Inside the CIA: Andrew & Jihi Bustamante Expose Government Spin, Honeypots, Epstein Questions & Lines the U.S. Won’t Cross PT 1

Tom sits down with two extraordinary guests: Andrew and Jihi Bustamante, elite intelligence professionals and co-authors of "Shadow Cell." Andrew, a former covert CIA officer and founder of Everyday Spy, and Jihi, a master targeter, pull back the curtain on the murky world of espionage, information warfare, and the complex dance between truth and spin in global politics. Andrew delivers a masterclass on how political appointees and intelligence leadership have shifted over the decades, exposing the tension between presidential loyalty and national service. Tom fearlessly challenges both guests to untangle headline-making controversies—from election interference to the notorious Steele Dossier—and explores whether we, as citizens, should blindly trust, fight, or try to decode the signals coming from our own government. This first half sets the stage for an unprecedented look at spin, power, and loyalty in the age of 24-hour news and social media. SHOWNOTES 00:00 - Fabricating Threats & The Russia Collusion Narrative 09:19 - High Turnover at the CIA: Box-Checking and Political Climbing 27:02 - Is America Headed for a Hard Reset? 32:13 - Go Along to Get Along: Cultural Realities of Government Employment 41:02 - Persuasive Headlines vs. Influence: Avoiding Media Manipulation FOLLOW ANDREW & JIHI BUSTAMANTE: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverydaySpy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EverydaySpy Website: https://www.everydayspy.com/ Want to learn more from Andrew? Find your Spy Superpower: ⁠https://yt.everydayspy.com/4l9HmlM Read Andrew’s CIA book ‘Shadow Cell’: https://geni.us/ShadowCellBook https://geni.us/ShadowCellBook%20 Follow Andy on YouTube: ⁠https://youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante Explore Spy School: ⁠https://everydayspy.com/ Support Andy's sponsor Axolt Brain: ⁠https://axoltbrain.com/andy Listen to the podcast: ⁠https://youtube.com/ ⁨@EverydaySpyPodcast⁩ https://youtube.com/%E2%81%A0%C2%A0%E2%81%A8@EverydaySpyPodcast%E2%81%A9%C2%A0%E2%81%A0%20 CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to ⁠https://www.vitalproteins.com⁠ https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Allio Capital: Macro investing for people who want to understand the big picture. Download their app in the App Store or at Google Play, or text my name “TOM” to 511511. SleepMe: Visit ⁠https://sleep.me/impact⁠ https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. ButcherBox: Ready to level up your meals? Go to ⁠https://butcherbox.com/impact⁠ https://butcherbox.com/impact to get $20 off your first box and FREE bacon for life with the Bilyeu Box! Netsuite: Download the new e-book Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders at ⁠http://NetSuite.com/Theory⁠ http://netsuite.com/TheoryShopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at ⁠https://shopify.com/impact⁠ https://shopify.com/impactHims: Start your free online visit today at ⁠https://hims.com/IMPACT⁠ https://hims.com/IMPACT. ********************************************************************** What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:⁠ join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: ⁠https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:⁠ see if you qualify here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call: ⁠https://tombilyeu.com/call⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:⁠ sign up here.⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/: ⁠https://tombilyeu.com/⁠ https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://twitter.com/tombilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. We like to think we live in a world of facts, that what our leaders and intelligence agencies tell us is actually the truth. But the reality is far darker. For decades, the intelligence community has shaped what we believe, not just by what they say, but by what they hide, twist, and flat-out invent. Their goal isn't to inform you. It is to control you.

• 1:30Tom Bilyeu?

  It's to control the narrative. In this episode, I sit down with former CIA officers, husband and wife team, Andrew and Jihi Bustamante. They break down the manipulation tactics that governments use against us, from the Russia collusion narrative and what it means to mass mind control tactics, supercharged by AI. They expose how agencies bend reality and how you can spot the con and avoid being taken in. Remember, the most dangerous weapon today isn't a missile or a drone. It's a fabricated story designed to keep you compliant. Without further ado, I bring you first Andrew, then both Andrew and Jihi Bustamante.

• 2:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Does the intelligence community ever fabricate threats to influence elections in the way that Tulsi Gabbard is saying has happened with the Russia collusion narrative?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Intelligence agencies not only have to manipulate the American public to prevent them from knowing the true significance of a threat that might be imminent, but they also have to manipulate the American public because manipulating the American public also manipulates foreign intelligence. If you tell something to an American publicly, you're telling it to every English speaker in the world. And that goes both ways. So if you omit a fact, then you're omitting the fact from foreign databases. Or if you tell an intentional falsehood, you're giving misinformation to foreign adversaries as well. Right? That's the information warfare landscape that we live in, that we so often forget we live in.

• 2:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. Okay, so we're being spun essentially at all times, and we have to be, according to what you're saying. So are they worried that we're going to panic if there's an imminent threat? Why, why spin us?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Because, so mass psychosis is very real. When, what will happen in any given group is you'll have, the majority of the group will simply react emotionally. Fear, sadness, outrage. They'll have an emotional response to an input, but they won't land on a decision. They won't land on an action step. A small subset of the group will land on an action set as well as an emotional set. But it's very difficult to predict what action the mass will not only adopt, but then pursue. So could it be peaceful protests in a park that they land on? Or could it be violent protests in the streets burning

• 3:55Speaker 01

  down businesses? The same input can yield both outcomes, but you don't really know which one it's going to be because it kind of boils down to the few people who have an action that they take, and then the response of the masses to that action. Do they support? Or do they, do they work against that action? And we've seen it in history, time upon time upon time. Sometimes protests break out and businesses burn. Other time protests break out and nothing burns down. We've seen people self-police. We've seen people hold each other back. We've seen people push each other forward into arms of troops or into lines of fire. Like, we've seen incredible things. Human beings are...

• 4:35Speaker 01

  For all their pros and cons, without a doubt, human beings are unpredictable.

• 4:39Tom Bilyeu?

  What Tulsi Gabbard is putting forward is that this was a coup. So extremely high stakes. So it does seem like the sense that it was fabricated is going to be important. So fabricated does not feel accurate, or it just feels semantically off.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So it is semantics with a heavy dose of accuracy, I would say. Fabrication by definition among intelligence agencies means that it is invented truth. There is no foundation in it. If you think about it, you've basically got three types of information. Misinformation, which is mistaken or inaccurate information. Disinformation, which is intentionally falsified information. But then you also have a third category category called malinformation or malicious information. Malinformation is real fact maliciously presented so that it can shape people's opinions.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  With the collusion accusations, what she's basically saying to a professional intelligence listener is that what was presented by the Biden administration was maliciously derived. Instead of taking the full body of evidence, they took a subcategory of that body of evidence, reached an analytical conclusion and presented it to the American people in a way that painted Russian activity in the 2016 election at the worst. So what she's doing is essentially picking a different subcategory of the same base of information and then presenting it forward, also some would accuse in a malicious intent to spin a positive story about Donald Trump. The truth is, in that body of evidence, you're going to have lots and lots of information.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So a true analytical product. Should look at all information and create a probability, a probability index, as well as a veracity index, meaning what's the value of each piece of information? So you may only have one or two pieces of highly valuable information, meaning very high accuracy, very high level of truth. And those two pieces of information might be better than 50 pieces of conjecture. We don't know. No one is talking about that in the media. No one's saying whether or not the report she's pulling from XYZ is high fidelity or low fidelity, or whether the original analysis that was reached by CIA in 2018 was high fidelity or low fidelity. It's, it's mixed.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  There's, there's a muted element to the value of the information. The other thing that we have to keep in mind is Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI is a presidential appointed position.

• 7:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And Why does that matter?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Because she's there to serve the president, as is Radcliffe, the head of CIA, as is the entire CIA. They all serve under the executive branch. So they have one customer and that one customer is the president. So what the president wants, the president gets.

• 7:32Tom Bilyeu?

  In this landscape, how should we contextualize the fact that these are presidential appointees who theoretically serve at the pleasure of the president? Though this accusation is very specifically that, oh, you had one thing happen, which was a bleed over from Obama to Trump was actually used to undermine the president.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  The thing we need to understand is that what we're seeing now isn't new. What we're seeing now has extended all the way back to 2003 with the creation of the DNI, and then even before that, with all positions that were political appointee positions. The difference is that social media and the 24 hour news cycle and the modern era of contributory 24 hour news cycles and conjecture news cycles and, and pundits all over the place, information is more available than it's ever been. The fact that the, the president appoints people into positions of power that will benefit the president's ambitions and outcomes and goals, that's always been the case. That's, that's always been the case as long as we've had presidential appointees. We just see it more now than we ever saw it before.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It used to take us two years, three years before we realized, oh shit, that person's just there to to put their stamp of of approval on anything the president says. It used to take us years to see that. We see that now in weeks or days or before it even starts. That said, what Donald Trump has done a questionable job of is that he's put people into office in his most current administration that are clearly not qualified for the job, that are clearly there because they had some sort of pre-existing relationship with the president before he was the current president. That's something that at least in the past, presidents have tried to obfuscate a little bit. They tried to pick someone who was a career diplomat, or they tried to pick someone who

• 9:22Speaker 01

  was in some sort of career category that was overlapping with the office that they sit in, right? But you're you're from RFK Junior to Hegseth, each of their positions, everybody on both sides of the aisle, look at that and say, this person doesn't have the qual- this, there's no way this person is the most qualified person in the country to sit in that role.

• 9:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Should we be uniquely suspicious of skeptical, maybe a better word? Should we be uniquely skeptical of Trump's appointees?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yes, because when you look at recent history, the last time we saw essentially cronies that were not qualified for their position being put into the office that they were put into was Venezuela under Chavez. I'm not comparing Donald Trump to Chavez. I'm not saying we're destined for the same future as Venezuela, but I am saying we took a big step, a very big step, from the Biden, Kamala, whatever that disaster was, to where we are now in the fact that we've basically abandoned previous protocols for how we identify presidential appointees and moved into this era of of pushing our appointees through nominations because we controlled the Congress.

• 10:32Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, you were in CIA for seven years, but you interacted with five different directors, which by the math is slightly unusual. So normally, the tenure of a director is three years. This is looking at history since, I think, 1947, when the CIA was founded. You're you were dealing with either 1.4, 1.8, I forget what the exact math was. It was about half of what a normal tenure is. And you, by the way, for anybody listening, you were gone a year before this whole scandal started taking place, for anybody who cares about that. But when you look at that,

• 11:06Tom Bilyeu?

  What was the protocol being used that created such a high turnover? Because I don't look at that and go, oh, we had a good system before and now we have something broken, though you are helping me understand this in a different light. But what was the methodology that was being used, whether it was by Biden, Trump One, Obama? Like, how did they select?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  The Office of the Director of CIA, I would categorize during my tenure at CIA, that office was being used as a place to check a box on an upward swing to other political utility. So, part of the reason that we had so many directors in such a short period of time is because when I first joined, Director Hayden, who was a four-star Air Force general, was the Director of CIA. That is blatantly against the rules at the time. You're not supposed to be a uniformed military officer and also be in charge of a civilian government intelligence agency. But they made, they had a carve-out, they made an exception for General Hayden. So, we were already kind of breaking the rules to put Hayden in place.

• 12:08Tom Bilyeu?

  And who was President at that time, Bush?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, it was Bush at that time. So, and Hayden had been there and Hayden had been very successful, by all accounts. And Hayden was well-liked at CIA. So Hayden was well-liked and Hayden was replaced by Panetta. Panetta was purely political, right? Leon Panetta. After Leon Panetta left, he was replaced by Petraeus as a civilian. General Petraeus, who had led military forces in the Middle East, came on as a civilian.

• 12:33Tom Bilyeu?

  So, once again, we have a weird thing? Or because he had exited the military, no beef?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  It was no beef by policy, but it was still kind of unique that he was a career military general who then came in to lead the intelligence.

• 12:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do we look at that sideways? Why is that? Why should that be weird? It doesn't hit me as weird, only because I haven't thought about it.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Because you have civilian agencies for a reason. And then you have military groups, military organizations, for a reason. The culture is totally different, the mindset is supposed to be different, the purpose is supposed to be different. When it comes to the military, they're there to follow orders without objection.

• 13:08Tom Bilyeu?

  So, when you see a military guy in a civilian organization, you should be paranoid that they're just following orders? Once again, that is just so baked into their DNA that good luck avoiding it.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And why do you put a military person in charge of an organization? For the same reason. Right, and then you also should also, as a leader, understand that when you put a military voice in charge of a civilian organization, you're gonna have a break between the organization and the leader. Because that leader's not used to leading civilians. That leader's not used to the kind of motivational talents, the kind of holistic leadership that's needed to lead people who voluntarily serve.

• 13:43Tom Bilyeu?

  You can't just tell them what to do.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Because you can't just, and there's no-

• 13:45Tom Bilyeu?

  You've got to bring them along.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  There's no professional implication, or no professional ramifications if they don't do what you tell them to do. It's not like the military, where you could go to jail, where you go under UCMJ-

• 13:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Very different, yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  For saying no to an order, right? And then the whole thing, there's this weird kind of back and forth with Mike Morell, who's a career CIA officer, who was a sitting director before he was pulled out of the sitting director seat to then become a full director by the end.

• 14:10Tom Bilyeu?

  So what's starting to break down? Like, I remember when Trump came into office and people were like, he doesn't trust the intelligence community and he's now starting to use Peter Thiel's company, which I'm Palantir. And people were like, this is so weird. It sounds like something started breaking down much earlier. There's so much division between the left and the right, that the agencies are starting to be weaponized against the other party to either keep them out of office. Like, is that what we see starting to happen? So these guys have an intuitive, like, give me a general, give me somebody that just follows orders, I'm gonna tell them what to do and they're gonna do it?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I don't think it's the weaponization of the intelligence services. It wasn't then. It may be going in that direction now, for different reasons. But what I would say happened is that prior to, prior to the second term of Bush, the person in charge of CIA, the people, the people put in charge of intelligence agencies, were there to serve the mission first. And that was it.

• 15:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Protect America.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Protect America, maximize intelligence collection, serve at the behest of the president to serve the American people.

• 15:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Do they maximize intelligence collection for any reason other than to protect Americans?

• 15:11Speaker 01

  No, they shouldn't have. They may have, only be, only if it was a presidential directive. And there's a whole carve-out in the intelligence world for when the president finds something that matters to them, it's called a presidential finding. That finding can literally be given to CIA and there's a blank check to pursue, whatever the president's pet project is. Usually with covert action. So there's a process for serving the president's pet projects. But generally speaking, by and large, you, you put someone in charge of an agency so that you can fire and forget that they're there. And they just keep the engine running, like a CEO. What happened in the latter half of Bush and all the way through the years of Mike Morell,

• 15:53Speaker 01

  which is 10 years of history, CIA became a box checking activity for people who wanted to ride the coattails of other successful politicians, especially with Obama. When Obama took office, Obama was there on the promise of changing things. Two years into his first four-year term, he was realizing change isn't easy. So then he just started using executive orders and he started to force policy through a Congress that he controlled. He also was able to do that in the intelligence services.

• 16:26Tom Bilyeu?

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• 18:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

• 18:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I want to restate what I think you're saying. So you can either correct where I'm at or we'll just have it on the table. When you say that they're riding the coattails of a politician, it's really a loyalty play. It's like, hey, you want to keep going in this world. So do me a favor, jump into intelligence, run the CIA. And then there's going to be rewards for you after that. And that's good for me as the president, because now I know that the person doing the intelligence work for me. I can just say, go do this thing and they're going to do it.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  But the loyalty was more to a party than to a person.

• 19:21Tom Bilyeu?

  That makes sense.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  So you're, hey, the Democratic Party has your back. Hey, the Republican Party has your back. All you do is you take this role, serving it for 18 months to two years. It's going to look great on your resume. It's going to be perfect when you run for president. Eight years down the road, 12 years down the road, 16 years down the road. So it was a box checking act. This is very common in the military. When you know you're trying to build a future two star general, you start building them when they're a lieutenant colonel. Right? You start making sure they have the right items on their agenda. They sit in the right offices for the right period of time and you move them up as quickly as possible. We have a term in the air force, it's called somebody on afterburners. Right? The Navy has their own term, the Marine Corps has their own term. Doing the same thing in the intelligence sector. You can't, it's going to be much easier for the American public to vote for you when you're, when you're running for president.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  If on your resume, it says you were director of CIA. Look at George H W Bush. Right. So that's what we were seeing. That's what happened. That's why Panetta took the job. That's why Petraeus took the job. Mike Morell was the first one to not really have that kind of political ambition. He had an opportunity to do something that was totally different, but it was still politically party oriented. What we're seeing now is a change to more individual loyalty rather than party loyalty. And a big part of that is because the Republican Party, let's not forget, did not support Donald Trump during his original run for president.

• 20:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Given that we spent however many years building up a pipeline that was loyal to a party, it does feel like the scene is set for a party to go, okay, this guy's an outsider. Everybody hates him because for people forgetting, this is not Trump 2.0. This is what happened when Trump 1.0 got elected. It seems like the table is set for, cool, let's take him down. Let's use the tools that we have at our disposal to make sure that an outsider does not come in and disrupt what at least from the left and the right, we can both agree on, which is that you need party loyal people. And so they're playing the same game. Trump comes along, he's playing a new game. Let's take him out. From a narrative perspective,

• 21:24Tom Bilyeu?

  it's very easy to swallow, but I'm also paranoid about facile narratives. So do you think that's what we're going to see play out in these indictments? Or will indictments ever come? Grand jury, I think, is active now. Or is this all just more spin on the behalf of Tulsi Gabbard?

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I don't think we're going to see backlash. I don't think we're going to see anything get moved through the court system, especially not anything fast, going back to previous presidents. What I do think we're seeing-

• 21:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Because there's nothing there? Or because the whole system-

• 22:00Speaker 01

  The whole system-

• 22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Is like, no way.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Well, the whole system is not built for this.

• 22:05Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't have this.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  So we don't, first of all, we don't have an official judicial system. Or we don't have an efficient.

• 22:11Tom Bilyeu?

  You mean within, okay.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  We don't have an efficient.

• 22:13Tom Bilyeu?

  We don't have an official judicial system, what?

• 22:15Speaker 01

  We don't have an efficient judicial system. And then, part of the reason that we don't have an efficient system in any of our three branches of government is because our forefathers wanted us to move slowly. Because they wanted to build, arguably, they wanted to build in space for, for people to pop off, have emotional changes, changes in the, in the geopolitical landscape that wouldn't radically transform our country. So they wanted to build in that buffer space. The second thing is that we have to understand that Donald Trump and the Donald Trump administration, the reason they are consistently one step ahead of the traditional bureaucracy of government is because he moves at the speed of business. He understands how to move at the speed of economy.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  He understands how people think and how to market to the way that people think. So whereas narratives used to be created, no shit. Narratives from government used to be created by the interns who worked for congresspeople who would sit around in a big room with a coach at the front and they would all shape their narrative. And then they would give those narratives to their congressmen and their congressmen would take that narrative to the floor.

• 23:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Bro, that's wild.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  It's ridiculous. And anybody who's ever worked on the Hill in any kind of like civilian capacity has literally watched, they're supposed to have a meeting with the senator or the congressman from Idaho, and instead they have a meeting with four 24-year-olds who are, two of which are interns, two of which are staffers, and they're talking to these 26-year-olds, 24-year-olds about whatever policy agenda is going to get passed. And then those four kids are basically like, we got you dude. And then they go talk to the congressman of Idaho and then boom, it's done. That's the way our government works.

• 23:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It's a shame.

• 23:54Tom Bilyeu?

  The part that freaks me out is not the youth. What freaks me out is that you've got a group of people basically saying, this is how we want people to think about it. Put it together, come up with the words, the angle, all of that, and then now we're going to feed it through the system by going and sitting down with these congresspeople. Especially now in the age where you hear the media and they'll repeat the same phrase. Over and over and over like a mindless drone. It is way unnerving. So hearing that, which I was not aware of in terms of how the message was shaped. That's not fun.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  That's not fun, and that's that's been how it's been for a long time. So by the time you and I hear something official from the federal government. It's been shaped for weeks, if not months by coaches. Congress, congressional staffers and congresspeople who agree or disagree or further tune. Whatever comes out of their staffers recommendations. Now we move at the speed of marketing. So now Donald Trump says something and it's out there. And his staff has to react to what he said on Twitter or what he said on X, right?

• 24:55Tom Bilyeu?

  It's a whole truth. How dare you?

• 24:59Tom Bilyeu?

  His stock just dropped.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  So there's all this different pacing that's very, very difficult. What's, what does that mean? The reason it's so unnerving to me is because. It's it's more difficult than ever before for Americans to know what is really happening. What is somebody actually saying? Are they actually saying what they intend to do? Are they saying something that they've been forced to say? Or are they just trying to save their job? We don't know. It's insane. And it's very, very difficult for any of us to make confident decisions in that landscape. And that is going to be the landscape. For many, many years, I would argue for a decade or more. Because the precedent has been set.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  The precedent has been set and it is in favor of the president. So whoever's going to come next and beat Donald Trump or whoever's going to come after Donald Trump no longer can be running for office. Whoever comes next is going to pull from this playbook. Because this playbook works. This playbook benefits the president, benefits presidential ambition, benefits the constituent base that votes the president into office. We're not going to see it. End anytime soon.

• 26:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, I want to keep drilling into the actual facts of the case here. So, uh, looking at what Tulsi Gabbard is claiming, it seems to hinge on a small handful of things. Uh, one, that they knowingly shaped the information. That Obama rejected an initial presentation that yes, Russia was doing something, but it's really not having any impact. Uh, it's, uh, the next piece would be that Trump actively was colluding, that not only was Russia doing this, but Trump was in on it. The Steele dossier was used in the creation of the intel, which they then said, no, no, no, that wasn't a big part of it.

• 26:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, since that was paid for by Hillary Clinton's, um, team. If all of those things are true, and Obama did know about it, that it was, as you said, malicious information, that they looked at a small subset. And then presented it as if this were the whole truth, uh, and nothing but the truth. They left out, obviously, the part that's come out in the Durham annex, which is that, uh, Obama knew about it, was briefed that they were using it as a distraction against Hillary's emails. Do you think that if those things are true, it would qualify as a coup?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I don't think it would qualify as a coup.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  And that's because in my worldview, coups are hyper organized across multiple branches of government. Uh, military, police, intelligence, uh, Internal Revenue Service, like multiple branches are included when you have a successful coup. Not just a leadership coup or a soft coup. That stuff happens in the third world, sort of, only because it's every, there's such a strong man in the, in office that once one person tips, everybody just follows suit. But not in the United States. So I would not qualify it as a coup. I will say that it seems, it seems reasonable and logical to me that Obama would have known about it. Because. Anything that's happening in the executive branch would have been told to the chief executive. Whether or not he made a mental note of it, whether or not it was on page 200 or page 2 of his president's daily brief,

• 28:13Speaker 01

  I don't know, but he would have known that there was some element here of, "Hey, Mr. President, we're seeing Russia participate in this way in trying to shape our elections or interfere with our elections. It looks like this is what we believe they want versus this other thing, whatever else." We had the same thing going into the 2024 elections with Biden, who then turned it to Kamala, and Trump again, where people were saying, "Hey, we see information that suggests China wants X, Russia wants Y, Iran wants this other thing, North Korea wants this third outcome." That's not unfamiliar territory to us. I think the big difference was in 2016, it became front-page news.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Foreign governments have always tried to participate, have always tried to interfere with our elections. They've always contributed, they've always messed with us. And presumably, we do the same. Exactly right. That's part of the process, that's part of the game of espionage. You never know how things are going to turn out, but you know that you want things to be so chaotic that the people in the target country don't believe in their own system. The fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that we're seeing what's playing out right now in headlines, is just making Russia smile all the way to the bank. Forget Russia, China. Everybody. China. Anybody who's not a democracy is looking at the United States right now, and looking at what's going across our headlines and saying, "That system doesn't work." There are Americans looking at us right now, saying, "Our system may not work." Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  That's the end goal. That's the whole reason that we interfere with elections at all. Not to get a certain person through the finish line, but to make everybody doubt the process.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

• 29:54Tom Bilyeu?

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• 30:37Tom Bilyeu?

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• 30:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Okay, so I'm certainly doubting the process. There's no doubt about that. If the things are true, I still don't want somebody to go to jail. I don't want, I am so worried about the justice system being weaponized against political opponents that I honestly don't know what to do. I don't know what the right play is. So the horrible answer that I've come up with is do obviously the investigation. You have to find out what's true. There's no way around that. So you have to find out what's true. And then it needs to be about the dismemberment of their legacy and their ability to interface with the government moving forward. But I do not want to see like, let's just say that Obama literally said, we gotta take this guy down. Like, this is crazy.

• 31:42Tom Bilyeu?

  So yeah, go back, find me something better, right? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. So you get it. He's obviously not gonna go say, make things up. But he's gonna make it clear that like, I need a certain answer. It's like, I forget, I think it was Brennan that said something to the effect of, but doesn't it ring true? And it's like, okay, signal coming in loud and clear about where you're. You're headed with this. So I assume even if it were something like that, and it was just like, we caught him on tape. He's saying it. It's obvious. Like, there's nowhere to hide. The grand jury hands down an indictment. Everybody looks at it and it's just like guaranteed thousand percent. He did it. I still don't want him to go to jail. But every time I say that out loud, I'm like, oh, God. Because you can't have a system where people are above the law.

• 32:24Tom Bilyeu?

  And at the same time, you can't have a system where people weaponize it and put their opponents in jail. Because ascertaining the truth, of course, is always going to be exceedingly difficult. And so you're gonna find yourself where the other side is like, ah, close enough. Jail him. And so, help. What do we do?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  The only thing we really have the option to do takes time. And nobody wants to hear that. There's nothing we can do today. There's no button we can press today. This is the, this is the same situation that you're seeing across Europe as well. In Portugal, in France, you saw, uh, there was another place, possibly Belgium. I may, I'm probably saying that wrong. I'm pretty sure there were three locations in the last two years. Where the parliament had a no, a no confidence vote and reset the whole political system. Every parliamentarian lost their office.

• 33:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  And had to be re-voted back in. Everything was dissolved and reset again. And.

• 33:22Tom Bilyeu?

  How did I not know that? That's wild.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And that's happened three times and at least three times in the last two years across Europe. In the United States, that's essentially what we're, that's what we need. We need a hard reset. We need to turn that, not just turn the computer off, but like factory reset the settings in many cases. To get back to something that we can control, something that we care about.

• 33:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Say that, do you mean rewrite the constitution? Or do you just mean the elected officials, they need to stand for office again?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Every person sitting in every seat that makes a decision that's supposed to be a representation of the American people. Every person, every seat needs to be reset. That would be my solution to how we would do this. Let's all revisit, who is the 12th congressional district leader for Wichita?

• 34:10Tom Bilyeu?

  What about judges?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I mean, I'm primarily thinking about the people who write policy, not the people who are in charge of enforcing the law.

• 34:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Well.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Those people are also-

• 34:19Tom Bilyeu?

  They got a little policy-y there for a minute. Until the recent Supreme Court decision, it really did feel like, and I mean, look, this is what the judiciary does, is they interpret policy, but it felt pretty activist-y.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I don't disagree with you, but the problem is that that's not going to happen. The problem is that in two years during the midterm election, we're still only going to see 30% voter turnout. And everybody knows that's what's going to happen. And that's what makes fatalists fatalists, and that's what makes optimists optimistic, and that's what drives the wheel of time forward, man. Things aren't going to change unless a whole hell of a lot of people start doing things that they've never done before, including researching who they vote for before they vote for that person, showing up to the polls to actually vote for the person that they choose because of things that they've researched, not things they've seen on TV in commercials, not things that their parents and parents-in-law are sharing with them around a kitchen table, but because what they're voting, their actual conscious, which means you have to be an

• 35:18Speaker 01

  informed voter to do that.

• 35:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And that is the, that's the long and short of it. And everybody above that, that, that pay stub, the name that appears above the government pay stub, everybody whose name is being, who's being paid by the government knows that the American voter is not going to do that. So that's why they do whatever they can to kind of preserve their job, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, or whether it's some GS5 working for the USPS.

• 35:46Tom Bilyeu?

  How does this end up happening without triggering the rank and file to whistleblow, which we're starting to get in this event, but it's not like a thousand people coming forward. So is it that you just recruit well for people that are loyal to the country? I don't, I don't know how you pull this off. Is it you just liken the book Shadow Cell, your new book, which by the way, amazing, and we will certainly be talking specifically about that in a minute, but you guys like really splintered off into these really small groups so that you couldn't sort of infect one another if one person got caught.

• 36:22Tom Bilyeu?

  How are they pulling, if something like this really did happen and we find out all these facts, how do they do it without triggering that whistleblower instinct?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  So it's not conspiratorial. I don't want anyone to think that there's some massive government conspiracy. It's just not, it's not feasible, it's not probable. And in my experience, it's ludicrous to think that this many people could be in on one thing. Because even inside government, you've got people motivated by different things. So it's not conspiratorial. It's very much tied to behavior and the flaws within the system itself. Government employees, by and large, are not your sharpest, smartest, most motivated, most dedicated employee. That's not what drives them to work for the government. What drives them to work for the government is a steady paycheck, a pension, job stability, and any number of other factors in life that make those things paramount to them. So you're

• 37:15Speaker 01

  not looking for, they don't, they're not predisposed to making waves, they're not predisposed to innovation, they're not predisposed to disruption, they're predisposed to stability, and a very set work schedule. So that's who we staff in government, by and large. The people who are innovators, who are movers and shakers, who are outliers to that community, usually end up getting the fuck out of government at the earliest possible convenience, because they know that the, that the checkmark on their resume, that they came from NSA, or they came from CIA, or they came from IRS, is going to benefit them in whatever they do next.

• 37:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So is this a go along to get along kind of thing?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Culturally, that's exactly what it is. Culturally, you get in, and then you're so happy that you got in. And now all you have to do is just sit there with your nose to the grindstone for 20 years, and you're gonna have a guaranteed pension. That is such a motivating factor, that when you layer on top of that the culture of, you don't get promoted unless people like playing with you, what we call the sandbox effect inside CIA. If you don't play nice in the sandbox, you don't get invited to the bigger sandbox. So everybody's promotion is not tied to their productivity, it's not tied to their effectiveness, it's tied to whether or not the person above them likes them. So then, we start having this grandfather or rabbi effect, whereas one person promotes and has success, they bring with them their loyalists. But those loyalists are different than what we talk about in political systems.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  What a loyalist really is inside of government is just somebody who understands you, can kind of understand what your intent is and what your purpose is, what we call commander's intent, so that you don't have to give them express instructions every step of the way. But that's how every office in government works. It's not that the most talented rise to the top. And oftentimes, what happens is the most effective people bail, and then whatever's left rises to the top. It's like the same way in the military.

• 39:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Woof. If we're being manipulated by our own government for dealing with all the things you just said, people that are likely to look away from something that's inconvenient to their career advancement, how do we, the American public, protect ourselves from being manipulated like that? And actually, can, before you answer that, can I ask an even more distressing question? Do you think we should protect ourselves, or should we go along with the narrative?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Oof. That is a red pill, blue pill, matrix question right there, my friend. So if you want life to be easy, go along with the narrative. If you want life to be easy, pick your news channel, whether it's CNN or whether it's Fox News. Only watch your news channel. Worry about the shit they tell you to worry about. Take the actions they tell you to take, and then just live your nine-to-five job. Just do it. And buy your bread, and buy your Eggo waffles, and, you know, drink your favorite coffee, and just go through life until the day comes that, for whatever reason, healthcare doesn't cover your illness, and you pass on to the next life. That's the easiest way to go.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Don't try to understand the truth if you're looking for the easy life. If you're looking for the truth, understand that there is no way to get there without a whole lot of work and a whole lot of effort. If you want the truth, you have to inherently distrust your government. You have to distrust that they are there to support you because they are not there to support you. They are there to support the government, the continuance of government. By definition, the American government's job is to protect the government of the United States, not the people of the United States. So if you sit at your table thinking, "Oh, my government is there for me," they're not. You may get to choose them, but their job is to protect themselves and to protect the

• 40:58Speaker 01

  legacy of the American institution because that's what really writes history books, not the history of John J. Smith. So understand that they're motivated by something very different than what you're motivated by. So you have to distrust them and you have to try to anticipate what motivates them. If you want to understand Donald Trump, all you have to do is ask yourself, "What does Donald Trump want from this decision?" If you can land on that, you're going to have a much higher fidelity of being able to anticipate what Donald Trump's next move is going to be because he is very, very good at doing what serves Donald Trump. Donald Trump's campaign, Donald Trump's administration, Donald Trump's name, Donald Trump's net worth. He's very good at that. Obama was the same way. Bush was the same way. We just have more insight into Donald Trump than we ever had into Bush or Obama.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  So you have to distrust your federal government and then you have to distrust the media because the media only knows, they only feel comfortable reporting what they're told by the federal government. A trained PR person who's there to save their job and there to save the federal government is telling the news media what their official statements are. Then you've got leaks and these anonymous sources. You have no idea what their motivation is. So you have to distrust what you read. That doesn't mean that everyone's lying to you. It just means you can't trust any of it. You have to take it all as raw information and then cross-reference it on your own. And I would recommend that when you cross-reference American media, you cross-reference it against

• 42:21Speaker 01

  the opposing political's media output and foreign media that is both left and right leaning. So you're going to look for something like Al Jazeera. You're going to look for something like France 24. You're going to look for something foreign to cross-reference against our own news sources. So that means if you really want to know what's Happening, you're reading four news stories about the same single thing to come up with your own conclusion on what's likely, what's probable and what's improbable.

• 42:47Tom Bilyeu?

  So give us some of the, for people that don't know you, which I think at this point has vanished something this small, but the whole idea of Everyday Spy is, hey, listen, guys, I was trained by the best of the best to be an espionage. And I'm telling you, a lot of these tactics work in your everyday life. So give us some tradecraft of how we look at information, figure out, because you're going to have to break things down either by what's most important, what's most likely to be totally sus, what does, and maybe you do this by the person, like, okay, what is it, what are Donald Trump's tells? I characterize Donald Trump as being a narcissistic entrepreneur who thinks of America like America, Inc., whatever, like, what's the tradecraft that we can apply here so

• 43:29Tom Bilyeu?

  that we can sift through this information, connect the dots with a high degree of efficiency?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  So you are, you're exactly right. Everyday Spy, the company that I started is a company that focuses on bringing spy education into everyday life so that people can break barriers, whatever those barriers are. For some people, it's a mindset barrier. For some people, it's a physical health barrier. For other people, it's a business barrier. But the mission of the company is to bring spy skills to the front, tradecraft to the front, that allows you to break whatever barrier you're facing. One of those barriers is information. On a large scale, if I were to start kind of from the top down, CIA looks at everything through two lenses first, a macro lens and a micro lens. In order to understand what you're seeing on the micro lens, you have to first assess it on

• 44:17Speaker 01

  the macro lens. We call this assessment versus assumption. If you assume something to be true, then you're not looking at it through a lens of objective fact, which is what leads to assessment. So if you're looking at the economy, the American economy, you have to assess it on a macro level before you look at it on a micro level. So you have to look at, is the economy healthy? How much is it growing or shrinking? How does it compare to last year? These are all macro assessments before you look at rare earth minerals, which is a micro assessment, before you look at AI, or you look at memory chips, right? You can't do micro, you have to look at macro first. The same thing comes to assessing a person. When you're trying to determine what is Donald Trump's agenda? What is Tulsi Gabbard's agenda? Is Pete Hegseth an idiot or not?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  You have to look at macro first. Assess the person. Where did they come from? What are their highest achievements? What are their lowest lows? Who are they married to? How many times have they been married? Where do they live? Blah, blah, blah, blah. What's their net worth? Right? All these macro indicators. Before you dig into, did he actually share Houthi secrets on Signal? You've got to look at them both. What happens is we live in an era where everything is very, all the communication is very micro. Because micro is what gives us something that we can click on and read day to day. Even when you look at a headline, you have to look at the macro part of a headline. This is a fantastic exercise for everybody because a, the macro part of a news story is the headline itself. When you assess a headline, you should be asking yourself,

• 45:45Speaker 01

  does this headline make me feel strong emotions? It is a classic-

• 45:50Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's just like a trigger to know if you're being manipulated?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 45:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so when you talk about macro, are you saying, because this is how I think about the economy, you need to be thinking from a cause and effect perspective? Uh, is that what you mean by macro?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Sort of. I mean, you have to look at the past, present, and future. And you have to understand that they, they all have a role in shaping the intent. So when you look at a headline, for example, when you look at the economy, or when you look at, when you look at a headline, this is just as one example. The headline is maybe 12 words. What is the intent of those 12 words? Almost guaranteed, the intent is to get you to read the first paragraph, or at least the first sentence of the article. So we already know that's part of the intention. But what's the larger intention? If you read a headline that's, that's speculative, or if you read a headline that's alarmist, right? Fire in Pacific Palisades tied directly to Mexican cartels.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Like, that, that is a very alarmist, uh, highly accusatory headline. The intent of that headline is not for you to read the story. It's for you to say that, to parrot that headline to five or 12 other people. To automatically share it on Facebook, to automatically share it on X, to get viral attention. Oftentimes, when you see a headline like that, and you read the first paragraph, the first paragraph will actually contradict the headline itself.

• 47:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  But that's a, that's a trick that's used in media. And that trick is well-known in espionage because it's the difference, the true difference between persuasion and influence. That is a very persuasive headline, meaning it gets you emotional and it makes you believe in it in the moment. But if you just take an extra five or 15 seconds, you'll stop believing in the headline because you'll read that first paragraph. Influence is the antithesis of persuasion. Persuasion, you trust something in a moment. Influence, you trust something long-term. So after you've watched Fox News for 20 years, you, Fox News has a great deal of influence with you.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  So now they can shape a narrative through you because they already know that you're believing most of what they share. So even though they share some facts sometimes, they also share some conjecture other times. But they've, they're able to influence your political outreach or your political, uh, decisions and your political perspectives because they've built that long-term trust with you. Whether it's factual or not is irrelevant if the trust is there.

• 48:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, the method that I use to steal my mind, and I'd be very interested to see if you see a better way to do it, or if there's tradecraft language that explains what I'm doing, is I build a map of cause and effect. And so if, um, I will, and listen, I know that the maps that I have of cause and effect are often, they're wrong in some way, and I just don't know which way they're wrong yet, so I don't want people to think that I fool myself into thinking, oh, this is perfect. Um, but when you're mapping cause and effect, you'll find that the output of the system has high predictive validity. And so it's like, okay, there's probably something wrong, but this is giving me answers that end up being true way more often than they're not true. So, uh, the economy, for instance, by building a map of the cause and effect of inflation, which is my favorite hobby horse,

• 49:03Tom Bilyeu?

  uh, it's made me made investing decisions that have made me millions of dollars. So it's like, good luck convincing me I don't understand the rough swag for sure of the cause and effect of the economy. Because I have spent now years building a cause and effect sense of the economy, testing it against decisions, if somebody comes and tells me, no, no, no, it's not really that way. Mamdammy runs in New York and is like, let's make grocery stores free. I'm like, hold on, this map of cause and effect that I built tells me that that's not going to work. In fact, if you do that, I'm just going to get richer because you're doing something that's going to be so inflationary. It'll be destructive to the economy. All I have to do is bet against the economy. I'm going to make more money. So it's like, okay, that's dumb because the people that you're trying to help, they're not going to be helped by that mechanistically. And so

• 49:47Tom Bilyeu?

  that is my protective mechanism. Now, it's extremely time consuming to build, but it's incredibly effective. Is there, like, for people that haven't read the book in Shadow Cell, like, you really get to life and death decision making. So that's the ultimate test. So how do you begin to rapidly understand in an environment where you know some people who are trying to disguise themselves from you are lying to you intentionally to crack through your defenses, and that if they're successful, they may kill, imprison, whatever?

• 50:29Tom Bilyeu?

  So how are you parsing that information, like, at the nitty gritty level? I got the macro, the micro, but like, what's the, like, real nitty gritty? We're here on the ground. You're saying a thing. I'm like, you looking at my face, my body language, like, what are we doing?

• 50:42Speaker 01

  So what you're, what you're talking about when you talk about your cause and effect map, the tradecraft term for that is called an ACH, an analysis of competing hypotheses. That's your map. And what an analysis of competing hypotheses is, is it's literally a list of all the hypotheses that could be determining the input that you're seeing. So the price of milk just went up. It went up because of A, it went up because of B, it went up because of C, or the value of my dollar that bought the milk went down because of A, because of C, because of A, B, C. So you create all these hypotheses, and then you compete the hypotheses against each other. What's probable, what's less probable, what's the evidence that I have to support this, what's the evidence that I have to support

• 51:23Speaker 01

  that? Is the evidence higher fidelity or lower fidelity? And then you come out with a, out with a highly probable, high fidelity hypothesis that you can then test to see whether or not your process was right or wrong. So ACH is what you're using for that process. And I love that you're doing it. I'm not surprised with somebody as intelligent as you that you've created something like that, homegrown on your own. When you're making decisions in the moment, you're doing something very similar. When you're looking at body language, when you're hearing verbal intonality, when you're considering how far behind you somebody is walking, or how slowly somebody in front of you is driving, you're doing the same thing. You're creating a real-time ACH. However, you're limiting the number of factors that you're considering to compete against each other.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Rather than having a fulsome list of 24 hypotheticals, you're only looking at the top three. The top three is something that you can process quickly. The human brain basically breaks everything into twos and threes. Twos and threes. So, something is two, until it is three, then it's three. Once it's four, it's two sets of two. Once it's five, it's one set of two, one set of three. So the brain just naturally moves in a way, or cognits in a way, that breaks things down into twos and threes. So if you have to choose between making two options or three options, always make three options. So, we try to have a primary option, a positive option, a negative option, a neutral option.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  So, I think this is happening and it benefits me, and here's my hypothesis. I think this is happening and it works against me, here's my hypothesis. I think this is happening and it's not going to affect me, but it will affect the next thing that comes. That's a neutral outcome. So whether it's somebody squinting at you, somebody high-fiving you, somebody yelling at you, you've always got to have those three hypotheses. Just as a quick example, you see a mother in a parking lot screaming bloody murder at her kid. Most people look at that and they're like, "That's a bad mom." Right? Maybe. That's one of three hypotheses. It could also be that that mom is stressed out, and whatever's going on, she's trying to protect her kid, and that's your positive. Her stress is what's protecting the kid. And then there's always a third option.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  The third option is it has nothing to do with the kid. We have no idea what's happening. Maybe she's just got fired and she's just reacting to being fired, but the kid's the one taking the bullets for her reacting. We don't know. But whatever comes next is she's gonna drive that car. So how does A, B, and C affect her driving of the car? Well, in all three cases, we know that there's going to be a stressed out driver behind the wheel. So now we can focus on that outcome, no matter what the input might be. Instead, most people would just focus on now gossiping about this woman who's yelling at her kid, completely oblivious to the fact that once you get behind your fucking wheel in the same parking lot as that fucking lady, she could run into the back of your car and now put you and your kids at risk. So ACH and that process of considering positive, negative, and neutral

• 54:16Speaker 01

  is a big part to how you get into the nitty gritty of of any real time operational implication.

• 54:23Tom Bilyeu?

  That's really useful. The idea of, okay, could be one of these forcing yourself to take different framing, very smart. But the, and this is what's going to happen next, I think, is the really useful insight. Scott Besant, the Treasury, the Secretary of Treasury, talks a lot about that with how Soros made his unbelievable fortune when they broke the Bank of England. So he said, okay, everybody talks about how brilliant that was. But nobody looks at, we doubled our money the next day because before we went in and broke the back of the Bank of England, we knew we're going to get this windfall and this is what we're going to do with it.

• 55:04Tom Bilyeu?

  And he was like, so we made a billion on the first trade and then we made like another billion on the second trade. And so he's like, nobody ever talks about the second trade. And he was like, the real thing is that, like knowing that next move. I always thought that was really smart and you're right. Most people, A, don't force themselves to come up with a different framing. So they have the initial reaction, the emotion makes the thing feel true, which I am desperate to get people to stop doing. Everybody trusts themselves way too much.

• 55:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect. So they see bad mom, they think bad mom, and that's sort of the end of it. They end up feeling superior, that feels good. And then they get smashed into by the driver because they're not paying attention. So yeah, that's really fascinating, but to pull yourself out of that is is really important. Okay, so bring-

• 55:57Speaker 01

  I want to throw that out there too.

• 55:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Please.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  I, I appreciate, one of the reasons I like you so much is because you want people to stop thinking that way. The depressing truth is 80% of the people listening to this conversation right now are not going to change the way they think.

• 56:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That is overly generous. I clock it and I'm not kidding at 98%.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  So, so between 80 and 98% of people hearing this conversation will not change. All that that's depressing if you look at it through a lens of humanity. I, we had this conversation off camera. You like people. You just don't spend a lot of time with them. I actually don't like people. And I spend way too fucking much time with them. Right? So.

• 56:37Tom Bilyeu?

  It's hilarious. Why don't you like people?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Because people are like this. Because 98% of people, if you're being accurate, 80% of people, if you're being generous, are emotionally driven, completely unpredictable. They want nothing more than just to feel the lie that they're safe day to day. And that is not what I, that's not how I want to spend my time. That's not how you have a deep, meaningful conversation with somebody. That's not how you find the person that you trust with your kids. That's not the person who gives you a whiskey recommendation that you actually want to drink. That's, that's an asshole. And the world is full of assholes just trying to survive, right? Just trying to make it to the next sniff of their own asshole. And I don't have any interest in that. I'm looking for that 2% of people who are like, you know what? I'm on a trajectory to improve, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how hard the work is, no matter how difficult the path is.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Because if I'm a little bit better tomorrow than I am today, I have hope for the future. Not hope that I'm being sold on the end of a ballot, but hope that actually resides in my brain and my body and my fitness level, et cetera. So, the vast majority of people are never going to change. That makes it all the more valuable to the few that do change. Because you now have not just, just like you were saying, the first trade and the second trade, and the real money comes in the second trade. If you improve yourself today, not only do you get a little bit better today, you get a whole hell of a lot better than your competition every single day. So you've got the benefit, the growth of your point A to point B, plus the growth of your point B against everybody else's stagnation from previous days.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  That doubles the amount of growth and doubles the amount of opportunity advantage that you have. That's a big lesson CIA teaches us. They tell us right out of the gates. We're going to tell you something that's published in psychology books, that's out there in business books. We're going to teach you how to do this in a systematic way. And even they know that only two out of the 10 people in the room are actually going to succeed at doing it in the field. And that's fine. With all of their application, with all of their. All of their hiring rigidity, they still know not everybody's gonna apply it. They'll learn it and never do it.

• 58:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's what I call the only belief that matters. If you believe that putting time and energy into something will make you better, then you'll actually put the time and energy into it. Some people just, the vast, vast, vast majority of people, never move forward. I assume because they're paralyzed by thinking, well, I'm not good at this and I don't want to be embarrassed and so I stop. All right, that's enough of that mindsety bullshit. I want to get back to the lie. You've said that twice now, so the lie that you're safe. How not safe are we?

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I, there's a saying that I learned in business from a, somebody that I trust. It may not be accurate, but it keeps my ass feet to the fire. That every company is basically one quarter away from not making payroll. Because any company that's longer than one quarter away from not making payroll isn't trying to grow fast enough. And any company that's basically one month away from payroll, missing payroll, is a company that's, that's too overzealous. Which basically makes it so everybody who has a job who's like, oh, I've got a job and I'm safe. Actually, you're one quarter away from not getting paid. Just depends on the decisions that your CEO makes. That same wisdom in business rang true for me immediately because that's how it works in espionage.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  We are always 60 to 90 days away from our next tragedy.

• 1:00:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Tragedy.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Always. We just don't know what that's gonna be. There's always some terrorist group that's planning to drop a bomb. There's always some drug deal that's trying to ship 10 tons of some sort of drug. There's always some weapons dealer who's trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon across a border. Always. And it's a 60 to 90 day window between whether or not they'll be successful or not. That's, that's how we view constant threats. So we can't just shut down. That's why during a government shutdown, your intelligence services don't shut down. Right? They don't even fall back to critical needs. They fall back, everybody in the intelligence infrastructure is considered to be a critical asset because we know 60 to 90 days is too much to lose a window into something. We get scared if we lose access for seven days.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  If we don't get new information from a target location in seven days. If, if Mazin fails, Immit fails, uh, Osin fails, everything fails for seven days, we start to really wig out because what's happening in those seven days? And if we're losing this gap right now, then we have to question the previous seven days before the gap. Was it shaped information? So have we really been 14 days out of the know? So Americans feel safe because they don't realize we're only 60 to 90 days away from the next tragedy.

• 1:01:18Tom Bilyeu?

  What comes next will only hit harder once you know what this guy's really capable of. In part two, we're digging into the dark arts of persuasion, how power is wielded behind closed doors, and how you can start applying spy tactics to regain control of your own life. Make sure you're following the show. And if you're listening on Spotify, leave a comment on this episode. Let us know what you think and what you want to hear more of. Until next time, my friends, be legendary.

• 1:01:46Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:02:31Tom Bilyeu?

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