1220: Andrew Bustamante | A Spy’s Guide to Our Dangerous World Part One

1220: Andrew Bustamante | A Spy's Guide to Our Dangerous World Part One

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional arms dealer, former jihadi, gold smuggler, money laundering expert, or Russian spy.

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Today, once again, back on the show for another round, is Andrew Bustamante of Everyday Spy former CIA Tradecraft teacher of spy school, and the guy who can make number [00:01:00] stations and one-time pads sound downright cozy. We're ripping into covert communications, disinformation campaigns, deep fakes, and why millions of wealthy Americans are whispering about leaving the country.

We'll talk Ukraine. Iran surveillance states the Mossad Epstein's intelligence ties what spies actually look for in a story and the trade craft that still works in a digital world. Here we go with Andrew Busante. Man, every time I see you, you got more hair. More hair. It's almost like it grows outta your head.

It won't happen much longer though. Now you're gonna get rid of it. Yes. Donating it to charity. Oh, okay. That's cool. You went from silent operative to sideshow, Bob Side

Andrew Bustamante: Show. Bob is exactly

Jordan Harbinger: what it feels like. Oh good. This is a weird way to start the show, but you're one of the only people who might know about this.

Have you heard of number stations? Yes. Yeah. Can you explain it actually? Or is it's a British phenomenon. I'm pretty sure it's actually international. This is fascinating and feel free to chime in where possible. I just, I found this and I was like, I gotta include this, even if it's not that relevant.

'cause it's fricking interesting. So on shortwave radio, there [00:02:00] are these radio stations that are basically just like di, a disembodied voice. That's 1 14 72 45, and it just goes for forever. And then it'll stop after, I don't know, half an hour, an hour, 90 minutes, whatever. And it goes like bing bong. And then it'll just start again with the same sequence of numbers.

And it does that. And then it changes like. A week later or something and there's no call sign. Nobody's ever claimed responsibility for them. And people think that they're international. 'cause you can hear sometimes people have an accent. Sometimes it's in Spanish, sometimes it's in Russian, British accent, whatever it is.

And on shortwave, for people who don't know, 'cause we're in the digital age, I'm gonna get this wrong probably, but the radio waves, they bounce off the ionosphere so they can go around the earth. They don't just go straight like A MFM radio and they can go really far. And I used to listen to these up at my cottage up north.

'cause we didn't have much radio. It was like rural area. So you had like a crappy blurry FM one, WW J, which is like my dad's news radio 95 or nine 50, whatever. And then you had [00:03:00] shortwave and we, I got this shortwave, like a garage sale and it's creepy, right? And you could listen to like international music, but then the other stations that have the numbers on there.

So when I was older I was like, hi, I wonder if I can find what those were. Because back then you had no clue. But now it's, we got the internet, I'll Google it. This is amazing. So first of all, I thought maybe it was pirate radio, but then the government really tries to find pirate radio stations. So how are they not finding closing down these number stations?

If it's pirate radio? Okay, so it's not pirate radio, but no one knows who they are and there's no call sign. Isn't that illegal? So the only person who could run that is the government or a foreign government. And it turned out that's what they are. So big time nerds found out where they were coming from.

'cause they're super expensive to run. A powerful radio station that goes around the world is not something you could run at least in the eighties, seventies, eighties, from like your backyard. Not gonna happen. That is tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions of dollars to run something like that.

And they were also coming from Cuba, the Soviet Union, the us, [00:04:00] uk, Australia, and places like Warsaw, stuff like that. And it turns out that this is a cryptography pattern. So this is where you come in, right? This is a cryptography pattern called a one time pad. Do you know much about these? Absolutely.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah.

So what you're getting at is really exciting, not just for nerds, but for operators too, because you're hitting on multiple really cool tradecraft elements that are genuine. Not like the movies. There's a movie called Number Station.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay.

Andrew Bustamante: Never heard of it. That's how popular the movie was. Right? But the point is, when you have actual encryption and cryptography, an element of onetime use, meaning the code is only valid once.

There's onetime pads that relate to books, pages and books, words on certain pages. In books. There's also onetime pads that relate to radio broadcasts. And what it means is that when something happens, you'll have literally imagine a pad of paper, and that pad of paper says something like January 1st, 11 o'clock on the 1st of January at 11 o'clock, whatever number comes from the [00:05:00] channel that you're listening to, correlates to an instruction in a separate manual.

And then you rip that page out and you throw it. Or burn it for dramatic effect. Then February 2nd, at two o'clock, there's gonna be another number, and if you get that number at that time, then you know it correlates to the instruction. If you don't get that number at that time, you still tear out the page and you throw it away.

It's very similar in the nuclear missile silos. They don't have a pad, but they do have a, a literal ream of paper with punches in it, and you feed the punched paper into the actual machine and anything that happens for 24 hours. It basically is dictated by the holes in that encryption.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember in the hunt for red October, I think I remember Gene Hackman in Denzel Washington maybe, or something like that, can see the face, but I don't remember the name.

Either way, they were going through the thing and they cracked open these plastic containers that looked really cool in the eighties. 'cause you're like, yo, you can't just make that yourself. Course you can now. But they cracked it open. They looked at the thing and that was like the code that they had to type in.

And [00:06:00] so this one time pad, it can't be cracked because it's only used once and then never again unless you have a copy of the pad. But like I couldn't just get that sheet and then reverse engineer the code and read future messages. It's only used for that one message. And that's probably a really basic way of explaining it.

But I thought, all right, shortwave, we don't use that anymore. We have digital encryption. And it turns out that's not true either. They still use shortwave radio, which is amazing. I thought this doesn't even exist anymore. Who would use this in the age of the internet?

Andrew Bustamante: So there are a couple

Jordan Harbinger: of

Andrew Bustamante: things that we fired off there.

Not fully accurate. First. Short wave radio and pirate radio aren't always the same thing. Pirate radio is when like an FM station or even an AM station gets pirated and is used. It's just an illegal broadcast for short wave radio is actually controlled by a whole different set of governing rules.

Pirate radio that the government tries to crack down on versus number station or even, I don't know, even dissenting shortwave radio. The government's gonna have a very hard time. Intercepting and finding the location of a [00:07:00] shortwave dissenting radio station.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well what I meant by that was simply that if there's an illegal shortwave radio station, you can be discovered easily the government and the FCC and the United States goes and finds that and it's easy to find, but also no one's gonna have a million dollar broadcast antenna set up for a pirate station.

So that's why people were confused about these. 'cause it's, wait, this is from Cuba and it's crystal clear in Spanish. This is not some dude on a beach in Cuba screwing around. This is a government installation. Same ones from the United States. And most shortwave radio was just like, it's like BBC or something and you can just hear the news from the UK and the US before the internet and still not.

So they still use this now and it doesn't really matter where it comes from. Right? 'cause you know the Russian one comes from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Andrew Bustamante: You actually don't know that. That's what makes it so scary. That's what makes it so powerful. Russians can send propagandists to Canada and broadcast from Canada.

Now you can have a stronger signal carrying a Russian message from even an allied country because it's very hard to identify the source [00:08:00] of that short wave transmission.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, really? I heard that it was totally easy to find the source of a short wave transmission.

Andrew Bustamante: It depends on the strength of the transmission, how many resources you're putting into it, but essentially the reason that this is so useful, even still to operators today is because a communicator can carry a shortwave radio in a pack, and then anywhere you are, if you have primary, secondary, and tertiary systems, all fail.

Satellites fail or they get jammed primary VHF signals get jammed or fail, batteries fail, or there's some kind of problem some other way. You can always pull out a short wave radio and you can always bounce it off the moon, bounce it off the ionosphere, bounce it in a direction where somebody knows to pick it up, and now all of a sudden you have a very resilient form of communication.

That's why it's so useful and so cheap, and as soon as you pack up that radio and walk again, next signals from a different place.

Jordan Harbinger: That's fascinating. I didn't realize that the small ones could broadcast. I just thought they were receivers. Apparently what they're still used for, basically a shortwave receiver is like 10 bucks on Amazon.

If I'm your handler or something, or you're trying to [00:09:00] communicate secrets to me, we could use something like Signal or whatever, digital encrypted communication. But then even if no one can decrypt it, which of course the NSA is working on all of that stuff slash can do all of that, they still know that's me talking to you.

Or they'll figure it out. And that's not good if you're like a Chinese dissident working in their nuclear program talking with somebody in Washington dc right? It's like, we don't know what you're saying, but you're probably not ordering DoorDash, so we're gonna arrest you and take care of business. But with the short wave radios, since they go all over the world, even if you know that that signal's coming from Moscow, like the CIA, figured it out, you have no idea who's listening to it.

Everyone in the world is a candidate to be listening to this. It's impossible essentially, to identify the recipient, because even if you could figure out who was listening to that, which you can't. Tens of thousands of people are listening to that because they're like screwing around with a shortwave

Andrew Bustamante: radio, and that's only if they know how to find that signal.

So you're exactly right, and this is why it's so viable even today. Yes, we live in a very digital signal saturated environment. There's constant signals, radio signals, [00:10:00] cellular signals, VHF signals, UH, F signals, line of sight signals. There's just incredible amount of noise. So communicating a message is nothing more than having a receiver on the same frequency as a transmitter.

Communicating something that makes sense to the transmitter and the receiver, even better if the actual information that's being transmitted isn't the content that's really being communicated. That's the problem with our encrypted signals, our encrypted tools like Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp, the actual message is what's being carried over so you can crack that encryption at the source.

Of the signal or at the source of the recipient. But if you can get either encryption key, you can hack the whole thing. And that's assuming you don't hack some other backend process. The Israelis are always working on, NSA is always working on GCHQ at the UK are always working on. So when you have a literal transmission that's carrying nothing of significance because the only person who knows what it means has the one-time pad.

Jordan Harbinger: So the Cuba station, Cuban [00:11:00] intelligence, talking to people maybe in Miami or all over the US and Canada, it doesn't matter and you can't tell who's getting that message. They have a one-time pad. There's another guest from the show, Jack Barsky, former East German spy. He talked about using these number stations and that was what prompted me to look into this again.

'cause I was like, I remember those from being a kid. And he would just go and sit in his home office, lock himself in every Thursday night or whatever it was. It was so freaking tedious. 'cause he'd have to spend like four hours writing all the numbers. Wait for it to go again, check all the numbers, use the one time pad and it would be like.

All is okay. Your family's fine. Moscow sends its regards and he is like, are you fricking kidding me? You know, like whatever. No, nothing to report. Like it's just nothing to report. But it took four hours to communicate that and used a bunch of obfuscating language because you don't wanna say the same number sequence over and over when it means nothing.

So it's like they had to bury the lead. It's not that efficient,

Andrew Bustamante: but it kept him safe as an illegal Russian spy inside the United States. That's how effective they [00:12:00] are.

Jordan Harbinger: It is. They still use this, which I thought was crazy. Just 'cause one encryption pinpoints the receiver and you never wanna do that. And I don't know.

I guess my question to you is what kind of content gets transmitted on a number station right now? Is it specific stuff for a specific person? Yes. But what kind of instructions get communicated to people in the field using something like this? Because it's a

Andrew Bustamante: one-time pad, it means that the person who creates the pad and the person who creates the sequence that gets read.

Can choose how many messages it carries. It could carry a message at one o'clock, a different message at two o'clock and a different message at three o'clock for three different people in three different parts of the world with three different messages. So Jack's receiving something on Thursday night at four.

There's six other days of the week. There's 23 other hours of the day. Everybody could theoretically have a different one-time pad. It doesn't have to be 13 people with the same one-time pad.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. That makes sense. 'cause if one person gets caught, the messages from everybody else

Andrew Bustamante: are still secure.

Exactly. Now, when you think about the utility of something like this, [00:13:00] it sounds silly to us as wealthy Americans, where we have one of the world's leading intelligence services. We're like, why wouldn't you do something more efficient? Put yourself in the shoes of a Nigerian intelligence service, or put yourself in the shoes of a Pakistani intelligence service or a Malaysian intelligence service.

Now all of a sudden you don't have the budget or enough viability to actually reach into the deep expensive tech because. What you're trying to collect on is something that even your own government doesn't see as a huge priority dissidents and people who are speaking out against whatever,

Jordan Harbinger: or you're trying to keep a secret from the United States and the West, and you know that your satellites are owned, right?

So

Andrew Bustamante: you also have the opportunity where countries are talking to each other. Myanmar could be talking to Vietnam using a number station, a pad between the two of them. So now it's a whole different, not necessarily diplomatic channel, but an effective collaboration tool for something else. You name it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. It would have to be a non diplomatic channel, right? 'cause otherwise you would just say, oh yeah, we had a transportation meeting and then you just wouldn't talk about transportation. It's open source. Exactly right. Weird [00:14:00] show open. But I've been fascinated by those for a while.

'cause I used to just listen to them and I would just listen to some guy with a rough Cuban, Spanish accent be like Uno. Then I like, okay, like what is he doing? Or German. Or Russian. Because look man, eighties kids, that was the only foreign language exposure that I had. Yeah. At all for uh, I don't know, 15 years on except for like middle school French.

That's not very interesting. It's an old lady who's telling you to sit up straight in your chair. It's not cool. Like Russian and Cuban Spanish and German was during the Cold War because you know, it would be like, this is from East Berlin. This is pretty freaking cool, man. Even though it could have been coming from Madison, Wisconsin, could have been coming from Madison, Wisconsin.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I gotta look this up. 'cause I could swear that when I researched this, it was just. Relatively trivial to find the source, but it doesn't matter. 'cause if you know it's in the Soviet Union, what are you gonna do about it? It's that you can't go, you can't find out where it's going.

Like the source you can find. But where it's going, you can't, the recipient you can't find.

Andrew Bustamante: And it also doesn't matter if you have 12 sources, as long as they're [00:15:00] all reading the same sequence at the same

Jordan Harbinger: time, in the same frequency. You mentioned last time you were on, which I think was 2023 maybe. Yeah. I think it was two years ago.

You said, oh, I might leave America 2027. We're right on schedule. Are you thinking about doing that still? Absolutely. Not

Andrew Bustamante: even

Jordan Harbinger: thinking about it. Okay. It's like it's, that is the target.

Andrew Bustamante: Spring of 27 is the actual, it's on our calendar in our Google documents. That's when we are Wheels up. Where are you gonna go?

Or is that a secret? Yeah, we're not telling anybody where we're going. Gotcha. We'll give you a list of our favorite places. Yeah. But first of all, why 2027? Just 'cause of the kids' schooling stuff or what? We were looking at 20, 30 as like our drop dead. But then as the world has changed from 2023 till today.

We've also decided to kind of increase our timeline. There's a lot of things that go into it. We want our children to have a second language. We want our children to try to get a citizenship in a foreign country, which means that we need to be cognizant of when they turn 18, which matters. And then you've got different countries with different requirements for citizenship, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So there's a lot of things there. But the main driving force for my [00:16:00] wife and for me, related to our kids is to get them a second citizenship. Citizenship, not residency. So they have a second passport so they can choose for the rest of their life, whether they wanna show the blue passport or some other passport.

Right. But then simultaneously to that, you also have very real security concerns in the United States, there's very real economic concerns in the United States, and diversity options are a benefit. And that's not just for us. We're actually finding that 53% of wealthy Americans being Americans with a net worth of $5 million or more, 53% of them have already.

Left the United States in terms of investment or dual citizenship or golden visas.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Interesting. So if I invest in something abroad that's considering leaving the United States, if

Andrew Bustamante: you invest to an extent where you can now essentially live there half the year, live there for longer. So if you buy property, if you buy a business,

Jordan Harbinger: I might have to get that citation.

And that sounds like a lot.

Andrew Bustamante: It is a lot. It's expected to hit 60% in the next two years when out of every two [00:17:00] wealthy Americans are already diversifying their interests outside of the United States, giving themselves essentially an escape strategy, growth strategy, or something else.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess technically we fall into that because our kids have some documents from Taiwan slash China even.

I'm like, the papers are in the system or whatever, and I basically have to just start paying insurance and then it's like as soon as I set foot there, the clock starts going and then you get a residence and then you convert that to a passport and then China invades and you end up Chinese. LOL, right? No, but not really, but it's possible.

Like my friends are always joking. They're like, so you're just gonna be a white Chinese guy? And I'm like, it could happen. Happen in Hong Kong. Yeah, exactly. Happen in Hong Kong. And those people, I think they still have Hong Kong passports, but that's just an administrative, they could phase those out tomorrow and reissue China passports.

Where do people have it better? Europe is good, man, but there's a lot of reasons that Europe is maybe not gonna be super stable. Have you seen the defense stocks in Europe are going up? That's usually not [00:18:00] a good idea. The same thing in the United

Andrew Bustamante: States. Well, yeah. It's important. People like to throw around generalized terms, like better.

I would argue there's no place safer. Where's it safer? And again, safer. Can some ways be a generic term? Sure. So I don't want people to think of it in terms of safer or better or really anything that ends in an error. It's really a question of for you individually, where do you see the most opportunity for what you're trying to achieve?

For us, if we want our children to have a second citizenship, we want our children to have fluency in a second language. We want our children to also understand how special the United States is. 'cause here's what's sad and depressing. 98% of Americans have no concept. How actually different and special the United States is?

No, of

Jordan Harbinger: course not. You can see the discourse online. I'm gonna move to North Korea, my brother in Christ. Go for it. Please spend a week there and don't run swimming back to the United

Andrew Bustamante: States. People don't understand how special it is here and you can't explain it, and you can't define it, and you can't watch it in a movie and be like, oh, I really [00:19:00] appreciate being American.

You have to live it. You have to live it. You have to see it. And we want that for our children. We want them to live, breathe, see, feel what it's like to be even just abroad for an extended period of time so they can come to truly appreciate why it is worth the fight to stay a free America.

Jordan Harbinger: Thinking about fleeing the country here in 2027, at least stick around through this ad break first.

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You can find the course again for free@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Andrew Bustamante. I'm curious what your perspective is on the Middle East. I wouldn't move there. I don't wanna live under an authoritarian regime of any kind. And I don't know if you can find a place in the Middle East that's not really touched by that, or don't tell them that.

Yeah, no, of course. Of course not. But also I have a little girl. I don't wanna subject her to a lot of that stuff, and I think that's gonna offend people, but I don't know if I care. Is it controversial that women don't have the same kind of treatment in the Middle East as they do in the United States?

Andrew Bustamante: You have an American girl.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:00] Yeah,

Andrew Bustamante: she's fine. If you are born a Muslim Arabic girl. Mm-hmm. That's a different story. Well, yeah. Especially if you're born a poor Muslim Arabic girl, that's completely different than a wealthy Arabic Muslim girl. So

Jordan Harbinger: you're saying that since I'm a foreigner, we're outsiders. We would be, there's the leeway when it comes to that category.

That's a

Andrew Bustamante: super important distinction, man, because when people try to make the argument like, oh, where are you gonna find this better than the United States? If you're an American, there are lots of options where you have more opportunities than you do in the United States. An American living abroad in Spain.

Has better opportunities than any Spaniard and better opportunities than any American in the United States. Say more about that. 'cause I think a lot of people are not sure how that works. So when you're an American abroad, depending on what community you land in, they may already have a preferential opinion of the United States, and they're going to bend over backwards to help you support you become your friend.

You're gonna find people more interested in helping and and supporting your business, your family, your job hunt, et cetera, [00:24:00] just because you are American. Whereas here in the United States. You're just another American, so why the fuck would anybody try to help you? Where abroad, they want to help you because of course they want to be friends with an American.

They want access to the American dollar. They want access to your network. They might just think that you're super rich because to them you are super rich, even though you make $35,000 a year, who knows, right? Yeah. So that opens up opportunities immediately just because of a passport that you're carrying.

People are gonna help you find an apartment. They're gonna help you furnish it, and they're gonna help you find everything you can think of. That does not happen here in the United States. Now, simultaneously, if you go to a anti-American country, you can expect the opposite. You can expect immediate criticism, immediate bias.

You can expect people to bully you or push you around, and that's your choice if that's what you wanna do. Or if you're an American traveling on a Canadian passport, you can hide that.

Jordan Harbinger: You know what though? I will say I wanted to go to a place that was anti-American. So I went to Serbia in 2004. I was like, we just bombed this place.

Surely everyone hates Americans. You know what? There [00:25:00] was a lot of that, but it was also like. Pretty cool, man. You're from the United States. I've never been there. All I, I mean, we hate you guys, but you're cool. I mean, it's fine. Tell me more about where you grew. Like people were like, you're the enemy, but also never met an American before.

The only American I met was a guy. We took prisoner in Bosnia and we didn't get to talk to him very much. People actually told me that. It's funny.

Andrew Bustamante: I mean, if you think about it, what would happen, honestly, put yourself anywhere in Missouri or Minnesota and a. Cuban moves in, there's gonna be plenty of people who are like, eh, there's a Cuban down the street.

But there's gonna be even more people who are like, I've never met a Cuban. That's right. Let's invite him over for dinner. Let's invite him over for dinner. But like three other people moved into the neighborhood. Why are you inviting the fucking Cuban guy? Because he's a Cuban guy. Right,

Jordan Harbinger: exactly.

Andrew Bustamante: Right. I wanna learn their music.

I've always wondered about plantains. Who knows why, but they're going to get extra attention just because they're different.

Jordan Harbinger: Man, when he, it was probably 1989, my neighbor had a Russian guy come and stay at his house, and I was like a Russian guy. My parents were like, really? Wow, what is he like? And I was like, he has [00:26:00] offensively strong body odor.

And I was a little kid, so he seemed like a giant, he had like a huge beard. And I remember being like, this guy is not at a bath in a really, really long time. He was super nice guy, super friendly guy. And I remember him just being blown away. We had a computer in the house and he was like. What is this machine?

'cause he'd never seen one before. Computers are relatively new then anyway. And he had never seen one and then he was like, I can't believe that everybody has a car. He is like, I don't even know anybody who has a car in the Soviet Union. I don't know a single person that has one. There's taxis. That's it.

Those are the things I remember him telling us. 'cause I think was pretty limited. But yeah, we were fascinated by this guy.

Andrew Bustamante: He broadened your understanding of life.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: Even if it wasn't light years, he broadened you more than the average person who couldn't even conceptualize the idea of somebody not having an adult, not having a car.

Although

Jordan Harbinger: I will say that a stereotype that all the Russians were like big, strong bears. Were like, that part's true. I remember his hands were so huge, they like eclipse. Again, I was a kid, but you know, I've shaken an adult hand. This guy was like really strong and he would pick [00:27:00] us up and throw us around 'cause that was another thing that he wasn't afraid to wrestle around and throw us around the house.

It was fun. And he was less gentle, I think, than a lot of other people. And you could tell he like loved kids and was just a fun dude. But he couldn't speak. So he had to do a lot more of that. Anyway, you're right, the whole like, oh, this person's an enemy. It doesn't really hold up at the cultural level.

It's more of like a policy level kind of thing.

Andrew Bustamante: So when we talk about that more opportunity thing, 'cause that's how we got on that, right? More opportunities if you're an American living abroad in a pro-American state. But then when you start thinking about your children, when you start thinking about your own kind of long-term, maybe health or wellbeing, my wife's not secret.

Dream is that our children will meet and fall in love with non-American children or non-American fiances or spouses or whatever, right? And then immediately be children of the world because they'll get married and they'll have the new citizenship. They're marrying into the citizenship that we helped them receive, plus their American citizenship.

Their children will have the choice of all three. And not only does that give you options in just community, but [00:28:00] it's every one of them has a different educational system. Every one of 'em has a different welfare system. Every one of 'em has a different healthcare system. Every one of 'em has different access to other countries.

The United States cannot go to Iran. If you carry a Turkish passport, you can walk right into Iran. And that's not to say that you want to go to Iran, but

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, you might wanna research it before you do, but you can. But there's options. Yeah, no, it's true. If I've done the math on this before, and it's okay if my kids have a Taiwan passport or a Chinese passport and the US passport, and then they marry somebody who has a French passport and a Spanish passport or a Moroccan passport, then my grandkids will be Moroccan Spanish Taiwanese Americans.

Now what makes you even go down that path? Do you see what I mean? It's just interesting. Also, healthcare system, like my insurance policy is if I get debilitating cancer. Kaiser Permanente is like, oh, see that line 48 of page 306. Sorry. I'm just like, well, I'm going to Taipei 'cause I've been paying $30 a month for health insurance for 20 years.

I'm gonna have them cure my cancer and it's a better healthcare system in the United States anyways. And

Andrew Bustamante: right there demonstrates to me [00:29:00] that wealthy way of thinking. You can put $30 a month into something that you don't even see. And then the idea of relocating your whole house, not to another state, but to another country on the other side of the world that is clearly in the crosshairs of a nearby neighbor.

Even when you do all that, you're still like, yeah, we can do that. We'll drop $15,000 or $7,000 or however much to fly everybody and relocate there in a heartbeat. The average households can't even conceptualize it. They can try. They can ask and borrow money from friends. They can take a loan, they can sell their car.

Have $10,000 in cash tomorrow, but they don't even think of it. That is literally a mindset of the wealthy. 'cause the wealthy are always trying to protect the assets they have.

Jordan Harbinger: I think also partly I've always been this way, right? I was an exchange student in high school that got me thinking internationally from an early age.

Then I studied abroad 'cause I was like, Hey, you don't have to take accounting 1 0 1 in calculus. You can get other credits. You screw around in like this place. And then they caught onto that and they're like, no, we're gonna make people take those classes there. And I'm like, what if I go to a [00:30:00] place that doesn't have an official University of Michigan Study abroad program?

They're like, we have it in 32 countries. And I'm like, what about Ukraine? And they're like, no, can I go there? Yeah, but we have to approve it. Okay, fine. I'm taking Russian and Ukraine, which I did. And they were like, fine. I feel like half of my. Life's achievements were reluctantly handed me like, here you go, you son of a bitch, I'm watching you.

You technically is, what's it called? Malicious compliance, where you're like, I'm going to follow this to the T to your own detriment. And even though that's not what you intended, you know, make your own concentration study abroad in a place that they didn't approve. But they said their hands are tied.

They have to, anyway, you're right. A lot of people don't conceptualize this, but I think this show, I try to help people do that because you don't have to be a millionaire to get a second passport. You just have to go, my grandpa was Irish. And then you've gotta mail in some forms in 300 bucks, and suddenly you're Irish too, or whatever

Andrew Bustamante: you can apply to become a teacher in South Korea.

And then once you go to South Korea as a teacher, and then once you're there, you can flip your visa and you can be like, I'd like to work [00:31:00] towards residency now. And you can still teach. So now you're getting paid to live somewhere else, to work towards a second passport. You're learning a second language, you're on your own, right?

So if there's all sorts of opportunities all over the world, if like you said, someone can

Jordan Harbinger: open your eyes to them. Just pay attention to those things. Switching gears a little bit, I'm wondering what kind of guidelines slash training that you can talk about that the CIA a gives you after you leave?

Because I know you probably can't associate with certain people. It seems like you can't even probably go to certain places and talk about certain things even inside your own house. 'cause I think it's like, okay, we know Andrew worked in the Middle East and his wife also, we're gonna monitor them. You can't just be like, remember that time we did that thing in Dubai?

It's like you can't do that. You still have to almost pretend like you're still in the game.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, it's a great question. There's no training that they give you after you leave. When you leave CIA, CCIA A is a little bit like the mafia I was gonna say. So the mafia or a cult? Yeah. So they make it very hard for you to leave.

They put as many disincentives as possible into the process of leaving. They don't help you find a job. They don't clear your [00:32:00] background. They don't help you with your resume. They don't give you any kind of transition assistance, which is what you in the military, they want you to go out, they want you to fail, and they want you to come crawling back.

I know when my wife and I left, we were two of five people in our peer group, meaning the group that started with us in 2007. By 2014 when we left, we knew of three other people who had left in the same year that we left. Two of the five came back within six months, within six because they just couldn't get a job because they couldn't make it work.

One of them was a finance guy who was like, ah, fuck this. I'm done with this because I can go make a bunch of money in finance. Turns out that once he got out there, the finance guy went out there, got a job right away, and the job was like a finance job. Yeah. It was 15 hours a day, 13 hours a day, no weekends off, no freedom.

Like he made a shit ton of money, but he had actual responsibility. So then he was like, I want to come back to fucking CIA, where I leave my work in the office and I really only have to work like government hours. Yeah. I get to see my kids again.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: So my wife and I, we did not go back. We struggled for a long time because [00:33:00] that's how we ended up forming our own business was because we couldn't find a way to get a job another way.

Jordan Harbinger: The resume gap, what were you doing for 14 years? You could, you would at least be able to say I was in the CIA and then nothing else. You can't, you can't even say that. So depending

Andrew Bustamante: on your cover, you have different gaps in resume. There are a lot of what's known as an overt CIA officers overt. CI officers aren't undercover, so there is no technical resume gap.

They are employed by CIA in a certain year, and then when they write their resume, they claim it. Oh, so they say like, I

Jordan Harbinger: was a Russia analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency for the last eight years.

Andrew Bustamante: Correct. Their tax records pay them. They have a history with the IRS. Their mortgage says that they're CIA employees.

They're not covert. So overt people have no break in resume, which is part of the reason why CIA saw such a huge exodus with the first Trump administration because they lost analysts and cartographers and creatives and alias docs people and unit logisticians tech people because they were overt and they could immediately make the jump to Google or open AI or [00:34:00] whatever else.

But covert officers, when they sign up, they sign a secrecy agreement. They sign two different secrecy agreements that are specifically related to the release of information related to their operational activity. Your cover is part of your operational activity. So when you are a covert CIA intelligence officer, which is about 10% of the whole body of CIA.

Now CIA controls everything so they can tell you what can and can't be put on your resume. They can literally line out certain words that you use in your resume and when the time comes that you leave, they essentially provide your exit resume, which with your cover identity still in the resume because they need to go through a cover rollback period where they review your operational background before they can clear it.

So it says like Fry Cook for seven years in Dubai and you can, and no shit, dude. Oh my God. You can laugh all you want, but that's terrible. Literally, there's a, you're a middle manager for a tire company and here your references and here's all your accomplishments and it's [00:35:00] all fake so that when anybody calls your references, there's no answer.

When they email the company, there's no response. So nobody can verify or validate what you did for those 3, 7, 12, 15 years.

Jordan Harbinger: If you wanna explain this. And you're like, I can't. And then they're like, all right, weirdo, who is probably in prison, thanks for coming in. Who's lying

Andrew Bustamante: about their resume? Exactly right.

And that's something that CIA puts out there because when you leave, they don't put you in a terminated status. They put you in a leave without pay status so that it's that much easier to process you when you come crawling back in.

Jordan Harbinger: Turns out I can't get a job. Oh really? Oh, that's so sad. Luckily you just happen to have your desk already set up.

We still have that cat thing that does the arm wave on your desk. It's still, it's still cranking. You might have to reset the clock. That's crazy to me, man. It's

Andrew Bustamante: brilliant. It's brilliant, right? Smart. But they make it so hard, they put so much money into training you, they don't wanna lose you. And they also understand that when you're inside CIA, you don't know how the real world works.

And that's something that's important to the real world is a very difficult place to be. And when you are part of an elite unit [00:36:00] like a clandestine CIA officer, your life is dangerous at times. But otherwise it's pretty fucking good. You're paid a government salary. You never take work home. You can't really work on the weekends.

They can't call you in on the weekends unless it's gonna look really suspicious. So you end up looking like a normal person. And that's if you're not in some sort of privileged cover position, like A COO or a CFO or an investor or an innovator, or you're driving nice cars, staying in ex excellent hotel, flying first class everywhere.

If you're in a really privileged position, life is super fucking easy for you.

Jordan Harbinger: That's what I wonder. 'cause I'm like, okay, he's got a law degree, let's make him a corporate lawyer. Let's put him in like a oil and gas related industry in the United Arab Emirates. Okay, so my cover is I'm a multimillionaire attorney with a bunch of cars, a driver, a chef, an assistant, a full office backup, and I fly on our company to this is like, I'm not going any, no, I wanna be a real corporate lawyer where my boss gives me shit every day and calls me in at 11:00 PM on a Sunday to wait for a fax.

Nobody's ever gonna [00:37:00] do

Andrew Bustamante: that. And that's a big part of. YCIA wants us to have just enough space to hang ourselves. You wanna leave, you can leave. Go see what the real world is like. Yeah. Go see

Jordan Harbinger: how hard it is to find a job. This is like Amish people. You know how they have Rum Springer, where they're like, no, no, no.

You wanna leave the community and go experience the world for four years? Go ahead. And then guys are like, I'm gonna meet so many girls. And then it's like, mom, I'm coming home. You know they have a couple beers and they go, where's my assigned wife? Yeah. They're like, this is pretty hard. There's a lot of bad shit going on out here.

Even driving is tough. Most of them come back home, obviously. What's in the President's daily brief.

Andrew Bustamante: You have any

Jordan Harbinger: idea?

Andrew Bustamante: So the president's daily brief, it's interesting, there's such a cool process behind the PDB, what we call the PDB, the President's daily brief, where you've got specific people who come in early to coalesce the intel, the raw intel from the night before, and then they prioritize it for specific briefers.

'cause the PDB is actually briefed to the president. It is a document, but the document comes with a handful of dedicated PDB presenters

Jordan Harbinger: that this sounds like the coolest thing. Like I would love to show up [00:38:00] and be like. Tell me what's going on with that weird coup in Nepal. And someone's like, well, I've spent the last 10 years analyzing Nepal and this is my area and I'm gonna explain it to you like you're five years old from the beginning to the end.

I wanna do that all day. Ah, come on. 'cause that would be way cooler,

Andrew Bustamante: right? That would

Jordan Harbinger: be way cooler. Uh, I love that idea. In fact, what it

Andrew Bustamante: is, is it's some middle management analyst who's trying to get the next checkbox on their promotion becomes the dedicated briefer. They don't actually have a deep expertise.

They probably have a deep expertise in one thing, kissing the president's ass. But the experts, the expertise is not what dictates what they brief on. Okay, bummer. You become, here's like your northern hemisphere briefer, here's your eastern hemisphere, briefer, et cetera, et cetera. Here's your imminent threat briefer.

And these briefers all show up every day to brief the president. But the president only has a limited amount of time. So you might show up at work at two o'clock in the morning to start prepping for a 7:00 AM delivery to the president only to then not actually get your time. You still log off at two o'clock, that'd be a bummer, but I guess you still show up and stand there in case you ask any questions.

[00:39:00] You still make the commute from Langley to the White House every day. Like you,

Jordan Harbinger: you go through all the motions. As long as they give you bagels, it's fine government, but White House Bagels though. White House Bagels, I don't know.

Andrew Bustamante: West Wing Bagels. Yeah, that's a shop right there. Somebody needs to come up with that.

West Wing Bagels. I would go there. It

Jordan Harbinger: probably exists already. We're gonna have to Google that. I should have asked this earlier. How come? You can talk about being a former cleanest operative in the CIA, but other people who come straight out can't do that. There's obviously some kind of,

Andrew Bustamante: so we were talking just a few minutes ago about how you have to have your cover rolled back.

When your cover is rolled back. You are made an overt employee because they basically clear what you can and can't talk about from your operational history and then also give you the bureaucratic. Check mark that takes you out of the covert category and into the overt category. Now, in 2014, when my wife and I left, it was very rare that people would leave.

They were seeing an increase in people leaving. But like I said, in the entire year from our peer group, we only knew of three other people. Total attrition in CIA in the year [00:40:00] that we left in 2014 was less than 1.5%. So they were losing like one undercover officer a month on average for a year. And the classes of these are, are not huge, right?

They were big during the war on terror. I mean, you're talking about two to 300% classes that are being cleared multiple times a year. If you're losing 12 guys a year, that's a lot. It's about under 10% of your clandestine core. But that attrition is, is agency-wide, all overt and all retirees. I mean, it's not many people that are leaving.

The first year of Donald Trump, when Donald Trump became the executive and CIA falls under the executive branch, then they saw a massive attrition to the point where I think at its peak it was 30 officers per month that were leaving. So in 2014, when my wife and I left, we put in our resignation, we got our leave without pay status.

They told us it'd be six months of leave without pay if we changed our mind. And then they would start the cover rollback process and it would take an estimated two years. It took exactly two years. So in [00:41:00] 2016, early spring of 2016, we got our official rollback letter. It took them two years to review us.

Everybody who left after that became part of a wait list. I know people right now who left in 2017 who are still waiting on a cover rollback, and that's what's created this incredible network of, we call ourselves alumni, this incredible alumni network of CIA, former CIA all around the world where we know.

What each other can do. And we also know the difficulties of being able to document it. So people are always trying to help each other. There's entire LinkedIn networks dedicated to CIA alumni who are trying to help each other.

Jordan Harbinger: I assume many of these people have had the idea to start a company where you just hire former agents.

'cause everyone, if everyone's desperate for a job and they're highly qualified but they can't talk about it except with other people who have clearance, then you could clean up if you were hiring. Arguably. Yeah. You

Andrew Bustamante: know it's funny 'cause this idea has actually started a few times. People have tried to do this, but what ends up happening is everybody's a fucking government employee [00:42:00] and they have no concept of how business works.

So you might start a business and you might understand how business works and you're like, oh, this is gonna be great. I'll get all these qualified former CIA people and then we'll all create a consultancy and we'll go in together. They don't know how salaries are determined and they don't have any concept of profitability, and they don't have any concept of operating costs versus fixed cost and long-term growth and what a growth rate is, and investor payback.

The employees just don't know that. So you might start a company and you're like, this is gonna be great. And then your first handful of CIA officers come in for the first two months, they're happy to have a job, but then after that they're like, why the fuck are you paying me a hundred thousand dollars a year, but you take home $300,000 a year?

I don't want a raise. And they're like, no, no, you don't understand. I'm the business owner. I take the risk and they're like, no, you're CIA. I'm CII don't see the difference. And this is not just a CIA phenomenon that this is former Navy Seals. This is former MARSOC Raiders, this is former NSA. When they come out, they just, they don't have any concept of meritocracy.

[00:43:00] Real meritocracy. They don't have any concept of profitability, so they can't speak business.

Jordan Harbinger: That is unfortunate. 'cause otherwise they would clean up. Yeah. All you have to do is you do a good job for a while and you start to earn a lot more money instead of just looking for the next best thing. We're talking about Cold War vibes, number stations, and deep fakes.

But first, a word from a company that definitely, probably maybe won't sell your IP address to a hostile actor. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Grammarly. Here's some real talk, whether people admit it or not, they judge you by how you write. You send an email with sloppy grammar, typos, and boom, people subconsciously lower your level.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show now for the rest of part one with Andrew [00:47:00] Bustamante. I know you and a few folks like Ryan Macbeth, I don't know if you know him. You've said World War III has already started. You still think that? Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: I don't think World War III looks like World War ii, but I do believe that whatever we are referring to when we talk about a World War, it seems to me like we have more indicators that we are in a world war rather than we are not.

In a World War,

Jordan Harbinger: what are you looking at indication wise?

Andrew Bustamante: I look at the number of active conflicts around the world. Right now in the United States, we're very focused on two or three conflicts. We're focused on Israel, we're focused on Ukraine and Afghanistan and Russia, and then sometimes we're focused on something else like China, drug cartels, whatever.

Yeah. Maybe it's Mexico, maybe it's China encroaching on us, whatever. But that's what we think conflict is. There's actually 161 active conflicts around the world right now, 161 different conflict zones where bullets are being fired and explosions are going off. The oldest conflict zone is actually Columbia out of all those 161, and nobody even thinks about conflict in Columbia.

When you look at each of those conflicts, it's not just [00:48:00] one group against another group in the same country or even across the state boundary. It's multiple countries engaged in supporting one side or another side of the conflict. The proxies.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: And that proxy conflict is unique. Proxy conflict didn't really exist prior to maybe 20, 25 years ago.

Everything before that was basically either interstate or intrastate. What about Vietnam and stuff like

Jordan Harbinger: that? I mean, that was a proxy

Andrew Bustamante: conflict. That was a proxy conflict that originated as an intrastate conflict that was inside north and South Vietnam, initiating on their own and then everybody else coming to the table.

Whereas many of the conflicts that we see now are instigated by external factors. I see what you mean. There's an economic benefit. That's what first world countries have learned. There's a massive economic benefit to war where you. Are supporting it but not engaged in it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, definitely. This is Russia's game.

Initially, it's the United States's game too. A lot of people thought World War III was gonna look like another World War ii, but it kinda looks like the Cold War instead. At least as far as like proxy [00:49:00] conflict.

Andrew Bustamante: We always try to find a way to frame something coming up with something we understand from the past.

Of course,

Jordan Harbinger: that's what history's for. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: But, but it's very difficult to do that. Like modern weapons, the battle lines in Ukraine look more like World War I than they look like World War ii with the trenches you

Jordan Harbinger: mean, and all that stuff. Yeah.

Andrew Bustamante: Except for the drones. And the drones are different, but now the drones look more like balloons.

Right. Remember, the balloons transformed the World War I landscape dropping bombs from gliders transformed World War I, and then that's what gave us the idea for actual bomber jets and bomber planes in World War ii. And now we've got drones dropping grenades, drones acting as kamikazes. It's a whole different evolving landscape, and that's what we need to understand When people think World War III.

The common misconception is that a nuclear weapon must be used if you're waiting for a nuclear weapon to go off. That's not going to be World War III if a nuclear weapon goes off. We just entered a whole new, the end of World War II of nuclear conflict, and I don't think our chances of a nuclear weapon going off are getting less each year.

I actually think they're getting to be more [00:50:00] each year, but I don't know why people think it's gonna look like a thermonuclear weapon being launched from a missile silo and going off in the middle of a first world country. That's not what it's gonna look like. It's gonna look like a tactical nuke or international waters.

You could imagine seeing a dirty bomb or a tactical weapon being used, who knows? And the attribution of that weapon being unclear, is that even possible to deploy a tactical nuke and not get caught doing it? I didn't say they wouldn't get caught. The attribution of the weapon.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, you'd see who launched it, but maybe not who provided it.

Andrew Bustamante: Correct. So just basic thought experiment. A nuclear weapon that's put into a grenade launcher. Like a shoulder mounted grenade launcher makes its way from Russia to Belarus and then from Belarus, it's actually used in Kiev. Who's responsible for that? The Russians or the Belarusians or the cutout that the belarusians handed it to that actually used it inside the country of Ukraine.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Now those are just little green men. They're not ours. I heard you say in other interviews that you think, or maybe [00:51:00] thought Putin was winning in Ukraine in or in terms of Ukraine, do you still hold the same opinion? Absolutely.

Andrew Bustamante: If anybody thinks Putin's not winning in Ukraine, I would love to understand your logic there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I thought Ukraine would be done for the most part by fall 2022, and that the east, the South, et cetera, would be taken by then.

Andrew Bustamante: The only reason that didn't happen was because of the counteroffensive that was supported and mounted by the west in August of 2022, and nobody really saw that coming, and there was a big faint, like predominant intelligence at the time, both overt and covert said.

Russia wants to go south. Russia wants to connect a land bridge that goes all the way to Odessa so they can basically close off the Black Sea and they own everything Ukrainian. That's strategically sound. That's what many analysts said. And then the counteroffensive feigned an attack in the south, but actually was a counter offensive in the north, which made sense for them because it, it ensured that they could harden their nation's capital and they could push back very thinly stretched Russians.

But that whole southern corridor [00:52:00] never really got closed off. The lines of conflict in the South have barely moved. When we had this conversation in 2023, 20% of Ukraine was controlled by Russia. Now 17 to 18% is still controlled by Russia. And Russia keeps on pushing, gaining fractions a day, fractions a week, whatever you wanna call it.

And the US is no longer supporting Ukraine significantly. Europe is struggling to support Ukraine. Ukraine's built their own drone business. They're trying to essentially pay for their own war moving forward, like it's a completely different world, but the one consistent factor has been Russia's ongoing, self funded, self-initiated.

Now, yes, they've joined forces with Iran and China to gain some benefits. But it's not like China or Iran has been pulled into this conflict. No.

Jordan Harbinger: And they're not cutting a check really for the, the arms or anything like that. What do you think of the drones hitting Poland from Belarus and Russia? Because Belarus News says, we warned the polls as an electronic warfare thing.

The [00:53:00] navigation failed, and I'm like, they're just testing NATO's defenses in response. What do you think the truth is? I think it's somewhere in between.

Andrew Bustamante: We've also seen where Ukrainian anti rocket efforts have deflected Russian rockets into Poland. We've seen that happen too. War has collateral damage.

War has things that don't happen in nice boxes, so it doesn't surprise me. That we're seeing drones crashing in a NATO country. It also doesn't surprise me that Poland of all countries would exercise, I think it was Article four of the NATO agreement where all countries have to come together and have a joint conversation about what they're gonna do.

Jordan Harbinger: Should we make sure that's

Andrew Bustamante: Article four? I think it's Article four. I think Article five is the joint defense article where they have to come to defend each other. Oh

Jordan Harbinger: yeah. Okay.

Andrew Bustamante: But they initiated one article, and the other article, the more severe article is still on standby. It's not surprising to me that it happened.

I think what's surprising to me is that it hasn't happened more.

Jordan Harbinger: I also agree. I thought that was surprising. 'cause my friends in Poland, I have a bunch of friends in Poland and they're like, everybody's worried I just canceled my vacation. 'cause you don't wanna be [00:54:00] outside the country if we have to emergency get back or you, we stuck.

Something like that. I don't know about the logic there. I feel like if you were going to Sri Lanka, now's a good time to maybe stay there for a while, but whatever. Poland is also

Andrew Bustamante: the most culturally opposed to Russia of almost anybody else. And nato like they're the most paranoid. They're the most secure.

They're the most aggressive rhetoric. So it's kind of a

Jordan Harbinger: hard temperature gauge. I would not screw with Poland. If you think Ukraine's shown remarkable resilience and toughness. Poland is gonna, I mean, they have a lot more weapons. They're way better armed. And they're like you said, more scared and they have their crap together way more than way less.

They corrupt for this. They're way less corrupt than Ukraine. And they have what, three plus years of notice of seeing what happens when Russia says, don't worry, it's just a military exercise. And they've been next to Belarus forever. And that's always been like kind of a well

Andrew Bustamante: Russian Russia. Funny how we're Russia now We just touch on Ukraine's corruption now, like the rhetoric in 2023, 2022 was that Ukraine wasn't corrupt as somebody who lived in Ukraine.

I'm like,

Jordan Harbinger: excuse me, I got robbed at the airport by [00:55:00] customs. I never believed that crap.

Andrew Bustamante: I'm just saying you are internationally traveled enough to have known the truth. But the average American person believed we were fighting in Ukraine because Ukraine was a democracy. We were fighting for Ukraine.

'cause Ukraine was a democracy and we were defending democracy and nobody would touch the fucking corruption there until two years later when Zelinsky himself, just to re win favor from Europe, had to root out corruption. And he was like, Hey guys, we've been corrupt for a long time. We lost a bunch of money, so we're gonna.

Get rid of all these generals and ministry leaders.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Look, I'm not no shade on the Ukrainian people. They're brave Brazilian. I loved Ukraine. I just got robbed by the cops. One of the things they, multiple times, one of the main things that all my Ukrainian friends told me was, if the police talk to you, just ignore them.

Pretend you don't speak Russian. And I was like, that doesn't sound from an American perspective, that sounds like a really bad idea. What do I do? They're like, walk or run away. And I'm like,

Andrew Bustamante: that's just not, that's so un-American.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And then they were like, whatever you do, don't get in the car. And then other like older Americans who were [00:56:00] there who were like importing tractors, they were like, just don't get in a police car.

And I'm like, okay, why do people keep saying that? And they're like, because they're gonna extort you. They can lock you in there and you have to dig out your wallet and pay to get out. So another American guy, he's like, any advice? I was like, Hey, you're new here. I'll tell you what everybody told me. If a cop talks to you, don't talk to him and don't get in the car.

And he's, oh, okay. And then a week later he is, dude. I didn't follow your advice. A cop talked to me and I got in the car and then he locked me in there and until I emptied my wallet and I was like, oh. So it does happen, alright. And I remember cops talking to me too, and I was just like, sorry. No rush. No rush.

And I just like duck into a hotel. Here's a pro tip. If you're in an authoritarian country, duck into a nice fancy hotel or business, duck into any business owned by a really rich person. That's nice because rich people are above the police, and the police are not going to go into the equivalent of the Four Seasons in Odessa, Ukraine and start screwing around with the people who are staying there because those people are the clients of the oligarch that owns the property chain.

Not somebody that you wanna mess with if you're a cop who is trying to get the [00:57:00] lunch money. So that was always my trick. It was like, if someone's messing with me, I'm like, let me just go in my hotel and grab it real quick. And I'm just, I'm not coming out. I'm sitting there talking to the concierge. I remember talking to the concierge at a five star hotel in Odessa.

Or maybe, or whatever, Jose City in Ukraine, wherever I was. And I said, the cops are outside. And he goes, oh, you can just stay here. You want some coffee? I was like, yeah, sure. And the cop eventually sort of like wandered in to look and the concierge, I didn't understand what he said, but it was basically the equivalent of, get outta here right now, or I'm gonna call my boss, who's gonna call his boss?

Who's gonna call your boss's boss and you're gonna be outside with a empty pot collecting change after this. 'cause that cop was basically like this. And then just sort of like, oh, you know, like what are the hands in the air? Shuffle away kind of things. And I remember seeing that cop, 'cause he would always screw around in the cyber cafe.

He didn't have internet at home. And I remember being like, he was just like, oh I'm not gonna screw with that guy 'cause he's staying at the whatever. And I just remember being like,

Andrew Bustamante: wow, that's a solid pro. That works. Yeah, it's a pro tip. Stuck into any [00:58:00] hotel. Duck into any, yeah, any restaurant, any probably business.

Jordan Harbinger: It probably, unless if state security's chasing you, that's different. They have cause, but if it's a traffic cop that wants a bribe and you're in, I dunno, Bosnia, go back to a five star hotel or any business that's in, you know, a nice one and they are just not gonna screw with you. Generally. No guarantees.

Don't at me. If this gets you beat up, it's better than getting beat up without trying, you probably won't get beat up if you're inside the hotel or inside the business. Very unlikely. Right. Exactly. So what do we think is gonna happen in Ukraine? I mean, they're kind of a pawn at a table according to pretty much everybody.

Andrew Bustamante: They've always been a pawn at a table. I believe that what Trump understands about Ukraine is that in business terms, we are sunk cost into Ukraine and we've sunk this cost in order to advance our weapons knowledge and our weapons capabilities. And as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, we realized the importance of drones and we were able to start developing and creating new military style drones in the US And we were only five or seven years behind China, who has been doing it for a longer period of time.

So [00:59:00] we got those benefits from Ukraine, and to a certain extent, the money that we paid was to help us get that experience without having to get it at the receiving end of bullets and bombs. But the other side is we want to be able to rebuild Ukraine when the war ends. We wanna be able to send out loans and lease agreements.

We wanna be able to have American businesses that win the rebuilding contracts for Western Ukraine when all this is over. Likewise, Putin knows that he is gonna boost his economy by rebuilding Eastern Ukraine. That's part of how the game works. But we need the conflict to end before then.

Jordan Harbinger: It looks to me a little bit like Germany.

I'm not saying the Ukrainians are Nazi Germany and World War ii, but I just mean it's gonna potentially be divided up.

Andrew Bustamante: And that's what we were saying. Putin is a master manipulator. Putin is an excellent misinformation and disinformation propagandist, but to a certain extent, what he has done is he has made limited claims from the very beginning that now four years later, we look back on and we're like, Putin always said that he didn't really wanna [01:00:00] take all of Ukraine.

And he always said he didn't want to threaten its sovereignty. All he said is that he didn't want them to become part of nato. So now, because he is been so consistent for so long, now we have that as our own justification for Putin has been saying the same thing for four years. So we, we might as well trust him now.

Yikes. That's not how he works. No, but that's how he

Jordan Harbinger: knows Logic works. Russia needs agriculture resources that are located in Ukraine. The West basically just needs contracts, like you said, and Ukraine as a buffer from Russia for the rest of Europe.

Andrew Bustamante: That's just what Europe needs. That's not even what we need.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, that's true. If

Andrew Bustamante: anything, I think the United States, and I think Donald Trump knows this too, if the United States does pull out of nato. And if they don't have a buffer against Russia, they're gonna have that much more of an impetus to continue increasing the defense spending. And guess who is the world's number one weapons exporter.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's gonna be the us. It's the

Andrew Bustamante: United States.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And depending on if we blow it. 'cause right now they are afraid to buy weapons from us 'cause we can turn off the spigot. So they're re-engaging their own domestic defense industry. That's the

Andrew Bustamante: missteps that the United States, and this is the problem with our current political climate [01:01:00] swinging so far left and so far right.

It's unpredictable. It's totally unpredictable. Not just to us, to our allies, to all of our allies. And our allies are not just our allies because they're democracies. They're our allies because they buy our weapons, they buy our tech, they run their money through our financial systems. They trade in US dollars.

That's what makes them allies. When China watches us freeze billions of dollars in Russian assets. China's like Shit, we're taking our money outta the US dollar. And that's exactly what you saw in 2023 and 2024. They took all of their resources out, which really helped exacerbate our own inflation. They didn't do it to create inflation, they did it because they saw that if their money's tied up in New York, it's gonna get frozen.

But if it's tied up in Dubai, it won't.

Jordan Harbinger: They still own a ton of American bonds. I'll have to look this up. 750 billion to 800 billion in US Treasury securities

Andrew Bustamante: ask what the percentage

Jordan Harbinger: of

Andrew Bustamante: US bonds owned by foreign or owned by China, kind of thing. 'cause I did this research not too long ago

Jordan Harbinger: and I was surprised by how [01:02:00] little the number was

Andrew Bustamante: in terms of percentage.

Jordan Harbinger: 2.1% of the US national debt is owned by China. Sounds like a little, and it is a little, but it's also a lot, ton of money. Yeah. An outrageous sum. Billions. Yes. Oh yeah. At least if you're looking for another episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show to check out. Here's a trailer of our interview with Jack Barsky, former KGB Spy, who posed as an American in a truer than life version of a Hollywood movie.

This is one of our most popular episodes of the show. Jack not only dodged the FBI for decades, but also defected from the Soviet Union secretly becoming a real American. We'll learn how spies were recruited and trained during the Cold War and what skills Jack used to assimilate seamlessly into American culture.

Jack Barsky: I was untouchable. I was above the law. I was always bypassing customs and passport controls, so a young person that really feels good because I never liked rules.

Jordan Harbinger: How did you flip to eventually becoming full American? I [01:03:00] know they tried to call you home. Can you take us through that?

Jack Barsky: They called me back as an emergency departure.

They've done this in the past. They call back an agent and as soon as they step on Soviet soil, they are jailed or even executed. I was stalling the Soviets. And then one day they send one of their resident agents and he said to me, you gotta come home or else you're dead. It was a threat. I decided I would defy them and tell 'em that I'm not returning.

I will not betray any secrets and please give the money on my account to my German family. Wow. And

Jordan Harbinger: tell us how you got caught, because this story's just not complete until you, like you said, had to face your past.

Jack Barsky: I was stopped on the other side of a tollgate. It was a state trooper, just like to check your license and registration and could you step out of the car.

I step out of the car still not having a clue what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Somebody approaching me from the back. The fellow introduced himself, he says, Joe Riley, FBI, [01:04:00] and he showed me this badge. We would like to talk with you. The first question I asked, am I under arrest? And the answer was no.

Then I said, what took you so long

Jordan Harbinger: for more from Jack Barsky, including how Jack was finally caught by the FBI and what happened after that? Check out episode 285 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. That's it for part one, part two, out in a few days. If it's not already, all things Andrew Bustamante will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

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You can also connect [01:05:00] with me on LinkedIn. Love to see you there. This show, it's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends.

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