"massage will do anything mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every israeli citizen around the world most other countries will stop at some point but mossad doesn't do th..."

"what is the mission of the cia how does it work the mission of the cia is to collect intelligence from around the world that supports a national security mission and be the central repository for all ..."

"everything's got to be prioritized that's one of the benefits and the superpowers of the united states is we prioritize everything so different intelligence organizations are prioritized to collect ce..."

"expensive book report you can ever imagine it's got its own binder it's all very high-end it feels important it looks important it's not like a cheap trapper keeper um it's somewhere between i would g..."

"the president you're 100 correct in how the agency and how officers and managers of the agency handle the pdb there's a ton of competition everybody wants to be the first on the radar everybody wants ..."

"a massive flaw in the system because if you're essentially appointing a director to do what you want them to do then you're assigning a crony and that's what we define corruption as within the united ..."

"what do you make of the hostile relationship that to me at least stands out of the presidents between donald trump and the cia was that a very kind of personal bickering i mean is there something inte..."

"when they did all they did was undermine the relationship they had with their primary customer let me sort of focus in on this relationship between the president or the leader and the intelligence age..."

"a system and a process there that's functioning so this winning idea is very interesting in what way short term and long term is russia winning some people say there was a miscalculation of the way th..."

"negotiation table with russia and turkey in order to get exports out of the black sea approved again demonstrates just how much ukraine is losing the the aggressor had a seat at the negotiation table ..."

"fall of this year fall of this year before winter hits europe nato wants germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted so they can tap into russian power there's no way they can have those sanctio..."

"everybody knows ukrainians are dying the game of war isn't played just it isn't even played majority by the people who are fighting the game of war is played by everyone else it's an economic game it'..."

"just shooting at civilians because they can't afford to just do bombing raids because they're going to destroy cultural significant architecture that's just too important to the russian culture and th..."

"him pushing forward all the way to take the south because that's not going to be effective strategy for him to win the hearts and minds of his people autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds tha..."

"risk the other thing that i think is important to talk about is we everybody is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war yes there's battlefield bullets and cannons and tanks but there's al..."

"make ukrainians believe that the united states is going to help them or that the west is going to help them it's enough to make russians think that that they're going to lose and maybe they should jus..."

"support that the united states is providing and is going to provide over over time the strategy that the united states has taken to support ukraine is similar to the strategy we took to support great ..."

"that is not part of the conversation that's being had with the american people so debt is a way to establish some level of control power is power that said having a very close relationship between ukr..."

"war at in their perspective after the wars won it's a difficult situation because i'm trying to make sure that that you and all everybody listening understands that what's happening in ukraine among u..."

"so uh you said american support so ideologically first of all you don't assign much long-term power to that that us could support ukraine purely on ideological grounds just look in the last four years..."

"america is currently supplying military equipment to ukraine absolutely and a lot of that military equipment has actually been the thing that turned the tides of war a couple of times already currentl..."

"the most probable outcome is that ukraine remains in air quotes a sovereign nation it's not going to be truly sovereign because it will become it will have to have new government put in place zielinsk..."

"also is that a negotiated peace really just means a negotiated ceasefire we've seen this happen all over the world north korea and south korea are technically still just in negotiated cease power what..."

"there is something about ukraine the deep support by the ukrainian people of america that is in contrast with for example afghanistan that it seems like ideologically ukraine could be a beacon of free..."

"symbol of freedom that's useful for the united states if we're starting to take the pragmatic view don't you think it it's possible that uh united states supports ukraine financially militarily enough..."

"nobody even thought about ukraine and the people who did know about ukraine knew that it was a extremely corrupt former soviet state with 20 of its national population self-identifying as russian like..."

"the star i would argue yes if you look at how much you captivated the intention of the world the attention the world has made no material difference man that's what i'm saying that's your estimation b..."

"driving and leading the west against this conflict well i think the opposition to this particular president i personally believe has less to do with the policies and more to do with a lot of the other..."

"elections and stops being about the philosophical the social the geopolitical aspects parameters of this war and more biologists like whatever the heck captivates twitter and we're gonna use that for ..."

"that's priceless in the world of the military the military industrial complex being able to field test combat test a weapon without having to sacrifice your own people is incredibly valuable you get a..."

"um the united states israeli i got to interact in ukrainian as well it's just it's striking it's beautiful i i just love people i love carpenters or people that are just extremely good at their job an..."

"engineering is happening there anyway that said the cia the fsb the mi6 mossad china i know very little about the mss ministry of state security i don't i don't know how much you know uh or just other..."

"correct with their culture you know what a chinese person who lives in syria thinks of themselves as a chinese person do you know what a chinese person a chinese national living in the united states t..."

"beats dgse in france they're the top they've got a massive budget that almost goes exclusively to stealing foreign secrets they're the biggest threat to the united states even above russia and above c..."

"it's a massive information campaign do you think in that way cia is not doing a good job because there's you know the fsb perhaps much less so jru but the kgb did this well which is to send a signal l..."

"physical beast he's a strong fit at the time 60 something year old man let me take a tangent on that because he's coming on this podcast oh excellent man so uh can you say what you've learned from the..."

"the catalyst of the virality of the myth is just being mysterious and and that's what cia does well to go back to your first question what does cia do they don't answer any questions they don't say an..."

"to the cia to that work it uh you spoken positively about that that world the good it does um and yet you're also a family man you value that what's that calculation like what's that trade off i mean ..."

"during the day um but cia just had no they had no patience for that conversation there was no family is not their priority so the fact that we were a tandem couple two officers two operators trying to..."

"around me so both my wife and i absolutely miss the people my wife misses the work because you know everything when you're inside it's all i mean we had we had top secret we had ts sci clearances at t..."

"at the time i had yeah you have to military regulations you can't have hair longer than one inch okay and this the the beautiful hair you have now that that came to be in the cia or after this so i di..."

"for me it was one of my favorite uh disguises it's what's known as a level two disguise one of my favorite disguises to don was just dilapidated brown guy uh can you actually we'll just take a million..."

"three level three is all of your prosthetics all the stuff you see in mission impossible your fake ears your fake faces your fat suits your stilts inside your leg your feet uh all that's level three w..."

"physical characteristics right what about like um you know what actors do which is the method acting yeah the method acting sort of developing a back story in your own mind and then you start um you k..."

"true self when we when we get back to a position of safety is it possible to do that so i i just have kind of anecdotal evidence for myself i really try to be the exact same person in all conditions w..."

"is that you keep referring to how you feel i feel this i feel that i feel like this i feel like that that feeling is a predictable character trait of all human beings it's a pink matter we call pink m..."

"systematically tap into the right side emotional side of the brain so that we can quickly get past all of the stuff you were just saying all of the well don't you have to be convincing and don't you h..."

"of thing i i would venture to say it's i mean i don't know how to measure how difficult the thing is but especially when you're communicating with people whose job depends on forming trusting relation..."

"is immensely powerful if you're trying to if you're trying to take your boss's job as long as you don't ever look like the bot the employee who's trying to take the boss's job the boss is focused on a..."

"you so there there's like a set of like interrogation trajectories you can go down that can help you figure out a person technically their interview interview like this concepts correct because an int..."

"of science you still have to learn how to mix the color palette and use certain brushes do you think of that as as a kind of uh the study of human psychology is that what a psychologist does or psychi..."

"i mean that's such a deep truth you speak to and and i i could talk about that for a long time there is i mean through these conversations in general whether it's being recorded or not i hunger to dis..."

"see that's in part of what i refer to when i say love because i feel like if uh like political leaders and people in conflict that the small scale and the large scale were able to tune into that longi..."

"what you were like at 27 but i was a total dipshit at 27. i'm not much better now at 42 but yeah you owe me but i would say make it yeah but i was like i just wanted to be anything other than a milita..."

"way that happened and this isn't real and then a day later i got a fedex or an overnight delivery of an airplane ticket and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation and then i just kept doing ..."

"love being told what to do what about the training process um for for for beco becoming a covert cia agent yeah so uh so the interview process is yeah the interview process too was that how rigorous w..."

"assessment was right whatever else it might be and then eventually get another phone call that says hey we received your package you've been moved to the next level of interview and now we need you to..."

"uh you're just shooting in the dark did they have you do like a lie detector test yes it's called a polygraph polygraph how effective just interesting for our previous discussion how effective are tho..."

"an entp that's an extrovert intuiter perceiver uh thinker ent thinker p perceiver my wife is an isfj which is the polar opposite of me e i'm extroverted she's introverted i'm an intuiter she's a censo..."

"corporate world and in the espionage world so in terms of compressed representation of another human being um you can't do much better than those four letters i don't believe you can do much better in..."

"awesome i can go be something else good instead of always being bad you're not going to be a ballerina oh let me know because i'm not graceful and you've you've you've learned this after years of expe..."

"it's it's uh for some reason really hilarious so it's good you've been asked i think on reddit other big secrets that you know that could land you and our country in terrible trouble if he came out to..."

"different you can direct you can change the course of faith so i i find secrets to be extremely valuable extremely useful even at the place where secrets are being kept from a large mass part of what ..."

"if it's a test of sorts if if they know you can keep that secret that means like you're somebody that could be trusted and i believe that like not just effectiveness in this life but happiness in this..."

"lesson to me i now have uh like layers of security and also an understanding which data is really important which is somewhat important which is not that important and layering that all together so ju..."

"hackers let me ask you about physical hacking uh so i'm now like i'm an introvert so i'm a paranoid about all social interaction but um how much truth is there is kind of a funny question uh how suspi..."

"the chinese use it extremely well the russians use it extremely well in the united states we actively train our officers not to use it because in the end it leads to complications in how you professio..."

"exactly what you're there to do your exact your mission is to have intelligent conversation with this person to find out if they have access to secrets and by virtue of you carrying out your mission t..."

"good model predictive model of what their behavior is going to be like right and you know what's fascinating is i think the challenge is building that model quickly so technology is one of those tools..."

"thing effectively and it's i mean when i think of the fact that you could create a dossier on somebody in a matter of 24 or 48 hours if you could wire them for two days right internet of things style ..."

"nsa is a six to nine month process the only way they could plus up their sizes fast enough was to bypass their own hiring and instead go direct to private organizations so naturally the government con..."

"think that there was there was definitely he understood incentives i mean donald trump understands incentives so he was in trying to incentivize them to stay but i think he was also playing a safety c..."

"forces that uh maybe government agencies operate under like what's your intuition is capitalism lead so you mentioned at least to maximizations of efficiency and performance but is that correlated wit..."

"norms of your customer base so as the norms of that customer base dictate certain requirements the company has to adapt to those requirements in order to continue to scale so if if a company tries to ..."

"base that's such an interesting question because you you look at big pharma and pharmaceutical companies and they have a quite a poor reputation in the public eye and some of it maybe much of it is de..."

"whatever it might be there's there's a certain level of do or die yeah i personally have a sort of optimistic view that ultimately the best way is to stay within ethical balance kind of like what you ..."

"true i think that your point of view is accurate i would also say that there the complexities of what makes somebody make a decision can only really be properly calculated with a baseline so because t..."

"especially american citizens this is a topic that i never get tired of talking about but it's very rare that anyone ever really agrees with me just so you know so i see where you're well what i think ..."

"some nefarious activity on your account they do nothing they might send a note to fbi because they have to according to some checklist but when nsa was collecting intelligence on metadata from around ..."

"so you said a few really interesting things there so because you are kind of an insider war for time an insider meaning you were able to build up an intuition about the the good the bad and the ugly o..."

"make it simple they stay with nsa and they say surveil them even more tap their phones tap their computers i want to know even more so then they get this preponderance of evidence what do you do with ..."

"system if it's operating within ethical bounds is that yes it could protect the populace so you're saying like the good given on your understanding of these institutions the good outweighs the bad abs..."

"survival for us we haven't tasted that level of desperation and fear yet or hopefully never but that's what makes us feel like there's something wrong with surveillance surveillance is all about the p..."

"interested in being politicians yeah that said i mean people are really worried about giving any one institution a large amount of power especially when it's a federal government institution um given ..."

"so basically hold them accountable if what's nice about this is that we can agree to disagree and history will be the one that decides but but once like there's a reason that edward snowden needs to d..."

"much of with us intel sharing with ukraine there's a tactical advantage from sharing a secret about russian military movements or weaknesses in tanks or you know supply chain challenges whatever it mi..."

"so right decision or wrong decision it was guided by and informed by national security priorities so from this program that was designed to use drugs to drive interrogation and torture people was born..."

"matter yeah i mean the basics of the physics might be there but a lot of people probably are skeptical i'm skeptical too but i'm just like you should be open-minded i mean that's that's that's actuall..."

"me that a president would go to especially the part of cia which is the special activities division it makes perfect sense to me that the president would go to a division called special activities who..."

"yep doing that you know a thing that crosses an ethical line even in it in a time where the human the entirety of human civilization hangs in a balance still forfeit that power that's um that's a beau..."

"time at cia well let me ask you do you think say played a part in enabling drug cartels and drug trafficking which is another big kind of um shadow that hangs over the cia at the beginning of the drug..."

"think all the accusations out there about how they would buy drugs and sell drugs and somehow make money on the side from it that's not how it works so do you think there's a on that point a connectio..."

"and you said the terrorist attacks in 911 were changed a lot for us for for the for the united states for americans it changed the way we see the world who woke us up to the harshness of the world i t..."

"lack of competency at the time now i understand that conspiracy theorists want to take inklings of information and put them together in a way that that is the most damning but that goes back to our po..."

"prestige notoriety none of those things are a challenge the rest of us we're busy trying to make money we're busy trying to build a reputation we're busy trying to build a career keep a family afloat ..."

"operations they are willing to invest and develop and and create an agent that serves their purposes now to create someone from scratch like jeffrey epstein the probabilities are extremely low they wo..."

"i've recently talked to ryan graves who's a lieutenant ryan grace who's a fighter jet pilot um about many things he also does work on autonomous weapon systems drones and that kind of thing including ..."

"that said when you have unexplained aerial phenomenon that are unexplained that can't directly be tied to uh to anything that is known of the terrestrial world then they they're left without an answer..."

"just um and you're saying that there's not from you understanding much evidence that they're doing so it could be because they're compartmentalized but you're saying private intelligence institutions ..."

"intelligent life form in all of the universe but to think that an alien life form is anything like us at all is equally as inconceivable to think that they're carbon-based bipedal humanoid alien speci..."

"would try to uh infiltrate i would try to put like figure out what is the language they used to communicate with each other uh i would try to operate at their physical scale like uh in terms of the ph..."

"wild conspiracy so in our example you talked about humans trying to communicate with ants ants are not intelligence there's no ants not intelligent species they're drone species that's somehow command..."

"and intelligent alien species would want to engage and communicate at all is an extremely human assumption and then from that assumption then we started going into all the other things you said if the..."

"know that whole process um the earth revolving around the sun yeah the earth revolving around the sun and but you know to me it's interesting because it asks us looking out there with seti just lookin..."

"happened when he realized how desperately he wanted it to be true this is the human condition we our pink matter works the same way as everybody's pink matter and one of the ways that our pink matter ..."

"after he drinks one whiskey all that goes out i think that was just in that moment in time like you know of brilliance a moment of release because i i think he still is uh you know um he's he's defini..."

"you guys uh he started talking to you about how his recruiters were feeding back to him his own beliefs his own opinions about himself how smart he was how good he was how uniquely qualified he was th..."

"the nietzsche gaze into the abyss it's a dangerous thing it's that's the path to insanity is to ask that question you want to be doing it carefully but it's also the place where you can truly discover..."

"you think to yourself what is their life like what do they feel right now uh you know are they comfortable are they uncomfortable are they afraid are they scared what are they what's the stressor that..."

"and how powerful it is especially for for like you said the spouse like intimacy yeah like stepping outside of yourself and really putting yourself in the shoes of the other person considering how the..."

"is is such a powerful way to uh resolve any tensions there even like people like trolls or all that kind of stuff i don't deride them i just kind of put myself in their shoes and it it it becomes like..."

"you're basically telling them the story that's in their own head when it comes to relationships and personal connection we talked about it earlier the thing that people want the most is community they..."

"uh as an example the disguise the disguise thing that we talked about earlier disguise in and of itself has mixed utility if you're brad pitt and you don't anybody know you're brad pitt you put on a l..."

"the idea of having privacy is um uh is is one that we kind of we think we can but we really don't is it possible for maybe somebody like me or a regular person to disappear from the grid absolutely ye..."

"to be we're all morally flexible here but now you have a technological device that you can work with and then from there on you're just doing whatever you have to do whether you're stealing every step..."

"nancy and dude and they still believe me yeah criminals just get it right so uh what happens with criminals is they go to the school of hard knocks they go to they learn criminal behavior on the job s..."

"and even if my son or daughter ends up at cia and even if they get ridiculed for being no you're the bustamante kid right your dad's a total sellout whatever it might be like i want them to know you k..."

"and it'll be over before you know it whether you regret it or not it's true uh what what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life self-respect that's a fast answer th..."

"just wake up and have a good day if you don't have self-respect the power of the individual that's what uh that's what makes this country great i have to say after traveling quite a bit in europe and ..."

"thanks so much for talking today lex i appreciate the invite man and it was a joy thanks for listening to this conversation with andrew bustamante to support this podcast please check out our sponsors..."