EverydaySpy Podcast - Warzone View From a First-Class Seat

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

The current conflict in Ukraine has topped headlines and commanded the attention of the world. And even as journalists dawn flak jackets in the streets and drones capture images overhead, the most inspiring stories aren't happening on the front line... they are happening in the shadows. Join Andrew as he share a story you haven't heard about heroes you don't know exist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. It's been a crazy couple of weeks for my family and I. We've been supporting our business and our business endeavors and serving clients and having a blast doing all of our normal everyday spy stuff, but we've also been tapped on by a number of our peers that are around the world to help participate in the humanitarian crisis happening in Ukraine. Now, I want to talk more about that a little bit later on. what started popping up more and more as I talked to my colleagues around the world is that

they were running into boundaries. They were running into blocks that were keeping them from achieving more in humanitarian aid, more funding, more mission success. And as I was hearing them tell me about their challenges, I realized that I absolutely had to talk to you about what's happening to them. Because if it's happening to them in their missions, in their operations, in their businesses in their nonprofit endeavors, it must be happening to you as well. So that's why we're here. That's what I want to talk about today is these boundaries that my peers were suffering through. And I want to tell you how we broke through those boundaries so that you can do the same thing. But to start, let me take you back just a few months ago to when my family and I left the United

States to spend the winter in Portugal. Now, we have been promising ourselves a trip to Europe and a chance to expose the kids to European culture for a long time. And it was the perfect opportunity for us to go and spend two months in Portugal. So we got on a plane in Tampa and we flew to New York. We flew from New York to Frankfurt and we were getting ready to board our final leg from Frankfurt, Germany to Porto, Portugal. Not a very long flight, about a two-hour flight. And as we were there at the gate, Luftanza, the airline, announced that they had first class upgrades available and that if anybody wanted to, they would upgrade you from your economy class seat to a first class seat for $300 a person for the final leg from Frankfurt to

Porto. Now, I'll be honest, my wife and I with two kids having just flown for a combined total of about 14 hours, we were really tempted to spoil ourselves and go ahead and get that extra upgrade. It would have cost us four tickets times $300 each to take that first class upgrade. But we were thinking to ourselves, how nice is it going to be to reclass. all the way back in a first class seat and go to sleep and the kids are going to have these extra large screen TVs that you get in first class. And then of course the stewardesses are going to be that much more attentive and they'll be able to bring water and food and snacks for everybody. And it's going to be this really luxurious, really easy and enjoyable final leg

to our destination after a long challenging travel day. But in the end, we decided not to do that. We decided that we were letting our 14 hours of air travel and our 20 hours of being awake. We were letting that kind of lead us down a path of temptation. So we chose not to get the upgrade. And I am so glad that we didn't. Because less than an hour later as we were boarding the airplane, what we found was that every seat on that Lefansa airplane was exactly the same. Every seat.

There was no first class, no business class, no economy class seat. There was no real extra leg room that we could even observe visually from where we were standing. Every seat was exactly the same. And the difference between first class and coach class was nothing more than two cloth curtains, one on each side of the aisle that hung down between the back of one row and the front of a different row. And that curtain was actually on a sliding rail. so they could slide it down to row three or all the way back to row eight. So Lufthansa knew that they were able to adjust the size of their quote-unquote first-class services.

Now, to you that might sound like a scam, right? It seems it certainly felt like that to me for an instant. How can you charge somebody $300 more for a seat that's exactly the same? How can you adjust the size of your first-class offering by basically sliding a curtain from, you know, from row three? all the way back to row seven. It seems like you're just taking advantage of the customer. In reality, what Lufthansa was doing was taking advantage of an opportunity called the artificial boundary. Now, artificial boundaries are something that exist everywhere. And CIA teaches us to identify artificial boundaries less because they don't want us to spend money on upgrades on an airplane.

And more because artificial boundaries can keep you from getting to where you want to be operationally, in a mission, in alias, in your own personal security, they're a powerful thing. An artificial barrier happens any time you feel like something is holding you back. Anytime you feel bounded. Anytime you feel like there is something standing between you and whatever you're trying to accomplish. When you feel that, that is a boundary. An artificial boundary is a boundary.

You actually can break through. but when you look at it, when you consider it, you feel as though you cannot break through it. That curtain that blocked the difference between first class and economy class was an artificial boundary. Anybody could actually just walk through that curtain. There was no difference in the seat at all. They could slide the curtain forward and backwards and actually change whether the seat you're sitting in is considered by title to be first class or considered by title to be economy class. It wasn't a real boundary. Now, the money that you had to pay to sit in first class, that was a real boundary.

If you didn't pay the money, you couldn't sit in first class. So what I want you to understand here is that I'm talking about the curtain itself. I'm not talking about the ticket price. The curtain itself was an artificial boundary. It wasn't real. Anybody on that plane could throw a spitball if they wanted to. They could throw a cracker. They could throw a cup right through the barrier.

between economy class and first class at any time during the entire flight. The boundary wasn't real. And because they could change where the boundary was, that's just further evidence that it wasn't actually real. There was a price tag when you stood at the gate. But once you crossed through the gate and got on the actual plane, that's when you realized there was no boundary. So my wife and I traveled and kind of chuckled that two-hour flight all the way from

Frankfurt to Porto because a number of other people had taken advantage of that opportunity. They had been kind of pulled in by the marketing of Lufthansa. And there they were, uncomfortable and scrunched in the exact same seats that we were, eating the same snacks that we were, getting the same half of a soft drink, just like we were, just like you are whenever you travel around. But the difference was they had paid extra money to get there. The boundary had fooled them, had confined them. They ended up spending extra money to have their seat dictated by this cloth curtain.

Now, why is any of this relevant? I mean, outside of being just an interesting story, the truth is that these artificial boundaries exist everywhere. They exist in your business. They exist in your career. They exist in your personal ambitions. They exist in your professional ambitions. And I've seen them creep up too many times over the last two weeks for me not to call it out.

Now, if you follow me on Instagram, my Instagram handle is at Everyday Spy, or if you follow my newsletter, if you follow me on YouTube, then you know that I've been very actively engaged with my professional network around the world supporting humanitarian needs that are happening right now in Ukraine. And those humanitarian needs are starting to pour over into other boundaries and other borders. Romania is very active. Poland is very active. if you didn't already know it, there's a significant sentiment among my private intelligence peers

that shortly after Ukraine is decided, we're going to see Russia actually move into Moldova and essentially annex the country of Moldova also. If I'm the first person that you're hearing that from, then congratulations. You just learned something that most of the people don't know yet. But keep your eyes on Moldova and you'll see where the next bit of land grab is going to take place. Now Moldova is not expecting. We're not expecting it to turn into a humanitarian crisis like we see in Ukraine because we just don't expect Moldova to put up a fight. Nothing like the fight that you're seeing in Ukraine.

But the folks that are suffering in Ukraine are not your typical civilians. Instead, what you're seeing across Ukraine is men and sons are being called to the fight. And the wives and the children that support those families refuse to leave. They don't want to become refugees. Yes, there is a refugee crisis. Yes, there are refugees fleeing the border. Yes, there are people who need to legitimately get evacuated for medical reasons because they're elderly, because they lose all access to shelter and food and water. But the thing that's really interesting is inside Ukraine, you're seeing a large portion of the population that is actually just leaving combat zones and resettling in resettlement zones because the women and the children want to show continued nationalistic support to their warfighter.

So they're going to a resettlement camp somewhere in the mountains to the west or the mountains to the south. And they are resettling there. And they want to do that because they want their husbands and their sons who are off fighting to know that they are not being left behind. And it's an incredibly brave, incredibly powerful sentiment when you think about what they're suffering through with, you know, being outmanned and outwebend and out-wepened and out-resourced by the Russian military. And I've been very fortunate that the specific nonprofit groups that I have been helping are helping those brave families that are staying inside the borders of Ukraine and refusing to become refugees from their homeland. Now, when I first partnered up with these organizations, what I was finding is they were running into artificial boundaries, just like what happened when I was on that plane from Frankfurt to Porto. they were running into issues, funding issues, funding approval, grant writing, grant issues. They were running into operational challenges, logistical supply chain issues, all these boundaries

that were keeping them from doing their core mission. And their core mission was simple. Go into Ukraine with humanitarian aid supplies, food, water, medicine, prefabricated buildings, so that they could create very rapidly these resettlement camps that would allow, the flux of people of innocence of women and children and elderly allow them to leave active combat zones and resettle for temporary 30, 60, 90-day periods into these fat prefabricated settlements in a safe haven so that when the fighting leaves their city or when the war is over, they can return back to their home rapidly without having to cross any borders or anything

else. That was the mission that this particular organization I was trying to support was trying to execute and they just were running into boundary after boundary after boundary. And the boundaries I found were artificial because I could fix those boundaries with a simple phone call. Now to the board of directors, to the founder of that nonprofit, they were very real boundaries, right? Just like when we sat at the gate at the airport and Lufthansa told us that we would have to pay $300 before we could sit in first class, it felt like a very real boundary. But in the fight itself, when you actually got on the plane, inside the fight itself, we quickly realized that solving the problems that this nonprofit had wasn't hard.

It just took a little creativity. It took a different approach. Yes, you could get first class by paying $300. Or you could just get on the plane and then realize that there's no boundary at all, their difference at all, between first class and coach class. And in Ukraine, what I found is I could make a phone call to my own everyday spy marketing team and all of a sudden my team could generate multiple marketing deliverables, one page flyers, websites, graphic images, anything that could be used to help expand and promote the mission of the organization

that we were supporting inside Ukraine. I was able to reach out and make phone calls to my ultra-rich clients. And all it took was a phone call to say, would you be willing to help resettled families in Ukraine? Would you be willing to make a donation? Would you be willing to offer supplies? Would you be willing to add your business to a supply chain list that will ship supplies to Poland so that they can be delivered onward into Ukraine? All it took was a simple question. And we started having dozens of people saying yes.

We had hundreds of people donating money. We've even had people donate six figures at a time. to help advance the mission of my nonprofit partner in Ukraine to support those resettled families, to make sure that orphans and children and families, elderly, are all safely taken care of and appreciated and honored for the brave stance that they have wanting to support their warfighter, even though that warfighter is no longer at home. It took about five days to break through every boundary that was previously holding back that organization. Now they have regular funding rolling in. They have an unlimited supply chain

that's guaranteed by multiple American businesses waiting for them in Poland. They have multiple trucks crossing the Ukraine-Poland border, delivering resupply into all of the combat zones. And they've resettled dozens of families, hundreds of children, and the number just keeps growing, even though the invasion keeps taking more territory. Now, if you're going, If you don't know the foundation I'm talking about, go ahead and pull up on your phone, look up Mountain Seed Foundation. MountainseedFoundation.org is our closest partner in Ukraine. They're doing some amazing stuff. If you don't have a computer or internet link nearby or you're driving and you don't want to look it up, that's fine.

Just remember to check out my Instagram account later on or check out at Everyday Spy on any social media account. And you'll see some of the images of what is happening inside Ukraine. And then you'll also see the good work that Mountain Seed is doing to pull those families and children out and put them someplace safe, even though battle rages on just a few hundred miles away from where they are. When you look at a boundary, when you look at something that's holding you back, holding back your business, holding back your professional life, holding back your career, when you look at it, you have to ask yourself the question, is the boundary I'm considering? Is this thing holding me back real or is it artificial? And even if it is real, even if it is a client that you can't seem to secure or funding that you can't seem to get, ask yourself the question, can I get the same result a different way? And if you can get the result a different way, then what you're actually seeing is an artificial

boundary. You're being blocked by one thing when there's variations, there's opportunities for you to get around that blockade a different way. It's the same thing as that airplane. It's a cloth curtain, not an impenetrable wall that's keeping you back from where you want to be. When you identify the boundary for what it is, then you start on the road to being able to figure out how to get around it. Because maybe it's not something that you can do. You don't have the money to buy the ticket. You don't have the network to be able to come in and offer the funding. Maybe you don't have the talent on your team to accomplish the specific task that you're trying to accomplish.

But somewhere, you're connected to someone who does. All it took was someone reaching out to me and asking me if I would be willing to help. And I am absolutely willing to help my nonprofit partners that are in an active combat zone. I'm willing to help my private intelligence peers anywhere in the world. All it takes is for them to let me know they have a need and then I can help them solution away through that need. I've helped business owners in the spy tribe. I've had help from ultra-rich clients that I serve where they just ask me. Is there anything I can do to help you? Help is out there. Help is something everybody wants to offer because successful people understand that most boundaries, most blockages are artificial. They're not real. You actually can get past them, get around them, get under them, get through them. You can shatter walls when you have help, when you have a connection.

a network when you have a creative idea that gets you around whatever is blocking you. So whether you're struggling in business, whether you're struggling to get new clients, whether you're struggling to make the right cash flow decisions, if you're struggling with funding from grants or whether you're finding yourself lost and not knowing what you're going to do in a career transition, all of those are boundaries that you can get around. They are artificial. You just have to see them for what they are. When you identify an artificial boundary and you realize that you can get around it, that's the first step to being able to find the solution to break through the curtain and recognize it for what it is. 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. the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy 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.