Why America’s Enemies Smell Blood : CIA Secrets, Economic Warfare, and the Next World War | Andrew Bustamante PT 1

Tom Bilyeu sits down with Andrew Bustamante, former CIA officer and founder of Everyday Spy, to uncover the hidden systems powering global politics, economics, and high-stakes decision-making. With his unique intelligence background, Andrew sheds light on why the world’s power truly runs on leverage—not morality—challenging everything you think you know about secrets, national interest, and survival in the geopolitical arena. In Part 1, Tom and Andrew pull back the curtain on the international leverage game. From the true function of secrets like the Epstein and JFK files, to the mechanics of economic warfare and media manipulation, they explore how the powerful wield information to maintain dominance. The discussion dives deep into real-world examples, like the China spy balloon incident, and explores why governments only release classified documents when it serves their purposes. This episode will alter your perspective on government actions, international conflict, and the moral constructs imposed on society, arming you with a profound understanding of the “outcomes, not morality” worldview that drives the people in charge. SHOWNOTES 00:00 – Andrew Bustamante’s CIA background and Tom’s introduction 07:42 – The consequences and strategic withholding of the Epstein files 15:37 – Moving from a “right/wrong” model to an “outcomes” model 28:44 – The fundamental difference between defending a country and defending its people 30:19 – Intelligence matrices: probability vs. reliability in decision-making FOLLOW ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EverydaySpy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everydayspy Website: https://everydayspy.com/ 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 ButcherBox: New users that sign up for ButcherBox will receive their choice between steak tips, salmon, or chicken breast in every box for a year + $20 off their first box at ⁠https://butcherbox.com/impact⁠ https://butcherbox.com/impact Monarch Money: Use code THEORY at ⁠https://monarchmoney.com⁠ https://monarchmoney.com for 50% off your first year! Netsuite: Download the new e-book Navigating Global Trade: 3 Insights for Leaders at ⁠http://NetSuite.com/Theory⁠ http://netsuite.com/Theory iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACTGO when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at ⁠https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu⁠ https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Jerry: Stop needlessly overpaying for car insurance - download the Jerry app or head to ⁠https://jerry.ai/impact⁠ https://jerry.ai/impact 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?

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  You hit us with a pinprick. You know, we hit back 10 times harder. They're not going anywhere. I promise you've tried for a decade now. It's not working. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I'm damn proud of it. Everybody sucks. You suck. They suck. This guy sucks. That's not happening. This is not that show. This is the Dan Bongino Show. We bring receipts and facts. Go to rumble.com/bongino or listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Jeffrey Epstein's story was never about sex. It was an illusion, like the dress some see as blue and others see as gold. Intelligence agencies exploit the same trick. They shape what you notice and distort what it means. Enter Compromat, the art of collecting dirt to control the powerful. Today, former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante reveals how Epstein-style ops really work and why the truth is often too useful to reveal. Bustamante and I discuss how to minimize truth blindness without seeing lies in everything. Without further ado, I bring you Andrew Bustamante.

• 2:16Tom Bilyeu?

  The world runs on, I think, different power structures than people realize. Give us your mental model for the secret power structures that the world really moves on.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I went into CIA thinking that the world moved on justice and equality, or like some pursuit of equity. What CIA actually taught me is that the world's power is all based on leverage. It's a constantly dynamic environment, just like the tides. Tides come in, tides go out. The power of the ocean is unmistakable, but the tide's always changing and the seasons change. Sometimes there's a storm, sometimes it's calm, right? The power of the world works on leverage. When you have leverage, it's your responsibility to take advantage of that leverage and make what progress you can make. But you also have to recognize when you don't have leverage. And that when, in those moments, when you don't have leverage,

• 3:14Speaker 02

  if you intend to still make progress, you have to follow the power of the ocean, understanding always that the tides will change again, right? And if you're not able to work inside that dynamic, that dynamic environment, then you're just the rocks in the ocean that just get pummeled and get worn down and get rounded out.

• 3:33Tom Bilyeu?

  So if that's true, how do countries get leverage?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  The biggest way is economically. And we've had this conversation multiple times and I'm pretty sure we see eye to eye.

• 3:42Tom Bilyeu?

  It is my obsession, yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Economics drives everything. And the reason that economics drives everything is not because of money. Economics drives everything because economics is based in the principle of limited resources, right? We will run out of blank. You will run out of gold. You will run out of silver. You will run out of processing power. You will run out of time. You will run out of dollars and cents, right? It's a limited pool of resources. That is factual. From the time that we were cave people collecting fucking blueberries, you're gonna run out. That's leverage. Somebody has a basket of blueberries. Somebody else doesn't have enough blueberries. And that person who has a basket understands they can't eat them all. Some of them are gonna go bad. So they have to find a way to get rid of the ones that are gonna go bad

• 4:28Speaker 02

  in, you know, fast enough that they can get something in exchange for just the lost blueberries. So can I give you my older blueberries in exchange for a squirrel fur? Who knows what, right? To make a new loincloth? I don't know. But the point is, that's the game. It's... Americans focus so much because of media on what they don't have. Never understanding that you do have an abundance of something else. And that something else you have an abundance of is your leverage point. Because there's somebody else out there who doesn't have that enough. And they are willing to make a trade. They are willing to make a barter. They are willing to make a deal.

• 5:09Tom Bilyeu?

  At the international level, it seems like a pretty dark game is being played. And right now, the fact that you had Cash Patel come into being the new FBI director on the promise of one of the things that, hey, we're going to release these Epstein files. Now, the Epstein files, to me, seem like this is a key point of leverage. And I can't tell whether they're not releasing the files because in doing so, they will tip their hand to how they gain a whole lot of leverage. Or if the people that they have leverage over already, there's just too many, too powerful. And it would be like spilling all of your leverage in one sort of dump. And now you don't even have that leverage.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I don't think you're reading it wrong personally. So secrets are leverage. What you know that somebody else doesn't know, 100% that's leverage. But secrets have kind of two dimensions on their graph of value. There's the intensity of the secret, right? That's one part of the graph. But then there's the timing of its release, the timing of when you make the secret public. So it's not secret anymore. What you're always trying to do is find the point where you get the highest level of intensity at the right time. So that you can maximize the impact of releasing the secret. Epstein files, JFK files, UAP UFO files, all of those things where we only see partial releases, partial redactions,

• 6:35Speaker 02

  partial declassification, that's showing us that the government believes there's a moment of impact between the timing of that release and the intensity of that secret that gains them leverage for whatever they want to do next. It's not something they're doing to be nice. It's not something they're doing to pay us back. It's something that they're doing because they need that leverage for what comes next. Remember the China spy balloon incident?

• 6:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, yes.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  In the lead up to the China spy balloon incident.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Nobody was talking about really much of anything. They were talking about China, but they weren't talking about UFOs and they weren't talking about China spying on the continental United States. They were talking about the threat of China overall. Then the balloon presented itself and there were days, just a few days in advance where they started talking about there's a UFO in the sky. There's a UAP. Nobody knows what it is. So all the UFO people got really geared up, but the typical American was like, meh, more UFO sightings. We don't really believe in that. Then the shit hit that it was a spy balloon from China. And pictures started coming across and that shit's over like Virginia. People are losing their fucking minds, right? There was a reason that that was released. There's a reason that it wasn't released two days before and it wasn't released two days after.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  It was released at that moment and it was because the US needed the support of the American people before it launched F six or F twenty twos to shoot down this fucking balloon over the coast of Virginia, knowing that shrapnel or debris might land on someone's house. Right? They wanted to shoot it down over the ocean, but they needed to have insurance just in case they screwed it up or the winds changed or something, right? So now we release it's a China spy balloon. It gives us a chance to show off our weaponry, highlight the threat of China, rally America around a new threat. And it gives us plausible deniability so that if we do shoot down a balloon and if something does fall on somebody's church, at least we're like, hey, we're protecting the homeland, you know, we're not a bad evil government. But then immediately after that, there were like three or four more balloons in the sky.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  What were all of those called? UFOs. And then in the following weeks, all people were talking about was these, these UFOs. Are they more balloons? We don't know. The government's only calling them UFOs and UAPs because there wasn't a reason to call them what they really were. Right? That's, that's how the government plays leverage. How do I play my card now to get what I need in this like reliable period of time, knowing that there's a, there's a shelf life for the secret and there's a shelf life for the release. So I'm off target with your Epstein files, but that's the same thing I'm seeing. The intensity doesn't match the timing to release the secrets yet. It could be that they're trying to cover up something that's embarrassing. It could also be they have something so good. Now's not the right time to release it.

• 9:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it also possible, like when I look at the JFK files, that seems more like a dissipation of energy, like we want to sort of drip and drab it out for a long time. So that by the time you have everything, it's like, well, there's really nothing here. Because if there was really nothing there from the beginning, and it wouldn't have mattered, released forty years ago, why didn't they release it forty years ago? And then the Epstein files, just, it seems impossible that this is the one that you hide. By hiding it now, you just seem complicit. So it seems to me that there has to be something so damning in that file that they'll take the reputational hit for saying, because they said, we're going to release it, and now they're not.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Correct, and that you're seeing that matrix play out right now. Let's use the JFK files as a comparison, right? If we had, if we would have released the details of the JFK file in the late sixties or early seventies, right? If that would have happened then, and there would have been signs that the FBI were tracking somebody who was already in relationship with the Soviets, and there was the CIA, Soviet police overlap, like all the stuff that's been released in the recent tranches. If that would have come out then, it would have been a major issue. So they didn't release it then. Instead, they release it now, when the intensity level is much less. So the timing is much less. So just like you have times where you want to release stuff to gain leverage, maybe

• 10:41Speaker 02

  you want that leverage to negotiate, maybe you also want that leverage to dissipate, to slow boil out. So now it's like, oh, of course the Soviets were tracking the person. We've been hearing about it in conspiracy theories for decades. So now the conspiracy theories are just being validated. So what's the leverage we're gaining by releasing it now? The leverage that we're gaining is that the current president can say, I released files that nobody else released. I made this publicly accessible when nobody else did, right? The stuff that we're seeing in the JFK files was, was absolutely intensely desired back then, but by releasing it now, we gain a different kind of leverage. So with Epstein, my suspicion is that, my suspicion is that people don't fully know

• 11:23Speaker 02

  how deeply tied he was to foreign governments, to foreign intelligence agencies, maybe even to American intelligence agencies. People don't know the extent. So they're afraid to release what they have. Because if they find out more later on, or if somebody else finds out more later on, it could be really bad. Especially in the current geopolitical arena that we're in now, right? When Putin is vying for power against Russia, or Putin is vying for power against Trump, Netanyahu and Trump are close and far and close and far. And then you've got complete transformation in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Like, the whole world is kind of a tinderbox right now. Nobody knows who's the next power broker. This is not the time when you want to say we know something, only to find out six months from now that we didn't know at all.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Right? For Russia to use that moment to gain leverage to release classified files that are released on Reddit, let's say, that show that they knew something about Epstein that we didn't release to our own people.

• 12:21Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:06Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Promo code IMPACT. It's completely risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. And we're back. Let's pick up right where we left off. I'm obsessed with having a mental model that gives me predictive validity. The more I read about history, the more I see things like COVID, Epstein, whatever is... My hypothesis becomes, in a time of crisis, experts, the elites, they're going to use that as an opportunity not to respond to the crisis, but to leverage it to gain more power, more control. And I have a feeling, looking at the Epstein file, and I'm not like a historian of this, but the mental model that I'm building is there are going to be people on that list that this is going to cause problems for. So that's one level. Powerful people simply do not want the headache.

• 15:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Could also be that they have footage of them doing truly evil things. That, obviously, is going to be something they want to keep under wraps. But the other one that is, might be the most interesting of them is simply, I'm beginning to map that people that run the world are effectively immoral. And like you said... It's just leverage. And so there is a darkness to that that exists in the human soul. That people in power know that exists in the human soul and that they willingly use it to gain leverage. And that all of the, even the power broker people come out of the woodwork, walk right into the honey trap.

• 16:01Tom Bilyeu?

  So the analogy that I use is geopolitics, the narratives that we make at the international level. It's a magician. This is all sleight of hand. The line between good and evil runs through every human heart. And that you can get a distressing amount of people to do something that is evil. And then governments leverage that to wage what I think is economic warfare.

• 16:29Tom Bilyeu?

  To create the world that we see right now where houses are out of reach and all that. But to me, all of this stuff is tied.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  I don't disagree that it's all tied. I also don't disagree that it's complicated. Cause what you just laid out is not a simple model, right? It's a complicated model. I think both of those things have more truth and validity than they do misdirection or miscalculation. Right? To simplify it all, however, what we learn at CIA is that everything is based on consequences and outcomes. There is no good and evil. There is no right and wrong. The average person struggles with that because from the time you're little, you're conditioned to believe in good and evil, right and wrong. Right? You go to church to fight evil, to believe in good. There's hero super movie or superhero movies about people who are heroes and people who are villains.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Right? Right and wrong, good and bad. These are, these are things that are, are man-made boundaries to help a developing brain learn social norms. That's why those things exist. The, the church, the public school system, your, your kitchen table. All of those things are, are there to help reduce the complexities of life to something simple, something binary. Black, white, good, bad, you know, pure evil hero villain.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  We're always trying to unpack that. As we grow in experience and age, we have to unpack those things. We have to walk those things back. Some people are more gifted at walking those things back, which is why CIA does so much recruiting from people who are on the spectrum. When you say walking it back, you mean to step outside of the frame of morality? What we call at the agency is moral flexibility. Not to step out of it, but to walk beside it. There's times when you want to get back into your morality. There's times when you want to step outside of that morality and adopt a different, more flexible version of morality. To get to an end. To get to an outcome that benefits you, right? Because really what we're talking about at the end of the day is survival instincts.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  All human beings have an innate desire to survive. We don't live in an environment, we don't live in a world where our survival is threatened equally. When you are living in the suburbs of Chicago, you are not in a position of threat like somebody who lives on the outskirts of Khartoum. Completely different levels of threat, but both individuals feel like survival is king. But to survive in the suburbs of Chicago, you might need to drive a BMW Modern Series, whatever, so that you get accepted socially. Outside of Khartoum, you might just need to, you know, know the right time to go to the market so you don't get a drone to drop a bomb on you right now, right?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  That's, there are different levels of survivability, but the mindset is the same. I say that because what we see worldwide, what we see playing out in headlines is not that much different than what plays out in the boardroom or plays out in the bedroom even. People are constantly trying to survive when we have the opportunity to thrive. We have an opportunity to take calculated risks and grow exponentially. We have an opportunity to make significantly more money than we make right now. We have an opportunity to get more sleep, have better relationships. Everything could be better, especially in the first world. But we're locked in this mindset of, well, if I do that thing that's going to help me make more money, am I doing the right or the wrong thing? Am I being good or bad?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Am I a hero or a villain? And because of that, we're constantly trapped in this. Model that doesn't actually serve us. So CIA's job is to train its officers to step outside of that, that less optimized model into a more optimized model that we call-

• 20:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Four outcomes. I just wanna keep that guidepost.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Four outcomes.

• 20:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting because it's so true at the level of the individual. I think there is something more terrifyingly pathological when you take it to the nation state level because from the mental model that I've built, and please punch me in the mouth if this isn't true, but the mental model that I've built is that to pull that off, the government knows that you're trapped in your morality, the Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men. And the government, playing the role of Colonel Jessup, is like, listen, so that you can live in that la la land of your morality, I have to stand on a wall and kill people. And you need men like me to stand on this wall and kill people. And if I tell you that every now and then, I have to turn inward and kill one of you to make sure that I can keep this

• 21:12Tom Bilyeu?

  charade going so that you can live that life, then that's what we're gonna fucking do. And when people in the morality frame look at the government and the way they actually behave, it is a level of repugnant that is terrifying. Now, when people are in the moral frame and they look at their governments and they realize, oh my God, like to get to this end, you've been morally flexible in a way that I find abhorrent, now there's like this massive cognitive dissonance. I'm gonna lay out a scenario that's a little bit conspiracy theory.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:47Tom Bilyeu?

  And I wanna get a sense of whether, I don't need to know if you think or believe it to be true. I wanna know if you think it fits within the framework of how governments actually act.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Do you know the sinking of the Lusitania?

• 21:57Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I mean, I do partially.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  The story is so-

• 22:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. Now, I'll try to mile marker the things where most historians will agree, and I'll try to point out where historians would be like, Tom's out of his mind.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Not that I'm coming up with these theories, though. These are definitely things that I've read from researchers and other historians.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:18Tom Bilyeu?

  But the sinking of the Lusitania was in 1915. This is a real communication, internal memo that Winston Churchill wrote, where he said, "We need to find a way to attract neutral ships to our shores as a way of embroiling the US with Germany."

• 22:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Meaning, we wanna get passenger ships here that aren't considered military vehicles. We wanna get them shot and sunk. Because if America doesn't enter the war, you're, uh, England, that part of the, um, access is gonna end up losing. And so, we've gotta find a way. And so, there, that part is, that communication exists. And that, what I just said is very close to verbatim. Okay. Then you've got things that happened, but are more questionable. So, what happened is the Lusitania was retrofitted to be able to carry munitions, explosives, et cetera. Okay?

• 23:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Why they did it, I won't comment on. They did it. Now, one of the reasons, this part is conspiracy, that people put forward is that the State Department had reason to, financial reason, to want the US to enter the war, but they had to make it palatable to the American people. So they're not working with Churchill, who has stated in this communication that this is their plan. Uh, so, the boat was retrofitted, we know that. Now, did the State Department start doing things like that, or work with the DOD to start doing things like that? So that, I mean technically, it would have been the British, because it was a British ship, but that it gets retrofitted, so they know that it sounds more like a military vehicle to the U-boats. That is an outcome, why they did it is up for grabs.

• 24:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, another thing that we know happened is they said that this was a civilian ship, and that there was no munitions on it. Well, decades after it gets sunk, they find that there were six million rounds, muh, million rounds of ammunition on the boat, so they lied about that for a very long time. That we know happens, been verified. And then, here are a whole host of things that do end up happening, whether they were the intent of everything, again, this is up for grabs. The Germans knew that the British were probably up to something like this, trying to get a civilian vessel to trick a U-boat, to get them to sink it, either by putting munitions on it, or whatever. So, the German government took out ads in the US newspaper saying- Hey, this is a thing. And just so you know, don't ride on these ships,

• 24:50Tom Bilyeu?

  especially if they're carrying munitions and they're going to a war zone. We have the right to sink them. And supposedly, the State Department stopped those ads from being run, except one got through and it ran. And guess what ships, uh, dates it ran next to? The Lusitania. So right next to the Lusitania is an ad like in this regional newspaper, put there by the German government saying, hey, these boats are being loaded with munitions. You've got to be careful. Like if you ride one of these boats, likely to get sunk. Okay, then the Lusitania going across to England, they pull back. It was supposed to be escorted. They pulled the escort back. They, um, steered it into a slightly new direction where the British Admiralty had intercepted German communications,

• 25:35Tom Bilyeu?

  saying that there were U-boats in that area. And they told the, uh, captain of the Lusitania to slow down. So you divert its course into an area where you know there's U-boats. Did you do it on purpose? Did they just get super unlucky? The chaperone ship was called back to shore? Did they do it on purpose? Was it unlucky? But Lusitania ends up getting shot. All the munitions explode, boat sinks, and 128 Americans are killed amongst the 1,200 total people that end up dying. The propaganda machinery goes nuts and says, you know, basically they've killed American troops. And the sentiment in America goes from, nobody wants to be in the war, to now they're in flame. Two years later, we're in the war. Now you, you can put that together of just, it's just unlucky, man. Right.

• 26:20Tom Bilyeu?

  War and these things happen and, you know, yes, Churchill was thinking about it, but he didn't, I mean, that wasn't, they weren't really doing it. Uh, sure, they lied about the munitions, but they were really just trying to sneak it over. Or was it Churchill goes, we can't lose. So put the munitions on and it either makes it and we get munitions. Or they sink it because we've had to retrofit the thing and it sounds like it and we drive it into the most dangerous area. And now we get the thing that we want, which is the US ends up becoming more likely to get into the war. And when I read that one, I was like, okay, admittedly, I don't, I cannot see into the hearts of men. I only know the parts that we can prove. But you look at that and you go, man, this is really uncomfortable that.

• 27:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Leaders do think like that.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, let's move away from the Lusitania and go to Sinwar. Israel, Palestine. And Sinwar goes, I'm gonna take hostages. I'm not gonna give them back. And now I've grabbed a hold of Israel. And Israel keeps saying, let go, let go, let go. And they're just punching me, Sinwar, in the face by killing Palestinians over and over and over. And I know if I let go, they'll stop punching me. But I'm not going to let go because I want them to punch me. And it's like, goddamn dude. It's so this very distressing mental map that I'm building is

• 27:43Tom Bilyeu?

  there are, again, I'm saying this because I'm trapped. I like being trapped here. Let me be very clear. I am trapped in a moral framework that says, yikes. This is really gross. That leaders will sacrifice. Because maybe thank God, America joined World War I. Maybe that is good and the world moved in a better direction. Maybe it's good that Israel is standing up and defending itself. Maybe it's also horrible as fuck. And so talk me off a ledge. Because the more I look at history and current affairs, the more I am just like, whoa.

• 28:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Like there are dead shark eyes in these power players as far as the eye can see. After the break, why most influence is invisible until it's too late. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve.

• 29:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14 day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  You hit us with a pinprick, you know, we hit back 10 times harder. People stick with us through thick and thin, midterms, presidential, because we don't lie to people, we don't fall for the current thing, and we produce evidence of our purchases. That's called a receipt. That's why this show remains incredibly popular with people because we bring the freaking receipts every time. Your country is on the line in this midterm election. Go to rumble.com/bongino or listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:13Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, let's dive right back in.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  The ledge I'm going to try to talk you off of isn't a ledge of calculated intent, because I think you're actually more right than you are wrong when you look at it and describe it the way you're describing it, right? You're looking at the facts, assessing the facts, looking at the outcomes that would come as a result of those facts. There's a matrix in the middle that I'll introduce you to that I think is the only piece that that you have either not stated out loud, or maybe you don't, you're not aware of it yet. But otherwise, I think you're more right than you are wrong. Yikes. Yikes is the right way to think about it. The ledge that I want to walk you back from is a ledge of of feeling like you are at risk because of it.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Because at the end of the day, you're also focused on your survival, just like I'm focused on my survival. Because our our brains, our biological brains, the pink matter in our heads, hasn't evolved at the speed of the environment around us. So we have AI and we have, you know, push button banking and we have antibiotics. We have incredible technology around us that keeps us alive and helps us to thrive. But by psychologically, we're still cavemen like we haven't had the 10,000 years to like evolve our brains like we need. So that we can actually see threats for what they really are. We still blow threats out of proportion. So I want to walk you back from the ledge of feeling like these calculations threaten you.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  And I want to emphasize why the calculations exist and how you can benefit from understanding them more than placing any kind of moral judgment or or living in your in your box, right? Your trap, as you've called it. One of the amazing things about people is that people have something called mass psychosis. Which means that as groups of people come together, their individuality starts to blend into a new norm. Right? So you by yourself, you can maintain your own beliefs and principles and ideas and moral guidepost, right? But as soon as we put you with somebody else, you start to blend in with them.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  It might only be 2% different from what you believe, but you start to become something else. The same thing happens when you start to bring family units together or community units together or employer units together. You've heard of a company culture. What is a company culture? It's a unique culture that the people who come into the company start to adopt. They might have believed in, you know, independence and innovation and disruption before, but now that they come into a company. Now it's the company's brand of disruption and the company's brand of innovation, right? They they adopt a norm to belong to what they are are attaching themselves to, right? That's a type of psychosis, the type of of mental model that's adopted because they want to have a biased

• 33:10Speaker 02

  group of people that that they belong to. It's a cognitive bias, the in-group bias, right? As those groups get larger and larger, what do they become? They become countries, they become governments. So going back to your Lusitania example, what was Churchill the most interested in? Protecting the lives of individuals in the UK or in Britain? Or protecting the British government? What was he actually more afraid of happening? The destruction of lives or the destruction of the government? His job was to protect the government. Because as long as a government exists, then the ideology of a country exists. Individuals come and go, right?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  The US government isn't there to protect the American people. It's there to protect the American government, right? We take an oath when we join any kind of DOD, CIA organization. Anytime you join a national security organization, you take an oath that says, "To support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The Constitution is what defines what is the government. You don't take an oath to defend the American people. You take an oath to defend the Constitution. It's a very different thing. American people come and go. America looks very different now than it looked in 1955, right? You can't defend the people because the people all have different opinions of, that change, that evolve.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Some people are educated, some people are less educated. Some people are educated from the wrong schools. Some people are educated from outdated schools. I mean, anybody who's spent a Thanksgiving with their grandparents knows, "Thank God, America isn't what those people grew up in anymore." But one day we'll be the grandparents. So why do we think that our government is there to protect us? It's not. It's there to protect the way we live. It's there to protect the ideology of a country. So Churchill understood that. And he understood that there are actions that we can take. That increase the probability of a favorable outcome that benefits us in this current conflict in a way that preserves the longevity of Britain.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  That's the matrix that I wanted to introduce you to, right? This idea, there's a second matrix, or a matrix that we use in Intel that talks about probability versus reliability. And the probability of an outcome and the reliability, meaning the trustworthiness of the information that we're getting, right? Those two things together help us determine what actions we do take and what actions we don't take, because we want to take an action that we have a high reliability. We highly believe that the probability is equally high, right? So we have, we have strong information that we deem to be true, that this, this action that we take will have a high probability result that benefits us. So we want to take high probabilities of high reliability information.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  We don't want to take somebody one time said one thing and we were like, oh, that's, that's an interesting nugget that gives us a high probability of success. That's not reliable. But when multiple people are saying something and it has a high probability of giving us, giving us the outcome we want, then we take action. So the idea of retrofitting a civilian passenger ship and inviting more passenger ships into a region specifically in the hopes that, that a mistake will happen, or even better, a mistake doesn't happen, like what happened here. The Lusitania wasn't a mistake. It was carrying ammunition. It was carrying weapons that supported a conflict. So the Germans weren't wrong in sinking it technically, right? But by controlling what we shared about it to the people, we were able to control what

• 36:52Speaker 02

  the people or Britain was able to control and the US was able to control how the population interpreted it. Why did it matter? Because the population thinks through that lens of mass psychosis. Same thing with weapons of mass destruction in Gulf War. Yeah. Right? Same thing with 9/11. 9/11 happened, we were all afraid of terrorists. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats right now for the same fucking terrorists in Pakistan that are doing the same kind of shit they were doing before. Where was Osama bin Laden killed? Pakistan. Who was an ally to the United States during the war on terror? Pakistan. Who didn't give America the ability to fly in and kill Osama bin Laden? Pakistan. So we took that authority on our own.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I say that because the example that you have in World War I just plays out over and over again throughout the world of conflict. You look at what's happening right now with Hamas and Israel, I would argue that there's multiple reasons why Hamas is getting the outcome they want. Even though Israel's also getting certain outcomes that they want also, now there's a leverage game because Hamas understands that if they capitulate, Israel's not going to slow down. There's no reason for them to believe that Netanyahu is going to stop committing atrocities across Gaza if they give him his hostages. No reason to believe that. Same thing between Russia and Zelensky in Ukraine. They're at a place now where they have more

• 38:18Speaker 02

  to gain by not cooperating than they have to gain by cooperating. That all of those situations, in their perspective, increase the probability of favorable outcomes for their individual countries. Putin believes he will make Russia stronger. Netanyahu believes he will make Israel stronger. Hamas believes they will survive through this conflict and radicalize more Muslim Palestinians than ever before. Zelensky believes that he's going to somehow return 1991 borders to Ukraine, even though his own top generals tell him he won't. They're all doing it because they think like individuals, because when you get a group of humans together, they start to become a new singular organism. And the

• 38:59Speaker 02

  organism, in many cases, is the government itself, its own entity.

• 39:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so are there limits? So taking it back to Epstein, hey, I'm gonna, I'm not saying you, but I'm just saying, they went and got pedophiles, presumably, allegedly, for a whole bunch of powerful people. And it's like, if somebody had that similar view, like, is it like, yeah, no limits. I don't like it, but there's no limits.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  It doesn't sound right to say there's no limits, but I'm using the word right and wrong. I'm trying to actually ask myself, like,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  And here's the rubric, here's the scenario that's going on in my head with your question, right? Here is an American citizen, standing right here, right? Thirty-three-year-old, mother of an 18-month-old child. She lives in Wisconsin. She goes to work every day, online, trying to make her Etsy store work. And she's been married for seven years, and she's a positive, helpful, loved individual, American citizen. Here is a Pakistani citizen, who's a scumbag, who was raped as a child, and who, from that, has become a pedophile, because now, he doesn't understand sex. So, his only understanding of sex is what was done to him, so now, he's a pedophile

• 40:21Speaker 02

  in Pakistan. Would I give him child porn, to get secrets from him, to keep her safe? I think I would. It keeps her safe. Would I kill him, to keep her safe? I think I would. Because, as long as he exists, he might pose a threat to her. And the world of reliability and probability that I was just telling you about, that matrix, when we have high-reliable information, that there's a high probability that this guy is planning an attack that might harm her, what's my limit? Because her could be my mom. Her could be my wife. Her could be my daughter.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  And this is my moment, to decide what I'd do to him. And, I want to do to him, what I would hope, somebody would have done to protect my mom, and what I hope somebody will do, one day, to protect my daughter. That's my calculation, because I'm thinking through that lens of survivability. I need her to survive. This is the future of our country. This guy's already fucked. He's already a bad guy. We gotta remember that we do horrible shit, to bad people. Bad according to our moral definitions of right and wrong, good and bad. They're already intending to do harm to national security interests. If he wants to blow up some dude in India, not my problem. If he wants to rape some kid from Singapore, not my problem, right? She's my problem, not these other folks. That's the calculation that we work with.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  And, inside that calculation, what wouldn't I do to protect her? I don't think there's much.

• 41:55Tom Bilyeu?

  Take Israel, Palestine, where obviously there's so much international outrage. In fact, there was just a murder as we're recording this of two Israeli embassy employees, where the guy was screaming, "Free Palestine." It's like, okay, well, from his perspective, if he's running that same calculus, then presumably, he's like, "Yeah, what's the problem? If I'm able to draw attention to my cause and get more supporters so that we can defend ourselves, then all's fair, right?" Take what's going on in South Africa. There's hundreds of years of injustice. And so, yes, we're going to kill a few white farmers and we're going to take their land back. Fuck them. Like, I've got to think about mine.

• 42:37Tom Bilyeu?

  As an international community, when it's not us fighting for us, but it's us fighting for a moral framework, or is that delusion on my part? And, Tom, you're being ridiculous. This is all leverage. This is just leverage. They put a bit of lipstick on it that they call moral framework, but this is really just leverage. How do we think about it internationally?

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Your morals are being defined for you. That's how you need to think about it. You haven't defined them for yourself. You weren't given the freedom or the flexibility to define them for yourself. You were put into a structured system, a structured school system, a structured educational system, a structured religious system, a structured professional system. Like, you have been shaped. So, your morality has been shaped by the government that sits at the wheel. There was a time when it was morally repugnant to think that black people and white people were equal.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  That was shaped. And then, it was changed. And now, people would still argue that there are plenty of racists out there who still think black people and white people aren't equal. But, at a government level, it's been moved. The dial has been changed quite a bit, right? There was a time when we thought that it was a great idea to have children performing labor in the fields. Now, we don't think it's such a great idea. There was a time when we thought it was better to keep women systematically underpaid. Now, we're going through a transition where are we trying to systematically bring women up to the same pay scale as men, based exclusively on their gender? So what's morally acceptable changes over time. Why? Is it you that changes? No.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  It's the government that changes the levels of what is morally acceptable and not morally acceptable. Sometimes that comes through social reform. Sometimes it's a marriage of social reform and political reform. Sometimes it's nothing more than blind political ambition and people trying to make a career in politics and looking for a cause that they can stand behind. Right? And a cause is gonna take them to the top. They don't even believe in it themselves. They just wanna get the benefit of it and they use it as leverage. Right? That's the world that we live in. Russia, prior to invading Ukraine, believed, the surveys just came out recently, Russians believed that the most important thing was quality of life.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  That's what the average Russian believed in, at a rate of like 65% of Russians polled, prior to the invasion of Ukraine. For the first 18 months of Ukraine, they still majoritively believed in that. But there was a, there was an increasing belief that power and global power and the respect for their global power, that opinion also started to rise. So now, two years plus later, Russians believe predominantly that the most important thing for them is the perception of global power, not quality of life. The contingent of Russians that care about quality of life is down like 25% compared to the group that wants to believe that global power is the most important thing.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  So Putin's war in Ukraine and what the propaganda machine and what the context for the West versus East power struggle, all of that has shaped what is now a new level of moral priority for Russians themselves. Right? The same thing is happening to Palestinians, the same thing is happening to Sunni Muslims all across the Middle East, the same thing is happening to Israelis, the same thing is happening in America. Right? People, there is, there's a bell curve of people who are still undecided. Right? That's the majority of people, they're still undecided. They, they hear arguments on both sides, but they generally keep their conclusions to themselves. And then you've got on the outsides of the bell curve, the two extremes. The one extreme that's very vocal in favor of whatever the action is

• 46:24Speaker 02

  and the other extreme that's very vocal against what's happening. Right? Everything breaks out into the 80/20 rule. So those are what we see the most. The dude who just shot two people coming out of a Young Diplomats party? That dude was fucked up. There are better ways to get a more effective outcome than that. But that individual was an outlier. They weren't able to process or think through the better way to do it. Just like Luigi Mangione. He thought killing the CEO of United Healthcare was the best, most effective thing he could do to shed light on the problems with American healthcare. Some would say he did a good job and they still do. And other people say he didn't.

• 47:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Lot of people.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  So that's it's what we're getting at is that this idea of morality is is given to you. Unless you take control of it yourself and say, this is how it pertains to me.

• 47:17Tom Bilyeu?

  But I'm reading a therefore, so your morality is given to you. It's not real. The stuff changes over time. Therefore, at the level of nation state, you have one job. Keep your nation safe. Be as morally flexible as you need to be.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  And that would say the same lesson applies to the individual. Right? The individual needs to understand your government is not there to protect you. American government is not there to keep us safe. It's not there to serve us. It's not there to keep us safe. It's there to serve itself. And as long as we serve within the confines of what it has dictated is beneficial for the American public, as long as we follow those rules, pay our taxes, do things the way that they let us do things, right? As long as that's what we do, they won't hinder us. They might even help us. But as soon as you try to go outside of that, things get much more difficult. Right? As soon as you try to live off the grid, things become difficult. As soon as you try to, you know, exercise whatever right you interpret is yours, but they think is is difficult, like just trying to take a pet from one country to another

• 48:15Speaker 02

  country becomes bureaucratically difficult. Whenever you run into that bureaucratic difficulty, what you're really running into is you are outside of the norm that the government has set in place to maximize and optimize its own survivability.

• 48:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about South Africa. As you apply that framework, did you see how Trump responded to the president of South Africa recently?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  I read a little bit.

• 48:38Tom Bilyeu?

  About it, but I didn't see it. I was gangster. So there are definitely complexities. I'll give people a very quick primer. There are multiple parties in South Africa, so it's not like the US where you just have two parties. There's a bunch and they're competing for attention. So there is a guy in their legislature, whatever they call it, parliament, whatever, who represents a party that has 10% of the vote. And he is talking about slitting the throat of whiteness, direct quote, kill the boar, kill the farmers, the boers, the Dutch settlers that came over like in the 1600s.

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Just openly calling for it. And he's saying, look, I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people as of right now. And they're like, uh, you can understand why people would be very unnerved by that. Cause yet, he's like, yeah, I can't promise that that someone won't in the future, myself or somebody else. And they're like, what is happening? So the president of South Africa sits down with the president, Donald Trump, and Trump plays him a video of this guy saying all this crazy ass shit. And as an international community, I think people sort of skitch out of like, okay, hold on a second. We're denying people coming into our country as refugees from a whole lot of places where people are brown, but you've got these white farmers in South Africa who are a part of a very

• 49:59Tom Bilyeu?

  racist regime and apartheid, and you're giving them the status. I mean, clearly, bad things are happening. Some farmers, people argue the number, some farmers have been attacked and murdered and their farms have been taken. And as far as I know, people have not gone to prison for that. And this guy who controls 10% of the vote is saying, we're going to expropriate all their farms. So we're going to, I mean, technically he's saying, we're going to kill them and take their stuff. And he's saying, even the president's not going to be able to stop us. So he's calling for all of their land to be given with no compensation whatsoever.

• 50:31Tom Bilyeu?

  How do, like, how do you, with this framework, which I consider it, I really worry when listening to you that you're just at ground truth and that there's, you're not giving me any adornments to hide behind. But with that unadorned just truth of how the human animal works, how do we think about it? Do we just go, well, if they've got mineral rights, then we're going to stand up under the pretense of helping, but this is really about getting the mineral rights that we need and nothing else? Or do we go, this is racist and we have to stop it? And of course, we're going to welcome farmers here?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  It would be nice if we stood by the ideological truths of America, right? And that we would identify racism as what it is, even if it's reverse racism, and that we would find some way to use our international wasta influence to-

• 51:20Tom Bilyeu?

  It's called wasta?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Wasta is the Arabic word for influence, yeah. We would use it to, to drive the morally right thing to do in South Africa, right? It would be nice if that's how we thought of it. But in the world of limited resources, where American dollars, American hours, American attention is limited, we have to take into account that what's happening in South Africa, what are the probabilities that what happens there will directly impact the national security apparatus of the United States, our 33-year-old mother, right? How much of our time, attention, and money should go into this issue to keep her safe? I would argue that right now, not much. And if there's mineral rights to be gained,

• 52:02Speaker 02

  that gives us a little bit of leverage that we can use to try to do what, what does benefit us in the long run, right? Or maybe there's some other leverage that we should use instead. What that leverage is, I don't know yet. I can see an intelligence operation where this is our chance to start growing our own covert influence among the white population, play into their racism, to start building our informant pool, to start shaping the leaders that will come about when a racist conflict- Like reaches a precipice and it's black versus white inside South Africa. Right. That's, that's the intelligence way of thinking about it. Don't think about the problem today. Think about the problem 10 years from now and how do we set ourselves up to be in a position of power 10 years from now instead of right now. Right. Because right now it's kind of out of our control.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  I would also say that reliability and probability, a zealot with 10% of the vote, who's talking about, you know, waging war on white people may sound scary, but what are the actual probabilities he's going to have success? What are the probabilities that there isn't some already existing radical group? That's not just going to assassinate that guy. Right. And if they do, what are we going to do? If we start getting involved now, then we're going to set ourselves up for having to be involved if he is killed later on by some contingent of, you know, white elitist South Africans, where if we just keep our distance now, it's their fucking problem. They'll deal with it.

• 53:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Coming up, how to spot a lie, disarm manipulation in real time, and use the spy mindset to win in everyday 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.

• 53:41Tom Bilyeu?

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• 54:26Tom Bilyeu?

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• 54:45Speaker 01

  You hit us with a pinprick, you know, we hit back 10 times harder. They're not going anywhere. I promise, you've tried for a decade now. It's not working. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I'm damn proud of it. Everybody sucks, you suck, they suck, this guy sucks, that's not happening. This is not that show. This is the Dan Bongino Show. We bring receipts and facts. Go to rumble.com/bongino or listen on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.