we're not daft. Like what do you think it would take for people to go to the forefront and say wait a minute what's happening right now for me is kind of backwards. Like there shouldn't be homelessness. There shouldn't be starvation. Like I even think I don't know homeless documentary and some things like France were the first country to make law that restaurants and supermarkets can't throw away food and end up feeding millions and millions of people extra each year. I understand people if you're homeless you struggle with confidence, low self-esteem, many, many things. So there's people with two jobs now who can't afford to even keep a house so it's difficult. But for a human race and eight billion people and there's a lot of intelligent people on this planet like why do you not think that these things haven't been eradicated or cut out where people can live a better life? A human being's first instinct because we're still animals like anybody else. Our first instinct is our own survival. That first instinct is exactly the answer to your question. In order to to dedicate your resources, your time, your money, your talent, your energy into solving these larger problems, you essentially have to take those resources away from your own core survival. If everybody in the world did that, there's a chance that we might all come together. But to use your words, I would say that we are as a human race, we are daft. That's exactly what we are. We are kind of, we are selfish. We are we are prioritising ourselves first, right?   And that right there, my friend, that's how every human being thinks. And that's why if we have to choose between taking something away from our tribe or our clan to give it to others, we're not going to do it. When we have built up so much excess, then we'll do it. Or if you look at how the UK and the United States are kind of structured, we incentivize people to give money away by rewarding them for giving the money away with reduced taxes, right? So we're trying to incentivize it all. But none of that has to do with the human condition being one of generosity and stewardship and community. Now, I'm not saying everybody is like that. There are certain people out there who genuinely, truly want to help those that are less fortunate than them. And they absolutely make sacrifices and suffer themselves to try to help others. There are absolutely people out there like that. But they're a minority. They're the minority like there are people out there who want to go to war every day and shoot everybody who disagrees with them and cause immense pain and harm. That is also a minority. So you've got these two minorities on both sides because in the middle is a bell curve. A bell curve of all the people like you and I who will help where we can help when we have excess. But we never are willing to risk our livelihoods or the livelihoods of our families in order to help someone who who has never been part of our responsibility. Do you think that just becomes a good thought then to think you're a good guy to think that oh yeah we can save the world and but realistically we're still like you say alpha and family comes first and we can't talk a good game but when you actually break it all down it's probably selfishness and greed that the world is upside down in a lot of places because we never know all the answers and we're never going to find all the answers it's just a good thought to think we know what the fuck we're talking about you couldn't hear that sometimes I think you know what you're okay you know certain things but other times you just think you're just I'm just winging it yeah but you know what who's defining what makes us a good guy or not a good guy it's our cultural conditioning the way I see it if you're somebody out there who says fuck everybody else I'm only taking care of my family who's to say you're not a good guy are you a bad guy because you say fuck everyone else I say you're taking care of your family there are plenty of people out there who don't take care of their family you you may not sacrifice for anybody else but you've gotten up in the middle of the night for your kids you've gone hungry for your kids you've you've gotten sick for your kids that is selfless that is you sacrificing yourself for them you've done it for girlfriends you've done it for your parents you've done it for spouses other people have done it for you the the definition of good people bad people is fundamentally flawed because who's to say what is good and what is bad if you are out there and you're sacrificing for anyone in any way I think there's a case to be made that you are still a good person the person out there who is truly taking only and giving nothing back that's a rare person that's a hard person to find we're talking about galaxies in the universe and how big it actually is we're just a pinhead and this whatever it is we're in but do you think there's other species living amongst us aliens I think the probability is too high that we have other species living amongst us that we can't we can't see we can't define we can't explain at the very least there are other animal species that are completely terrestrial that we have yet to discover at the bottom of the ocean see yeah living in the amazon rainforest living in the in the arctic ice fields we know so if we know that there's that higher probability of terrestrial creatures that we can't explain and we can't see then the probability that there are non terrestrial creatures also out there is too fantastically high for us to reject so do I believe that we have seen aliens I don't believe that we've seen them I don't think the probability is is there for us to have been able to observe them with our naked eye or with our own uh human terrestrial technology but that doesn't mean that it's impossible maybe it has happened I just think the probability is low what do you think Antarctica I think it's amazing I think the art the fact that we live on a planet with ice caps is mind boggling why do you think people can't go there well I think that there are there are groups that go there for science and for research people with money though who cares yeah right people with money people without money they're just people right people with money people with expertise people with skills people can go there if you don't have money you can volunteer to go be a mailman in Antarctica right it's a miserable difficult nine month job and you don't make a lot of money but if you want the experience you can go do it right so I don't believe everybody has equal rights to experiences around the world you just don't you have to be able to contribute in order to earn a seat at the table if you can't contribute you have no right to sit at the table your job is to then find a way to contribute so that you can sit at the table it's mad though to think that there's ice all around sort of a plan at that what do you think about it in mainlanders and stuff I think it's all fascinating it's uh I was recently talking to somebody who I really respect and who I really like and they were kind of having one of these you know what if conversations and they were talking about what if we were actually ejected into space how long would the human body actually survive jettisoned into the vacuum of space and it's funny because movies I've seen it go both ways in movies I've seen it where people like immediately explode and freeze and I've seen it where people somehow last you know 15 seconds floating through space before anything bad happens to them but it was really interesting to be in this conversation where this guy had seriously thought it through and uh and I feel like if if this guy is a friend of mine who has seriously thought this through and he's an intelligent guy if this one person in my community has put that kind of time and effort into it how much more impressive is it that there are so many other people like him who have put the time and effort and energy into creating spacecraft craft that can transit the vacuum of space land on the moon rove the moon and send back pictures how crazy is it that we have satellites that are nothing other than giant floating telescopes you know 100 000 miles away from earth taking pictures and sending the pictures back here uh is it the space travel and space exploration are just fascinating to me uh and I love that we live in a time where we get to enjoy it if you think about it in the 1960s nobody nobody had any of what we have now was it 60 67 68 the sent people to the moon like it's fascinating like you can go through the conspiracy theory routes and look at certain things and think that's not real but everything for me is a conspiracy unless I can see it with monies like how do I know what's real if it's fake yeah even this table you like what is it really like it's just mad the universe how it works how it functions human beings like I'm so fascinated when you go into that little zone and think about it it can blow your mind but absolutely it's just life is a magical journey it's painful it's happy it has its moments but it is a journey I'm not going to get out alive maybe we're a technology now man who knows but see when you let you go on missions and certain things they get they get paranoid when you come out the cia let the get scared that anything are you just so calm and collective and all aspects of life I would it's not paranoia but it's also not necessarily calm it's more like a sense of of confidence and a sense of control I know with higher confidence than the average person what my security awareness is what level of threat I'm exposed to what the chances are of something you know tragic or terrible happening so because of that that kind of logical calculated approach I feel more capable day to day and more capable on a mission the people who suffer from anxiety and the people who suffer from from depression oftentimes they can't quantify what their true risk exposure is so as because they don't know they end up they end up just reacting to a feeling and that's a very difficult place to be so paranoia is an example of that paranoia is reacting to feelings rather than rather than calculating objective data or objective fact about your status so I would say that I'm blessed to be less paranoid but it's not always great to know your true security status because there's plenty of places that I go now with my kids or with my spouse where I can't get comfortable why because I know how dangerous it is where we are I know how vulnerable we are when we go to a concert when we're standing at an airport when we're in when we're in line to go vote right like those are your most vulnerable points you're in a group that's predetermined to be there and it's a concentrated area usually with controlled entrances and exits it's like the most dangerous place you can be so back in the day I used to love going to concerts I used to love going to big busy bars and big packed you know amphitheaters where there would be a big football game or something now it's like we're not nearly as safe as if we were back at home or playing in the backyard or at a park or a playground or at a place that's where there's less people and more space so it gets to be a tricky double-edged sword are you envious of the just the average human who just works and is oblivious to what can actually happen with terrorists or whatever it is the information that you have that do you ever get envious of being them being so oblivious of what can happen in life you know I'm not I'm not jealous of the average ignorant oblivious person I'm not jealous of that person because that person is just uninformed they're disinterested and they're uninformed and they're a walking victim but the people who I am honestly jealous of are the people who are completely satisfied with their life especially if they're like completely satisfied with a kind of mediocre life because they're satisfied they're happy with their job and they're happy with their paycheck and they're happy with their spouse and they're happy with their kids and they're happy with their diet and they're happy with their body and they're happy with their sleep and whatever else and they just go through life day after day kind of rinse wash repeat and there's there's no there's no stress because there's no Yn ni'n sylwgr i'r wneud hynny? Yn ni'n fwyaf amser, felly rydyn ni'n fwyaf amser. Rydyn ni'n fwyaf amser, rydyn ni'n gwneud hynny, ac mae'n llunio amser, ac dyna, rwy'n fawr ar y cyflennu. Rydyn ni, yw'r wneud, hynny yw'r gwaith, yw'r ysbryd, rydyn ni'n dweud, rydyn ni'n dweud. Rydyn ni'n dweud hynny. Rydyn ni'n dweud. Rydyn ni'n dweud hynny. I have a tally that goes through my head of wins and losses and the losses always outnumber the wins, right? So I do get jealous of the person who doesn't have that conversation in their head of the person who is very content to just turn on Netflix and binge watch a show and have two beers or two glasses of wine and order take out or a microwave dinner and they're completely satisfied with that. So see, we spoke earlier about how powerful the mind is that right now it's so rife with suicide and from males that because of the mindset everything I believe is the mindset and how you see the life and how you want to be. But why do you think suicide is so bad for males? What do you think the ingredient is that why men are slipping and the heartbreaking thing is they want to take their own life? Yeah, you know I have a soft spot in my heart for men because I myself am a man, I have a son, I have a stepdad who killed himself. So do you hear that? It's not, I appreciate that, right? It was his choice, not mine. But I don't want to think that suicide is only an issue for men. It's an issue for teens, it's an issue for women, it's an issue for children, it's an issue for the elderly. Suicide is a sad, sad thing. When an alpha predator determines that they're so surrounded by threats that they have to essentially be a threat to themselves, that's a very sad thing. Now when you ask why, I think that the reasons for why are many more than even I understand. Our culture is a very challenging place right now because we're so divided. If you have an opinion, there are just as many people who are willing to hate you and spit in your face about your opinion as there are people who are willing to listen to it. So that guarantees you that almost half of who you meet are people who are going to disagree with you and make you feel bad about your opinion.  If you just verbalize an idea that you haven't decided on yet, that makes it hard. That makes it hard for people to trust one another. It makes it hard for people to have a community. It makes it hard for people to have friends and relationships that they trust. If you don't have a community, you can never have a tribe. If you never have a tribe, then you're always stuck on the outside. Again, we're alpha predators that want a pride, that want a wolf pack, that want a community or a clan. When you force somebody to the outside where they never feel like they have that kind of connection, it's a death sentence. They say that loneliness is the number one killer of people worldwide. It's worse than cancer, it's worse than war, it's worse than anything else because people can't find a community. They can't find a group where they have connection and we're a predator that doesn't survive when we're outside of the group. Do you think that's why tribalism is a big thing? Do people want to go to the NFL matches or the soccer matches and feel part of something? It's not a bad thing, but they just want to feel. If there's a rally, there's street parades, people like you say there's all these isms and all these label arches and labels. If you're feeling lonely, you're happy to just join something and match with people just because you want to feel part of something. Exactly right. Tribalism isn't a result of us feeling lonely. Tribalism is our default status. It's what we want in our core. Even the most lone wolf people out there, the most independent people out there still want to surround themselves with other independent people. Maybe they don't want 25 friends, but they still want two. By nature, we are pack animals. I would say that the tribal aspect of us is how we're wired at our core. When we're left alone or pushed out, then we can never resolve that wiring. That's what drives people to a slow and steady grave. It's not guaranteed to kill them, but the probability is very high that loneliness will have permanent damage. Was your cover ever blown as a spy? My cover was... I was never able to confirm whether it was compromised or not. Compromise is the word that we use rather than blown or burnt. There was one mission in particular where we had an open inquiry into whether or not it was compromised and if it was compromised internally or externally, or whether it was compromised by some action that I took. The results of that were inconclusive when I left CIA since then. This is part of the story that I'm trying to get the publication review committee to let me tell. Since then, there have been arrests made. There have been moles discovered at CIA that could reasonably explain where my cover or how my cover was blown or resolved or compromised. I don't have the silver bullet solution. I don't have the smoking gun right now because it's probably still sits somewhere in classified files. How many different ranks are there in the CIA? Lots. It's not like the army where you get sergeants. I was going to say it's not like the army. It's more like a corporate structure and less like a military structure. You can become a vice president or a director. That's not what we call them, but you can become that kind of person. But it's not like you earn it through tests or years of service. Who's the top agency on the planet? Obviously, MI6. You've got CIA. What's the one in China's at the RSS? MSS. MSS, who's the biggest and the strongest? There's different ways to categorize. Biggest and strongest. The Mossad is the most vicious, but they're very small. They have a very small budget, large compared to the state of Israel, but small compared to everybody else. But they're highly capable because they're so willing to take risks. CIA heavily funded with multiple avenues, technology, weapons, paramilitary, covert influence, cyber attack, cyber defense. So extremely capable in a large set of skills with global reach. So CIA is obviously very powerful. MI6 is in the same boat. Well funded, lots of reach, but then you have places like DGSE in France or the BND in Germany, where they don't have the large reach, but they have a very large budget dedicated to just one kind of skill set. So that makes them extremely powerful in the one thing or two things that they choose to focus operations on. And then of course you've got Russia and the SVR, which has insane reach and incredible knowledge into how to make clandestine operations work for a long period of time without being discovered. So it's a mixed question, but I would say if you wanted to know who the top four were so that you could research them for yourself, I would definitely say CIA is at the top, I would say DGSE is at the top, I would say the MSS is at the top, I would say SVR is at the top.  Correct, my wife is a former CIA officer just like me. Is that against policy or anything? Did you have to keep that secret? No, it's actually very much something that CIA likes. They don't really encourage it, but when it happens they like it. Because when you've got two people who are dating or married and they're both undercover and they both work for CIA, it's basically like the family is a CIA family. All we did was work. We didn't go home to our wives, we didn't go home to our husbands, we were at work with our wife and our husband. So you just work all the time. It wasn't until we had a child that we started to come into issues with prioritizing our time with CIA. All of a sudden there's a child in the mix and the child is something that we want to spend time with our kid. We want to spend time with each other and our child, so now something is pulling us outside of CIA. But when we were just married and operating together, it was all CIA all the time, they were very happy. See with the emotion, see if you were on a job together. Like you say, we're alpha, we want to protect. Can that jeopardize a mission? Because you're also with someone that you love or are your soldiers caught up in that mission that you've got to leave your emotions at the house basically? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. So the best combination is when you can draw the parallel with how the mission is helping the person that you're leaving behind. When you can do those two things, you're invincible. When you don't know the purpose of the mission or when you can't see how the mission supports the family. Then you're left leaning on willpower and leaning on self-discipline to compartmentalize them as separate things.  I don't want to think about it right now. I'm going to choose to stay focused on the mission. But then as the mission grinds you down, as you start getting tired, as you start running out of resources, your mind wanders. Why am I doing this? What's the point? What's the value? What's the benefit? So that's a less ideal situation. And then you've got the totally worst situation, which is when you're directed on an assignment that you've asked not to be on because you're concerned about something on the forefront at the house.  That's the hardest type because now it's not when you run out of resources that you start thinking about them, you're always thinking about them. So you're in a position where you have a higher risk exposure by virtue of the fact that your head, keeping your head in the game, takes so many resources, takes so much effort, so much time. And that's the worst situation to be in. Luckily, they don't usually do that to us, but sometimes they have to.  If you're the only one that can do it, they're going to ask you to do it and you kind of have to take the career penalties if you say no. What sort of penalties do you get if you reject the mission? So it's kind of like getting a job offer. You may never get asked back again. So you may be penalized by not being invited back. You may be penalized by missing an opportunity to advance in your career. Like I said, it's not like the military. So every two years you're not eligible for promotion. Sometimes you're only able to promote if there's space. And the only way there's space is if somebody else was either retired or throughout or died. So if you miss that opportunity, that opportunity may not come back again in your career. And then of course there's also a very healthy culture of fiefdoms or godfathers, godparents. Where you're a senior officer, I'm a junior officer, you like me and we become like a godfather situation.  And anything I do, I always try to make sure you look good. So that's been a benchmark way of how CIA does business for a long time. How long can you go on a mission for? It can be years. It can be hours. It depends on what the mission sets and the mission needs are.  And then it becomes dangerous because you might have psychological or cognitive issues trying to come back to your true persona and leave your alias behind. And there have been instances of that happening. And then of course the shorter that you're gone, it's kind of you have the higher chance of making a mistake. Your name is Jimbo, but you're only Jimbo for like two hours on the phone and you accidentally forget that your name is Jimbo. So the sweet spot is somewhere in between, right? The sweet spot is somewhere in the three to five days as much as three to five months. That's enough time for you to really have a standard. A documentary with Jim Carrey and he was talking about Methadactin, I think it was Man on the Moon. A comedian he played. Andy Hoffman. Yeah, and he actually believed he was him. He was so close to actually getting kicked off the set because he was just annoying everybody. He actually became Andy Hoffman. Andy Hoffman, does that play a part then when you become an actor?  Yeah, there's a big difference between between Methadactin and operating an alias. And the big difference is not in how we do it. We do it almost the same way. The difference is that actors are encouraged to adopt their persona. They're encouraged to take on the feelings and the roles and try to really put themselves in that person's role, to experience that person, to become that character. That's what they're trying to do, become the character. That's not what we're encouraged to do. We're always encouraged to compartmentalize. Imagine you have a drawer and inside your drawer there are these little square boxes. Inside one box is your real self. And then all of the other boxes are filled with the character that you're being. But there's still you inside that box. That's how we're taught to go through alias. So we're always grounded in who we really are and the rest is always a role. But we're putting effort into playing that role. Ideally over time we put less effort into it, but there's always a role to play.  They don't leave any room for who they are themselves. That little bit of compartmentation makes all the difference when it comes to how we operate. What about disguises? Disguises are a super interesting thing because there are many different types of disguises. Some of them are very simple, some of them are complex. None of them are really like they make them look in the movies. The movies make it look like you wear all sorts of rubber and prosthetics and that those things last forever and that they get ripped off in some sort of great reveal at the end of the mission. That's not really how it works in the real world. In the real world we try to stay away from anything that's a prosthetic because prosthetics are very unreliable. Instead we lean on simple things that break up our profile. Because your profile is one of the most identifiable things about you. How you stand, how you walk, how you laugh. Those are all part of your profile. If you can break those up, then essentially you are in disguise. What about cloning? People getting cloned, humans. I know they've done dollydy sheep, the cloned a sheep, made another sheep. Now we're talking about human beings can be cloned now. Does that happen? I have never seen a scenario at CIA where human cloning or any kind of animal cloning is executed. I'm sure there's still science and scientific research. For sure it's got a use case in espionage, but not in my experience, not yet. What was it like coming out of the CIA? It was hard. Leaving CIA is like leaving any other job only on top of the job, which is a very interesting and enjoyable job. You're also leaving the whole community. When you're living and working undercover, the only people who know who you really are, are the people that you work with who are also undercover, because you all work in the same secret base. You all work in the same secret building. In many ways you share the same cover. It's really hard when you leave that, because going back to our whole idea of tribal animals, you leave behind everything. You leave behind everyone who knows the real you and you have to start all over again. You can't stay in contact with the people that are still undercover, because if you become what's known as Overt, when you say, hey, I'm a former covert CIA officer, then you can't be connected to people who are still current covert intelligence officers, not through social media, not through phone numbers, not through Sunday night dinners, because you would compromise their cover. When you step away from CIA, you step away from all of your friends. What's the, to come out of the CIA, it was a step to do it with you and your wife, then giving birth to it as a, do they understand that or is it a kind of look you can't leave that? What's the steps to leave? Yeah, they don't really have good steps to leave. When my wife and I left in 2014, we were a rarity. It was very uncommon for anybody to leave mid-career. Their attrition rate was less than half of 1%. Now their attrition rate is much higher. CIA actually has a challenge right now, recruiting and maintaining talent, because people don't want to work there. Why is that? The politics, the constant bipolar, the polarization in politics in the US itself. Then there's also the pay is not competitive compared to what people could make if they went and worked for Google or Apple or Salesforce or Amazon. So there's a number of things that the modern current generation doesn't like that older generations used to be very proud of. So in the United States, if you didn't know, there's a major recruiting crisis for the military. People don't want to be soldiers. There's a major recruiting crisis for the government. People don't want to be government employees. There's a recruiting crisis for CIA. People don't want to be spies. It's a challenge that they have yet to figure out because the current youth want to do something else with their life rather than be government servants, because what so many people have always wanted to do prior to the current generation of adults. How safe is the USA 11, Andrew? It's not dangerous to live inside the USA. I know we have a strange reputation abroad where people think that it's very dangerous that there's high crime rates and there's violent people with guns. Or as many as the UK. UK is probably one of the highest in the world. Well, UK is really interesting because of knife violence. Knife violence is strangely high here compared to... It's anomalous compared to the rest of the world. Byscheri, if we had gun stores here, how many deaths would that actually be? Glasgow, what I'm from, was a mother capital Europe for a couple of years. Well, I think that speaks to human condition, right? People are violent. Alpha predators hunt. That's what they do. Especially when they feel like that's what they have to do to survive or what they have to do to gain an advantage. How has life been since you've come out? You've been a father. Have you adapted okay? Have you missed your whole life? I love life now. My wife has a different answer. My wife really misses being in the know. She misses all the secrets. She had a different job. My wife was a targeter. Her job was to take information and use that information to find people of interest and then either recruit those people, capture those people or neutralize those people. That was her job. She lived in the world of data and targeting and human profiling. For me it was always about going out and meeting people. What I find now is I still get to go out and meet people, only now I do it as a business owner and I do it as a friend and I do it as a world traveler. I don't do it on behalf of the US government in whatever requirements and whatever cover alias identity that they gave me. For me life is infinitely more fun. I control my own schedule, my own travel plans. I hang out with my kids. I sleep in. I stay up late if I want to. Some days I don't work. Some days I work extra hard. It's the ultimate freedom for me. But I do know that my wife misses the insights. Do you get to speak to people once you came out like psychologists or therapists to reassess your mind that people struggle with PTSD here in the military and stuff like the Jews have anything in place or you just forget about it as soon as you leave? There's nothing in place for us. CIA has never had a transition plan because they don't expect people to leave. For the most part when people leave CIA they just come right back in the next day as a private contractor or with a big firm and they come back. They make an entire life out of working at CIA. So they don't have a plan for dealing with PTSD. They don't have a plan for dealing with long-term stress or people who have continuous health problems because it's a very demanding job. Some people ruin their body, ruin their gut, ruin their hearing, ruin their eyesight in service to their nation. There's no long-term care for that. But I've been fortunate that most of my operations I didn't see the kind of trauma that triggers PTSD. My operations were for the most part very clandestin, old, very well executed, very well organized. So there was just not a lot of trauma. It's not like a James Bond movie. It's a very boring life when it comes down to it. My wife, she has anxiety that she still struggles with and a lot of that anxiety comes from what she saw, what she knows, how she had to do her job and that is harder for her to shed. An anxiety is a tricky thing because it doesn't have a clear trigger. PTSD can sometimes be triggered by loud noises or flashing lights or a memory. Anxiety is not like that. Anxiety can just creep on you. Creep up over the course of three or four days and you don't know why. So she struggles with that. We have employed therapists and we've employed different types of prescription medicines and we've explored supplements and all sorts of stuff just like everybody else has. One of the big things to understand is CIA officers aren't that different from everyday people. We were recruited out of everyday life to go do something extraordinary and then when the extraordinary thing is done we come right back to everyday life and there's nothing special about us. We just got a chance to do something that most people would say yes to if they got the invitation.  Do you ever feel used then that there's no help after it where you've stepped to the forefront and agreed to do what you've do, but you ever think well I've helped you but no one's helped me? Do you ever feel used at what you've done? So the way I would classify that is I think a way that's very common among tier one and elite military and elite government. We understand that we were given an amazing opportunity and we were given incredible training and we had an incredible experience. So was I used as a tool? Absolutely. But was I rewarded for the time that I was being used? Absolutely. I got to do things and see things that I still can't talk about. I have just as many memories that go through my mind that will bring a smile to my face and make me just immensely proud of myself as I do situations where I have remorse or discomfort, right? So the challenge comes when you realize in the job that you are just a tool, that you're replaceable, you're just a number, no one is going to remember you. CIA does not remember its veterans. It does not remember its dead. It does not remember the people who made a big impact. That's not what it's there to do. It's there to keep Americans safe. Keep Americans safe today, keep Americans safe tomorrow. There's a huge backlog or there used to be a huge backlog of people who wanted to get in. So they would just churn, right? Bring in new bodies, get rid of old bodies, keep Americans safe. That's their job. That's what I want them to be focused on. The day that they start focusing on heroes inside the building is the day that they lose their focus on keeping Americans safe. So you just have to once you have that realization, you have to ask yourself the question, do I want to dedicate my life to a job that's not going to remember me? Or do I want to dedicate my life to something else where I can make a real impact or a lasting impact? For me, I wanted to build a legacy. I wanted to build a family that was not a family I was born with, a family experience that I didn't get to have. And I want my children to have fond memories of me because I do not have fond memories of my childhood. And if I can give my children a legacy on two or three generations in the future, for me, that's infinitely more valuable than all the spy operations in the world. That's what it's all about, isn't it?  How hard does it look for you and your wife then? Is that a big bonus that you should know the job and you should know what you went through where you can keep each other in a nice balance where you don't actually run wild with it? Yeah, where you've basically saved each other's lives. Correct. It's immensely therapeutic and valuable and helpful that we've had the experience together. We see the world through the same lens. We see what's happening in the news. We see what's happening around the world. We see what's happening in politics and in government. And we can immediately be on the same page when we compare notes. There's no gap between us because of what CIA gave us. We're still husband and wife. We still don't agree on everything, right? But when it comes to the world around us, for the most part, we see that eye to eye. It's just the family that we're building that we don't see eye to eye on all the time. So I'm working to grow the company. Everything is about Everyday Spy right now. Is your company? So our business is Everyday Spy. You'll find it at everydayspy.com. We have a top, an iTunes top 10 podcast called the Everyday Espionage podcast. And I have on social media, you'll find me anywhere on social media at Everyday Spy. But the mission that we have right now is to build a company that provides us long-term financial security, long-term financial independence. And inshallah, in an ideal world, our company will be so healthy and so strong and so resilient that we'll be able to pass it on to our kids if our kids want it, or we'll pass it on to a suite of executives that we hire. And then if it gets as big as I hope it will get, then we'll also be able to open a whole philanthropic element, a whole wing of our company where all it does is help do good, just like you and I were talking about, because I understand and I believe that when you have excess resources, you do the responsible thing and use those resources to help lift others up. And for me, there would be no better, there is no better win scenario than my financial independence, my children's long-term financial security and the excess to donate and make philanthropic things happen. That's the beautiful thing about life. The gift that life has given when you help another is both rewarding for both parties, I believe. For anybody that's watching, Andrew, struggling with mental health just now, what advice would you have for them? Keep trying, keep fighting, keep working, understand that you're not alone. Mental health challenges are common for alpha predators, not just human beings, but for in the animal kingdom too. They find animals that show illogical, erratic behaviour all the time, simply because they're alpha predators that did not have a pack or a pride, or the right kind of prey to hunt. So we have to understand that if it's in our nature to be part of a community and be part of a tribe and be awesome, that's what an alpha predator is, it's an awesome creature, then if you're not feeling awesome, if you're not part of a pride, if you don't have a community, of course you're going to have those mental challenges. So the goal is to just keep persevering, take what we've talked about today and apply it, find your one or two close friends that maybe you haven't met yet, but find them out there, find your pack, find your tribe, and build an amazing life. You ever took a ayahuasca Andrew? I've thought about it to be very honest. So one of the things that I've been looking at doing is how to, again, tap into more of that energy source that drives us. There's a whole science behind energy that's really interesting to me, not just the hippy stuff like I look like, but actual scientific energy. And in my consideration of ayahuasca, I've actually started on a journey towards transcendental meditation to try to see how deep I can get into that energy before I have to use any kind of herbal or external supplement of any type. And I've already started to see significant benefits even just from the eastern practice of meditation. Meditation and breathing techniques is the strongest thing you can do on this planet. I'm a friend of Wim Hof, a cold water fairy priest on the podcast. I've done ayahuasca. I made a documentary about it in Costa Rica. Again, I'm always searching. Andrew, if I'm honest, I'm always craving something. There's always something I'm missing. No matter how popular my podcast comes or how much money I make, I'm never satisfied.  I've accepted that. And for me, it's just to keep moving forward and setting new heights and hitting new goals. And energy is a very important thing because everything I believe is energies and frequencies. Like you're sitting here, me sitting here. Why are we here at this time talking about the way we're talking? Let something's boot us here.  Even thoughts is energy. You're shooting energy into whatever it is. I think you'll be doing ayahuasca next year for some reason. But I'm not a fucking... I don't see the future, but I genuinely believe that's the route you maybe take. DMT as well, but I feel as if ayahuasca. I'm always skeptical. I'm always... I struggle with trust, if I'm honest. And when I was doing that, I wasn't really... In a good place. I hear that's important. Yeah, I think I was... You look for answers. People are telling you this is a shortcut to happiness. It's a miracle cure, whatever it is. You buy into it, but whether I believe that 100% truly, I don't know. I'm still in a great place. I'm drink-free. I'm drug-free. I'm gambling-free for years. I've created a podcast, but I always want more. Yeah. Listen, for coming on today, Andrew, I thoroughly enjoyed your story, man. Absolutely great and for taking the time. I know you're just off the plane, but would you like to finish up on anything? I love what you're doing and I love hearing that you are also on such a similar path with me. Not just to the people out there who are struggling with mental health, but I also think it's worth highlighting all the people out there who struggle just like you and I do with we're never satisfied with what's the next thing, what's the next big thing, and why can't everybody else move as fast as I can move? Why isn't everybody else trying as hard as I'm trying? Why are other people wasting their time behind a TV or burying themselves in drink or burying themselves in drugs? Where are the people that want to just make the most out of this one rock, this one ride around the rock that we get, right? And those are the people that you and I want to surround ourselves with. I would imagine that after hearing what you just said, you live a fairly lonely life yourself. There's not a lot of people who you can connect with. Hear myself, brother, London. Do you know what I mean? My family back home, but I'm wanting more. In my mind, the perfect life would be with my family, kids, but I'm always searching for something. I don't know what I'm searching for.  I've done it, but it never ever made me happy. That made me least satisfied that never, the more people I was surrounded with, the more drugs I took, the more money I had, the more unhappy I was. And now that I'm doing everything on a positive light, I'm still battling with that happiness and sadness. That's the energy. And that's scary. And I'm thinking to my wired up wrong that I can do cold water therapy, I can do meditation, I can do yoga, I can eat clean. And I'll never, I'll feel amazing for short little bursts, but then there's always something missing. And then sometimes I can slip. My only downfall to now is eating. I don't eat clean. I believe if I eat better, I believe it will take me to another level. I believe it will take me, I believe my frequency is strong, my energy is strong, but I believe that my eating is my main downfall because I emotionally, after this podcast, I've done free podcast now today, it becomes tiresome, you're drained because there's so much, there's no notes here, it's just energy looking into your eyes and trying to dig a little deeper than most, but we're all known on our journey brother and I'm proud of everything you're doing and this is something that we don't know what's on the corner, we can only just enjoy it. How can people get in contact with you, Andrew? Anybody who wants to find me, the best place to go is everydayspy.com. Start there, you'll find a contact form if you want to reach out to me directly. You'll also find I have a quiz on my homepage, a button that just takes you into a fun little quiz that I built that basically simulates the same kind of psychological exam you would get at CIA. 12 questions and you find out exactly what kind of spy you would have been at CIA. So the best place to find me is at everydayspy.com, the second best place to find me is on social media at everydayspy and then of course if you are a podcast person, if you like to listen because I don't really have a YouTube podcast going yet, but if you're an audio person, find me at the everyday espionage podcast on your favourite podcast platform. Why are you not doing a video as well because you bring in big numbers that you would hit big numbers because you're very well educated on life and you have your own opinions and everybody has opinions on life and that's great but you're very well educated on, I believe you can help a lot more people with. I want to, trust me, I want to reach a larger audience, it's why I'm here man, it's why I flew here to sit with you because I want to reach more people. The biggest challenge is really just a challenge of technical proficiency. It takes time, it takes talent, it takes resources to create a decent video for YouTube or for anything else. I don't have that time or those talents and I'm trying to find someone who has those times and those time and the talent and pay them but you know, business has priorities so you've got to do things in a certain order so that's the next goal. I'll probably be on video before I'm on Hayawasca. That's an andy boy. A pleasure again, I wish you all the best for future, anything I can ever help with, my phone call away. I appreciate it James.