Ex-CIA Spy: The Government Is Hiding A Threat Bigger Than Iran... | Andrew Bustamante Pt 2

What's up, guys? Today I’m bringing you part 2 of a mind-blowing episode with former CIA intelligence officer and spycraft expert Andrew Bustamante. If you don’t know Andrew, he’s not only a decorated CIA veteran, but he’s also spent years consulting with top organizations on national security and critical decision-making. Andrew is a master at deconstructing the global chess game between superpowers, and today, we go deep into why AI is the new arms race, what China is really doing behind closed doors, and what it means for the future of America and the world. We’re talking about everything from the chilling pragmatism of the Chinese government, the perils of declining self-belief in the West, and what we need to do right now to win the future. Whether you’re worried about rapid advances in artificial intelligence, the fate of democracy, or just want to know how to outsmart your competition in today’s noisy world, this episode is for you. If you’re hungry for actionable insights on how to think at the highest strategic level, and you want the clarity to navigate a world that’s changing faster than ever before, you cannot miss this conversation. If you dig it like I did, please leave a review and help us get these vital ideas into the hands of everyone who wants to shape their destiny. I’m Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. 00:00 Japan's immigration challenges 05:18 China's holistic tech integration 07:25 Speculating on future AGI impacts 11:36 Concerns about AI dominance 12:57 AI advancement implications and concerns 16:11 US needs its own AI 19:36 AI and military applications 23:02 China's strategy in Hong Kong 28:27 American beliefs and financial hedging 30:22 Feeling unsafe during COVID 33:00 Future of the United States 36:41 Finding optimism and making change 42:08 Learning and knowledge cycle 43:40 Using open-ended questions in sales 46:12 Two questions and a confirmation strategy Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl#CashAppPod *Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosure. Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Whatnot: Download the Whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription order Ethos: Get a free quote athttps://ethos.com/impact Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact ATT Business: Switch to AT&T Business at https:// https://incogni.com/impactbusiness.att.com http://business.att.com Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impact What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside 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 Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:15Speaker 00

  Right now, you can look at the world. If you've got declining demographics as China does, as the US does, as Japan does, South Korea does. Your answer is immigration or AI. Those are your two options. Japan is now starting to run into immigration issues for the first time basically ever. And they're certainly hyper allergic to that. So you're seeing a response very early in ways that you're only just now seeing in Europe, where they got way farther down the path. So that's very interesting. US obviously ran and will, I think, go back to running their own immigration experiment. Should the right get out of office and the left come back in? Certainly with the DSA energy.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  But back to AI. AI gives you a chance where you don't have declining overall GDP, even if you're still willing to let the, you know, hundreds of millions of people just phase out and not worry about the fact that you have a much smaller set of females of childbearing age. So one of the questions I don't think Americans are being honest about, because we're now turning hard against AI. Like the sentiment in both Republicans and Democrats is falling so fast, it's terrifying. And that is to me crazy that we're just like abdicating the pursuit of the most important technology the world has ever seen.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  So when you look at China, how important is AI to them? Are they going to pursue it in a way that we're just going to give up on here in the US?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't even think that's my opinion. That's well documented that they are full speed ahead in AI. They are taking off the ethical concerns that we have. All they care about is being able to have a technology that can massively increase their productivity, perform consistently, and outpace American technology. The cover of The Economist last week, maybe last week, maybe two weeks ago, was a cover celebrating Chinese AI development. Because here's what's fascinating. Not only is the United States anti or ambiguously committed to AI. China has already paired AI with robotics. The two go hand in hand.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  The collegiate governments across the GCC countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, they're all pushing their investments into AI, where they used to push their investments into American real estate, American weapons development. Now they're pushing it into AI, which means all of that Gulf Coast money, all of that GCC money is going to Chinese development and Chinese support to develop AI capabilities in the Middle East.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Do you have, is there any reporting on that? I haven't seen the percentage of, because I would say a big part of the reason we went to war with Iran was to make sure that we could secure the GCC investments in AI. This is the first time I'm hearing anybody put forward that a lot of those dollars are now going to China.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one of the best places that I would look at is, is the Edge. What is it called? The Edge conglomerate? It's the military conglomerate of the UAE. UAE, which just broke from OPEC, the UAE that's increasingly independent. The UAE that just cut off all ties to Iran, which is a big step, because people don't realize most of UAE's food comes from Iran.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  So they're finding their food from somewhere else and I don't know where that is. But Edge is a fantastic example of how the UAE has consolidated all of its high-tech military infrastructure into one organization. That one organization is investing heavily in AI development from across the world. It's not just the United States. So I agree, the United States may be trying to secure investment. And I don't know what the specific breakdown is as it is now. I am sure that breakdown exists somewhere. Somebody's done a study. Who? I don't know. But somebody's done a study to see how much of the technology that's being purchased and invested in the Middle East is coming from China versus the United States. My point with all of that is China, at the current rate, they will outpace us in AI.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Based on what?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Just based on their willingness to invest, develop, grow, apply, their risk tolerance for applying AI, their lack of political debate about AI replacing jobs or anything else. To their, to my admittedly dark, but I still think ethnically accurate interpretation.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  If people die, people die all the time in China and it gets underreported because they just don't have reporting systems for it like they do in the United States. But if you're a Chinese person in Beijing, where your parents are also in Beijing and you don't really like taking care of them, or maybe you put them on private insurance, you're not having kids on purpose. The last thing you're concerned about is a village full of uneducated, broke, poverty stricken people 10, like 2,000 miles away. That's the last thing you're concerned about. And the Chinese government isn't concerned about them either because the Chinese government's like, let them fucking go. We have, we have batteries and renewable energy

• 6:37Speaker 01

  that we can plug into a robot on a tractor and replace the whole farm. That's, you can see how China's putting it all together in a way that the United States is putting it all together in a piecemeal way. We see renewable energy as separate from electric vehicles, separate from robotics, separate from AI. China's like, no, they are all the next step to replacing people who are a net drain on the national revenue, replacing them with a net productive capacity on the GDP national ledger.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  It's sad dude, but I, in my time in China, they are wildly pragmatic. If you think the Japanese are pragmatic, the Chinese are 10x.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. That is more the face I was making is just like, that's so ruthlessly efficient. Yeah, watching what they're doing with energy versus what we're doing with energy is crazy. Just today on my live show, the three of us were yelling about, because that's my whole beef is, this is crazy to me that the US has overregulated energy production. We should be letting the best and the brightest people innovate on energy, supply their own energy, let Microsoft spin up Three Mile Island, let people do nuclear, let companies generate their own energy, make them responsible for their own energy. Fine, whatever, but like, let them improve this system. It's crazy to me that we're just letting China run away with it.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  That is excruciatingly disheartening.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Does that sound like a country in decline?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  The US?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  No, the, now.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Oh, China, yeah. So I think China has economic woes to be sure. I think China has belief in themselves though, and that's going to count for a lot. But before we get to that, I want to understand, what are the consequences if China gets the AGI before we do?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So advanced general intelligence or artificial general intelligence is so far away. I'm not, I'm not convinced that it's something that's imminent. When anybody gets to AGI, the real question is going to be, what were the, what were the things that we did immediately before breaking that barrier to help us protect systems, processes, governance after that event? What we're doing right now isn't even close to being able to hem what's going to happen with advanced general intelligence or with artificial general intelligence. When it happens, it's going to be literally, what did we do the three months before we broke that sound barrier? If China gets there first, and if China sets the standard for what the barriers are,

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I mean, you're talking about a complete unknown. For sure, it would be based on completely different ideological goals, economic goals, political goals, sociological goals than what would happen if the United States did it. Or any other Western country would do it because it's not going to be how, it's not going to be founded in democracy. It's not going to be founded in support to populations. It's not going to be based in the, the advancement of humankind. It's going to be based in the optimized maximum utility of tools. And that then makes the question like, if that's what it's based in, will it ever become self-aware? And if it does become self-aware, then it's just a tool.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  How will it react then? This is, it's funny that you mentioned this because just before we, we started talking on camera, I was telling you about a book that I've been reading from the 1980s, a book called Hyperion. Hyperion, for anybody who's not a super sci-fi nerd, Hyperion was a book from the 1980s that won a whole slew of sci-fi awards that is still very well regarded and virtually unknown as a mainstream book. When I started reading it, I started reading it because I wanted to explore the discipline that goes into creating a world. It's a very detailed, I mean, you create a world in the video game all the time, but it's something that I don't do very often.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  What turned the corner for me when I was reading the book, because it was, it's work to read a book that's world building. But what turned the corner was when they introduced AI. A book from the 1980s introduced AI as a very real, a very real question concern worry that we're talking about right now. It introduced this idea of AGI in the 1980s in a sci-fi story about what would humanity look like in an age beyond AGI? And that's, for me, that's what's so powerful, what makes that book such a great book, but it also is part of what makes us have such strong dissenting points of view in our country right now about artificial intelligence.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  We're worried about AGI. We haven't even given ourselves permission to generate AI at the pace that we could.

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• 15:00Speaker 00

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  The thing I want to understand, so I have a very strong opinion that America needs to win that race, that the thing that we need to watch out for above all else is humanity's tendency towards tyranny. It's the one variable that China has not protected itself against. And so I am terrified of a world on, like if we're worried about artificial intelligence has a whole bunch of question marks and we don't even know, you don't need to look that far because a authoritarian leader with all the power in the universe, I mean, this would

• 15:44Speaker 00

  be like a magic device if it really, artificial general intelligence is scary because it will get into a self recursive improving loop. And the theory is that at that point, then it will, it's, you know, a hop, skip and a jump to artificial superintelligence. Once you get to artificial superintelligence, then it's like, okay, are we a pet of ASI? Are we, does it have such a different value system that it doesn't have any beef? It's perfectly happy to be a tool for us to use and it just doesn't care, doubt it? So that's where I'm like, okay, hold on. We've got just one thing to deal with right now, which is we've got these two systems, one of which is killed in not too distant memory, 45 million people.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  If your read is anywhere near accurate, it's perfectly happy to let hundreds of millions of people die if that's what it takes to just revamp the economy.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  I don't want them winning the race. If they were to win the AI race, are there consequences? And if so, what?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  And it's, this is, this is what makes it so hard to answer in any confidence. We can, we can speculate for sure, but you're 100% right that the Chinese government that's in power right now is a government that let 45 million people die in the 70s, 50 years ago.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is not ancient history.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And, and here we are debating whether or not they'd be willing to let hundreds of millions of people die between now and 2050. It doesn't seem like a stretch to think that with, that in a hundred years, they would let it happen twice and larger than before. And find a way to blame us for it. Find a way to blame some kind of external factor for it, right?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  But the idea that artificial general intelligence getting into a recursive loop of self-improvement would somehow be better if it happened for the United States than if it happened for China? That's the part where I don't know that there's enough evidence to suggest what better actually is. Because in the United States, it would most likely be economic, it would almost guaranteed be used for military purposes. Hopefully it would be used for some kind of efficiency to our, our energy infrastructure.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  And our, and our technology, our technology advantage in the marketplace. But those are all the same places it would be used in China as well.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  But if I told you that they were about to build a super soldier, would you say, ah, cool, let them? Or would you say, yeah, we got to build our own super soldier?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I would say that for any country, though. But here's what's fascinating. The United States has always been an imperial power, always trying to project its power abroad. China has largely, not just during the time of Mao, but even before that, even under Xi Jinping, was largely a regional insular power, trying to maintain-

• 18:36Speaker 00

  For a while, China was pretty acquisitive in terms of trying to rule as large of a portion of the world as they could in their time.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  But so when, so when was that time period?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Jesus, the years, I wouldn't know.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  But, but it wasn't a, it wasn't a centralized government that was trying to do it.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  True.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right? It was a weird sort of barbarian, fiefdom, competing kingdom sort of world, which is exactly what happened in Europe and with the Native Americans here in the United States. When you actually compare governments to governments,

• 19:12Speaker 01

  would China just basically use AGI to essentially make itself into a super police state? And a super powerful defensive shell with a capability of basically projecting economic and political threats worldwide? Or would it also create a military capability so that it could invade the United States? Guaranteed, the United States would weaponize it so that it could invade China.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  But we'd never invade China. It would all be cyber. My whole thing is I'm worried about cyber warfare. And if, um, if we got it, then we would certainly use it. We would say we're using it for good purposes, but we would certainly use it to see anything we wanted to see, control anything we needed to control. But the same will be done against us. To me, this is an arms race. It's best understood as the race to nuclear. And just like with nuclear weapons, it's the proliferation that stops the use. Because you have mutually assured destruction. Now, I don't think it would work like that with AI. I think that they would literally try to deploy the AI as fast and furious as they could. And you need an AI that's going to stop those attacks.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  And it becomes like spy versus spy with the AI versus the AI. That's my instinct on where this plays out, which is why you can't just let, like, if I'm China, like, I cannot let the US have this and me not have it.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  And if we're the US, we can't let them have it and us not have it. I'm perfectly happy to live in a world where they're doing their thing and they're growing it as fast as they can. And they're making it more efficient and yep, great, got it. I totally understand. My advice to every country would be to get your own AI. Do not let anybody else control your access to literal intelligence. The thing that I'm reacting against is the US has been prosperous for so long. They have completely lost sight of the fact that one day, somebody else could be slapping you around, telling you what to do. And it is going to be absolutely cold comfort that you felt America had it coming, or whatever weird fucking thing it is that they think. It's like, bro, we've got to be all over this.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  And just like we had the Manhattan Project to make sure that we got nuclear weapons first, we need to make sure that we are in pursuit of this technology. First of all, because when used for positive things, it is going to be the single most transformative technology ever. They're already now doing, it's one cancer, it's just melanoma. But they're filing for a patent for the ability to do mRNA vaccines based on the actual tumor that you have. And getting your own body's immune system to recognize it and go attack it. Now, that wasn't going to happen without AI. And if you want to talk about supercharging that and getting it to work with all the other cancers, you're going to need AI. And the fact that AI can fold proteins, so it can create novel proteins and figure out drugs.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  And I mean, there's just so many things. And people are, but it's going to increase energy costs. Yeah, because your dumb ass overregulated the energy industry and didn't allow there to be continued innovation there, like China has done, where their access to energy is almost a vertical line, because they're putting so much effort into whether it's coal, whether it's solar, whether it's nuclear, like, they're just, to your point, to them, energy, AI, technological superiority, cost of living, it's all one thing. And man, in the US, we've just got our heads screwed on backwards. It's crazy.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  The original question you had was what happens when somebody breaks through AGI? And, and that's why I, it's not going to be limited. It's a recursive loop. So there might be a cyber attack that starts an AGI war. Assuming that we're in a race to AGI now, which would be great to say that we're in a race to AGI now. It does certainly seem like we are racing with our shoelaces tied together. And China's racing with two separate shoes. But if we're in an AGI race, an AI race with AGI as the finish line, that way, we don't even have to worry about super intelligence. If that's the race that we're in, once AGI exists, it's not going to be long before it says,

• 23:22Speaker 01

  cyber warfare is the easiest first step, but you still need boots on the ground. They may not need to be human boots.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Now, it gets to the point that China has robots and electric vehicles and renewable energy it can put on those electric vehicles. Now you have automated tanks, automated howitzers, automated logistical supply lines, automated boats that deliver new weapons, automated everything that's powered by the sun, powered by the wind, powered by remote charging stations that just float in the sky. Who knows what?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  But the thing is, new technologies are born on the back of military use. That's, that's where our AI came from. It all derived from military use cases. Chinese is going to be doing the same thing. So whatever breakthrough happens with AGI is going to happen militarily first. And only from the successes of the military experimentation will secondary use cases be identified. So invasion doesn't mean human invasion. Invasion can literally mean what we're seeing in Ukraine right now, just armies of drones. Drones that are designed to do who knows what. And I mean, a drone can fly in, a hand, a battalion of drones can fly in and do all the hard, dirty work,

• 24:35Speaker 01

  provide all the, the area command and control and, and set the perimeter and just wait until a human being, five or 10 human beings come in. Then a series of robots can come in and create a prefabricated command center and everything. So human beings literally just walk in, sit behind computer terminals. And now they're in control of a thousand square miles. All done because AGI participated in drone, land combat, naval combat, sea combat, satellite surveillance, cyber warfare. It's not one or the other. It's all of the above. That's exactly how AI is trying to be rolled out into our conflict now. War planning, mission planning, actual munitions on delivery, et cetera.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  So I appreciate your point on cyber warfare. But to think that invasion isn't going to be something that's part of the equation in the future. I think China doesn't want to send a million men on a ship to the United States. But if they had an option to one day in the not too distant future, send automated boats across the Pacific, they would.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  I have a harder time imagining what would spur that. But there would certainly be the capability if we continue down the path. So there's no denying that.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Do you have a hard time in picturing it if the United States remains a superpower?

• 25:54Speaker 00

  I do.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  I agree. As long as there's parity, there's deterrence. But if China actually reaches AGI first, it means that they monetized AI first. It means that they've, they've far superseded our economic superiority long before they've ever, long before they would ever send forces to the United States.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  It's interesting if, I think if they got to AGI first and then quickly got to, I know you're trying to avoid the ASI thing, but I think that they're almost one and the same phenomenon.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  That the first thing I do is go, hey, guys, I've got it. And here's the list of demands. Stop doing this. Start doing that. Be that. And if you acquiesce, then all is well. Okay, you didn't do the first thing, so now I'm going to show you the blatant power of this. Boom, your entire power grid just shut down, whatever. Turn it back on. So you guys can see, we really can do it. Stop fucking around. Get in line. I'm way more worried about that than I am like the Terminator bots rolling up, because controlling people is hard. And so the more enemies you make by rolling up and trying to like shoot things, the bigger problem you create for yourself. If you just let them know, look, and we can choke you guys out at any time, there's no point. Why would we want to do that? Let's just get in line.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  I have a feeling it'd be something more like that.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  It's interesting. It's a very Western mindset. The whole idea that they would announce their capability. Make a threat, wait for acquiescence, demonstrate that they have the ability.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  You don't think they would?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Look at what they did in Hong Kong. China, China operates completely different than the United States. They create a capability, they don't tell anybody they have that capability. They deploy that capability because they get the element of surprise by deploying the capability, not by announcing the capability. So they deployed their legal capability in Hong Kong. They deployed their police capability in Hong Kong. It was all there. So that when the time came to take control of Hong Kong, it was literally a snap of the fingers. And there were thousands of, of police following legal orders, beating rioters in the streets. So what's more likely to me is that they would have AGI, they wouldn't tell anybody about it. They would use that AGI selectively to test their capability in the United States. Shut down power grids. Don't warn the United States.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Shut down the grid, turn the grid back on. Okay, now we know we can do that. Can we attack the, the water supply? Can we attack, uh, energy, uh, um, renewable energies? Can we attack major industry, uh, tech industries in California? Can we target just a single company? Can we shut down Salesforce but keep Google running? And if they can do all of that, now they know they have that power. So then they just launch that power, shut everything down. And then the United States is saying, somebody come help us. And then the Chinese are there. Hey, we just happen to have drones, robots and boats that can bring you food, water and, and portable gas, energy, whatever. We can help you.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Just like we were the first ones to create the COVID vaccine, we can be the first ones to deliver you a solution to your massive, unexplainable, unfixable, uh, grid shutdown. It doesn't have to be like, hey, we're sable rattle, saber rattle, sable rattle. Here come ships across the ocean with guns and flags and trumpets. That's an American thing. Right? Here's the president saying, we're gonna send a naval war, uh, a naval carrier group to Iran. I'm telling you, now we're doing it. Now every day in the news, you're seeing new satellite images on its way. That's a very American way of carrying out conflict.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well said. That's, I think, a very good point. Um, okay, so in this crazy world, the only thing that's going to get somebody into the position that they want is self-belief. They believe that they can do it. They believe that they have the mandate, whether it's the mandate from heaven to be the middle kingdom as China believes about itself, or once when America believed that we were the shining citadel on a hill and we were the place that had the moral authority and we were righteous.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  God's grace.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yes. I don't think America, America certainly is fractured. Maybe there are some people like me, maybe there's a bunch of us that still believe in America. That, um, you know, are willing to work hard to try to be the best and, you know, really do something in the world. But I think that a lot of people have lost faith in America, do not have the will to stand up for America, don't have the will to reunite people, any of that. When you look at the will in China versus the will in America, um, do you see that there's something consequential there that's going to be deterministic in this coming conflict between two great powers?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Even the question, I think, under, underestimates the way that Chinese think. I don't think they think about the will. Like, they're not worried about the will of the Chinese people. Their job is to do this other thing. Like, my job is to manufacture widgets.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  But are they doing it because they're afraid or are they doing it because they really believe like, holy hell, like, we've really done something? We've China.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely, they believe that because you, so I'm 46 years old. If I was a 46-year-old Chinese man, then that means from the day I was born until today, I have seen the fastest growth in China of all time.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Seen fastest growth of anybody.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Ever of all time.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I went from, I went from possibly still having a dirt floor to being the second largest economy in the world in my lifetime, and I'm still prime production age. So do I even have an idea that somehow we're like on the decline? No, it's like, we're still skyrocketing, guys. We're, we're being, uh, there's some hiccups because of AI and technology. There's some hiccups because of these crazy ass white people on the other side of the ocean who are always starting wars. Like, there's some hiccups, but, but man, like, I am part of the, of the greatest generation.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  We still believe that the greatest generation's already passed. We have books about that.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  They, they may not think about it, but they have it. They have the will. They have self-belief. And I think what America and Europe is struggling from is they've lost the belief. And so you've got China believes in itself, Islam believes in itself, and now you're getting this like sort of crazy disruption in the West because we don't believe in ourselves. We're trying to go head to head with Iran. We're certainly losing that battle. Uh, Europe is trying to sort of stand up for itself and say, wait, we do have a culture and it does deserve to be protected. But they really can't get people excited about that. And so they keep inviting people into their country or not kicking people out of their country who have no interest in assimilating whatsoever.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Uh, and so that strikes me as like, if you were gonna say what's the biggest problem, I'd be like, that.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I would agree with that. I would agree with that because you're, and I, I, I'm not gonna name names. But when you say that there are certainly people who believe in the United States,

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I believe most Americans would say, I believe in the United States. But then the next thing you would have to ask them is, how are you dividing your resources to show that belief? And all those Americans who bought guns because they were afraid somebody might try to steal from them during COVID, which was a huge spike in Americans, they actually have a belief that they're investing in that goes contrary to the belief of long-term American stability. And all those people who started moving some of their investments into foreign stocks or moving some of their investments into foreign property, all those people who bought a second passport or those people who pursued a second passport by exercising their Irish descent, their Italian descent, their Spanish descent,

• 33:50Speaker 01

  their Canadian descent, like, there's a lot of people out there, tens of thousands of Americans who are still living in the United States, who would probably say, I believe in the United States, but I'm hedging my bets. I'm making sure that if I'm wrong,

• 34:05Speaker 01

  then I'm, I'm good to go. And that is a very different belief in America than I think what we're talking about when we talk about an innate faith that the Chinese might have for themselves. They, like, you don't hear about Chinese millionaires trying to leave China. You hear about British millionaires leaving the UK, but you don't really hear about a lot of migration of super wealthy.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  A little unfair, just because China will capital control the shit out of you. They will jackma you until the end of time. But, um, certainly I do think that China has, from the person who saw themselves come up from a dirt floor to one of the most spectacular high rises on planet Earth, is gonna think, yeah, this is pretty special. They probably to a large degree think that the, well, the authoritarianism is working, so I don't exactly have a real big beef. Um, so I don't begrudge them that. I certainly understand all of that. I'm maybe talking about something slightly different, which is, um, so I certainly got a gun during COVID because shit was actually getting weird. Uh, a photo of my house was put on the internet that said,

• 35:11Speaker 00

  I can't remember if it said eat the rich or burn the rich. I think it was burn the rich. So I'm literally looking out at LA on fire, seeing my house as the photo where people are saying that. Uh, yeah, so in that moment, good sense prevailed and I was like, I'm going to make sure that I'm protected. My whole thing is that there is a massive divide in the country and some people actively hate their own country. And that to me is when I look at the anti-AI sentiment, when I look at the anti, they'll call it billionaire, I'll call it anti-entrepreneur sentiment. Uh, when I look at the fact that people outright say that, and I'm talking people with American accents,

• 35:55Speaker 00

  that we've got to take down empire. They don't say the empire. We, we're in the belly of empire. We gotta take empire down. Like, that's how they look at America, that they wanna hang the American flag upside down, that they want to get rid of borders, that they want to, um, bring in migrants illegally, legally, doesn't matter. Make sure that they have the right to vote, abolish the Senate, get it just to be a pure, um, number of people who vote style democracy. That's where I'm like, uh-oh, like, this is, when you have a country that's in that kind of internal peril, you are at a very weak point. I won't say that we haven't been here before. We had an actual civil war and we're not in actual civil war right now.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Maybe cold, but we're certainly not hot. So America's gone through worse. But yo, in my lifetime, this is different. This is a very different texture.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Which is just a fantastic juxtaposition about a Chinese person who is your age and where they stand right now. It's, uh, you know, I was, I was mentioning to you earlier that one of our first conversations ever,

• 37:07Speaker 01

  I think it was three years ago, the thumbnail was war is coming. And now here we are in 2026 and there's war in Israel, there's war in Ukraine, there's war in Iran.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  We're talking about when there will be war over Taiwan.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  People thought I was just fear mongering, but yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  A second conversation that we had, maybe six months after that, the thumbnail was.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Get out of the United States by 2030. And now here we are having a conversation about active people. And here's what's so fascinating is there are people inside the United States who believe they're actually helping the United States. By doing all the things that you just said, by talking about dissolving the empire and letting in migrates migrants limits, uh, legal or illegal and robbing from the rich and dissolving uh, the Senate like. Those people think they're helping the United States. So if this is the change that we've seen in just three years of conversations between us.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  What's the next seven years gonna look like? And what's the next 25 years gonna look like? And I ideally, everything moves at a faster pace, so we shouldn't be facing 25 years of disarray. But at 25 years of disarray is gonna get concentrated into potentially five or seven years of disarray.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  I've been saying this for a long time. I know we talk about it offline too. It's not un-American to think about what you can do to take care of yourself, your family, your legacy, your wealth. That doesn't make you un-American. That makes you responsible. What you could say, good sense prevails.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  But the problem is there are always going to be people out there who say that if you are preparing for something else, then you're not a true American.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about how much you're paying to stay safe online. Count it up. A VPN, a password manager, something to block ads and trackers. The service to scrub your data off of broker lists, a tool to flag scam emails. That's five, five subscriptions, apps, logins, and most people still have gaps. That's the problem Surfshark solves. It's not a VPN. It's an all-in-one security suite, one tool that protects your connection, your personal info and your devices all at the same time. Go to surfshark.com/tomb or use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark,

• 39:36Speaker 00

  backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's S U R F S H A R K dot com slash TOMB. Surfshark.com slash TOMB. Use code TOMB for four extra months of Surfshark. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Um, my core thesis is if you have people that are that divided, you're not going to be able to generate the forward momentum to go up against Iran, Russia, China. Like, you're just not going to be able to defeat it. And so when I think back to uh, even World War II, the very first thing that Churchill had to do

• 40:21Speaker 00

  was he had to get everybody to believe in England. He had to get everybody to unite to say, we are going to stand up. And that's who we are. We're not the people that back down. And it was giving people a sense of a reminder of what their national identity was. And we would have to do that. And I really don't want to see us have to go all the way to somebody having guns pointed at us before we do it. Um, but we really do have to decide what we stand for, what we're willing to fight for, what we are trying to build and create. We have to start thinking long-term. We can't be thinking in election cycles. We've gotta be quite literally teaching our children, like, this is what it means to be American.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  And right now, we're a long way from a unified message. I won't say that there aren't people that are doing it, but I will say that we're a long way from a unified message. And that is very distressing.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  If I think through the lens of history, I'm, I am not able to come up with an example of when we unified that wasn't at the receiving end of an enemy.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  9/11 brought us together. I think the assassination of JFK brought us together.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  World War II brought us together. And our enemies have learned that as long as you don't provoke the dragon, the dragon essentially just has indigestion on its own all the time. So it would be a significant departure from our historical evidence for the United States to find a way to unify and do it quickly enough to overcome the advantage that some of these authoritarian countries already have.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm gonna take my shot on the live. I've really started forcing myself to talk about, okay, what are the unifying ideas? What should we be excited about? How should we be thinking? What should we be telling kids? It's a drop in a very large ocean, but I will certainly keep trying. We'll see what comes of it. Now, that's my sort of bit of optimism. You have recently shown some optimism with your book. What are you hoping that people will use it for? Cause you've gone, I've moved away from personal development. Uh, I really enjoyed it while I was doing it, but found that it's, um, well, I mean, part of it's just, I said what I had to say.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Uh, and then some of it though was that getting people to actually make change is very, very hard. It's much easier to aim at kids and just not let them get into bad ruts in the first place. But what do you want people to take away from the book?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  So I have a new book coming out September 8th. It's called Outsmart Everyone. And the goal.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Very bold title, my friend. Very bold.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  But the goal of the book is basically to deliver on the title. I want anyone who reads that book to be able to outsmart everyone else around them. Because where my experience at CIA, where my experience as an entrepreneur, where my experience as the first millionaire in my family line.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Congratulations.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. But where my experience has pointed me is that you can't save everyone. And the idea that you can help everyone is an idealistic and beautiful idea that I grew up with in the eighties and nineties, but it is a completely artificial, unsubstantiated promise. You can't help everyone. Not only do you have the people who don't want to be helped, you have the people who can't be helped. And you have the people who will work against any help you try to give them actively, just because it's help. And I literally can point to people in my family who fit all those definitions.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  And I'm also learning as a, especially now that I am in a position where, I mean, I just signed paperwork this morning for a half million dollar line of credit to myself.

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Which is unbelievable to me. It's unbelievable that I have the assets, that a bank would offer me that in the first place. I am now in a position where I don't even have to ask for a loan. I can just literally take money from myself that's given to me that paying an interest rate. So I'm paying an interest rate for the expense of borrowing money, but I don't actually have a monthly payment. I don't actually owe anybody anything. Like, that's a, that, this is something I've never experienced in my life. And this is common for wealthy people. Where the rest of us are stuck taking a $60,000, $60,000 car loan nowadays isn't even crazy to think about.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  That's wild.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  20 years ago it was. A $60,000 car loan at 8% interest, where you have to pay every month or else risk the forfeiture of your car. I am outside of that forever. My children, as long as I protect my assets, my children are outside of that cycle forever. What I'm learning is that I need to help the people who are the most motivated to help themselves. Because those are the ones that shape the future for their country, for their family, for their industry. Helping everybody, to your exact point, trying to get everybody, everybody to improve or optimize themselves is a losing battle. What I need to do is find the 3% that will never give up trying.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And that's why I wrote Outsmart Everyone.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  And so, given the boldness of the title, like, if you were gonna TLDR for people, how do you actually outsmart everyone? Like, there's a core concept in the book that I think is very interesting at a high level, but make it real for people, which is, okay, you're in a world, there's so much information. Most of this information is either spin. Uh, it's fake, so it's just literally AI, so it's hard to figure out what's real, what's not real. Uh, there's miss, dis, uh, information. I'll never grant you malinformation. That one, it's just for the record. Mal is something that's true, but inconvenient, so I will not acquiesce to mal. But uh, certainly misinformation, disinformation, all of that stuff is real.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Uh, and so part of the promise of the book is you can actually turn that um, just actual massive cacophony of information and actually make it knowledge. But how? Like, what, what is that transition that you're walking people through?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  So TLDR, CIA teaches us that there's a national security triangle that we use to identify priorities for national security. And those priorities for national security, they align one-to-one with priorities for our individual lives. Influence, power, security. It's the same three things that drive an individual or the same three things that keep a country safe. So the question becomes, how do you maximize your power, maximize your influence and maximize your security? The way that CIA teaches us to do that is through a, through a flywheel, another triangle. That's about information, consuming information and testing it with experience. And then from that experience, creating knowledge.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Knowledge being distinctly different than information, because knowledge has gone through the test of experience. And everybody's experience is different, so everyone's knowledge, based on the same information, is also different. But then with that knowledge, you go out and collect new information that you test with experience and you create new knowledge. And the person who can go through that flywheel the fastest is the person who will outsmart everyone else. And what's, and what's the most powerful piece of this for me is that CIA also taught me that because of the way the brain works, we all want to be outsmarted. We want someone else to do all the mental lifting, all the heavy thinking, all the planning and engineering, and we just want the icing.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  What we don't want is to feel like we've been outsmarted.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  That's fucking interesting.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So Outsmart Everyone teaches you how to outsmart everyone and how to do it in a way that they never realize they've been outsmarted, which just makes them love you.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  That's wild. A little distressing, but very useful that humans are wired like that. Give an example from the book of a just banger that you walk people through of like, okay, take this thing, you turn it into this, you think about like that, and then deploy it like this to get an outcome.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  My favorite section of the book, I teach a concept that CIA taught me called two questions and a confirmation. Two questions and a confirmation is something that we use in the field of intelligence to collect as much sensitive information from a target as possible without ever exposing the target to sensitive information about ourselves. But what I've learned is that in the civilian world, especially in business and entrepreneurism, you can do the same thing with a sales prospect, with a client, with a competitor, and you can suck up massive amounts of information, whether it's marketing data or competitive data, or getting them to believe in a sales promise to get them to close the sale, using the same two questions and a confirmation. And this is how it works.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  I ask you a question, an open-ended question about anything, and I let you answer that open-ended question in whatever way fits your preferences. I don't try to lead you on, I don't try to guide you, I don't try to prime you, I just ask a question. Because what's going to happen is an open-ended question will invite you to talk about your answer. So just for those of you who don't know what an open-ended versus a closed-ended question is, a closed-ended question is something that you can answer with a sentence or a single word, right? Did you like dinner? Yes, that's a closed-ended question. How was the movie? Fine, that's a closed-ended question. An open-ended question is, what did you think of that movie? How do you like mystery movies? Something that invites people

• 50:12Speaker 01

  to talk. They have to explain their answer. Now, I've asked one question, open-ended question. You've given me a response that is relevant to you and all new information to me. So now I only have to ask another open-ended question based on some part of your response. So I'll ask you a second open-ended question, which you will respond to again with an explanation of new information. At that point in time, you would think that in a normal conversation, I should start talking about myself, or I should stop asking questions because it's going to feel like an interrogation. What I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to confirm and repeat back to you something you already said, which makes you feel heard, makes you feel validated, makes you feel like I'm really listening

• 50:57Speaker 01

  to you. And after I make my confirming statement, I'm going to ask another question. And I'm going to ask another one after that, and I'm going to confirm your response after that. And what that creates is this relationship between us where I'm in control of the entire conversation, and you're giving me so much information about yourself that you don't even realize you're doing it. And I'm collecting information about you and simultaneously making you feel good about it, because you feel confirmed, validated, listened to, and because I'm sitting here asking you all these questions and letting you just talk, you like being around me.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Isn't that wild?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  So two questions and a confirmation is something that I've been teaching for years. There's, I have a centimillionaire client in Orlando that I taught this to their sales team, and they spiked their sales. I still have people from his sales team that write me to say, I can't believe how easy this thing works. Salespeople that come off the street with no sales background, and they literally watch like a 15-minute video from me, and then they go and they make their first phone call, and that's all they do for the whole phone call. And they close a sale, they close a deal, right? I've had, I have people that I've taught who are anywhere from medical professionals to coaching professionals to psychologists. I just taught this at a, with a sensitive client in Denver who's

• 52:17Speaker 01

  involved in the grid, energy grid. And I taught them this methodology for their consultants who consult on the energy grid. And their consultants were like mind blown, because one of the hardest things is for, in an energy world, is to be able to bridge the gap between the person who provides the energy and the person who actually provides the infrastructure for the energy. All it takes is two questions and a confirmation, and they're like, I can't believe it's this simple to get a client to listen to me, to buy what I'm trying to get them to buy, to close a deal, to close them on a multi-year contract. I've been using this my whole life because I know it works. If it can make someone turn coat against their country, it can certainly work to get someone to hand over their credit card.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Very, very well said. Where can people get the book?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  You can find Outsmart Everyone online at all online booksellers. You'll find it at Barnes and Noble, you'll find it at Amazon, you'll find it in the UK at all of the major UK sellers. And if you want to go to the website for the book itself, you go to outsmareveryonespy.com. All the details are going to be in the description of the video.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  I love it. Man, I really cherish sitting across from you and talking about this stuff. So thank you as always for taking the time. I appreciate it.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, sir.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  You got it. All right, everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  I think America's gone too far in privatizing everything. Election campaigns are something that should be funded 100% by government money, and private donations should be banned, not even possible. Set it up in such a way that you guarantee you can't buy your property.

• 53:58Speaker 00

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