EverydaySpy Podcast - The Missing Link in the Info Chain

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Spy movies and mainstream media always talk about the process of 'analysis'. Many of the world's top experts even carry the title of 'analyst.' But the value of analysis and the power of an analyst is based in a skill you rarely ever hear about. In this episode, Andrew gives you the skeleton key to unlocking information like a spy and puts the power of analysis into your hands... forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. About three years ago, my family and I moved to Florida, and we had just left the agency. We arrived in Florida. We were excited to be there. I was excited to be there. My wife was coming home, and the kids had really only ever been to Florida once in the past to visit their grandparents. So you can imagine arriving in Florida in the October time frame when the West, weather here is gorgeous and the weather in the rest of the country is starting to get a little bit

cold, how positive, how optimistic, how happy everybody was. Well, within just a few short months, by early December, my son, Sina, had started to struggle breathing. Now, he was three years old, and I was a new parent. I was worried. I didn't understand what was happening to him. I had come from a background of intelligence and military, and I felt so comfortable with so many things, but a three-year-old child struggling to breathe was not an area where I had a lot of experience. It was not an area where I was very comfortable. My wife and I took Sina to our family pediatrician. Now, we didn't have a long history with this pediatrician, obviously, because we were

new residents to Florida. But that pediatrician recommended us to a pediatric pulmonologist. A pulmonologist is a doctor who says. specializes in lungs, and a pediatric pulmonologist is obviously a doctor, a lung specialist who specializes in children. Now, we were sitting here with the pulmonologist, and he was a very nice gentleman in a fantastic office that was clearly set up to put children at ease. And when we sat with him, and he asked us a few questions and started listening to my son's lungs with the little headset that doctors used, the word is escaping me. So forgive my lack of English.

vocabulary. But as he started listening to my son's lungs, it only took a few minutes before he came to the conclusion that my son was suffering from asthma. That conclusion surprised me because we had no history of asthma in my family. We had no history of asthma in my wife's family. My son was an extremely active three-year-old. He would run around the living room almost every night for 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time after his bath just burning off energy. Nowhere had we ever had lung issues, nowhere had we seen asthma, and at no point in Cina's history had he ever suggested that he had difficulty breathing. And here we had a specialist that was referred to us by a reputable pediatrician telling us

that our son might have asthma. Now, if you've ever been in this situation, If you've ever sat across from a doctor telling you a prognosis that you were not comfortable with, we did what most people do. And we listened. We worried. We got a little bit stressed out. And then ultimately, we decided that we were going to talk to a second specialist. We were going to go get a second opinion. Now, it turned out that we learned quickly just how small our part of Florida was because there really wasn't a second pediatric pulmonary specialist that we could talk to. So we turned to, to our own training instead.

Gee and I knew that at CIA, whenever there's an intelligence problem, whenever there's a question that policymakers need answers to, and we don't have all the facts right away, the first thing that analysis teaches us to do is something called an A-C-H, an analysis of competing hypotheses. Now, in this process, what you do is you take and you create as many potential reasons,

as many hypothetical explanations for the problem at hand as possible. I mean, sometimes these hypotheses are ludicrous hypotheses. So whether you're dealing with terrorist groups or foreign influence or counterintelligence officers and deep cover agents in your own country, you create this map of competing hypotheses. And then you go through an analytical process where you collect information and use that information to systematically terminate or cancel each hypothesis until there's only one or two or three left. And then you have essentially nailed down a handful of explanations that could

answer the question you have at hand. So as an example, with our son, we had seen him develop some sort of breathing problem. So we wanted to understand why was the breathing difficult. So we created a list of hypotheses. And on that list included everything from seasonal allergies to rare lung disorders, to genetic flaws, or even like onset to genetic triggers that came with age. It was a huge list, maybe 60 items long that was all just as imaginative as we could make it, creating this map of conflicting or competing priorities. Now, from there, we actually enter the analytical process. Now, it's going to take a whole lot longer than one podcast episode to teach you how to analyze information. But essentially, what the process of analysis is,

is taking information, a large amount of information, and breaking it into smaller pieces of information. That is analysis. So as an example, if you had to analyze a terrorist or an extremist attack against a embassy in a foreign location, like what happened in Iraq recently, you would take the attack and you would take all the information that went around that attack, the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, the how, every detail you could gather about the number of troops, the age of the troops, what they were wearing, the vehicles they were using, the weapons they had in tow, the timing, the messaging, the strategy, everything. And you would break them all into smaller pieces of information. That is an analytical process. Sometimes people get confused by

analysis, thinking that it's something more intelligent or something smarter than that. But really, all analysis is is taking a large piece of information and breaking it up into smaller pieces of information. That's what we did with our son. We took all that we had seen about him and we started breaking it up. When did it start happening? Where was he? Where was he sleeping? Where was he walking? Where was he playing? What time of day did we see the breathing the hardest? What time of year, was it in Florida? What were the conditions when we moved from Virginia to Florida? And we started breaking all of the large complex data into smaller pieces of information through an analysis process. And then we started running each of those pieces that we had been able to

break apart through our analysis against our ACH, our analysis of competing hypotheses. And we were able to start ruling certain things out. For example, when we were able to line up the time that his breathing started to become laborous, when we lined that up against something like whether or not he was suffering from a lung disorder that was early onset with age, we realized that it was very unlikely that he had developed some sort of genetic mutation at the age of three when most genetic mutations don't set in until puberty or shortly before puberty. So we were able to start knocking hypotheses off the list. When it came to asthma, we didn't fully knock asthma off the list, even though we had so many pieces of data, right, our history with the family, our own history

with lungs, with lung health in our immediate family and our extended family, as well as his own performance as, you know, at two years old and three years old, never showing signs of asthma, because we had a doctor who suggested it might be asthma. So we left that on the ACH, but we were able to eradicate a lot of the different hypotheses that we had. Now, the most important part of analysis is a word that you very rarely hear. It's a word called synthesis. If you consider analysis the process of breaking down a large complex data set into smaller

data sets. Synthesis is the process of taking those smaller data sets and combining them together to reach a conclusion. So here is the point where you actually take all the data you've collected and you've broken down into smaller bits and you start trying to identify trends, patterns, you start to find commonalities. So going back to our example with an extremist attack on an embassy in Iraq, you could take everything, all the pieces that you analyze down, all the data, that you break down from that attack, and you can run that data against similar attacks in places like Somalia or Nairobi or other parts of Africa.

And when you look at the historic activity of extremist attacks against embassies, what you'll start to do is reach conclusions through the process of synthesis because every attack had its own analysis. In every attack, they looked at the timing, they looked at the people, they looked at the weapons, the vehicles.

So when you have five attacks in five different locations, and they've all been properly analyzed, you have all this data that you can work from. Now you can start pulling pieces of data out of each attack to build trends, build profiles, build strategies, build a sense of some piece of synthesized intelligence, what we call final intelligence or finished intelligence. And this tells you, this gives you what you need to have a viable hypothesis, a viable theory, something that you can actually give the president of the United States so he or some other policymaker can make a decision about American policy in a certain region. That is the exact process that we applied to our son. So we took his, all the analysis that we had done of his breathing, we had broken it down, used it to rule out certain hypotheses. and then we started to synthesize some of the analysis data points that we had to reach our own conclusions. At the end of the day, we had basically created a short list based on probabilities and likelihoods of what was bothering him.

And then we systematically started to treat each of those issues. And surprising to me and to my wife, the top issue that we started to treat was seasonal allergies. because when we went through ACH, when we went through our process of synthesis, it turns out that December is a peak month in Florida for a specific kind of allergen that affects children, specifically our son's age, because of a type of pollen that doesn't exist in northern climates at the level of concentration that it exists in sandy climates, sandy hot climates like in Florida. So we started using Claritin, and before we knew it, our son's breathing issues were gone.

And then a year later, that same time of year came around, late November, early December, and our son started having breathing issues again, and we knew exactly what it was. And here we are now with our son's seven years old, and we know what's going to happen in December. We know he's going to have the same issues. We know exactly how to treat it. And we know that our intelligence training with age. with analysis and synthesis gave us better information than the pediatric pulmonary specialist who we have never gone back to and who we have never recommended. Now, in a strange kind of

side note, I do have to tell you that we went on to do some deep research on the doctor himself after we found out how wrong he was. And it turns out that that doctor was working on publishing a medical journal article that year, specifically talking about the increased rate of asthma in Florida children that started in the wintertime. So whether or not that was an example of the kind of bias, cognitive biases that we have talked about in the past, where he was intentionally or he was unintentionally seeing in our son a form of behavior that he had already come to predict or expect in other children, that could have very well been what's going on, or it could have just been an example of

poor professionalism where he wasn't really assessing our child as thoroughly as he should have. Either way, whatever the reason, it was very comforting to us to see that our intel training was still viable, still useful in everyday life in something as simple as keeping our children healthy. We have been talking about how you process information. We've been talking about it through the entire election cycle. And now, a week after the elections, we're seeing that information is coming out showing that the polls were not as accurate

as people believe them to be. Well, you and I talked about that weeks ago when we learned about the problem with polling. Where the world is offended and upset that the polls were predicting a landslide victory for Joe Biden, and instead, we're seeing an actual very close race between Biden and Trump,

That is a perfect example of what my wife and I went through when we listened to this pulmonary specialist to tell us what was wrong with our child. My message to everyone listening is to remember that you are the ultimate decision maker in your life. You are the one who has the power to act on whatever information you are receiving. But that also puts you in a unique position where you're the one responsible for managing, processing, analyzing and synthesizing the information presented to you. If you analyze and synthesize the information you learned from this podcast, you can make the

decision to stop listening, to turn it off, to not recommend it to anyone else. But if you're analyzing and synthesizing the information you're learning from me and it is benefiting you, it is enriching you, it is making you better equipped than you were before you listen to it, then by all means, let me know, leave me. me a rating, leave me a review, tell me what you think. Send me an email directly. Tell me how the podcast is impacting you. And please forward us, share this podcast with your friends, with your family, with anybody out there who you have seen struggle with information, with trusting the media, with learning how to live a better and more informed, richer existence. That's exactly

why everyday espionage is here to equip people with unique spy skills that give them distinct advantages in everyday life. I don't want to see my fellow Americans struggle the way that so many people struggle because they don't have some of the most important skills that CIA equipped GE and I with before we left. Analysis, synthesis, and ACH, the analysis of competing hypotheses, these are exactly the type of skills that we use day in and day out to run our business, to keep our family safe, and to improve our lives. And now you have that same tool at your disposal. And that is Everyday espionage.

Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at Everyday Spy or on my website, Everyday Spy. or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations and join me for an authentic spy training mission.

And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.