← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Why America’s Enemies Smell Blood : CIA Secrets, Economic Warfare, and the Next World War | Andrew Bustamante PT 1
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Tom
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 kompromat, the art of collecting dirt to control the powerful. Today, former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante reveals how Epstein style ops really works 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. 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.
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Andrew Bustamante
I went into CIA thinking that the world moved on justice and, 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, and that when, in those moments when you don't have leverage, if you intend to still make progress, you have to follow the power of the ocean, understanding always that it 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.
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Tom
So if that's true, how do countries get leverage?
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Andrew Bustamante
The biggest way is economically, and we've had this conversation multiple times, and I'm pretty sure we see eye to eye.
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Tom
It is my obsession. Yeah.
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Andrew Bustamante
Yeah. Economics drives everything. And the reason that economics drives everything is not because of money. And 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 blueberries, you're going to 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 going to go bad. So they have to find a way to get rid of the ones that are going to go bad in a and 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 you. 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.
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Tom
At the international level, it seems like a pretty dark game is being played. And. 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.
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Andrew Bustamante
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, U, uap, UFO files, all of those things where we only see partial releases, partial redactions, partial declassification. That's showing us that the government believes there's a moment of impact between the timing of that release and the. 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? Oh, yes. In the lead up to the China spy balloon incident, nobody was talking about really much of anything. They, 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 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 it was released at that moment. And it was because the US needed the support of the American people before it launched F6 or F22s 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. 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. 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 is not the right time to release it.
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Tom
Hmm. 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 40 years ago. Why didn't they release it 40 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.
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Andrew Bustamante
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 60s or early 70s, 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, you, maybe you want that leverage to negotiate, maybe you also want that leverage to. 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 we're. My suspicion is that people don't fully know 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. 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. 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. 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.
- [11:43]
Tom
More with Andrew Bustamante coming up. 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 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, 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. 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 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.
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Andrew Bustamante
I don't disagree that it's all tied. I also don't disagree that it's complicated because 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, 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. 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.
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Tom
You say walking it back, you mean to step outside of the frame of morality.
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Andrew Bustamante
What we call it 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.
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Tom
Morality to get to an end, to
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Andrew Bustamante
get to an outcome that benefits you. Right? Because really, what we're talking about at the end of the day is survival instinct. 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. 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, 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. 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? 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 for outcomes.
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Tom
I just want to keep that guidepost for outcomes. 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 charade going so that you can live that life, then that's what we're going to fucking do. And when people in the morality frame look at the government and the way they actually behave it, 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 going to lay out a scenario that's a little bit conspiracy theory. And I want to get a sense of whether I don't need to know if you think or believe it to be true. I want to know if you think it fits within the framework of how governments actually act. Do you know the sinking of the Lusitania?
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Andrew Bustamante
No. I mean, I do partially.
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Tom
The story is so awesome. Now I'll try to mile marker the things where most historians will agree, and I'll try to point out where historians will be like, tom's out of his mind. Not that I'm coming up with these theories, though. These are definitely things that I've read from researchers and other historians. But the. The sinking of 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, meaning we want to get passenger ships here that aren't considered military vehicles. We want to get them shot and sunk. Because if America doesn't enter the war, England, that part of the access is going to end up losing. And so we've got to find a way. And so there, that part is that communication exists. And what I just said is very close to verbatim. 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, 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 now working with Churchill, who has stated in this communication that this is their plan. 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. 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 6 million rounds, 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, 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, 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, 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 steered it into a slightly new direction where the British Admiralty had intercepted German communications saying that there were U boats in that area. And they told the 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 128Americans are killed amongst the 1200 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 inflamed, two years later, we're in the war. Now you. You can put that together of just. It's just unlucky, man, war. And these things happen. And, you know, yes, Churchill was thinking about it, but he didn't. I mean, that was. They weren't really doing it. 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 or. And we get munitions or they sink it. Because we've had to retrofit the saying 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 leaders do think like that.
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Andrew Bustamante
Yeah.
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Tom
Now let's move away from the Lusitania and go to Sinwar. Israel, Palestine. And Sinwar goes, I'm going to take hostages. I'm not going to 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, God damn, dude. It's so this very distressing mental map that I'm building is 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 and so talk me off a ledge because the more I look at history and current affairs, the more I am just like, whoa. 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
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Tom
All right, let's dive right back in.
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Andrew Bustamante
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.
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Tom
Yikes.
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Andrew Bustamante
Yikes is the right way to think about it. The ledge that I want to walk you back from is a a ledge of of feeling like you are at risk because of it. 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, have incredible technology around us that keeps us alive and helps us to thrive. But biologically, 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, I want to walk you back from the ledge of feeling like these calculations threaten you. 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 guideposts, right? But as soon as we put you with somebody else, you start to blend in with them. 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 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? 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 evolves. 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. 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 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 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 or 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 the people, or Britain was able to control in the US Was able to control how the population interpreted. Why did it matter? Because the population thinks through that lens of mass psychosis. Same thing with weapons of mass destruction in Gulf War.
- [33:27]
Tom
Yeah, right.
- [33:28]
Andrew Bustamante
Same thing with 9 11. 911 happened. We were all afraid of terrorists. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats right now for the same terrorists in Pakistan that are doing the same kind of 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. I say that because the. 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 is 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. And Zelensky and Ukraine. They're at a place now where they have more to gain by not cooperating than they have to gain by cooperating. That all of those situations to, in their perspective, increase the probability of favorable outcomes for their individual countries. Putin believes he will make Russia stronger. Netanyahu believes he'll 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 organism, in many cases is the. Is the government itself its own entity?
- [35:28]
Tom
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 right 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.
- [35:51]
Andrew Bustamante
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, and here's the rubric, here's the, here's the scenario that's going on in my head with your question, right? Here is an American citizen standing right here, right? 33 year old mother of a 18 month old child. She lives in Wisconsin. She, 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, 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 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 would. 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. And this is my moment to decide what I 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, he's already a bad guy. We got to remember that we do horrible 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. And inside that calculation, what wouldn't I do to protect her. I don't think there's much.
- [38:16]
Tom
Take Israel, Palestine.
- [38:17]
Andrew Bustamante
Absolutely.
- [38:18]
Tom
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 them. Like, I've got to think about mine 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?
- [39:16]
Andrew Bustamante
Internationally, 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. That was shaped, and then it was changed. And now people would still argue that there are. 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, 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 that's going to take them to the top. They don't even believe in it themselves. They just want to 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 believes the Met. The surveys just came out recently. Russians believe that the most important thing was quality of life. 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 majoratively 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. So Putin's war in Ukraine and what the propaganda machine and what the context for the, 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, 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 diplomat's party, that dude was 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 UnitedHealthcare was the best, most effective thing he could do to shed light on the, the problems with American health care. Some would say he did a good job, and they still do, and other people say he didn't.
- [43:26]
Tom
A lot of people.
- [43:27]
Andrew Bustamante
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, but
- [43:39]
Tom
I'm reading it therefore, so your morality is given to you. It's not real. This 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 as.
- [43:53]
Andrew Bustamante
And I 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 as yours, but they think is. Is difficult, like just trying to take a pet from one country to another 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.
- [44:48]
Tom
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?
- [44:59]
Andrew Bustamante
I read a little bit about it,
- [45:00]
Tom
but I didn't gangster. So there are definitely complexities. I'll give people a very quick pretty 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 bores, or the Dutch settlers that came over, like in the 1600s, 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, you can understand why people be very unnerved by that. Because yet he's like, yeah, I can't promise that, that someone won't in the future. Myself or somebody else, 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 sketch 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 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 in. 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. And 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.
- [47:26]
Andrew Bustamante
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.
- [47:41]
Tom
Wasta.
- [47:42]
Andrew Bustamante
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, 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, 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 ten 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. I would also say that reliability and probability. This 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.
- [49:42]
Tom
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.