1221: Andrew Bustamante | A Spy’s Guide to Our Dangerous World Part Two

1221: Andrew Bustamante | A Spy's Guide to Our Dangerous World Part Two

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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 neuroscientist correspondent four star general, or real life pirates.

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It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, part two with Andrew Busante. If you haven't heard part one, of course, go back and listen to that one. First, we're talking about espionage, Epstein, Iran, Ukraine, and more.

[00:01:00] Now, let's continue this conversation here with Andrew Busante surveillance states like the UAE.

Andrew Bustamante: What's it like living in a place

Jordan Harbinger: like that?

Andrew Bustamante: You know, nobody wants to hear it, but there's a lot of conveniences that come from living in a surveillance state. It's super safe. It's a big part of why I really do think that the US is on a trend towards being more of a surveillance state because it's so convenient, it's so safe, it's so efficient.

In the United Arab Emirates, I lived in Abu Dhabi for a while, and as soon as you enter, you're given a national id. You don't have to be a resident or a citizen, but you're given a national ID because your national ID is tied to your passport, and then you're required to create, to have a local bank account.

So now your passport, your credit card, your bank account, and your national ID are all linked. If you rent a car, it's linked. If you own a car, it's linked. And the reason that happens is so that anywhere you go. Cameras can either pick up on the RFID in your id, they can connect everything. There's no showing up in court.

If you get a speeding ticket, you're immediately fine. They see you going [00:02:00] too fast on a camera that's sitting every quarter mile, every half mile along the highway. They don't call 'em miles there. They call 'em kilometers. Every 500 meters, you pass a camera, if you're going one kilometer an hour over the speed limit, you're immediately fined.

You're immediately billed. It's taken off of your bank account. It's taken out of your, your license, even really? Is it really one kilometer over a one kilometer mount. So Dubai and Abu Dhabi live in two different Emirates. So you drive the highway to get between them. You can, I shit you not when you cross the midpoint because all the cars go from speeding.

'cause in Dubai and the Emirate of Dubai laws are much more flexible. Where they're much more Sharia in Abu Dhabi. So you've got all the speeding on the highway and then as soon as you cross into Abu Dhabi, everybody slows down to the speed limit. It's clear as day when it happens. Really. Some surveillance states are not great places to live, such as North Korea.

I don't even know if North Korea, it really even counts as a surveillance state. 'cause they can't surveil everybody

Jordan Harbinger: think surveillance state without real electricity. It's, [00:03:00] it's a little rough around the edges, right? Tattletale state. Yeah, tattletale state. China maybe. But again, American China, yeah. Cool.

Place to live if you're a foreigner. Less so if you're a rural Chinese person who's trying to survive in a modern economy. But anyway, we can. I was just curious what it's like to live in a place like that, because most people haven't, most people never will. Do you think the CIA had anything to do with the JFK assassination And now you can see, by the way, I'm just trying to get clips for stoners on YouTube,

Andrew Bustamante: but let's do it.

So I don't believe CIA had anything to do with the JFK assassination in terms of choosing to kill JFK. Do I think that they had some kind of operation that was going on that may have overlapped with the assassin? Very likely, especially if there was so much foreign, domestic political subterfuge that was going on all around JFK.

Everybody was probably involved in some way, shape, or form. Not to mention the fact that it happened at a time when there was no government oversight. So everybody's doing their own fucking thing and the left hand isn't talking to the right hand. So it would make sense that there's overlap, but I don't think they were responsible for it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:00] Tell me about Jeffrey Epstein, uh, speaking of Stoner Clipse for YouTube, but tell me about, let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein because. So first of all, people are like, he was an asset. It's easy to say that, but people have no idea what they're talking about. Why would somebody like that be valuable, for example?

Andrew Bustamante: So there's two terms. There's officers and assets in the world of human intelligence, right? Officers are the people who work on behalf of your national security infrastructure. So if you're the United States, you have a US intelligence officer. If you are a, or you have a law enforcement officer, but your asset is not usually a member of your national security apparatus, your asset is the information source that's helping to secure national security.

So whether you're a CI asset, a clandestine informant, or confidential informant for FBI or for a local police force, you're an asset producing information that yields security, infrastructure, information, relevance, right? So you've got officers and assets, Epstein. Many people, I think correctly [00:05:00] identify him as an asset.

The guy was for sure, not an officer. There are some people who are like, oh, he worked for CIA as if to imply he was a CIA officer. That is for sure not the case as an asset. CIA has a very difficult time getting American assets. There's all sorts of legal ole elements that make it very difficult for an American citizen to be an asset for CIA.

And then if that American citizen is committing active crimes, for sure can't touch 'em because CIA has no authority in the United States to grant leniency on criminals who are American citizens.

Jordan Harbinger: Right? So you can't do the law enforcement thing. Like with the mafia guys who come on the show, they send me these documents, I forget exactly what they're called, but it's like this person for the purposes of law enforcement in this particular case may engage in racketeering, bribery, gambling, illegal, whatever.

And it's. You're like, wow. And it's protected. It's a note from the DA or the US attorney that says, this guy's allowed to gamble, engage in a prostitution, racketeering operation, money laundering within the scope of this [00:06:00] particular operation. And then it's also in return. He's rolling

Andrew Bustamante: over on everybody's deal.

Correct. So the idea that Epstein was an asset for CIA also doesn't make any sense. The most logical intelligence role for him outside of the United States would've technically been a country that is distrusting, but still has access pro-American access, a country like Israel. And that's why there were so many suspicions that he was some kind of Israeli asset, which would make more sense than being a CIA asset.

But I actually had somebody recently who came from the national security law enforcement infrastructure side who gave me the most logical outcome that it makes the most sense that Epstein would actually be a FBI clandestine informant. He would have a letter like what you just dictated that says he's allowed to do all these things.

In the best interest of this FBI investigation against 55 other people. 'cause everything Jeffrey Epstein touched was dirty. Every person, every deal, he helped rich people hide [00:07:00] money. He was so much more valuable as a conduit for multiple cases rather than closing the case on him himself. And it would make sense for a guy like that.

Once you get the get outta jail free card from FBI, you know that FBI has a legal obligation to grant you immunity because that's what they put in the letter. And immunity means that even posthumously, they're not gonna expose you. 'cause to expose him as an FBI source now would basically tell every other current FBI source, we'll expose you to.

And they can't do that.

Jordan Harbinger: And obviously he was raping underage girls. There's no way to sugarcoat that. You can't get a letter that allows you to do that from the FBI. Theoretically can't get a letter

Andrew Bustamante: like that. I don't think you can get a letter like that that allows you to do that to American girls.

Interesting. Oh my gosh, that's dark. I'm sorry. People have to understand that there's a very big difference in the world between American and not American when it comes to the American legal system. You're not wrong.

Jordan Harbinger: Think the other thing he was doing was filming [00:08:00] all of these powerful people also raping underage girls in order to get something on them and then maybe control these people.

So is that sort of in line with the, because the FBI can't go. You can blackmail other people.

Andrew Bustamante: Well may maybe they can, but that's a dirty letter. There's all sorts of tricky stuff here, man, because you've got islands that are not American islands. He was in the US Virgin Islands. But that's, so those are US territories.

I don't actually know what the legal

Jordan Harbinger: obligations are. We'd have to ask a real lawyer who is not me to explain the subtle differences in FBI jurisdiction between us and those. Or it

Andrew Bustamante: may, and it may not even be FBI jurisdiction, maybe some other jurisdiction. But my point there is there are certain states in the United States require that both people under observation acknowledge that they know they're under observation.

Other states don't like, there are certain states in the US where if I call you, I can record it without telling you it's recorded. Yes. Single party consent. Yeah. And there's other states where you have to have both. And the same thing is true for video. So again, if FBI was trying to collect incriminating evidence [00:09:00] against American citizens committing crimes in a US territory, him having cameras everywhere would make perfect sense.

And maybe the majority of his footage couldn't even be touched because it was American businessmen committing crimes against foreign girls. That did not align in terms of illegality, prostitution is legal all over the world. Slavery is still legal all over the world. We live in a bubble here in the United States.

Jordan Harbinger: We don't realize it. What mistakes are oversights in counterintelligence would allow somebody like Epstein to operate. It's the scale he operated at for so long.

Andrew Bustamante: I mean, it would take a great deal of mistakes, which is part of, I think, the argument behind why it's almost improbable that all of those mistakes would've happened and then sustained for so long it makes more sense that there was some sort of acceptable measure that he was working within.

Jordan Harbinger: Because I think the conspiracy folks, and honestly I can't say that they're totally off on this one. From the sound of it would be so many things have to go wrong to let somebody like that be off the leash for so long that [00:10:00] it's almost like he had compromat on people who made important decisions, whether to shut down an operation like that, for example.

Andrew Bustamante: That's where it all starts to fall apart. People land on this idea of blackmail. Professionals don't use blackmail. Blackmail is the weakest form of persuasion, of manipulation. It's so fucking weak. But people believe that it's such a big deal because of movies and television. If you just do a again thought experiment with basic blackmail, somebody comes out and tries to blackmail.

You're like, oh, I know that you cheated on your wife. Here's the blackmail. Now, as soon as it's publicly available, the person who receives that blackmail is like, it's fake. It's a phony. Well, especially now, deep fake bingo. It's ai and then who's gonna put the resources into analyzing it to verify that it's real?

Meanwhile, you, the person trying to blackmail the person just spent your only round blue or what exactly that happens at an international level. It's even worse. If net and Yahoo had dirt on Donald Trump and he [00:11:00] released that dirt on Donald Trump publicly, Donald Trump would refuse it. Nobody would verify it.

And then at the exact same time, Donald Trump would be like net. And Yahoo just tried to stab me in the back by making up fake information. He's cut off. We're gonna put sanctions on Israel, everybody's gonna, it's not how it works. It's a huge losing game. It seems like the real,

Jordan Harbinger: real would be either all those mistakes were made and it was just a total cluster fuck over there.

Or he was just really valuable doing something else. And everyone was like, God, this guy is so gross, but ugh. Look at all this great stuff. He's getting us all the time. And gross people are super valuable when the public says, we'll never know the truth. Do you agree or do you think they'll never know the truth?

They're never gonna expose this. Right? And you know, it's funny, it's like a JFK thing.

Andrew Bustamante: The shooter of Donald Trump in July, in Butler, Pennsylvania, no motive has ever been established. Oh really? People forget that shit. People just completely forget. And that's the trend that government understands the memory hole.

People don't pay attention long enough, so everybody's throwing a fit about it. No one's gonna remember fucking Epstein, what? 12 months, two years. Even with all the clip traffic. You can go [00:12:00] to like Google Trends right now and watch how the trending searches for Epstein have significantly dropped just a matter of time before something else takes over.

It's a little

Jordan Harbinger: disturbing, but it's also like, look, the government wants to cover something or keep something secret.

Andrew Bustamante: Whatcha gonna do? That's their right. Yeah, that's their right. That's they choose what message to share publicly and what not to. People don't like hearing this, but the United States government is what defined your rights, which is why they can take your rights away.

People all often will say, now, you

Jordan Harbinger: know, these are inalienable. Okay? Why? 'cause a government document says that. One thing that people are often surprised by. I saw this absolute knucklehead at the airport and he had put all these like anime stickers on his passport and I said, man, you better get those off there.

And he is like, why? It's my passport. And I was like, let me, lemme stop you right there. Not to be too much of a law nerd, but that is not yours. The government of the United States owns that document. And if you go to this customs officer and you got fricking Charizard on page seven instead of a visa for South Korea, they [00:13:00] can confiscate this and make you get a new one.

It's actually a crime, I think to deface this in the first place.

Andrew Bustamante: I feel like the front page of your passport says this is government property.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. As if anybody read anything in there that wasn't just their name and address. Right.

Andrew Bustamante: Just, it's just sad that people carry around a document. They haven't read it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're supposed to sign it too. That's another thing. If you don't sign your passport, you can go to a place, and I can't remember where I was, might have been hungry or something, but he is like, you didn't sign your passport? And I was like, oh, let me do it right now. He's like, no, no, you can't just sign it right now.

How do I know that you, this is your passport. You have to sign this in the president of a government official, which by the way is not true, but he was like, how do I convince this guy to give me a hundred euros right now? That was basically the conversation we were having, and this has actually happened to other people with the whole signing of the passport thing.

Sign your passport and read the fine print. No. Put fricking stickers on there with Otaku or whatever the hell it is. What elements of your CIA training do you find yourself applying in your day-to-day life?

Andrew Bustamante: The vast majority of what I apply is [00:14:00] understanding human behavior, persuasion and influence techniques.

It's how we've grown our business. It's how we've grown popular in the last few years. It's how we live right now, right? Because those things are just based in empirical science, and we use them all the time at CIA because the process of creating an asset, the process of getting someone to share their secrets, the process of somebody transitioning from a patriot who loves their country to a traitor, who betrays their country.

That process is age old. It's predictable human behavior. It's nothing more than building the experience of an intimate relationship that's artificial. And everybody learns those skills through the school of hard knocks. Who to trust, who not to trust, what the right things are to say, we call it how to play the game.

We all know what it's like to suck up to the teacher we don't like, but we're only sucking up. 'cause we want an opportunity to get a good grade and we never know when we're gonna have to call in that card, but we're gonna build up that social capital anyways. All CIA does is give us the terminology and the process to do those consistently.

So now that's what we use. I use [00:15:00] those all the time. Personal security, home security, I mean the list goes on and on. But I use so many spy skills in my everyday life that I knew I could build a business called Everyday Spy, which is just spy skills in everyday life.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. How do they choose the cover? I assume you don't get any part in that and it's something that's beneficial to the agency, obviously, but are all the covers relatively.

Boring. Like corporate attorney, finance manager, or is it like, wow, this dude is already kind of a well-known ish reggae artist that travels around the world? Let's lean into that.

Andrew Bustamante: No, I will speak for the post nine 11 CIA because pre nine 11 CIA didn't have structure. It didn't have oversight, it didn't have left and right boundaries.

The executive branches tool of foreign policy, they could do whatever the, the executive branch chose. So everything prior to 2001, if you have an example of a professional tennis player, that's fine. But post nine 11, with the [00:16:00] advent of government oversight with Senate Intelligence committees, right, with A DNI in place, everything had to change and it professionalized in a way where it was using best practices for intelligence operations.

And one of the best practices is you want cover identities that are benign. That are not alerting, that are uninteresting because the benefits of that are exponential. Not only does your officer have an easier thing to remember because they're a middle manager in an envelope company, but now it's really easy for them to tell that cover story on a plane or in a cab, and nobody wants to talk to them.

If you make them something interesting and then they talk about it, other people are gonna ask questions, and the more questions, the more you have to master your cover, the more room you have to make mistakes inside your cover. So they want very benign cover identities. Now, I will also say you are correct.

We don't get any say 99% of the time. We don't get any say in what our cover is. The 1% of the time that we do get a say, we have to justify why it would matter. Like for example, you [00:17:00] have family connections in Taiwan. So if they were to be like, Hey, we're gonna base your business out of Malaysia, you might be like, eh, how about a little bit?

It doesn't really make any sense because it's gonna hold up to scrutiny if it's out of Taiwan. So that's the 1% where you get a say.

Jordan Harbinger: So basically, if you can backstop it a little bit by accident, by who you really are, really are Exactly. Then it's helpful. Yeah. The reason I ask this is because. And again, I dunno if this is apocryphal bullshit or not, but there are these stories like, did you know that whatever film actress was a CIA asset?

And it's like, but that's the difference between an officer and an asset, like an officer, middle manager, envelope company asset. This person who, I don't know, dictators love him and he's always performing one-on-one shows with a Gaddafi. Like, alright, we kind of wanna be in this guy's orbit.

Andrew Bustamante: We don't have to give him a cover.

Jordan Harbinger: He's a pop singer.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, exactly. Right. And that's why I love that you understand the difference between asset and officer, and hopefully everybody listening now knows that better too. So when you see. Was Frank Sinatra an asset? How many musical artists have been accused of being assets? Yeah, it's a ton.

Yeah. [00:18:00] Possibly because especially if they get a letter that says, Hey, when you're doing this stuff on behalf of the United States, you're also allowed to get free gold. Yeah. And cocaine in women and whatever. We won't tax you on the gold that you collect. That's right. All of a sudden, Sinatra's like, Hey, I'll cheers to that.

I'll come back once every six months and tell you about how I got banged by three hookers and you know, whatever in France. Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. Probably do it for free information. Warfare and influence. I'd love to talk about this because social media is a weird battlefield now more than it has been in the past with TikTok and everything.

How would you explain to the average listener reviewer how intelligent services might weaponize something like TikTok X Instagram? Maybe we use the conflicts like Ukraine or Israel Palestine. It's

Andrew Bustamante: not a might like it's an active weaponization I just said

Jordan Harbinger: might 'cause in case you're like, I can't

Andrew Bustamante: say

Jordan Harbinger: how

Andrew Bustamante: they're actually doing it.

Oh, no, no. It's actually happening. But I will say this, I would not call social media a battleground because in a battleground you have [00:19:00] offensive and defensive efforts that are taking place. You have no fucking defensive efforts in social media. It's all offensive. It's a mosh pit. Everybody's shooting shit all over the place and nobody's trying to build defenses.

All the defenses, were kind of outsourcing to the executives who run those firms, or the security teams, or the moms and dads who have to babysit their kids, or we create apps that block content from kids, but nobody's trying to actively identify the fake information and prevent it from coming. So it's not really a battlefield, it's just the giant like lava pit.

But the way that it's used, professional intelligence services. So when it's coming from state owned. Sources, state owned bots and state owned services, they understand that getting a specific outcome is very, very difficult. The probability of getting the outcome you want when it comes to an influence campaign, an information campaign probability is very low, but the probability is very high that you'll be able to create so much chaos and noise that you will consume more of your opponent's [00:20:00] resources at a proper ROI.

So I can put $5 into an ad that creates a huge headache for you, and then I know that you have to put $200 into resources to try to fix the ad that I put out there for $5. So that's what ends up happening, especially with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, stealing cryptocurrency, China. It's so easy to create these influence campaigns that just create doubt and chaos and discord because the cost to fight it is so expensive that they already know the United States isn't gonna pay it.

Instead, they're gonna say, Hey, counterintelligence Center, please send out a note to the American people that says Maybe you shouldn't trust what's on YouTube.

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Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, and spies every single week, it is because of my network a skill that I have [00:23:00] taught two real spies in real life from both sides of the pond, Europe and the United States, or at least, well, I shouldn't say too much about that, but let's just say that I'm teaching you the same skills, at least some of them for free over@sixminutenetworking.com.

You might not be a spy, but you definitely need relationship building skills no matter where you are in your life or career. Yes, even if you're retired and you need to learn them in non cringey, down to earth ways that are practical, that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better peer, and ideally in just six minutes a day because that's all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course.

Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again, all free, zero shenanigans@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Andrew Bustamante. China and other places. At least for me personally, China has tried to get me to post propaganda before, but I'm curious what's the most effective way governments quietly influenced journalists or media organizations without it looking like outright propaganda.

'cause this attempt by China was really clunky. It got exposed on YouTube. It's basically like one guy who was an agency sent a bunch of [00:24:00] stuff to a bunch of YouTubers without vetting them. Like you would know that I probably wouldn't post Chinese propaganda if you, I don't know, looked at anything I've done in the last 20 years.

And they also emailed my friends at the China show, which is like properly anti-China, and they asked them to do the same thing. So they got exposed. But other countries are slicker. They're better at this.

Andrew Bustamante: It's about the modus operandi, the strategy behind the country. China, their strategy is a bull in a China shop.

That's how they do things. That's how they've always done things. They do lots of sloppy operations. And I say sloppy because that's a generic term. What I mean by that is they have no problem handing over to amateurs. Multiple opportunities to do covert influence to less covert influence to do digital offensive cyber operations, foreign commercial operations, they'll just outsource it to anybody because they want as much noise as possible.

The more noise people feel like China's so sophisticated, there's such a threat. They're everywhere. Meanwhile, very high sophisticated operations can sneak by, [00:25:00] but even when they broke into the Office of Personnel Management in 2003, I think it was, they left clear mess in the code. That was easy for people to go back and be like, China's the one who stole this, which they love because this is all art of war stuff.

When your opponent talks about how dangerous you are, it makes everybody afraid of you. Russia's the opposite. Russia doesn't want anybody to know they were there. So Russia goes in and when they leave, you actually don't know they were there, so we don't even know what they stole.

Jordan Harbinger: Or you think it was North Korea because they put that in there.

Like one of my friends does high level cybersecurity stuff for like the ruling family of Dubai and stuff like that. Right. He'll say things like This looks like a Russian attack, and then the next day, this looks like a North Korean attack. Actually, no, we think it's a Russian attack. How do you screw those things up?

And he is like, well, what happened was we saw Korean in the code and we knew it wasn't South Korea 'cause it didn't make sense and it was using North Korean vocabulary. Then we realized that probably was put there on purpose to make it look like it was them when it was actually fancy bear whatever. And that's a false

Andrew Bustamante: flag.[00:26:00]

False flag Operations are very common and it's a great way of throwing people off the scent when you make it look like somebody else has done something because you know that the first scrutiny is gonna go to the other flag. So that's a big part of it. When the US finds that Russia has infiltrated a system and they've done it with tools that the US didn't even know existed, they don't make a fucking press release about that.

'cause they don't want to tell the American people, Hey the Russians, we can't protect you. The Russians just stole all of your data from the social security thing and they use this tool that we'd never seen before. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: pretty

Andrew Bustamante: smart,

Jordan Harbinger: huh?

Andrew Bustamante: Anyway,

Jordan Harbinger: back to other news, it's quite interesting to see how they use journalism and media and social media and that's just gonna get worse and worse

Andrew Bustamante: and there's nothing you can do to prevent bad information from getting out.

The only thing you can do is identify it on your own and then not internalize it, not trust it. Because right now there's no sufficient defensive strategy out there. AI can't do it. The government can't do it. The people who actually control the platforms can't do it. Even if they wanted to. [00:27:00] Meta wants to block disinformation.

They want the government off their ass, but they do the best they can do. But at the end of the day, it's still user beware. Israel

Jordan Harbinger: Palestine, man, I'd love to talk about how radicalization happens. It's a little bit, maybe it's too spicy of a meatball. Too big a bite. It's such

Andrew Bustamante: an interesting meatball though.

Yeah. 'cause I agree it's spicy, but it's such a good meatball.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, we can dive into it. First of all, this is also a tough question. Where do you stand on this? I mean, it's a tough conflict.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, it's a tough conflict. And I think at the end of the day, Americans need to understand that Israel is good for us.

Tell me about this. Because everyone's like, we're wasting our tax

Jordan Harbinger: money defending some random country

Andrew Bustamante: in the Middle East. Like that's because we're That's 'cause they're dumb asses, right? I'm like, you're in high school. You dunno what you're talking about. Yeah. So we have to understand that America, all the way back to the days of Civil War, the reason that we chose the fights that we chose to fight were so that we could secure ourselves for the future.

The federal government isn't here to take care of us today. The federal government is here to ensure the survivability of the federal government, the American idea, the institution survives. [00:28:00] They don't really care about you today. So anybody who thinks like, oh, the government's there to serve me. They are public servants.

But you are just one small in like a reminder that you don't even own your passport. They're not here to serve you. Correct. Yeah. So the United States knows that Israel serves as almost like a watchdog that keeps Iran and all the threats from the Middle East over their first, in order for something to reach us, it basically has to go through Israel and Israel being a country that we fund, that we helped to develop, that we helped to build their economy that we supply with weapons.

Like it's a strategic partner. It's a tactical partner. It's an ideological partner in so many ways. And not only that, but Israel sits in a very different place than where we sit. We sit with no threat to our northern, southern, eastern, or western borders. We have Ocean Canada and Mexico. We're good. Israel literally sits in a den of thieves.

Almost every border is an active [00:29:00] aggressor. And if it's not like a country like Jordan, they're just a pass through away from an active aggressor. Land borders are exposed, ocean borders are exposed. So you have to understand that Israel is in a highly threatened posture and it knows governmentally that part of its job is to reduce the threat to the United States.

So when you look at it through that lens, Netanyahu going after Hezbollah and weakening Hezbollah benefits the United States, him going after Iran and weakening Iran benefits the United States. Him bombing Qatar benefits the United States. Tell me about that. 'cause people are like, Qatar's, the US ally.

What the hell? Yeah. People are fucking stupid. Qatar is the financial hub for Islamic extremism. It has always been. That's where all the uh, Islamic extremist money goes through. They facilitate that, which is a big part of why Hamas has a footprint in Qatar at all. Qatar also is the largest military base in the Middle East because the United States made that strategic decision in an age before we had Islamic extremism, but gets complicated.

[00:30:00] So Netanyahu knows that he needs to win back favor with Islamic countries, and the chief Islamic country is Saudi Arabia. Everybody else is second to Saudi Arabia. And if people don't know that, they need to wake up to that. Your Bahrain, your Oman, your UAE Iran, all of them comes second to Saudi Arabia.

So he knows that if he pissed off Saudi Arabia the most with the devastation that he's wreaked on Gaza. So if he wants to get any favor back from the Saudis, he needs to, without giving up on Gaza. What he needs to do is he needs to find other ways to make them happy. And when I say happy, I'm talking about the Abraham Accords that they almost signed between Israel and Saudi Arabia before October 7th.

So now what Netanyahu has done in the last year and a half is he has systematically reduced the biggest threats, not just to the United States, but also to Saudi Arabia, taking

Jordan Harbinger: out Hezbollah, weakening Iran, and then having Syria fall. This is an [00:31:00] uncomfortable analogy, but you remember when Osama Bin Laden was surprised that the towers fell?

They weren't just severely damaged. I feel like that was what Syria was. They were like, we're gonna take out Hezbollah. They're gonna rebuild eventually. Oh wait, it made them pull their forces from Syria. Well, we kind of saw that come, holy crap, Assad flew to Moscow and it's over. And then Iran was like.

How did we own all this? How did we screw this up? And I think then, and only then was everybody kind of like, wow, we thought a couple dominoes were gonna fall. We didn't realize they were

Andrew Bustamante: all gonna fall or almost all. So Netanyahu, as much as people wanna criticize him, and a lot of what he's done is illegal according to international law and human rights, but he has essentially secured Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States for probably two decades.

We're not gonna be dealing with Hezbollah, we're not gonna be dealing with Hamas to the level that we've been dealing with them in the past. The Houthis and Iran and the Iran nuclear program. They're all significantly reduced. That makes everybody happy. So even [00:32:00] more than that, Netanyahu is enough of a statesman to understand that formally the United States and Saudi Arabia and UAE are all gonna come out and say, Israel, you're a naughty, naughty boy, and we're not gonna support you.

He understands that's what they have to say publicly, because diplomatically, they will 100% continue to support the Israeli government, even if it means Netanyahu has to fall at some point in the future.

Jordan Harbinger: Do hostage situations like the Israeli hostages, for example, this is a conflict hostage situation, so it's a little different from, I don't know, American hostages in Iran or something like that, but do they follow predictable intelligence patterns or are they all kind of entirely unique and situational?

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, I would say they're more unique and situational, and even then I would want to really defer to a hostage expert in what they've seen in multiple hostage environments. But what we find playing out that people aren't speaking to is the fact that hostages don't live, and when they don't live for whatever reason, they lose their value as leverage.

So you've got [00:33:00] one side that wants to believe they're alive, and you've got another side that wants you to believe they're alive because as long as you believe they're alive, whether or not they're alive, you have leverage. As this conflict has taken so many years, one of the dark realities that we do have to understand that people again, don't want to accept.

If Netanyahu decides to air raid a building and there's two sick hostages alive in the basement and the air raid kills them, he can still claim that they were killed in custody before they ever got there. So he has leverage to continue to prosecute conflict because the impetus to prove that it wasn't the air raid is on a terrorist organization, which is gonna be very difficult to prove.

What's interesting to

Jordan Harbinger: me is I'll, I'll be talking about this conflict with somebody and they'll say like, this is Israel's fault, or the hostages are dying. And I was like, if the police. Storm a bank that's being robbed and the robbers kill the hostages in the bank. You don't blame the police. And people were like, of course you do.

That blew my [00:34:00] mind because I'm like, no, you blame the bank robbers. Who shot the hostages? The police went in there to, or the military, like trying to get them out. No, I blame the military. I blame the police. So you can't convince people on this one. They've picked their side. And that's what this conflict, speaking of social media and disinformation like this conflict is, it's almost like religious in nature, literally in some ways.

But culturally religious, you will never convince somebody who's pro-ISIS Israel, like a hardcore, that they're doing anything wrong. And you, you'll never convince somebody who's pro-Palestinian that, do you condemn Hamas? Yeah, but whatever. And then they'll qualify it with, but their resistance movement, there's no

Andrew Bustamante: middle ground here.

For most people. Responsibility lies in so many places. I don't blame social media. 'cause social media is just, it's the shit storm that everybody's watching. If there's anything I blame, it's the individual ignorance. Each individual person's ignorance in their inability to separate Hamas from Muslim, Hamas [00:35:00] from Palestinian and Israel from Jew.

There are plenty of Jews who are not Israelis and there are plenty of Israelis who are not Jews. We did an episode

Jordan Harbinger: on antisemitism and people are like, I don't hate Jews. All I'm saying is that the reason we blame Jews for everything is because of what Israel's doing. And I was like, dude, I don't think this

Andrew Bustamante: is the little nuanced discussion that you think you're making right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even Hamas. Hamas is only recognized as a terrorist organization by 12 countries because it has two different wings. It has a political wing, and it has an extremist wing, a militant wing. And even though I would say that the two are not as distinctly different as they probably want us to believe, they're still completely different from just being Palestinian, living in Gaza.

Jordan Harbinger: No, I agree with that a hundred percent. I'll move on from that 'cause it's a, again, a spicy meatball and we're not gonna solve anything on this. I was just curious about your opinion on that. Iran's always fascinating to me, right, because. They want conflict with the United States, but they want it to be opaque.

They can't just go, we're shooting rockets at American forces. That happens sometimes, but it's [00:36:00] pretty rare. It's usually in response to something else. They can't really attack the United States. They do it via proxies. They're like a shadow player, not really a direct actor most of the time. From a former SPA perspective, how does Iran project power without openly going to war?

Talk about Hezbollah and other organizations. Yeah,

Andrew Bustamante: absolutely. So Iran's primary point of conflict isn't even with the United States, it's with Saudi Arabia, because inside the Middle East you've got two different centers of influence that are competing for dominance, and it's Saudi Arabia and Sunni Islam and Iran and Shia Islam, and you've got these two distinctly different.

Centers of gravity. What Iran really wants is to make more Shia states than what Saudi Arabia really wants, is to maintain more Sunni states, and that's where the main axis of conflict is. But Saudi Arabia is so important to the United States and Saudi Arabia has been the reason that the United States has expanded so deep into the Middle East that now Iran understands that the United States is a secondary threat because anything that it does well, Saudi Arabia [00:37:00] benefits.

Iran also understands though that it's in a precarious situation because it's isolated. Iran's primary wealth comes from natural resources of which is oil and agriculture. It is the bread basket of the Middle East. So when you go to Saudi Arabia, when you go to UAE, when you go to Oman, you eat Iranian food, you eat Iranian produce, even though those countries all see Iran as a

Jordan Harbinger: villain.

What methods does Iran's intelligence service use to fund and coordinate proxies like Hezbollah and Habas and, and how do Western intelligence agencies counter and track that in the first place?

Andrew Bustamante: So it's a great question. Iran funds its proxies through a mix of subsidization, like subsidizing the proxies and then also letting the proxies do whatever they wanna do in addition to Iranian directed mission.

So like hang out, take over Lebanon, but also shoot stuff

Jordan Harbinger: at Israel when we need you to

Andrew Bustamante: correct and we'll pay you for the stuff we need you to do. And then maybe we'll give you like a monthly stipend for the other stuff. But you definitely have to survive on your own. [00:38:00] So keep stealing and robbing and whatever else, and extorting whoever you can.

So there's an element of both, which is why the proxies never really get very efficient. They never really get very large or successful. They're perpetually in third world mode. Hezbollah hasn't changed much except in terms of size in like 30 years. It hasn't really modernized 'cause it hasn't had the budget to modernize.

It's just trying to survive. So that's how they fund them. And then you had a second question. How do Western Services, intelligence services track and counter that? And that's a big challenge. So a lot of times what we do is we follow the money, we follow where the transactions are coming from, where they're originating, what the denominations are.

Big part of the reason why I am not a fan of decentralized currency, why I will never be a fan of decentralized currency is because the primary use case for decentralized currency is criminal activity. If you really care about economic benefit, you want centralized currency because every transaction generates money that doesn't come out of your taxpayer pocket.

So that's the big challenge. Bitcoiners are so angry right now. They're punching [00:39:00] the guy. Oh, yeah. And thank you Bitcoin for making a bunch of bad guys really fucking rich because your price is going up so much for something that people can't use in a pizza shop. Yeah. I do see people cheering a

Jordan Harbinger: lot for Bitcoin, and it's usually people where you go, oh, that guy, huh?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's, it's like a bunch of like human traffickers love it. Drug runners love it. The people who uh, sell people love it. Traffic children. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They love it. And us nerds, we love it too, but we're not what people are concerned about. Okay. Yeah. It's the decentralization. It appeals to the geek and the libertarian, but it's like we're cracking some eggs to make the solid and those eggs are minors and innocent people.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So follow the money. Yeah, follow the money. Follow the money.

Andrew Bustamante: Follow the money. And then when you find the source, this is what people also need to understand. When you find the source of the money, you don't run a raid. You then start to monitor it. Intelligence collects intelligence. Very rarely ever interrupts.

It was really when CTC, when the counter-terrorism center was first stood up. Every center inside the CIA has a mantra, if you [00:40:00] will, right? Like a saying that goes along with them. And CTC had to come up with a mantra. So they came up with this mantra that was deny, disrupt, and destroy. And the whole idea there was deny access first.

If you can't deny it, disrupt it. If you can't disrupt it or deny it, then destroy it. But if you can't destroy it, or if you can deny or disrupt, then do those things first. Given the recent talks

Jordan Harbinger: around nuclear enrichment and the fact that Iran moved all their uranium out, by the way, what was that about?

So for people who don't know, we dropped the, what was it called? The giant bomb on the naans facilities of several months ago. But we gave them a warning. So they moved out the personnel, they filled the tunnels with concrete so they could dig them out again, and they moved all the uranium,

Andrew Bustamante: from what we understand.

I don't know that we gave Iran a warning. I would wanna double check that. I don't recall us giving them a warning

Jordan Harbinger: either way. They moved everything out and everyone out, and they preserved the interior of the structure

Andrew Bustamante: with concrete before the bomb hit it. We don't know how much has been preserved, how much has been destroyed, but the satellite imagery suggests that there was a [00:41:00] mass exodus to get things out before we actually bombed it.

Jordan Harbinger: And people were saying we set them back by a few months, a few years. How does spies verify how close

Andrew Bustamante: Iran is to a bomb? This is another uncomfortable truth that Americans really do need to understand. American insight into Iran is only as good as the assets that we have in Iran, and there are plenty of people out there who both within their brief and outside of their brief have commented on the fact that we don't have very good assets in Iran.

We don't as an American intelligence service. So what that means is we get our information from somebody else. It's not like Mossad's gonna tell us a hundred percent of what they know. They're gonna tell us only what they want us to know,

Jordan Harbinger: right?

Andrew Bustamante: They're four years behind. But Mossad go ahead and tell 'em they're four days out so

Jordan Harbinger: that they boil more

Andrew Bustamante: shit up in

Jordan Harbinger: iRANO.

Andrew Bustamante: The United States, especially with the Trump administration's first term and the disruption that happened to CIA and all these people leaving CIA. Now you have fewer people to cover more hostility and you have a CIA that often feels like. [00:42:00] Repugnant at their leadership now because it's all back and forth.

So how professional are they in carrying out their operations? Quite professional, but are there enough of them to actually do it? We don't know. I've had people from inside CIA who have talked to me off camera who have said that they believe that 40% of CIA's intelligence right now is actually being provided by foreign intelligence services.

That means only 60% of what we're telling the president is our own intel. 40% of it's coming from someone else.

Jordan Harbinger: So we could be feeding all of our military and civilian decision makers just disinformation. And

Andrew Bustamante: here's why that's so important, because in the 1980s, it was the eighties. The Clinton era. No, that was the nineties.

That was the nineties. So in the 1990s, because I knew what a blowjob

Jordan Harbinger: was, I wouldn't have known that in the nineties. That's a Monica Lewinsky reference, not a random perverted

Andrew Bustamante: other

Jordan Harbinger: thing. That's awesome. Just in case anyone's murdered

Andrew Bustamante: in the nineties, the Clinton administration was making executive policy decisions about Cuba.

The primary two people that it was getting information from was a senior analyst in DIA and a senior analyst in the Department of State. [00:43:00] These were the two people primarily feeding the President's daily Brief on what policy decisions to make about Cuba. Well, it came out in the mid eighties, 88, 89, that both of these two individuals were Cuban intelligence assets.

So Cuba was feeding these two different sources, the same false information, and then these two sources were feeding the false information to the president, and it looked like it was valid corroborated information because it came from two different services, not recognizing that they had both been penetrated by Cuba.

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If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate [00:46:00] listeners do that is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

If you can't remember the name of a code, you can't find the code, please email us. The team would love to help you out with this. We are happy to surface codes for you, jordan@jordanharbinger.com will reach somebody here. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Andrew Bustamante, whenever I hear about Cuban intelligence success, they're so, they're so good.

They're so good. Good. And it just shows you how terrible they are at managing an economy because they owned the crap outta the us. They had Soviet backing. They were in this amazing spot for all these reasons, and yet they still are. And I love Cuban people, but the country is a dump. It's beautiful. It's been mismanaged so poorly that it's like you couldn't have tried to make it.

It looks like tropical North Korea. It really does. It's just amazing how much they screwed it up. [00:47:00] It's almost like communism doesn't work. I know. I'm gonna get unsubscribed from that. I don't care. It's almost like communism and repressive authoritarianism just are not the best way to run a country. It's a shame that you have to worry about your opinion on communism, taking away subscribers.

Oh my gosh, I don't really worry about it. I'll say, I remember when I was talking about my experience in North Korea, this is a a few years ago and it was on a live broadcast and I mentioned Iran as well, and it was probably 2022. And I was just saying like, look, you be grateful you don't live in Iran where this and that and can happen in North Korea, this and that.

And one guy was like, don't you think it's a little ethnocentric to say that the US is a better system than Iran and North Korea? Like. Dude, you're calling me from what? An iPhone. Do you think any North Korean or Cuban random civilian has one of these? Do you ever ask yourself why you were able to eat three times a day with absolutely no issue?

If there's two countries where we can objectively say our system is better, it's gonna be Cuba in North Korea and Iran, or there's a couple of countries where you could say, our system is better. It's gonna be this mess of nations. You stack China against the us, they have this and we have that, and they [00:48:00] have this and we have that.

Okay, fine. There's debate going on there. If you go to any one of these places, the lights turn off half the time. And that's if your city has electricity in the first place. When we were in Cuba, we didn't just stay in the capitol. We went to some rural areas and I remember people, kids and young people would come out in like dirty underwear and I'd go, why is everyone naked?

And I remember one of the ladies was like, they don't really have other clothes. And they would ask us for stuff like pens because they were blown away that we had working pens. I, I'm like, this is, I thought you had free healthcare and stuff. And I remember our guide going, they have their teeth and you know, if they get lung cancer, but they're naked, they're walking around naked, they don't have running water.

And he's just like, yeah. And even that was the propaganda line because a few years later he escaped to Miami after telling me for a week how amazing Cuba was and every conceivable potential category. It was just, and I

Andrew Bustamante: mean, it's important to know that what you're describing isn't just villainous countries.

Cambodia isn't that different from what you just described in large [00:49:00] parts of Vietnam? It's not that different from what you just described.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Back to Iran. I know that Israel was super successful in taking out Iraq. There's a podcast with Sam Harris that they interviewed an Israeli journalist. I don't know if you heard this, but apparently there was a meeting where all of the missile command brass, air force brass, they all met in one place and Israel bombed and took out all of them.

It turns out that this meeting was organized by the Masad, but imagine this all your top brass, all of the right people emailed to set up a meeting that was credible to go to this easily accessible place. So it's not like they all got a fake email and they showed up. The organizational people called the meeting, which was influenced by the masad that had enough clout to get every single one of those very important people into a place that was vulnerable at that specific time.

Andrew Bustamante: That kind of intelligence sounds fake. Here's what's important to understand about Israel. Israel is also an information warfare machine. So they love getting people to take the step too far and think that all those people were in one place [00:50:00] because of Mossad influenced.

Jordan Harbinger: So you're, it sounds like you're

Andrew Bustamante: saying.

Jordan Harbinger: Shit. If they're all in one place, go bomb 'em right now. And then they're like, what we're gonna do is say that we organize this whole thing. Oh, that's so smart. Correct. They they, that's almost better. They

Andrew Bustamante: have the intel to know that the meeting is gonna happen, but then when they actually release it, they're like, let's go ahead and tell everybody that we orchestrated it too.

So next time anybody calls a meeting, they're like, last

Jordan Harbinger: time my superior

Andrew Bustamante: died. How do you know it's not Israel? Remember we were just talking about how misinformation and disinformation is really all about getting the other people to spend more resources? Well, if it costs you $0 to go ahead and make a public statement, yeah, we bombed them and we orchestrated the meeting and meanwhile everybody else is spending tons of resources.

Like trying to verify the

Jordan Harbinger: next meeting is not a trap. Actually, I love that take because that's even better somehow than that organ. No, we organized the whole thing from start to finish. It's Or did we? But what you need to do is make sure that you never have a meeting again, and everything you do is 16 stories underground, which is much harder for you to execute.

Andrew Bustamante: This is, again, we talk about Mo Israel's MO is to do incredibly brazen acts of violence [00:51:00] and take public credit for it. Then air footage and everything else because they know that there's a fear mongering element that deters its enemies even further. Whereas China goes in and just breaks everything and they don't really care if they get caught, and Russia doesn't wanna get caught.

The United States also doesn't want to get caught, which is why the United States denies everything. They're like, oh, I'm pretty sure that we saw US airplanes over that site. Nope, that wasn't us. That was somebody else. They painted their airplanes that looked like us. We deny everything. It's why our politicians are the way they are.

Jordan Harbinger: That's so interesting.

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, I

Jordan Harbinger: hadn't thought about that, but you're right. Like you look at the pager thing where they took out half of Hezbollah or, and of course it's all on Sun security cameras, so they can verify the whole thing. Hezbollah is probably using smoke signals by now to

Andrew Bustamante: communicate with each other, right?

Think about when, uh, they released footage of their own drone pilots inside Iranian territory. First of all, there's no way to verify that those drone videos were coming from inside Iran, but they didn't care. They're like, let's put it out there. We're gonna even have somebody recording clandestine footage.

Like you think the Navy seals have somebody in there on like an iPhone. Like, wait a second, before you breach, it's a GoPro go. [00:52:00] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You know what though? I will say I do know some special operators. Apparently there are body cams and stuff for probably breakdowns later. It would not surprise me at all if they were like.

That video's pretty sweet. We should put that on the internet. That's pretty, that was a hell of a shot. It's only a matter of time. This reminds me of that information warfare. Remember when Ukraine had put the false tops on the trucks and put the drones in there and they lifted the drones up? If y'all haven't seen this, you got a YouTube.

This Ukraine basically spent, I don't know, years orchestrating these containers that had a false compartment, and inside the compartment were drones that had explosives. And as soon as the truck drivers from Russia picked it up and drove them deep into Russia, these drones took off and landed in Russian airfields and took out, I don't know, a billion dollars or two worth of advanced military hardware.

But they videotaped, from what I understand, how this went down. And that was as good as the victory of blowing up all the hardware or close to it, right? Because you see that and you go, guess we shouldn't count them out just yet. Holy smokes. This is like a Mossad level. Intelligence and military [00:53:00] success.

And from Ukraine, the country that we thought was a bunch of, oh,

Andrew Bustamante: no,

Jordan Harbinger: no, no, no. Shrubs in shrubs and rees. It's

Andrew Bustamante: not coming from Ukraine. It's coming from all the allies that help Ukraine. I see. Because who's gonna bake that idea and then be able to test it, but they can bake it and give it to Ukraine and test it just fine.

And if the whole thing goes tits up, eh, Ukraine tried and the tail. But if it works, and now there's a reason for video footage. 'cause now whether it was the French or the British or the Americans, they're like, ah, now we know that shit works. We can start creating vehicles that we only sell abroad that have false compartments in the bottom.

To

Jordan Harbinger: your point, Russia's checking every single truck now for a false compartment. Correct.

Andrew Bustamante: Spending a bunch of time

Jordan Harbinger: and money. Yeah. So, so the imports of goods during wartime for them just skyrocketed in terms of time and effort. Yeah. It's really interesting now that you've pointed that angle out, you can almost see it in every operation.

Right. The value of. Causing friction for your enemies is just huge.

Andrew Bustamante: It absolutely. So there was this famous Soviet document that was collected during the Cold War early on in the Cold War shortly after World War ii. And in that Soviet [00:54:00] document it said that one of the key things that Soviet intelligence or KGB operatives should be doing to their American intelligence assets, they should be encouraging their American assets to have as many meetings in the building as possible, as many meetings in their daily life as they can have.

Because the KGB was like, the more Americans are in meetings, the less anything is getting done. So it was actually like a KGB, like seal of approval. Hey guys, call more meetings and do whatever you can to encourage more meetings and more communication in your office because we know it's gonna slow the Americans down.

It's gonna slow them down militarily. It's gonna slow them down in their communications and telecommunications infrastructure. And now look at us. Now we're a fucking meeting hungry culture. A whole corporate culture was dictated by the KG B, or isn't that crazy?

Jordan Harbinger: We're gonna need a Zoom to talk about our planning meeting for our Q3 objectives meetings and it's, so are we having a meeting to talk about a meeting where we're gonna talk about meetings, correct?

Correct. Yeah. But it's an important meeting, so be there. Yeah, it's all hands. It's funny, I did a call with a really, [00:55:00] really, really big multinational corporation that everyone has heard of and they're trying to acquire my show for their network. And the initial call took two weeks because there were like 27 people that needed to be on it.

And finally they were like, screw it, only 22 of the 27 can make it, but it's as good as it's gonna get. So that we had the meeting and we talked about basically nothing that couldn't have been done in an email and they said, we need another call in three weeks we're gonna do this. It took about eight or nine weeks for that to happen.

There were 150 or a hundred and something people on the invite and they finally gave up and two people showed up to the final thing and I was like, so did the cost of time, the delay. Only to have almost nobody show what benefit was there to that. And I remember one of the guys was like, ask me that when we're not on a company Zoom call and I'll tell you.

And I saw him in a meeting and I was like, do you guys always do that? And he is, you'd be surprised. There's a lot of that. Holy shit. Your whole day is just meetings. He's, I get most of my work done after work. Unbelievable. I know we're running outta

Andrew Bustamante: time. I would love to plug the book at the end though [00:56:00] too if plug it right now, because otherwise I might run out the clock.

How's that? So yeah, my wife and I just released our CIA memoir. It took three years to get it through the CIA approval process, but it was important to us to go through that process so that we couldn't be held criminally liable so you don't go to prison. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's a good idea.

Andrew Bustamante: But it's really exciting because our book Shadow Cell, our memoir, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

We just found out the news a few days ago that we hit the New York Times bestseller list. It was a really big deal for us because the book was such a labor of love. It was such an interesting project that we were dedicated to, to have it reach the kind of success so quickly that it has already reached is really exciting.

So I always wanna encourage people, if you wanna know what modern Spycraft looks like, if you want to understand what a memoir looks like, that CIA doesn't want released, go check out our book Shadow Cell because CIA deemed that book classified in 2022. And then only after threatening them with a First Amendment lawsuit did they choose to allow it to be released to the public in 2025.

Jordan Harbinger: Full of stuff you're not supposed to know according to CIA. Yeah. Alright, we'll link that in the show notes. I want [00:57:00] one more little juicy question then we can finish in the next nine minutes. You're one of the only people that has a rational, in my humble opinion, take on why China is not ahead of us in every area.

I think a lot of podcasters and journalists for that matter, they're outta their minds. China has a speed on this, this, and this, and my only conclusion is they watch the social media where people are like, there's a train going through the building. We don't have that in America. And it's just the, so the rubric for whether you have a modern society and you're living in the future is how many LEDs are on the outside of a house?

Like I don't get it. But people really, they go crazy for this. And I think China has a lot of cool advanced stuff in major cities, tier one cities. I don't believe, and I don't think this is cop, I don't believe they're ahead of us in most areas. And you're the only other person I've seen that kind of ag agrees with me.

That's not like, uh, doing it for political reasons.

Andrew Bustamante: It's a shame too, 'cause I love China. I had a chance to travel there and study there when I was with the military. I love a lot of China, but I do not like the Chinese government and I do not like the Communist Central party. There's all sorts of issues there.

And it's [00:58:00] those issues that also prevent them from being the juggernaut that we're also afraid of. Yes, because they're authoritarian. They can make decisions quickly and yes, they can copy and mimic and do all sorts of things that we can't do very well, but that's their strength when it comes to their weaknesses.

They can't innovate like we can innovate. They can't build ideological relationships like we can build ideological relationships, which makes everything they do very pragmatic. And then that just breeds this culture inside of nobody really wants to brief bad news up and nobody wants to disagree with the boss, et cetera, et cetera.

That doesn't create the kind of conflict and constructive criticism that you need to actually get better. So even politically and economically, they're dealing with completely different unique issues than our different, unique issues that are plaguing them from their currency to their property and real estate issues.

We have it bad enough with 330 million people. They have all of that times [00:59:00] 1.6. It's one, I think they're 1.4 or 1.5 billion. Billion people.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

Andrew Bustamante: billion. So if we have 330 million Americans, that times three is still. Only 75% of what China has, right? It's insane how huge they are. So think about their population challenges, their taxation problems, their infrastructure problems.

They are growing. But I had this great friend of mine who explained to me once the United States spent 50 years laying telephone wire so that we could connect everybody by phone. China was basically living outta dishes while we were laying telephone wire, and then we invented cellular networks. All China did was they joined us at the same time that cellular networks were invented.

So they don't really have 50 years worth of laid telephone line. It's interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: Other countries have this problem too, where it looks really great and it is. They have all this modern connectivity. My friend went to Africa and he said, I have better service in Uganda than I do at home. What happens when that goes down?

Andrew Bustamante: There's nothing [01:00:00] else there. That's it. That's the thing that we need to understand about China. Like they don't want war even more than we don't want war because they know their vulnerabilities very well, which is why they're happy to play the long game and they're happy to continue to just peck away at our ideology because they understand that the biggest vulnerability for America is Americans.

That otherwise we're wealthy and we're healthy and we are unstoppable. So it's like the fat kid that has everything that he could possibly want. His biggest risk is just his health.

Jordan Harbinger: Diabetes. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's no better metaphor for the United States than a fat kid. Than a fat kid. Seriously. A fat kid on an iPad.

That's right. Fat kid on an iPad. Guilty. Thanks for coming. That's how I spent the show. Thanks for

Andrew Bustamante: coming in, man. Awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: As usual. I appreciate

Andrew Bustamante: you, man. Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: That was a good episode. Another one in the bag, man. I appreciate it. Holy moly. Thanks very much dude. What kind of person breaks into systems for a living legally and uses those skills to catch online predators?

[01:01:00] Ryan Montgomery, one of the top ethical hackers in the game, joins me to expose the dark web's, ugliest corners, and the tools hackers use to exploit vulnerabilities. Most of us don't even know exist.

JHS Clip: I like to call myself a cybersecurity professional. I got a bunch of data from a pedophile website. I left where I was at and I went home, and I didn't know exactly what I was gonna do.

Obviously, I just knew that I needed to do something. After I did some digging and I found my way into their server, I installed a few back doors, and I'm gonna take the identifying details, which includes their emails and usernames and more. It took, I guess, going viral a couple times for people to take me seriously, but law enforcement is involved now and things are being taken care of.

I'm not gonna stop until I make as much impact as possible. I have a, a skill set that I could use for good. There's many ways for me to figure out who you are with just the tiniest detail. This is not just the Teen chats, this is Instagram, Facebook. TikTok, Snapchat, Xbox, Roblox, Minecraft. I can go on for [01:02:00] hours.

You'll be blown away at how quick it happens. So it's important for your kids to know it's okay to come to you about this stuff. It's just important to make sure you know what your kids are doing and not just taking their word for it. I don't believe it's stoppable, but I believe that if you just let it go rampant and hope for the best, it's just gonna continue to get worse.

I don't have the answer to pedophiles or human trafficking. I do know that I can offer my abilities and my network to do something about it on a large scale. You know, if I can help, one kid is worth it. This is my goal right now to not only run my companies, which is a separate thing, but in the time that I do have available, focusing it all on this, if you are a member of one of those sites, I guess you have every reason in the world to be scared.

Jordan Harbinger: To learn more about Hacker hierarchy wild exploits and why doing the right thing in cybersecurity can still mean living in the shadows. Check out episode 851 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks again to Andrew for [01:03:00] flying out here and doing this episode again in my kitchen. Actually, I like that guy because, uh.

Personable dude. He's using his spy skills on me. He's charming me with his spy skills. All things Andrew Busante will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser, very practical, very specific, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. It is a very practical and short read almost every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I am at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where the mostly crazy people are. This show is created in association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting [01:04:00] others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in espionage, Epstein Israel, or Ukraine, maybe even a little Iran sprinkled in there, definitely share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time. This episode is brought to you by G, your modern year-round, CP, a partner for business owners, entrepreneurs, investors, and high net worth individuals who wanna keep more of what they earn.

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