#2194 - Luis Elizondo

**Luis Elizondo** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
What's up, Luke? How are you?

**Luis Elizondo** (0:13)
Hey, sir, I'm doing better than I deserve.

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
Well, that's a good statement.

**Luis Elizondo** (0:17)
You know, there's an old military saying, any day above ground is a good day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
There you go. So tell everybody what your official job was.

**Luis Elizondo** (0:27)
Wow. I had a lot of official jobs.

**Joe Rogan** (0:29)
With the government in regards to, you know.

**Luis Elizondo** (0:33)
You know.

**Joe Rogan** (0:34)
You know, those things.

**Luis Elizondo** (0:36)
Sure.

**Joe Rogan** (0:37)
One of these things. That's a, allegedly, that's a replica of the one that Bob Lazar worked on, the sport model.
I've heard that before. You know, Designs by Perry. The E in Perry is a three. And he's a dude on Instagram that sent me that.

**Luis Elizondo** (0:55)
Very cool.

**Joe Rogan** (0:56)
Pretty dope, right?

**Luis Elizondo** (0:57)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:58)
We have another one that looks just like it at the mothership at the Comedy Club. When you walk in, you walk right through like a giant suspended UFO.

**Luis Elizondo** (1:06)
Very cool.

**Joe Rogan** (1:07)
So obviously I have issues.

**Luis Elizondo** (1:08)
Well, you know what? This is a neat town. I was strolling the streets yesterday.
And I came across the Texas Toy Museum. Now, I'm not one for museums usually, but something I saw was automatically transported me back to when I was a kid. I'm an old guy. So I grew up 70s and early 80s.

**Joe Rogan** (1:28)
How old are you?

**Luis Elizondo** (1:29)
52

**Joe Rogan** (1:30)
I'm 57

**Luis Elizondo** (1:31)
You are?

**Joe Rogan** (1:31)
Yeah.

**Luis Elizondo** (1:32)
Man. Well, I look 10 years older than you. I got a lot of long, hard miles on me, unfortunately.

**Joe Rogan** (1:38)
I do too, believe it or not.

**Luis Elizondo** (1:40)
Well, you'll have to share with me your secret. Because, unfortunately, if I tell people this is as good as it gets, I'm about as attractive as a cement truck, you know.
So after the Army, I went into the Federal Service and had a lot of jobs, mostly in counterintelligence, which is looking basically what the bad guys know about us from an intelligence perspective. And in 2008, I changed my job. One of my jobs, I was working at the Director of national Intelligence, which for most people may or may not know, it's kind of outside of DC and where I lived, I was on the other side of DC., living on a little island in the Chesapeake Bay. And so my commute was terrible. I mean, it really, really frankly sucked.

**Joe Rogan** (2:21)
Did you have to take a ferry every day?

**Luis Elizondo** (2:23)
No, but it was about a three-hour commute each way. Because you have to go right past Langley. Yeah, it was brutal.

**Joe Rogan** (2:28)
Why didn't you move closer?

**Luis Elizondo** (2:30)
Well, you know, I wanted to give my kids a really good quality of life. And I did not want to work in the city and then kind of expose them to kind of the craziness, if that makes sense.

**Joe Rogan** (2:38)
Especially DC.

**Luis Elizondo** (2:39)
DC is crazy, especially with kids, right?

**Joe Rogan** (2:42)
Yeah, kind of nuts that they don't clean up the capital of the fucking country. It seems like, you know, brother, it's kind of indicative of the rot the whole country is involved in.

**Luis Elizondo** (2:50)
It's such a disgrace because you bring in these foreign dignitaries and the first thing they see is, is just the dereliction of it. And it's a very poor reflection on really what the American spirit is about. But, you know, that's that's for another conversation.

**Joe Rogan** (3:03)
Yeah, it seems like they could fix that. Yeah, especially in that place.

**Luis Elizondo** (3:09)
Yeah, one would hope, right?

**Joe Rogan** (3:10)
Yeah, I mean, Jesus Christ, it's the nation's capital.

**Luis Elizondo** (3:12)
Yeah. So I was offered a job to go back to the Pentagon in 2008 for a little while and basically run the integration between national level intelligence information and local and state and tribal law enforcement. So after 9-11, the country realized that we had a significant problem getting national level information down to the cops on the ground that could actually do something about it.

**Joe Rogan** (3:39)
Why?

**Luis Elizondo** (3:39)
Because he didn't have security clearances. So they couldn't, they weren't allowed to be provided that information. So one of my jobs was to try to help fix that. And shortly thereafter, I got there in 2008 It was probably early 2009 is when I was approached by two individuals who came to me and they said, look, we'd like to consider you for a program that we're part of. It's a very nuanced program, very secretive program. Now, when you're in the government, you hear that all the time. It's not, you know, people look at it and they say, oh, you have a secret clearance or a top secret clearance. millions of people have have some sort of security clearance in the government. And a lot, a lot of people have a top secret clearance. So it's really not that uncommon. It's really not that sexy.