The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - CIA Spy: "Leave The USA Before 2030!", "Why You Shouldn't Trust Your Gut!", "I Held The Nuclear Codes Around My Neck" - Andrew Bustamante

Starting point is 00:00:00 Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

Starting point is 00:00:37 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. For seven years, I was working undercover as a spy. And I needed to know how to manipulate, how to live and operate without ever being detected, and how to collect secrets. Okay, I've got so many questions. Andrew Bustamante. He's a former CIA officer. Who uses spy skills. To teach anyone how to master their mind, talents, and potential in business and everyday life.

Starting point is 00:01:02 When I left CIA, I realized that I could use CIA skills to succeed in business. One of the first things you should want to learn is how do I know if I'm being lied to? As an example, bad liars, that is one of the biggest tells of an unskilled liar. Next, people have four basic core motivations. Reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. And if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things. Deception versus perspective. What's that? 90% of the people out there, they're all trapped in their own perception and thinking emotionally

Starting point is 00:01:34 and emotions are very likely wrong. So CIA trains us to recognize and distrust our perception. And there's two really quick things that you can do. Next, SADRAT. It's an acronym. And all of our marketing, all of our human interactions falls into the same SADRAT process that I learned at CIA because the human condition is so predictable. So SADRAT stands for SADRAT. And it's the reason my company has grown 300% every year for the last three years. I want to know more. Was there any situations where you felt your life was at risk? What do you think about what's going on at the moment with geopolitics?

Starting point is 00:02:08 Do you think we're already engaged in a form of world war three? And then why are you going to try and leave America in 2027? Quick one, quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show. And that is by hitting that follow button

Starting point is 00:02:22 on this app that you're listening to the show on right now. This year in 2024, we're trying really, really hard to level up everything we're doing. And the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps the show more than I could probably articulate. And it allows us, enables us to keep doing what we're doing here. I appreciate it, Dealey. On to the show. Andrew, you're well known for your time in the CIA because people are so intrigued and compelled by it. How long were you in the CIA? I was actually in the CIA for a comparatively short period. I was only in for seven years. Many people make a 30 or more year career out of CIA. So it was really quite a small blip in terms of my overall life. I wore the US military uniform for seven years before that as well. So 14 years

Starting point is 00:03:16 total spent in service to the United States. And what is the CIA? So the CIA is, the United States is intelligence, foreign intelligence collection platform, their primary agency deemed with collecting foreign secrets that have any kind of impact in American national security. So if you think about it, there are multiple what's called intelligence agencies in what's known as the intelligence community or the IC. CIA is just one of those 36-ish community members in the IC. However, it is the one charged with centralizing all of the intelligence collected, hence the central intelligence agency. So it's the hub in a large wheel of intelligence collection. Is that what a spy is? Is it the same thing

Starting point is 00:04:02 as being a spy? So I'm going to, I'll geek out with you a little bit here because terminology is really very important. So there are spies and spy is a vernacular that's used in common conversation that doesn't really have a definition in terms of the intelligence or espionage profession. You have handlers, you have assets in terms of traditional espionage. Handlers are officers who collect intelligence. Assets are foreigners who provide intelligence to the handler. So a CIA officer or an MI6 officer, a Mossad officer, an MSS officer, depending on the country, these are officers who collect secrets. They are therefore handlers. And then all the people who provide them secrets who collect secrets. They are therefore handlers. And then

Starting point is 00:04:45 all the people who provide them secrets are considered assets. Traditionally speaking, when you talk about a spy, some people think a spy is an asset or a handler, either someone who provides information or someone who collects information. And the term spy is just confusing enough that oftentimes people will project their own opinions on top of that word because they don't understand the real nuance of espionage. So I thought of a spy as someone that goes to another country and collects information secretly and then sends it back to the country they came from? So technically that is an intelligence operative or an intelligence officer, also known as an operator or in media and operative. Sometimes it's also called an agent, right? An intelligence agent. These are all kinds of terms that get nebulous, but what you're describing is a intelligence, a trained intelligence officer, no matter what country you're in, whether you're in, it doesn't matter what intelligence

Starting point is 00:05:46 profession you're in either. And there are multiple types of intelligence. There's human intelligence, signals intelligence, measurements intelligence. Anybody who travels to collect secrets on behalf of their country is an intelligence officer. Is that what you were? That's what I was. You started a company after leaving the CIA called Everyday Spy. Correct. For someone that's just clicked on this podcast now, who's trying to understand the value that they're going to get from you by understanding the work that you do at Everyday Spy, what are they going to get from this conversation?

Starting point is 00:06:17 This conversation is designed to, for me, to be able to explain how spy skills have a very real value in breaking everyday barriers. And that's the mission of my company at Everyday Spy. We use spy education to break barriers, social barriers, financial barriers, educational barriers, cultural barriers, language barriers. If there is a barrier in life, I made it my mission in my company to break that barrier using a proven real world skill or technique from espionage. And what sort of means is that to what end? So if I'm, you know, the average Joe listening to this now, when you say break barriers, what are those barriers that I'm going to be able to break in my life? So I intentionally use the term breaking barriers

Starting point is 00:06:59 because we all have different barriers. What the reality of life is that we all come into barriers that are similar, but we come into those barriers at different times. For some people, there's a barrier in income that they're born into. For other people, the barrier that they're born into is that they don't have a father. For other people, they come into a financial barrier when they're 18 and they have to leave home. Some people don't ever know financial barriers, but they do know educational barriers because they suffer from dyslexia or they suffer from ADHD. There are people who have barriers that are due to anxiety. The reality is there's really 12 or so barriers that we will all experience in our life,

Starting point is 00:07:38 but we will experience them at different times. For some of us, it won't happen until we become parents. For others, it happens as soon as we hit adulthood. The idea is that CIA is extremely familiar with barriers. And what they teach us as officers going through their training programs is not just the details of tradecraft, but it's really to understand that any barrier that we as individuals face, they can get us through. But we can also predict barriers other people will run into. And if you know somebody else's barrier and you understand their barrier better than they do, when you help them through that barrier, they will tell you secrets. They will tell me secrets. As part of your training to become a CIA officer, you must have learned how to manipulate people.

Starting point is 00:08:26 That seems to me, from what I know of spies, pretty foundational to what it is to be a successful spy and to get information from someone else. In this conversation today, are we going to learn how, through your training, you were taught to get information from people and make them do what you wanted them to do. Yes. And I'll be very frank here. I try to exercise something called radical transparency. If you want to manipulate people, you will learn that from this conversation. If you want to manipulate people, I will teach you how to manipulate people. In just a simple conversation, you can learn those skills. But the thing to understand that's the most important is that whether you want to manipulate or not, others are manipulating you just because you don't know what they're doing, right? The

Starting point is 00:09:17 problem with being an intelligence operator is that to achieve the things you have to achieve, you sometimes have to do things that you don't want to do. In being a business owner, what I've discovered is that many business owners struggle because they feel like they have to do things they don't want to do. They feel like they have to be sleazy. They feel like they have to be tricky. They feel like they have to mimic, you know, shyster, bad guy, business owners, right? The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation. And that coin has value. Manipulation has value. But the other side of the same coin is motivation. If you can get people to do what they want to do,

Starting point is 00:10:00 then you have motivated them. And that is worth just as much as getting people to do what you want them to do, which is manipulating them. We'll get into all of that, but I want to understand where you came from, because I think this is quite pertinent to both your work as a CIA officer, but also there's really interesting sort of psychological elements to why the CIA chose you that are deep within your childhood story. Going right back to the beginning of your life, what is the most important context we need to understand to understand you? I think the most important thing to understand from my childhood is that I was raised by my mom. My father died. My father was killed before I was born. He died in a violent crime in California.

Starting point is 00:10:42 I didn't know him ever. And my mom had to start life with a newborn son, not just as a single mom, but also as the single mom of a man who was killed in a crime. She's Latina. My father was American Indian. So there was an element of racial diversity in 1980 when I was born that also kind of played a role in all of that. And the reason that that's important is not because of what happened in the past. It's because from that foundation, my mom married a Caucasian man who became my stepdad, who became my adopted father as well. And I had to kind of learn how to come of age or literally come of age in a household where I didn't know my father. I had a stepdad who was Caucasian with two half sisters who were Caucasian. And my stepdad's whole goal was to just pull my mom as far away from her roots as possible because he didn't

Starting point is 00:11:45 want to deal with all the drama that comes from being part of a Catholic Latin family. And my mom was all for that, but nevertheless, like that was, that was the kind of soup that I came out of. What were the needs that were going unmet in your life at that point? You do not ask easy questions, man. So I was not, I did not feel loved. Growing up, I did not feel loved. My mother loved me. And I know logically and rationally that she loved me. But my mother was a cold woman.

Starting point is 00:12:20 She was focused on career success. She was focused on feminism. She was focused on career success. She was focused on feminism. She was focused on other things. As an adult now, my sisters and I often reflect on the fact that we think our mom was the kind of woman that didn't want to be a mom, but it was expected of her to be a mom. So therefore she became a mom. So there wasn't a lot of love. There wasn't a lot of emotional support. There was plenty of academic support. And it was always hard because the academic support came,

Starting point is 00:12:53 I think, as a way of making sure that they didn't have to provide the other support. Because if you have an academically successful student who turns 18, they can get the fuck out of the house and you can have your life back. And I think that was the mission for my mom was just academic success, academic success, be successful. So I don't have to take care of you because I'm not really good at this whole hugging, loving thing. And I just want you gone. So I feel like that was my mom, my dad and my mom, I think had a marriage that was based in a common set of objectives, more so than shared love. And they were just kind of pursuing those objectives. And I was fortunate because from that, I was cultivated

Starting point is 00:13:34 to be a hardworking academic success. And that led to a full ride scholarship and that led to, you know, success in other parts of life. But for sure, it was, it was an un, it left behind a trail of always wondering who, who, who loves me in my family? Is love even important in a family? Does it matter? Or am I being too focused on this whole love thing? Uh, as an example, I tell this story because it's totally normal to me, but a lot of other people find it surprising. There was a day where my mom pulled me aside. I was having an argument with my stepdad and I went to my mom looking for support and I asked her to support me. I was like, do you love me? Do you love me or do you love dad more? And she looked at me and she was like, of course I love your dad more than I love you because you're my son. I have to love you. You were born to me. I must love you, but it's a choice to love your dad. So I have to love him more because it's a choice. And for me, I will never

Starting point is 00:14:37 forget that conversation. I'll never forget the look on my mom's face. It was so simple and so academic and so clear to her. And it's never been something I could ever actually accept. And even now as a husband and a father myself, I don't understand how that was logically sound to her. I don't know how you could ever actually prioritize who you love. All of that, as you've said, as the results resulted in your academic success and your, your focus and all of those kinds of things, but at what cost? I mean, it makes you kind of fucked up, man. It makes you feel like, first of all, it makes you feel like your secrets are justified. It makes you feel like you must

Starting point is 00:15:15 have secrets because there's nobody that you can talk to about certain things. I, I, I remember for many years, you can't take, you can't take your love life to mom and dad. You can't tell them the girl that you think is cute. You can't talk to them about not getting picked to go to the prom dance or anything like that. You can't talk about that with them because they don't care. And you can't trust your sisters. You can't trust your mom. You can't trust your dad. You can't trust the people in your own house. So because you can't trust them and because you can't take certain things to them, you must keep secrets. and since you must keep secrets you must be allowed to keep secrets there must be secrets that are totally acceptable that they are also keeping from you so i grew up in a world where

Starting point is 00:15:56 secrets were something that was very normal and then from that you start to learn that if secrets are normal then lying must also be normal and totally acceptable. So there's a level of sociopathy that develops when you feel like you're on your own. And that's something that most people out there who are loners, who have grown up in that world, they learn to understand that there are certain elements of social behavior that are not culturally acceptable, but as long as you don't talk about them, you can practice them. So that's a big part of what I learned personally was that secrets, how to keep secrets, that secrets are normal, how to lie, how to lie without being caught. And more importantly, that there is a very real difference between the people who are raised in a world where they trust people,

Starting point is 00:16:54 they trust others. And because they trust others, they have a built-in vulnerability, a built-in deficiency compared to the people who are raised in a world where they don't trust others. Because when you're raised in a world where you don't trust, you can always learn to trust. But when you're raised in a world where you trust first, it's very difficult to train that person to know when to not trust someone else. How do you feel about that wiring that you have because of that experience? I mean, it's sad. I'm doing everything in my power to not wire my children the same way that I was wired. So I do believe that there is a faulty wiring that happened. But at the same time, it's been very valuable to me. It's been very productive and valuable in terms of

Starting point is 00:17:36 what I've been able to experience, what I've been able to see and do financially, economically, relationally. I benefit and value. And this is a big challenge that I have is as much as I sit here telling friends and like I'm telling you secrets, because this is what happens. We tell people secrets when they trust you. When I share with you the challenges of growing up, it's important to me that I don't sound like I'm complaining or whining because I had a fantastic foundation for success after that. But I defined success in all the ways that I was trained to define success, financially, economically, empirically, not based on how I feel internally. Have you had to do a lot of work to counteract the potential consequences of that wiring as you become an adult and a father

Starting point is 00:18:26 and all of those things. It's something I think about a lot. I think I've got my own pretty fucked up wiring and I'm scared now because I'm on the footsteps of becoming a dad myself. You know, I'm with a partner, I've been with her for four years. We're talking about kids right now.

Starting point is 00:18:41 And I think, Jesus Christ, like there's a really, you almost can foresee that there's a really you almost can foresee that there's a really high possibility i'm going to up as a dad because my brain is wired towards like validation and work career success and i'm a bit of a workaholic and so have you had to do a lot of work on that absolutely so the first thing i'll say is you will up as a dad we will all up as parents The question is how big will we fuck them up? And I'm working very hard to make sure that the way that I fuck up my kids is in

Starting point is 00:19:12 small ways that they can fix in small ways. But I already know the sins of the father pass on. So I'm just trying to minimize what I pass on that's negative and maximize what I pass on that's positive. The additional layer that is unique to myself and all professional intelligence officers is that when we are recruited into intelligence service, specifically when CIA recruits field operators, it's fairly transparent. They tell you that you were recruited because you are a little fucked up. They tell you that you were recruited because of a certain psychological profile that makes it so that you pragmatically view things like secrets and lies. There's a few different terms. We call it moral flexibility. Depending on the situation, there are some things that I would deem immoral,

Starting point is 00:20:07 but to do them in a different situation is totally acceptable. And that's just something that I'm wired to be, that's been wired to me since I was a kid, but CIA understands how to take advantage of that, how to use that in a way that benefits American national security. There's also an element of high performance that comes from being wired a certain way. So there is a tie between childhood trauma and high performance. It's a well-known, it's a documented connection, but CIA has learned, as has MI6 and Mossad and all the other intelligence services of the world, they've learned that when you train someone who has just the right amount of childhood trauma high performance, when you get

Starting point is 00:20:50 your hands on them at the right time in the right period of their life, they can be trained to become extremely loyal, highly productive field operators that end up spending 30 plus years in service to their nation. When did they get their hands on you? They recruited me when I was 27 years old, coming out of the military in 2007. I was looking for whatever the next step was going to be. And that was when I was approached by a CIA recruiter. I heard that you got a pop-up on your computer screen. Yeah, back in the day.

Starting point is 00:21:22 I was actually applying. I was a nuclear missile officer for the CIA, or excuse me. I was a nuclear missile officer for the CIA, or excuse me, I was a nuclear missile officer for the Air Force. And a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force controls nuclear ICBMs. So I wore the little ring. Wait, wait, wait. What's a nuclear ICBM? So a nuclear ICBM is a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile. So the large missiles that carry nuclear warheads for mutually assured destruction, nuclear war type of stuff. So you controlled the nuclear missiles? I was half of who controlled them. I wore one ring, somebody else wore a different ring,

Starting point is 00:21:53 and that was how a nuclear missile got launched. What does the ring do? So the ring is a key. On the end of it is a key. And when you get a nuclear code that comes in, the code, you put it into an old school computer system, and the two of you take your key ring and you insert it into the silo operating system. And then you turn in unison. And when you turn in unison, it launches a nuclear weapon. How did you get yourself to the point in life at 27 years old where you're holding a nuclear key around your neck? I would love to say it was a series of good decisions, but it wasn't. I did what I was told. That's how I got there. I did what I was told when I was in high school and I got good grades.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And then my mom told me that the best school of all the universities that chose me, the best school I should go to is the Air Force Academy. So then I accepted a full ride scholarship to the United States Air Force Academy where I did what I was told. And I graduated as a Lieutenant. And then I followed what the Air Force told me to do from there. And they told me to learn how to fly. And then they told me that they needed me to work in nuclear and space weapons instead. So then I went to that school and I did well at that school. And I ended up just kind of climbing the ladder. I did what I was told. And then one day I found myself a hundred feet underground, miserable. It's a horrible job.

Starting point is 00:23:19 Why? So in 2007, when I was a nuclear missile officer, you sit in a launch control capsule, an LCC that sits a hundred feet underground. And you sit there on a 72 hour shift with one other person, the other person who holds the other key. And then you are one nuclear crew of maybe 30 different nuclear crews who are all on deployment at the same time. So at any given time in one Air Force base, there's 60-ish people underground for 72 hours at a time. And then in different missile base, there'll be a different 60 people underground. And your whole job is just to sit there and wait for nuclear war to break out. And obviously nuclear war hasn't

Starting point is 00:24:03 broken out and hopefully it never will break out. So as you sit there underground, not seeing sunlight, and as you sit there in a capsule with one other person that you very rarely ever like, you have a lot of time to reflect on what am I doing? What am I doing with my life? I'm a redundancy of a redundancy of a scenario that we all are working very hard to make sure never happens. Is this a productive life? Like, am I making a difference? Am I leaving a mark in history, sitting here, not launching missiles, waiting for a message to come in that I already know isn't going to lead to nuclear war. It's a very difficult and thankless job that even right now, as you and I are having this conversation,

Starting point is 00:24:54 there are some 200 Americans sitting underground doing that exact job. And that's just in the United States. Every country that has nuclear weapons is doing the same thing. If an order had come in that instructed you to launch a nuclear weapon, would you have done it? Absolutely. That's what you do. The other thing that's important to understand is we're redundancies of redundancies. So we don't know if an order says to launch nuclear weapons. We just know that an order comes in that says to insert the keys and turn them. And if it's a valid order that comes in, then the machine will let us insert our keys, we will turn our keys, and then the machine will do what the machine does. Sometimes that order that's coming in is saying launch nuclear missiles.

Starting point is 00:25:36 Sometimes that order that's coming in is just a drill to make sure that the two people in the capsule turn their keys. Oh, really? So you never know the difference? We're just a redundancy of a redundancy, man. It seems hard to me to understand how someone would stay in that job for a long period of time. So they must have like really high attrition. They have shockingly low attrition because they do such a good job of psychologically identifying the right people for that job. Were they scouting you, do you think, from a very early age to eventually go into the CIA? No, I don't believe so. I think CIA is far too practical to do anything that requires scouting people from a young age. I think what more realistically happened

Starting point is 00:26:17 is that they had a very simple algorithm that they had applied to every government website, so that when people of a certain profile applied to a job on a government website, then they'd get a flash on their screen, just like I did, that said, hey, we appreciate your application. We'd like to have a different recruiter contact you for a different opportunity. What were you applying for on that government website when that pop-up came up? Yeah, I was applying for the Peace Corps. I was trying to get into the US Peace Corps because after spending two years underground waiting to launch nuclear missiles, I thought that it'd be great to get out of the Air Force and go do the exact opposite. Kind of like if you've ever had a really bad breakup,

Starting point is 00:26:57 you go looking for the exact opposite of the person you just broke up with. That's how I felt. And the Peace Corps does sort of humanitarian work around the world. Exactly right. I mean, I was looking to teach children English in Africa or save orphans or do microfinance or build huts. Like I was looking to do something that built the world up instead of just waiting to tear the world down. You get this pop up as you're applying and it says another recruiter wants to speak to you or something. What's to that effect? What happens then? So that's when being a 27 year old single guy kicks in and you think to yourself, there might be something better. So once you think to yourself, there might be something better,

Starting point is 00:27:37 it's really easy to say, yes, like I'll wait. And that's all the, that's all the screen was asking me to do is just pause my application for 72 hours. So it's easy to click yes. And then you fall out of that website and you're just on hold for 72 hours. Either a better opportunity is going to happen and someone's going to call me or no one's going to call me and I can come right back and finish my application. But just to say no means to miss the opportunity. And that wasn't me. And then within 72 hours, you got a call? Within 24 hours, I got a call. Yeah. I got a call from an unlisted number. It just said 703. And there was a woman on the other end of the line. She gave me a first name, but I don't remember what her first name was. And she basically confirmed who I was and confirmed that I was applying to the Peace Corps, asked me if I'd be open for other government opportunities.

Starting point is 00:28:24 And then she said that there might be opportunities in the national security sector that I'd be interested in. And she'd like to send me an airline ticket and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation to come up to DC to hear more about the job. What did you think at that point? I thought it was a prank call. I thought that the call wasn't real. I thought that the call was maybe it was some kind of gimmick or maybe it was something else or it just didn't sound real. Especially not when she said she was going to like send me a paper airline ticket and she was going to send me all this stuff in the mail overnight FedEx. But then it showed up. And then when it showed up again, that 27 year

Starting point is 00:29:00 old single male kicked in and I was like, well, now I have a ticket. Let's see where the ticket goes. And let's go to the reservation counter at the rental car desk. And is this a real rental car reservation? It's a real reservation. Is there a real hotel? And then you just kind of follow the breadcrumbs. The rental car reservation is real. The airline ticket's real. You fly out there, you land. What happens next? You get another phone call that says, hey, did you get in safe? And then they tell you the address for where you're supposed to show up the next day. And then you go, it's a nondescript building and you walk in. And for me, I walked in, there were 10 or so other people in the waiting room. None of us really knew what we were there

Starting point is 00:29:38 for. We all knew that we were there for something related to a government job. Everybody's dressed essentially the same way. And you find out that this person's in finance and that lady came from social work and whatever else it might be. And then eventually somebody comes out and calls you into a room. And then you go through the first, what we call the first round of interviews. And it's just kind of like a fit to see what you're interested in, what you're not interested in, et cetera. And it was at the end of that first interview that the lady said to me that I might be a good fit for the National Clandestine Service at CIA, which I didn't know what that was at the time. And then she basically broke it down and she was just like you and I did at the beginning of this conversation. She was

Starting point is 00:30:17 like, essentially, we want you to be a field officer or what you might know from the movies as a spy. And of course, for me, I was, I mean, my seven-year-old self was like, I'm going to be a what? Like, you want me to be a spy? You want me to like drive fancy cars and wear tuxedos and always have a beautiful woman on my side? Like sign me up for that. I mean, starving children in Africa can wait.

Starting point is 00:30:40 I want to do that. But then of course comes the byline afterwards where she's like, you can't tell anybody that this is what you're now applying for. We're going to move you on to the second phase of interviews. We need you to go back to your hotel and go back to Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and live your normal life. And if anybody asks you why you're out here, just tell them that you came out here applying for a government position and you don't know whether or not you're going to get it. And in the meantime, we'll be in touch. And then they get in touch

Starting point is 00:31:07 again. And then they get in touch again. And then you go through multiple more rounds of interviews. So they fly you usually back to the DC area. And then the interviews just get kind of more intense. You go from a fit interview to a kind of like a test, like an interview that's more of like a test with somebody else. They ask you scenario-based questions. They give you puzzles. They ask you some light psychological stuff. If you pass that, you'll come back again and you'll do a whole round, like a three-day, multiple-day psychological evaluation, multiple psychological tests, intelligence tests, IQ tests, EQ tests. And then you'll have a post-interview with a psychologist who reviews the results of your psychological battery against a therapy kind of session,

Starting point is 00:31:59 where they ask you questions much like you ask, right? Like, what was the primordial soup that you came out of and where are you the most fucked up and where are you the least fucked up and that kind of stuff. And, and if you pass all of that, then eventually you get what's known as a conditional offer of employment or a COE. And that's when CIA writes to you on a blank piece of paper that does not say CIA. And they basically say, we would like to offer you employment at this pay scale, making this much money. If you accept, your induction date will be on this date at this time, and then just drive in through the front gates at this date and this time, and your name will be on a roster. In that job offer, do they pay a lot of money? No. They pay a lot of money in comparison to other government jobs because CIA is just one of

Starting point is 00:32:50 the higher paying government agencies, but it's not a lot of money at all. I think when I, it was 2007 when I was conditionally offered employment and I think my starting pay was 72 or $74,000 a year, which was comparable, a little bit less than what I was making as an, as an Air Force captain at the same time. But I was an Air Force captain living in Montana, making $75,000 versus a brand new CIA recruit living in Washington, DC, making $72,000. When you got that letter in the post saying that you'd been offered a role, how did you feel? Great. Yeah. Yeah. I felt like I had done everything right. Right. I felt like, I mean, there was a part of me that says, that, that says, and I still kind of follow

Starting point is 00:33:30 this mantra, like who gets to do this? So that felt amazing. And then there was a ton to use your word, a ton of validation of like, now I get it. Now I know why I went to a college. I didn't like, now I know why I put up with a stepdad and listened to my mom. And I don't need love and you don't need support and you don't need a family that cares about you as a person. All you need is to check the fucking boxes because this is where you get to go when you check the boxes. And now that I've checked all the boxes, I'm free. So that doesn't really work that way. Because when you're hired, because you're, you check boxes, it just, the boxes just change, but you still have to check the boxes. And at that point it goes from interview to, I guess, training.

Starting point is 00:34:15 Correct. During that whole interview process, you're not allowed to tell anyone, I'm guessing. Right. Even your family. Nope. So what, what'd you tell your family that you've been up to during that period? So this is what's nice about their recruitment process. Remember, I told you earlier that I accepted as a child that there are times that you have to lie and there are secrets that you have to keep. This was just a secret I had to keep and a lie that I had to tell. So I told my

Starting point is 00:34:38 family that I was looking at getting out of the Air Force. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Maybe I'd go work for the government. And I was going to DC to do some government interviews. I was never close to my family. From the time I left for the Air Force Academy at 18, I mean, I went home maybe once a year. Every time I tried to go home, it was always a kerfuffle because my parents didn't want to buy the airline ticket because it was expensive and I didn't have money to buy an airline ticket. So I had to ask them.

Starting point is 00:35:02 And it was the same song and dance every Christmas holiday, right? Like, I'd like to come home. I don't have any money. Well, we don't have any money either. Maybe you shouldn't come home. So it was really easy to be 27 years old. Almost 10 years after that, I'm not really close to my family. So I tell them as little as possible. I had a girlfriend at the time. She was a great girlfriend, but she wasn't as great as being a CIA officer was going to be, right? I had friends at the time. She was a great girlfriend, but she wasn't as great as being a CIA officer was going to be. I had friends at the time, but they weren't as cool as being a CIA officer would be. So it was really easy to just start just cutting off the branches of my social tree because I was going to go do something awesome. I didn't need anybody else.

Starting point is 00:35:40 Did the CIA tell you to disconnect from these people at all? They told you that you would have to eventually. And they explain how you're going to go into covert service. If you're going to go into clandestine service, you can't take a whole Rolodex of people with you. So one of the things that they asked during our psychological evaluation was, how much do you need close relationships and close peers? And how do you feel about severing ties with what we sometimes call like secondary or tertiary relationships, friends, college friends, like a primary relationship is your spouse. A secondary relationship is all your close friends. A tertiary relationship is somebody who you work with. So like, how do you feel about cutting off all those not so important relationships? And for me, it was easy, right? I was like, let's go. I'm

Starting point is 00:36:26 going to go do something amazing. I don't need college friends to go do something amazing. Do you think your appearance and ethnicity factored into the CIA's decision to recruit you? Absolutely. In 2007, so just to take everybody back, 2007 was six years after 9-11. It was three years after the CIA 9-11 commission or the US government 9-11 commission came out, which basically said that everything CIA had been doing up to 2001 was wrong. They were focused in a Cold War era. They were not focused on terrorism. They were focused on Ivy League, Caucasian graduates as being the next generation of CIA officer instead of diversifying for a diversified world. So without a doubt, they were looking for

Starting point is 00:37:11 different people. They were looking for young people, colored people, LBGTQ plus people who could connect with the modern day threat around the world. And then I think on top of being brown and ethnic, I also came with a huge government file because I had been part of the Air Force since I was 18 years old. So they knew everything about my health, everything about my mental health, everything about my academic, athletic performance in college. They knew everything about me. And I think that's part of why my onboarding process took about nine months, where the typical onboarding process takes about 18 months. How do they train you to become a CIA agent? So a lot of the training part is classified still, so I can't talk about it. But there's a school

Starting point is 00:37:58 that we go to. It's fairly publicly known, but I can't acknowledge what it is and isn't. And we go there for many months. And we basically were pulled out of everyday life and were put into a controlled simulated world. And inside that simulated world, they kind of control what's happening around us. So if you can imagine almost like going from being taken out of your apartment where you live, and now you're put into a different apartment, but the apartment that you're put into is part of a giant game. And somebody else controls all the game. So they control the news that's on the TV, and they control the cars that are on the road, and they control everything except the weather, basically,

Starting point is 00:38:39 so that they can create multiple different types of scenarios where you exercise the skills that they taught you from driving to first response, first aid response to lying, living and working under alias identities, all that stuff. So you're put into a very controlled environment for a long period of time where they can test all of your tradecraft that you're taught. It's very expensive. It must be very expensive for them to train a CIA agent. Right. That's why they train us in batches. So there's generally two to three batches a year that go through different types of training. And there's different classifications of officers too, right? So your analysts are different than your technical officers who are different than your field officers. So what they'll do is they'll batch you into, or at least what they did in 2007 is they would batch you along with your discipline and then send a batch to training. And then everybody goes through the same lectures during the day, just like university.

Starting point is 00:39:34 And everybody goes through a series of exercises at different times of the day and different times of the week. But essentially everybody goes through the same curriculum and everybody has the same grades. And then those grades are all measured against each other and the bottom performers are cut out and the top performers get to stay. That curriculum, what is involved in that curriculum? You mentioned a few things there. Is learning how to kill people involved in the curriculum? No, that is not involved in the curriculum. Not at the basic training level.

Starting point is 00:40:01 Do they teach you that? They teach some people that, but they don't teach everybody that. It depends on the discipline that you're part of. If you're a paramilitary officer, you need to learn how to kill. And you need to learn how to kill in different ways. Kill quickly, kill quietly, kill with blunt weapons, clear with bladed weapons, or kill with bladed weapons, kill with projectile weapons. So kill with explosives, de-arm explosives. So it all depends on the caliber, the level of officer that you're kind of put into. So paramilitary, they must learn that,

Starting point is 00:40:32 but your standard human intelligence field collector, they need to learn how to live and work without being caught. So if you kill somebody, it's a big deal. You might get caught. So it's much easier to teach that person how to manipulate, how to collect secrets, how to live and operate without ever being detected. Whereas a paramilitary officer doesn't need to learn all that. They taught you how to lie. They teach you how to lie. How do they teach someone how to lie? It starts with a foundation of making sure that you recruit people who are already liars. And then once you, when you're sitting across from a liar, you can start to understand if they're a good liar or not very quickly.

Starting point is 00:41:11 You've probably talked to people who are bad liars. I've talked to everything. So, you know, when someone's a bad liar, so from that you can identify people who are good liars. And then when you do find a good liar, you start to teach them what they already naturally do that makes them a good liar. And then you start to teach them how to refine that skill. And you start to teach them how bad liars operate and how you can detect a bad liar and how you gain advantages with lies and how to handle lies. As an example, because I promised you skills,

Starting point is 00:41:53 bad liars talk a lot. Good liars talk a little because the more you talk, the more you run the risk of undermining your own lie. Bad liars make a lot of statements. Good liars ask a lot of questions because if you ask questions, you're not really disclosing anything about yourself. So if you've ever had, if you think back and you, if you remember ever going to a party or ever having a date or ever being in a social environment where there was somebody there that made you feel so interesting, but you didn't know anything about them, you were talking to a very good liar. What about body language? Is that a factor in lying? Absolutely. I mean, body language is a factor in everything, but body language is especially a factor in lying because again, going back to the idea of a skilled liar versus an unskilled liar, a skilled liar knows how to appear like they are telling the truth with their words and with their body. Whereas an unskilled liar often has a disconnect and their body will say a different message than

Starting point is 00:42:46 what their mouth is saying. Consider your stereotypical jock, your standard European footballer or your American jock. A lot of times they'll be portrayed as like somebody who like, they sit bigger than life and all this other stuff, right? Their body shows confidence and openness, but then when they talk, they sound like idiots, right? I don't know. I'm sure like, you know, totally like, dude, that lady, like whatever. There's a disconnect. Their voice does not demonstrate the same confidence that their body demonstrates. So you know that that person is lying. What they're lying about is not necessarily just the content of what they're saying, but they recognize they can't cognitively accept the fact that they are in a position where they are telling an untruth. And that untruth at a minimum is that they are not super confident and super comfortable. They are actually uncomfortable

Starting point is 00:43:43 and they are not feeling confident. And that's why they're stammering over themselves. So when you were lying to someone based on your training, would you think a lot about your body language? Yes. And what would you do? What would you, what were the principles of making sure your body language wasn't letting the cat out of the bag? So one of the first things to do when you're, when you're trying to lie to somebody, and again, we're, we're now talking about how to lie to somebody. You shouldn't want to learn how to lie to somebody. You should want to learn how to know if somebody is lying to you. But we always start this way where we want to,

Starting point is 00:44:14 we're afraid to ask the real question, which is how do I know if I'm being lied to? Because that shows vulnerability. But if you want to learn how to lie to somebody, the first thing you do is you mimic the person. Look at you and I right now, we are mirrored. Are your hands connected under the table? So are mine. Are your feet crossed under your seat? So are mine. We are mirrored right now, which means when you look at me subconsciously, you see yourself. I want you to see yourself in this exercise, because if you see yourself, your initial instinctive response is going to be trust because who do you trust in the whole world? You trust yourself. So the first step to being able to lie effectively is to be able to mirror the person you're lying to. If I was coming

Starting point is 00:44:57 at you, like, you know, right away, you're going to be like, I don't know who this guy is. Right. And similarly, if I was to be like, just for people that are on audio, he's just like doing different postures and body languages. So that are far away from my own, putting his hands on the table, et cetera. So, okay. It makes sense. So we want to mirror first and you mirror because mirroring creates a foundation of trust subconsciously, it creates a foundation of trust. And then once you have that foundation of trust, you just start kind of pushing the envelope more and more with the untruth or with the fabrication that you're creating, the lie, right? Is there anything else on the subject of telling a lie to someone that's

Starting point is 00:45:36 believable that we need to be aware of in terms of skills? Yes. So first, the whole idea about, there's two important ideas that get glorified in social media that are just inaccurate. And the first is called eye movements. You can't actually tell if somebody's lying to you based on where they place their eyes. Because while there are certain elements of eye movements that have biological relevancy, there's many, many more things about eye movements that don't have biological relevancy. There's many, many more things about eye movements that don't have biological relevancy, right? So what I mean by that is if I ask you, what's your oldest memory?

Starting point is 00:46:13 You just look to your left. It's natural to look to your left when you're from a Western country because chronologically timelines start on the left. So when you ask somebody a question about time, and they look to the left, up, down, or in the middle, generally speaking, that has biological relevancy. So it's a low probability that they're lying, but they still could be lying. When you ask somebody a question, they look to the upper right or the lower right, or wherever they might look. There's not necessarily biological relevancy because they could be looking up into the right because down into the left, it's too bright. And they could be looking in any number of directions because maybe they have a headache

Starting point is 00:46:55 or maybe they have something else going on. The ability to create some sense of probability about why they're making the eye movements they're making is too difficult. So you can't assess someone's honesty or dishonesty based off of eye movements, even though you're going to hear that you can from Instagram influencers and, you know, discord and everywhere on the internet, you're going to hear that there's some connection that you can make justifiably. It's not true. The same thing is also true. So it is also an untruth that you can rely on something known as micro expressions, micro expressions being the number of times your eyes blink or the twitch in your face, or if you're sucking on your lips, these ideas that get glorified through social media as indicators of deceit. The truth is you don't know if someone is lying to you until you have had

Starting point is 00:47:45 enough time with the person to establish what's known as a baseline. A baseline means what's normal for you. So I'll just use you as an example. 10 minutes before the cameras turned on, you were a totally different person. Your energy is different. You're so much more conversational. Like you are just, you're an awesome friendly guy when the cameras are not on, but you turn into an interviewer when the cameras turn on. Totally rational, totally logical, makes total sense. That doesn't mean that you're lying now and you were telling the truth then. It means that the environment has changed and nobody would know that if there wasn't a baseline. Most people that watch you don't ever know what you're like outside of this baseline.

Starting point is 00:48:31 So you have to get to know the person and then understand the variance that's unusual to understand if they're lying to you. Exactly. We call it time on target. You need time on target so that you can understand the delta, the change between their baseline and whatever pressure you're putting them under. Was there any sort of consistent telltale signs that someone was lying to you in an

Starting point is 00:48:51 interaction? Like, you know what I mean? You know, certain, you know, nervous things that they do change, you know, what are those variances that you might see that you go, this person's now lying to me? Yeah. So with unskilled liars, it becomes much easier because a lot of times with skilled liars, with people who have either learned how to lie through formal training or people who have learned how to lie through the school of hard knocks, when there's people who are skilled liars, it's difficult to find generic tells. With people who are unskilled liars, it's much easier to find generic tells. There are people who you've heard of being on the hot seat. It's a, it's a phrase we use in Western culture pretty often. Like when someone is under pressure, we call them being in a hot seat. When you've got

Starting point is 00:49:34 an unskilled liar, they can't stop moving their body. Like they're just, they're always uncomfortable and they just keep moving and they keep twitching and they keep fidgeting. And it's like, they're sitting in a hot seat. That is one of the biggest tells of an unskilled liar. And again, anybody who's ever had like a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a 12-year-old try to lie to them, they know what that looks like. They can't make eye contact. They do a lot of like verbal noises that aren't actual words, they can't get comfortable, they keep moving around, they keep shifting, shifty. All those words came from real world examples

Starting point is 00:50:12 of an unskilled liar trying to lie. But you don't need micro expressions of the face or to know which way their eyes are tracking in order to pick up on that. Going back to your training then, what were some of the other most important transferable skills that you learned throughout that process? The most interesting and useful things that we learned during training actually had to do with the psychological processes that

Starting point is 00:50:33 people go through and being able to understand the process and then predict and identify when the process is happening. Those are the things that really make a huge difference. Yes, it's cool to learn how to do a dead drop. And yes, it's cool to learn how to detect surveillance or how to drive a car through a roadblock, right? Those are all very interesting things. But the most useful things are the things that you can use all day, every day through multiple types of interactions. And there are a series of processes, a number of processes that we learned that had to do

Starting point is 00:51:03 with human psychology. One of those processes is understanding the idea of core motivations. Core motivations are, remember how we talked about manipulation and motivation are two sides of the same coin? When you understand all the different options of the currency that you're working with, you can work with it more effectively. So people are generally, despite age, race, creed, or religion, people have four basic motivations. And we call those four basic motivations RICE, R-I-C-E, stands for reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. Reward is anything that you want. Money, free vacations, pat on the back, women, alcohol. If that's something that you want and me giving it to you gives you what you want, then that's a reward. People do lots of crazy

Starting point is 00:51:54 things for rewards. And these rewards change over time? And based on person. Okay. Right? The second primary motivator is ideology. Ideology is the things that you believe in. People do crazy things for the things they believe in, whether it's their religion, whether it's their country, whether it's family, whether it's what they believe is morally correct, right? So if you can assign, if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things. C is coercion. Coercion is all the negative things, guilt, shame, blackmail, anything that you do to force someone to take certain action by leaning into the negative elements of motivation,

Starting point is 00:52:33 which is also known as manipulation, that falls under the C or coercion. And then E, ego, is everything that has to do with how the person views themselves. So oftentimes ego gets oversimplified into thinking that it's just people who have a big ego, right? Somebody like Donald Trump, who has a big ego, or you name the famous actor who has a big ego. Ego is also people who don't have big egos. Mother Teresa had an ego. She wanted to sacrifice for other people. She wanted other people to see her sacrificing for other people. That is also ego. So with these four core motivations, you have a rubric, a process to understand why other people do what they do. If you understand why other people do what they do, all you have to do is connect what they care about with what you want them to do.

Starting point is 00:53:25 And you just increase the probability of them doing what you want them to do. Of these four core motivations, is there an order of the strength that they have over people? So if you were really trying to get someone to do something, you'd focus on this core motivation over that one. Yes, absolutely. Ideology is the strongest. Ego is the second strongest. Reward is the third strongest. And coercion is the weakest. This is one of the things that movies get wrong. Movies try to make it look like you can blackmail somebody or hold a gun to their head and get them to do what you want them to do. In the real world, once you hold a gun to someone's head, they never trust you again. You can never get them to do something twice. Whereas if you

Starting point is 00:54:05 appeal to their ideology, doing this is good for your country. Doing this is good for your family. Doing this is good for your health. If you can appeal to someone's ideology, they'll do what you tell them to do for a long time because they'll trust you. Is this really the essence of manipulation then? That is the essence of motivation and manipulation. The same coin. You'll hear me come back to this because one of the things that people really struggle with outside of intelligence is they feel like they have to label things as good or bad. When you have moral flexibility, you take away good and bad. Everything just becomes a question of utility or productivity. If you need someone to do something and you can motivate them, then you should. But if you need someone to do something

Starting point is 00:54:52 and you can't motivate them, that's a green light to manipulate them because you still need them to do what you need them to do. If you feel bad about manipulating somebody, you are not going to do well in the intelligence world. You said the ideology is the strongest of the four of the core motivations. How might you go about finding out someone's ideology in the context of business and life? A lot of times people will volunteer it to you. There's two ways. If you're a keen observer, people will volunteer it to you. You've already volunteered that you are ideologically predisposed to fatherhood. You've already talked about it. The reason that you're worried about fucking up your kids that you don't even have yet is because you're thinking

Starting point is 00:55:33 about fatherhood. So clearly you are ideologically predisposed to what it means to be a responsible father. You want to be seen as a responsible father. That plays into your ego as well. So I'm sure when you're talking to your partner, if you guys are already looking at where would we go to school? Where would we live? What kind of diapers should we use? If you're even thinking about that, you're thinking about it through the lens of the ideology of being an engaged, present, helpful, loving father, right? So people will volunteer it. Your customer base will volunteer to you what their ideologies are. They'll volunteer their politics. They'll volunteer their pain

Starting point is 00:56:12 from their childhood. They'll volunteer their pain from business. If you listen. If you listen. The second way that you can get to understand the ideology of your customer base is through active marketing, the right kind of marketing, not mass marketing, not the ideology of your customer base is through active marketing, the right kind of marketing, not mass marketing, not the kind of garbage that you see on Instagram and YouTube about, you know, how to make people believe in your brand because you use the right colors, but actual marketing where you present a message and that message was crafted with an emotion behind it, people who respond to that intentionally crafted message are showing what their motivations are because they were clearly motivated enough by the message to take action. You've heard a lot of people talk about

Starting point is 00:57:00 narrative, especially in politics. There's, you know, oh, there's the liberal narrative and there's the Republican narrative and there's the conservative narrative and the church narrative. And people talk a lot about narrative. Narrative is not the power in influence. The power in influence actually comes from messaging. It takes two steps to get to a narrative. It takes messaging first, and then messaging builds a narrative. If you think about messaging, messaging is supposed to be an emotional thing. Just a statement, just a message, just like a text message, right? Are you afraid of being the kind of father that isn't present for your kids? That creates emotion in the right ideologically predisposed person.

Starting point is 00:57:46 There's no woman out there who's going to be motivated by that. She might be motivated to tell her partner about that, but it's not going to resonate with her like it resonates with me as a father of young children. But that's just the message. Then the narrative is not emotional in nature. The narrative is logical in nature. So you use an emotional message to communicate a logical narrative. Are you afraid of being the kind of father that wasn't, that's not present for your child? Oh man, that just like, that pulls at my heartstrings. Well, then all you have to do is sign up for this app

Starting point is 00:58:25 that reminds you every Sunday to read your kids a story. And you're like, oh, that makes total sense. All I need is a reminder and I'm going to be a good dad. And that's messaging and narrative. The same thing happens in politics. The same thing happens in geopolitics. The same thing happens the whole world over. Because in the intelligence world, we understand messaging and narrative. We know how to use messaging and narrative. It's how you elect a president. It's the reason that Saudi Arabia went to war with Iran over Yemen. Everybody understands at a national security level, the idea of creating a message or a narrative using emotional messaging. But when it comes to business, people don't get it yet. They haven't learned that lesson yet because they've all been

Starting point is 00:59:11 taught through an MBA program or something else that you sell toothpaste by creating more toothpaste with brighter colors on more shelves. Thinking about ideology and everything you just said there, has your experience over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years really made you rethink and look at the world entirely differently? Because if you are so focused and able to detect and understand messaging and narrative, you must just see it everywhere you go in everything you do. Right. So there were two big aha moments for me. And the first was in the very beginning parts of my training at CIA. I mean, when I went through all of the CIA recruiting process and all of my time in the military, I just felt like I was doing the right thing.

Starting point is 00:59:51 I just felt like I was doing a good job. I felt like I was special, right? Like, wow, I must be super special because I'm getting picked for the National Clandestine Service. So I felt like I was doing everything right. And then I actually ended up going through my training program where they confirmed that I actually was broken in certain ways. I was high performing because I had trauma as a child. I lie and I steal and I have no problem with sociopathy because I'm not mentally healthy, right? Like that's

Starting point is 01:00:29 basically what they confirmed. Like you're wired in a certain way that's really useful, but you're actually not neurotypical. You're not successful in the way that you thought you were successful, but you are still very useful. And oh, by the way, you're even more special because now you work for CIA. So don't ever stop working for CIA because they know that what drives us is our ideology, right? Our ideology and then our ego. So they hook us that way. So for me, that was my first big aha moment, because up until then, I always thought maybe I understood the world, but nobody else seemed to understand it the way wins the lawsuit. It doesn't make sense. How is there a legal structure, but criminals don't go to jail if there's a legal structure? I remember seeing it all and thinking that it didn't make sense, but never actually being

Starting point is 01:01:42 confident enough to say anything about it because it was a secret and I didn't make sense, but never actually being confident enough to say anything about it because it was a secret and I didn't feel comfortable sharing that secret. CIA then taught me what you're seeing is actually the world as it really is. And let's train you to show you and give you a vocabulary to understand what you're seeing. Let's teach you about human psychology so you understand why it works the way that it works, why everybody sees it and nobody talks about it. So that was my first big aha moment. And then my second big aha moment came when I left CIA and I was unemployed for like six months living in my in-laws converted garage with a one-year-old child, wondering how the fuck I did so many things so wrong that I couldn't get a job, even though I was just part of the CIA. And in that time,

Starting point is 01:02:37 feeling like just the world's biggest loser, the only skill that I could lean on was what the CIA had taught me to do. So then I lied my way into a fortune 10 company and all of a sudden I wasn't a loser anymore. And once I realized that I could use CIA skills to succeed in business, that was my second big aha moment. So now everything I see, I see through a lens of CIA skills in a business world. Perception versus perspective was one of the other things that I've heard you talk about. Was it quite a big, I guess, shift in understanding, but something that the regular person doesn't really understand? Yeah. So the idea of perception and perspective, I have to define them first, right? Perception is what you believe you see.

Starting point is 01:03:29 Where you sit is how you perceive the world around you. Perspective is how other people see where you're sitting. So when I think about us right now across the table from each other, my perception is what I see of you. Your perspective is very different than my perception, right? At a minimum, I'm looking at you with a background that's different than when you're looking at me with a background. So the benefit, the advantage that CIA gives its field officers is that it trains us to recognize and distrust our perception. Because perception really only comes from one source, and that is your own five senses. You

Starting point is 01:04:13 are the source of information for your perception. So for anybody who's ever seen like a little pile of socks in the lower left-hand corner, and thought it was a rat and they jump until they realize it's socks, that is your perception lying to you. Perspective means that you get data objectively from the world around you. So if you're in your room and you see a pile of black in the corner, your perspective tells you, this is your room. There's never been a rat in your room ever before. That pile in the corner is probably something like socks. Perspective keeps things objective. Perception makes things very subjective or very emotional. So CIA trains us to lean into our perspective, gain perspective, think about things objectively, because if you lean on your perception, you're leaning on emotions and emotions are very likely wrong. How can I train myself to lean more on my perspective? There's two really quick things that

Starting point is 01:05:10 you can do. The first is immediately distrust your emotions. Know right away when you're feeling emotions. In other words, what I'm saying is don't trust your gut, which is the antithesis of what most people tell you to do. Most people say, trust your gut. I'm telling you right now, your gut, which is the antithesis of what most people tell you to do. Most people say, trust your gut. I'm telling you right now, your gut is more often than not lying to you because your gut is based in emotion. Your girlfriend's not about to dump you. Your boyfriend isn't cheating on you. You're not about to go bankrupt. Nobody cares about the zit on your nose, right? That is most likely true. There's a small chance that your perception is correct, but when it comes to gambling, are you going to bet on the small chance or the bigger

Starting point is 01:05:54 chance? You should always gamble on the bigger chance. The bigger chance you only really understand through perspective. If you have perspective on something, then you have multiple data points on something. So when you feel yourself getting emotional, stop and let your emotion happen for a second, right? I feel nervous. I feel anxious. I feel doubtful. Okay. I probably don't have to. You probably shouldn't because whoever's sitting across the table from you, whoever's coming into the room with you, whoever else is on the bus with you, they are all focused on a thousand different things. And the things that they're focused on most likely don't include you. Sounds easier said than done. Correct. Is that a process of repetitions to train yourself to think like that? It is. It takes momentum. So what ends up having to happen is that you need to exercise it

Starting point is 01:06:46 intentionally at first. And what happens is as you intentionally exercise your perspective over perception, what will start to happen is you will start to see that what you were worried about doesn't happen. And then once you see it not happen, once you see your perspective give you the correct information over your perception, once you see that happen once, then it starts to gain momentum. And then it happens again, and it gains more momentum, and more momentum, and more momentum, until the time comes that you realize it's much easier. But it is. It's a learned skill. You have to learn to think objectively instead of subjectively,

Starting point is 01:07:27 think rationally instead of emotionally. And a big part of what helps you do that is understanding that 90% of the people out there, they're all trapped in their own perception. They're all trapped in thinking emotionally. They don't even know that there's an alternative. Just think about this, man. The conversation we're having right now, the people who are hearing this conversation right now, They're all trapped in thinking emotionally. They don't even know that there's an alternative. Just think about this, man.

Starting point is 01:07:49 The conversation we're having right now, the people who are hearing this conversation right now who have never heard that there's a difference between perception and perspective are already better equipped than all the other assholes who have never heard this conversation. They're already one step ahead of their competition. They're one step ahead of their spouses, their partners, their bullies. They're one step ahead of everybody because now they can use the words perception and perspective, subjective and objective, emotional and logical and rational. They can use these words to define how they want to think, even if they don't think that way yet. That's the huge advantage to what CIA calls the trained and the untrained. Trained people at least are aware that there's an alternative option.

Starting point is 01:08:28 Untrained people aren't even aware that there's an option. The vast majority of people out there are what I call bobbleheads. They don't even know there's an option. They're completely unaware of an alternative solution, an alternative process. So they're trapped in their perception. They're trapped in their emotion. They're trapped in their subjectivity. And that makes it so much easier for people like you and me and everyone listening right now to use rational, objective perspective to get those people to do whatever we want them to do. You've had a lot of recent success in business, you know, with your company company Everyday Spy and other ventures that you've been involved in. What are some of the fundamental skills that you find yourself transferring directly from

Starting point is 01:09:15 your CIA experience every day when you're closing business? At CIA, there's a saying at CIA that I realized is also a saying in business that I didn't realize until afterwards. And it's called kissing a lot of frogs. And it's a salesmanship term outside of CIA, where it means that you have to call a lot of leads. You have to shake a lot of hands. You have to make a lot of pitches before one of them turns into a prince, right? At CIA, we have the same concept, but for a different reason, because finding a person who is willing to tell you state secrets, willing to risk their life to give away the secrets that they were entrusted with, that's what an actual asset does, right? When CIA sends a field officer to you name the country, when they recruit an asset from that country, what they are actually recruiting is a foreign national who is a local of that country,

Starting point is 01:10:15 who has access to state secrets, who is willing to share those state secrets in exchange for something else, money, alcohol, pornography, you name it, right? Who knows what they're after? But your job is to find the person who has secrets and give the person the thing that they want in exchange for those secrets. That is a rare person to find. It is hard to find a willing collaborator from a foreign country who has access to secrets and is willing to share those secrets with you in exchange for some kind of remuneration. Very, very difficult to find. But if you can find a spy, if you can find a trader, you can make a sale, right? The two skills are incredibly interconnected. So what I found is that this process and the skills that we use to find an asset

Starting point is 01:11:06 translate immediately into business. Everything from how you talk to the person so that you can identify their core motivations, gaining perspective over that person's position in life. If you can gain the perspective of your customers, you already know what your customer's thinking. You already know what they want. You already know what their problems are. You know what their problems are going to be because you can sit in their shoes, but they can't sit in your shoes, which gives you the advantage. So the process in espionage is a process called SADRAT, S-A-D-R-A-T. Very similar to the RICE acronym I gave you earlier.

Starting point is 01:11:44 SADRAT is a process of human intelligence conversion or collection. The SADRAT process is actually the foundation to my company's sales process. All of our marketing for digital sales, all of our human interactions, all of our upselling and everything else, all falls into the same SADRAT process that I learned at CIA. Only we use it for sales and we use it for marketing. SADRAT. SADRAT stands for spot, assess, develop, recruit, handle, and terminate. That's what SADRAT stands for. And in classic U.S. government acronym jargon, handle starts with an H, but in the acronym, we use the letter A. Spot, assess, develop, recruit, handle, terminate. Spot means you find a potential client, right? Recruit means

Starting point is 01:12:38 you sell that client on your product in exchange for your product, in exchange for their money, right? Assess is a step that we use at CIA to determine whether or not somebody will be a good, productive client. Oftentimes in sales, people skip that step. They don't think about a good, productive customer. A good, productive customer has lifetime customer value. A good, productive customer turns into referrals, turns into positive reviews and positive ratings. They have infinite value more than just the money they give you in exchange for your service. Assess is a critical piece in the CIA recruitment process. It's also a very important piece in my company. I'll tell you something which kind of validates that from my own experience before we continue on that point of assess. In the first couple of years of my first company, we would just take any customer.

Starting point is 01:13:36 And when we looked at our financial record for the previous year, what we noticed was that there was a cohort of customers that were exceptionally valuable. And even though we'd won business with this other set of customers, we were actually losing money because they were only lasting for a month. So we made this sort of framework to determine the customers that we should actually say no to, basically, as you say, based on their lifetime value. And we figured out that there's a certain type of brand that has a certain size budget, that has a certain number of employees, that is trying to solve a certain type of problem that would be exceptionally profitable for us. So when we got the inquiries coming through our website,

Starting point is 01:14:08 we were now looking at the inquiries through that lens and measuring them through that lens because it became so clear that all of our best customers fit into the sort of top right of this sort of Venn diagram. And that's what I hear when you say assess, and it was absolutely game-changing for our business, but most entrepreneurs will just take every customer and they think of all of them as having the same potential and lifetime value. Exactly. You just nailed the word game changing. You can play the game by just selling to anybody. But if you want to change the game, you have to make sure that you're selling to a very deliberate cohort of customers because those customers not only yield more revenue per customer, but they bring in more customers like them, which is where you get an exponential level of not

Starting point is 01:14:45 revenue, but profit. Just like you said, you talked about a very profitable group of clients, not a high revenue group of clients. So when you focus the conversation on profit instead of revenue, and you focus it on the right customer instead of just customer, it's game changing for your company. So you would assess targets in the CIA using the same sort of framework? Yep. Using the same framework because in recruitment operations, what you're looking for is people who will be good assets. In the business framework, what you're looking for is people who will be good customers. An asset and a customer are almost the same thing, right? A customer is the most important asset of a company. And what does a customer do? A customer provides something

Starting point is 01:15:31 of value in exchange for something they want. What does an asset do? They provide something of value in exchange for something they want. So it's really a one-for-one comparison as long as you understand the language of espionage and the language of business. So what we did in espionage is every time you're trying to develop a source, you're always asking yourself the question, will this source be a good, reliable asset in the future? Will they do what we tell them to do? Will they be able to provide information in the long term, not just once or twice, right? Is the information they provide high value information? It's the same thing you're doing with a customer. Will this customer do what I tell them to do? Will this customer provide high

Starting point is 01:16:15 levels of value? Will this customer last for a long time? You used the word espionage a few times there. What is the definition of the word espionage? Espionage is defined as the stealing of secrets. So espionage is always illegal. There's no country in the world that says that espionage is legal. So espionage is, it's when CIA commits espionage, when MI6 commits espionage, they have a carve out in their law as it pertains to their own undercover clandestine services so that a American can conduct espionage overseas and not be prosecutable for that espionage under US law if they're part of CIA. Same thing is true in the UK.

Starting point is 01:16:58 An MI6 officer can commit espionage overseas and not be held accountable for it under British law. It's a carve out. Otherwise, if you're a British citizen committing espionage anywhere in the UK or abroad, you are punishable under UK law. I've heard you say that espionage really is about getting people to let you into their secret lives. Correct. What is our secret life? So, you I, if you go back to an earlier part in our conversation, we were talking about how, when you trust people, you'll tell them your secrets, right? When you help people, they'll tell you their secrets. There are three lives that any, anybody lives. We have a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The public life is the life that

Starting point is 01:17:42 we're all very familiar with, right? It's the life that you live for everybody else to see. Not just the people who watch your podcast and the people who work for you and your company, but your public life also includes what you show your friends. It includes what you show your church. It includes who you are when you walk down the street. The clothes that you choose to wear are a perfect example of your public life. It's what you want people to think of you. Remember the E in rice. Mother Teresa wanted people to see her a certain way. That is her public life. When you're in espionage, the goal is to get away from the public life. Because if you want someone to give you secrets, you can't get secrets from somebody who's in their public life because they're protected in their public life. So you have to move them from public into secret. And the middle step between public

Starting point is 01:18:31 and secret is private life. So you have to move somebody from public life to private life. Private life is the life that your partner knows. Private life is the life that your closest friends know. Your mom and your dad may know it. It's the people who know that your feet secretly stink. It's the people who know that you don't really like to eat oysters because whatever they give you gas. That's all stuff that's private. Your business partners don't know that. Your customers don't know that. The people who watch your podcast don't know that. And it makes the people in your private life feel like they know you. And it's what makes it so that for you in your public life, you feel like you have meaningful relationships. Because instead of 200 people who you kind of know,

Starting point is 01:19:16 now you've got 15 people who are in your private life. They know your home address. They know your birthday. They know your favorite ice cream. It makes you feel good. Inside of someone's private life, they will share sensitivities, but they may still not share secrets because it's one thing to secretly tell somebody that you're worried about your business. You're worried about the next revenue cycle. You're worried about maybe your wife is having an affair. Those things are uncomfortable, but you'll share them with people in your private life. But you would never tell someone in your private life that you're having an affair. You would never tell someone in your private life that you hit your child. You would never tell someone in your private life that your

Starting point is 01:19:56 parents sexually molested you or whatever else. Those dark, deep secrets only live in your secret life. The life that's so secretive that you don't even share it with the people in your private life. What we're trained to do is to follow a process that allows us to meet somebody in their public life, get them to let us into their private life, and then get them to let us into their secret life. Because it's a very simple psychological process to get into someone's secret life because secretly we all want somebody in our secret life. We all want to have someone we can tell our secrets to. We just don't trust anybody in our private life enough to get there. So if you know how to leverage perception and perspective, use the four core motivations, when you know how to leverage SADRAT to create trust, you can actually cut into someone's secret life.

Starting point is 01:20:58 And once you're in someone's secret life, they never stop trusting you. They never let you leave. Because it was so rare and so hard to find you from their perspective. They don't ever want you to leave. So even if you break their heart, even if you lie to them, their trust in you is so great and so strong and so subconscious that you don't ever leave their secret life. I'm very keen to know how you get into someone's secret life and how they might get into your own. And we've talked about some of those principles earlier, but I was wondering if one of the techniques you might use is by sharing

Starting point is 01:21:33 your own fake secret life with them to create an element of comfort. I think I've heard, and I think I know from doing this podcast generally, that vulnerability creates vulnerabilities to some extent. If you open up to someone, they're more likely to open up to you. Correct. So you're getting into now a form of mirroring, much like we were talking about physical mirroring. Now what you're talking about is emotional mirroring. There's a nuance there because you have to know when to mirror appropriately because if you're mirroring somebody else and they know that you're mirroring them, then subconsciously they feel like they're in control. Okay. Interesting.

Starting point is 01:22:14 So what you need to do is you need to mirror just enough to get to the place where you can get them to mirror you. When they mirror you, subconsciously, they know that you're in control. So once you are in a position of power or control in a conversation, then you can use the ploy of feigned vulnerability, which I wouldn't quite use it the same way you did. I wouldn't make up something vulnerable. Instead, I would, we call it opening a window or opening a window that opens a door. So we have these windows and doors in conversation. So opening a door means completely changing a subject, right? So if I were to just say right now, I don't really like French food, that's opening a door. You as the interviewer can go through that door or you can close that door

Starting point is 01:23:02 because it's not relevant, right? But if I open a window about how I have certain digestive challenges that I don't like to talk about, that's a window. You can always come back and push on that window and get me to go through a whole new door of conversation. Right. So when it comes to vulnerability and conversing with somebody about vulnerability, you want to present windows and not present doors. So instead of saying something that's a fake vulnerability, you would say something that's a real vulnerability that may not be applicable to you. Like perhaps you say something like, you know, I have been having massive arguments with my wife recently, and sometimes it makes me just want to leave home. That's real. That's not saying I'm going to leave home. It's not saying what I'm arguing about.

Starting point is 01:23:49 But if I believe that in your secret life, you are also fighting with your wife and you're living in a different room and you're not telling anybody about it, I want to show some sort of bridge between us that gets you to admit that to me. Because if you can admit that to me, maybe I can find out more about what you're doing to cope with the fact that your marriage is falling apart. Maybe you have a girlfriend, maybe you're on Tinder, maybe you're doing something else, right? Maybe you're drinking, maybe you're doing drugs. I don't know, but I need you to let me into that secret life. So I'm going to present a window and see if you go through that window. So say that I was the asset and you were the CIA agent. You have more experience in that role than I do. And I was sat in a bar and I said to you, yeah, God, this week's been really hard

Starting point is 01:24:37 at home because my wife, she's annoying me. And you were trying to get into my secret life. How might you maneuver from there? Right. So there a the basic principle here that we would use is called the two and one combination so two means two questions and one means one confirmation so when you present to me a topic that i want to explore further the most rudimentary of techniques out there is you present to me a topic i want to explore. So I ask a follow-on question. You will answer my follow-on question because you're predisposed to answer my question. I will ask another follow-on question.

Starting point is 01:25:15 You'll be predisposed to answer that as well. And then I'll say something that confirms what you're saying. That way it doesn't feel like you're being interrogated. Instead, it feels like you're talking to somebody who gets you. So I'll confirm what you say. Like, oh yeah, I mean, I had a girlfriend once and her feet stank so bad. And man, it just made me want to like sleep with her feet outside of the covers. And then you just stop there. Because you've asked two follow-on questions and one confirming statement, the psychology of the other person is going to be to continue volunteering information.

Starting point is 01:25:50 And then you just repeat the cycle. So they give you another piece of information. You follow, follow-up question, follow-up question, confirmation. Follow-up question, follow-up question, confirmation. To you, it feels formulaic. Listen, ask a follow-up question. Listen, ask a follow-up question. Listen, ask a follow-up question.

Starting point is 01:26:07 To them, it feels like they are talking to somebody who really, really cares. Just put yourself in the shoes. Practice a little perspective here. Imagine if you really were talking about something that was frustrating you, and the person sitting next to you at the bar literally didn't do anything other than ask you follow-up questions and agree with you. You're going to feel like, you get me, man. Why can't my wife get me like you get me? Like, you know what I'm talking about. I completely agree with you, man. Tell me more.

Starting point is 01:26:34 Oh, dude. And then, and you can see how we'll just, human beings just fall right into the groove. The parallel here to business, but also the sort of transferable skills here are quite clear. From what I heard, when I'm doing an interview, when I'm meeting a candidate for a job, when I'm trying to sell to a client, really my disposition should be to be doing exactly what you said, asking them questions, confirming, asking them questions and confirming. Right. If you think about it, everybody's in a contest for control. Who controls a conversation? The person asking the questions or the person saying the most words? It's always the person asking the questions. Because the person asking the questions determines the direction of the conversation.

Starting point is 01:27:15 It feels the other way around though. It feels like the person speaking the most has the most control. And what did I tell you about feelings? Don't trust them. Don't trust your gut. Don't trust your emotions. right? It feels like the person talking the most is the person in control. It is not. It is not. The person asking the questions is in control. Think about this interview right now. I will answer whatever question you bring up next. If I don't answer the next question you bring up, I will feel awkward because you and I both know who's in control of this conversation, even though I'm the one saying the most words. Interesting.

Starting point is 01:27:51 The implications of this in sales, human resourcing, marketing, advertising, it's the reason my company has grown 300% every year for the last three years. It's because the human condition is so predictable. People just want to feel heard. They want to feel listened to, and they want to feel validated. You can automate that. You can automate the process that makes people feel heard, confirmed, and validated. You can automate it, and then they will sell themselves. That's really good digital marketing. That's how it works. Really good direct sales.

Starting point is 01:28:34 That's how it works. Really good salesmen have already learned this. Real good salesmen understand that it's all about getting a lead to talk about themselves as quickly as possible. And then once they start talking about themselves, you just ask questions. Let them lead themselves through the sales process. The problem is with most business owners out there who haven't been trained in what we're talking about, they feel like they have to talk the most. They feel like they have to get the customer to understand the benefits of the product. I need to get you to hear me. I need to get you to hear me.

Starting point is 01:29:05 I need to get you to listen. I need to get you to understand the value of what I'm offering you. That's not what the customer wants. That's the salesperson's perception. What the customer actually wants is a product that's going to solve their problems and a salesman that's going to help them. What's the kind of person that helps you? The person who

Starting point is 01:29:25 asks questions. I'm really interested in this concept of change and how the CIA drills into you that you need to accept change. Because in all of our lives, one of the things that most of us are quite bad at is accepting change. We're very rigid. Again, maybe that's because of perception and ego and these kinds of things. But when I was reading through what they teach you at the CIA, they change your relationship with change. They do. So a big part of the advantage of having change is the fact that it's not natural to accept change. So if you can adapt to change faster than your opponent, you have a built-in advantage. You have an edge. So these three principles, time, distance, and change in direction, these three principles that CIA teaches as concepts apply in multiple

Starting point is 01:30:11 different ways. So as an example, time means that you need to accept that things take time, that time is a resource for you to use. Too often, we feel like time is fleeting. Time is running out. We have to take action quickly. Time is against us. That's not really true. In fact, time is a tool that you can use to break things down. Secrets don't withstand the test of time. How long will it take for you and I to get into each other's secret lives? Nine months. That takes time. Not many people would wait nine months for anything, right? But time is a huge advantage that you have. If all of your opponents are rushing and you're the only person who isn't rushing, time becomes a huge advantage to you that nobody else has. Explain that in the context of business then.

Starting point is 01:31:01 So in business, people are trying to make a rapid sale. Most people want an impulse buyer, right? What do I have to say right now to get you to buy my $7 thing? I don't really want you to buy a $7 thing. I want you to buy a $97 thing. If it takes me three weeks to get you to buy a $97 thing, it takes this other person three minutes to get you to buy a $7 thing. Who's the better salesman? Well, I would argue that it depends on what you're looking for in terms of long-term. This person selling a $7 thing every three minutes has to find a new lead. They have to find, arguably, if they sell one out of every 10, if they convert at 10%, they need to find 10 new leads every three minutes to make $7. If I convert at 10%, I need one person to buy a $97

Starting point is 01:31:47 thing every three weeks. I have a much less demand on my time to find new leads and I can qualify my leads better. And if someone's willing to spend $97 on something, guess what that tells me about that person? They have more disposable income. The $7 person, I don't know anything about their disposable income. Do they have some? Do they not? Is that mom and dad's credit card? I don't really know. I'd rather spend three weeks of time cultivating a person who buys a $97 something, because then I can sell them a $297 something. And then I can sell them a $997 something, because I can test their threshold for price sensitivity. Was there any situations during your time abroad where you felt like your life was at risk or any sort of

Starting point is 01:32:33 really clear apparent threat? Yes, there was. There's one specific moment which I'm actively trying to get cleared by CIA to talk about where I felt like with high confidence that I had fallen under the scrutiny of a local country's surveillance team. So I was in a foreign country. I believed I fell under their surveillance apparatus and they were actively surveilling me. And the country that I was in and the job that I was doing in that country made me believe that if I had a surveillance team on me, their goal would be to apprehend me at a certain point in the operation, at a point where they could get the most propaganda and political

Starting point is 01:33:17 leverage, et cetera, et cetera. So that occurrence happened in about 2011. And I'm trying to go through a process now to get that cleared by CIA. Up until about nine months ago, CIA was giving me the thumbs up that I'd be able to talk about it. But then geopolitical tensions in the world changed, and CIA changed their mind along with that.

Starting point is 01:33:40 So now I'm exploring what avenues I have to get them to adhere to their previous approval of letting me tell my story versus being forced to adhere to my continued secrecy agreement. So you were in a foreign country. You felt like you were under the surveillance apparatus of a foreign country. What gave you that impression? Was it looking over your shoulder and seeing something? It's the process that we're trained to use for surveillance detection. So we're trained in a process where you run what's known as an SDR. And in that SDR, you have steps, methods that you use to determine whether or not you are being actively surveilled. And again, we use time to our advantage. So it's not like something happened in five seconds and I thought I was under surveillance. I intentionally carried out a series of steps

Starting point is 01:34:25 over say three hours or six hours. And over that period of time, I had enough information, enough data points to confirm with high confidence that I would be under surveillance. SDR? Surveillance detection route. Okay. And that could be like a car following you or it could be... A person following you or a drone following you or your phone being uh acting in a certain way to make you believe that you're being digitally or cyber uh surveilled sex peonage everyone's favorite subject it's a very real thing it's a very real thing that's used in

Starting point is 01:34:57 different ways based off of uh a country's civil rights so in the united states we don't really use sex peonage don't really we don't really use sexpionage. Don't really. We don't really use it because it goes against the rights, the individual rights of the citizen who works at the intelligence agency, right? So if you tell a female intelligence officer that they must sleep with this target in order to get information, you're violating her rights as a US citizen. In China, that's not the same case. In Russia, that's not the same case, right? In the UK, they're also, they don't subscribe to forced sexual acts in service of collecting intelligence.

Starting point is 01:35:39 Forced. Forced. But you can if you want to. What ends up happening is you can if you want to. And for those people who do, they end up creating what's known as an operational security risk. Because once sex is involved, the power shift becomes untenable. So if the whole goal of a handler is to maintain control over the asset. Once sex happens, it's harder for the handler to maintain control over the asset in a objective relationship because now sex leads to feelings, like hormonally it leads to feelings. The act of orgasm releases certain hormones that create senses of connection with another person,

Starting point is 01:36:26 right? So when that oxytocin drops, when that neuroepinephrine drops, your body starts to tell you that you are connected to another person. That is the antithesis of a proper asset handler relationship. You fall in love with them. And we call that falling in love with your asset. I wouldn't ask you if you ever engaged in anything like that. I appreciate that. I was fortunate enough that I made all the connective hormones I needed to make with my wife, who was also CIA. Disguises. Did you ever wear a disguise?

Starting point is 01:36:58 Absolutely. Yeah. Disguises are something that are much more common than people would believe and much less quality than people would believe and much less quality than people would believe. Really? Yeah. So most disguises, what we actually call disguises inside CIA, we call them costumes. We don't really call them disguises. Disguises is a word that's used in pop media and pop culture.

Starting point is 01:37:19 In the real world, we call them costumes. And our costume departments, our disguise department, the whole objective behind a disguise or a costume is just to make you not look like you. Not to make you look like someone else, not even to make you look like a realistic person. It's just to make sure that you don't look like you, right? So consider your picture, what you look like. You have some very definitive features. Your nose, your forehead, your beard shape, your hair, right? So consider your picture, what you look like, you have some very definitive features, your nose, your forehead, your beard shape, your hair, right? The way that you hold

Starting point is 01:37:50 your face, the neckline that you have. So if we wanted to change your appearance, just so that you didn't look like Stephen Bartlett, all we'd have to do is take away those things that make you, you and turn them into something else, right? We could put a nappy redheaded wig on you. We could put giant oversized sunglasses on you. We could shave your face or paint your beard gray or even put a fake mustache on. We could put an oversized necklace around your neck. And now the picture of that

Starting point is 01:38:17 is not going to look like the picture of Steve Bartlett. Those are all light disguises though, right? Correct. Is that there's deeper types of disguises, right? Correct. Is that there's deeper types of disguises, right? Correct. I've always wondered if they like plastic surgery and if they give a spy plastic surgery and those kinds of things. So there's three levels of disguise. There are some places that will go as far as permanent plastic surgery, but most Western services won't do that because it's,

Starting point is 01:38:45 it doesn't help the officer to have a permanent change to your body made doesn't make you more effective at going undercover because now you're just permanently changed. So you still look the way you look. The value in a disguise is being able to reset the disguise, to reset the costume so that you don't look like yourself. So our three levels are level one, level two, level three. Light disguise is level one. Level two is long-term disguise. Level three is something that we call prosthetic disguise. So light disguise is what we talked about. Oversized sunglasses and a nappy wig, and all of a sudden you're a different person,

Starting point is 01:39:22 right? You're Loyola. You're not Steve Bartlett anymore. Phase two is long-term disguise. Long-term disguise means it's still you, but we change you physically for a long-term operation. So instead of having short hair, we grow your hair long. Instead of having a beard, we shave you clean. We lose some of that hard-earned body mass that you have, or we gain body mass that you don't really want, right? Maybe we put some kind of fake but long-standing tattoo on you, right? We do something with you that changes the way you look physically. It's still you. The reason that's important is because you always have to ask yourself the question,

Starting point is 01:40:00 what will a police officer think when they storm into your hotel room at night? If you're wearing a light disguise and a police officer storms into your room at night, they're going to ask questions like, why do you have a wig? Or if you don't have a wig, you just wear a ball cap and a hoodie, there's nothing for them to ask, right? They're basically saying, oh, this is you. Your license says it's you. And you wear this ball hat, this ball cap, and this hoodie all the time, whatever. You're not going to jail for that. So level one and level two disguise are very safe. It's hard to get someone arrested using those two. Level three is what the movies are made out of. That's your prosthetics. If we put fake ears on you, if we put a fake nose on you, if we change your eye color,

Starting point is 01:40:41 if we put in a fake missing tooth, right? Instead of a real missing tooth. If we do that kind of stuff to you, police officer breaks into your room in the middle of the night. Now they ask, why do you have a fake nose that you're not wearing right now? Why do you have fake eyebrows? Why do you have fake ears? Why do you have a blacked out tooth, right? Now they look at your ID and you don't look like your ID. Much less common, I'm guessing. Very uncommon. Very uncommon. And you would use them strategically at different times. But if you watch too much Mission Impossible or Alias,

Starting point is 01:41:14 you start to think that people wear disguises all the time. There's so many problems to disguise. There's so many operational inadequacies to operational, to disguise, that we could have a whole conversation about it, right? Like things don't stick to your face in the extreme cold. Things don't stick to your face in the extreme heat or when you're sweating your ass off in the Philippines. Things melt. Makeup melts. The adhesive that sticks a fake mustache to your lip starts to disintegrate. Like there's all sorts

Starting point is 01:41:45 of problems with prosthetics in real life that Tom Cruise doesn't have to worry about in the movies. When people think of spies doing espionage overseas, wearing disguises and all these kinds of things, it does make you think they must be exceptionally good at dealing with fear because a lot of people would be too nervous or too anxious or whatever to not like crack under that kind of pressure. If you're meeting the guy that has the nuclear codes for Iran or whatever, and you've been working for nine months to meet this person, you know, you've got to have a good handle on your own anxiety and your own fear. Do the CIA target people that are good at that or do they train that or is it both?

Starting point is 01:42:25 It's both. It's a great question. It's both. CIA wants people that carry a certain level of anxiety because when you carry anxiety, you're naturally paranoid, which means you have heightened observational skills. Most people who suffer from anxiety feel like they're inadequate in some way. In reality, they are hyper adequate. They are more than adequate. Anxiety is a superpower through the eyes of the CIA. I would take somebody with anxiety any day over somebody without anxiety because anxiety keeps you alive. Anxiety keeps you sharp. Anxiety keeps you learning. It keeps you attentive. It's a good thing. But to your second point, you are also trained. You are trained to understand

Starting point is 01:43:05 how fear works. And to oversimplify it, your brain has two hemispheres, right? A left brain and a right brain. Your left brain is your logical brain. Your right brain is your emotional brain. Because you have two different hemispheres and they operate on two different bases, right? One is based in logic, one is based in emotions. They actually operate and they process at different speeds. Your logical brain processes much slower than your emotional brain, which is why it takes you an instant before you're scared, but it takes you maybe minutes, hours, weeks before you're convinced. So what ends up happening is fear in an untrained person, going back to our conversation about trained versus untrained,

Starting point is 01:43:51 in an untrained person, fear is an emotion that's processed by the emotional brain very quickly. So then they react instinctively to their fear. That's where a lot of people who suffer from anxiety get held back. When you can train someone to understand that the same thing that makes them emotionally scared is also being processed by their logical brain. Your brain is actually going through the process of determining how scared you really need to be. If you can just slow down the emotional brain and train the rational brain to work a little bit faster your whole relationship with fear completely changes how do they train you to slow down your emotional brain so that you don't react that's a big part of the reason why you have a controlled

Starting point is 01:44:36 training environment that lasts for multiple months because what they do is they inoculate you it's called stress inoculation they inoculate you. It's called stress inoculation. They inoculate you with scenarios designed specifically to trigger your emotional response. Even though you have been trained to not trust your emotional response, they inoculate you so that over and over again, you have to go through the process of, I feel fear, I have to not accept it. I feel doubt, I have to reject it. I feel like I'm being watched, I have to reject it. I have to give my rational brain a chance to catch up so that I can get objective facts about the scenario. And there are some people who don't do it well. There are some people who never inoculate themselves against fear. So then they end up getting cut from the farm.

Starting point is 01:45:24 So for the average Joe that's listening to this now, or Jenny, the average Jenny that's listening to this now, and they live a life that's held them back because of their fear. They don't take the risk. They don't raise their hand to do the presentation. They don't lean into uncertainty. Based on your training in the CIA, what would you suggest that they should do to get over that fear? So they need to inoculate themselves as well. Inoculate means? Inoculate means expose yourself in controlled ways to fear. Very similar to the way you inoculate against COVID or you inoculate against the flu, right? You expose yourself to a strain that's weakened so that your body can gain some sort of familiarity with it. You do the same thing with fear.

Starting point is 01:46:06 So if you're afraid to give that presentation, you're not ever going to change the fact that you're afraid to give a presentation, but you will be able to change something that you're less afraid of. So if you're afraid of going to the gym, if you're afraid of eating at a certain restaurant down the street, if you're afraid of stepping out of your front door, if you're afraid of asking your friend their opinion about whether or not you're overweight, find something small where you are less afraid of this than you are of this other thing and inoculate yourself with this. Like lean into the small fears, the fears that you already know are kind

Starting point is 01:46:46 of irrational and simple. And if you can overcome those, what will happen is you will start to gain momentum. And the thing that you do to inoculate yourself is to know upfront, you know, you're going to have an emotional reaction. You already know it. It's the thing that you're afraid of. You can predict that. So you already know, I'm going to ask my buddy Steve if he thinks that I'm overweight. I'm terrified to ask him. He's either going to say yes or no, or he's going to take some cop-out answer and ask me what I think. But I already know that it's going to feel uncomfortable.

Starting point is 01:47:20 But he's my buddy. It's low risk. Let's see how it goes. Let's see what it goes, right? So you go and you ask the question. you put yourself in the face of fear. You're still going to have the heart palpitations, the cold sweats, your emotional brain is going to take off and all your physiology is going to like let loose. But then Steve is going to tell you his answer and it's over. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that wasn't nearly as bad as I thought

Starting point is 01:47:42 it was going to be. And then when you do the same thing with your friend, Jenny, and the same thing with your friend, Bruce, and the same thing with your friend, Robert, by the time Robert tells you his answer, your body's not reacting the same way as it did when you talked to Steve. Small inoculations are training your emotional brain to slow down and training your rational brain to speed up. So then you move on to the next most scary thing without going to the scariest of things. You know, I was thinking about that as you were talking and I was thinking, gosh, I think a lot of people know that. I think they know that the way to get better at speaking on stage is to go and speak on stage, but they're still held back by, you know, God, if I do that,

Starting point is 01:48:21 I'm going to mess up. And then people are going to think I'm this, that, and the other, and then I'll never X, Y, Z. Right. So you can say that to someone, but getting if I do that, I'm going to mess up. And then people are going to think I'm this, that, and the other, and then I'll never X, Y, Z. So you can say that to someone, but getting them to take that first step seems to be the impossibility. And here's where the former CIA officer in me comes out. Because if you're too afraid to do that, good. I don't want you to do it. Because you being unable to do it gives me the advantage. The person who's listening to this, who says to themselves, I'm scared, but I'll do it anyways. That's the person who deserves the opportunity to change their life. The person who's listening to this that says, I'm too scared to do that. Good. I need you to stay exactly where you are because in our world, the flat out truth is our world

Starting point is 01:49:07 needs cogs. Our world needs people who are trapped in the consumer cycle. We need those people because the people who are trapped in that consumer cycle, the people who are prisoners to their fear are the people who run the economy. It's the people who are willing to break that cycle and capitalize on the fears that you can't overcome. Those are the people who actually provide you the service that you need because you can't do it by yourself. So I want to encourage the people who are willing to take the scary step. And I also want to discourage the people who already know that they're too afraid. We need both.

Starting point is 01:49:48 As you know, we're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company. I've spoken about this many times before, but I'm obsessed with finding 1% gains in all that I do. I'm a big believer in the theory of marginal gains, especially in health and in fitness.

Starting point is 01:50:02 Seeing 1% and small improvements in my WHOOP data, be it with my sleep or my heart rate variability or other health indicators, gives me this incredible sense of forward motion. And over time, the ultimate result of these gains means a healthier and better version of myself in the long run. My WHOOP, which is this thing on my wrist,

Starting point is 01:50:19 has really allowed me to understand actions that I don't necessarily need to completely change, but things that I can tweak in order to become the person that I want to be and go in the right direction with my health. So if you're obsessed with finding those 1% marginal gains as well, like I am, go to join.woop.com slash CEO, where you can try Woop for 30 days risk-free with zero commitment to see how impactful it can be for you. You met your wife while you were an undercover CIA operative. Yeah, I am still to this day very thankful that she is a poor judge of character. In 2014, you leave the CIA, aged 34 years old.

Starting point is 01:51:03 You both resigned together? We both resigned together. Why? It was mostly my idea. My wife had a stellar career. We had a one-year-old child at the time. And we were at a point in our career, coming off of very successful operations together right before that, where we were both kind of middle management.

Starting point is 01:51:21 And that middle management lifestyle meant that we're spending 12 to 16 hours a day on the job, just like most people. But the difference is when you're spending 16 hours a day on the job, it means that you're in a skiff somewhere. You can't take your work home. You can't work from home. So you're literally absent from the house. So trying to coordinate two 16-hour schedules along with a one-year-old, when neither of us signed up to be that kind of parent, we both wanted to be the kind of parent that was present for our children. And instead, we're giving our child to some daycare center and paying extra overage fees to have that daycare center keep the baby for 12 hours a day. It's a sucky situation. So for family reasons, more so than for career reasons, we both decided, hey, let's double down on family and let's see if we can't start all over again. Are you going to leave America in 2030?

Starting point is 01:52:14 I'm going to try and leave America in 2027. I read that somewhere. Why are you going to try and leave America in 2027? So I think the United States is going through a very difficult time right now. And I think most people understand that. We are a young country. No matter how much we think that we are the best in the world, we are actually going through the early part of our adolescence as a nation. And you can see it playing out every day in the headlines. You can see it in our role in geopolitical events. You can see that we're suffering in terms of trying to identify ourselves. We don't know, do we want to be a real democracy? Do we want to be kind of a partial democracy?

Starting point is 01:52:58 Do we want to treat everybody as equal? Do we not want to treat everybody as equal? We're struggling in the same way that you and I did through middle school, right? My children mean the world to me. And what I want to do is give them a life where they have the choice to do anything they want to do. Unfortunately, I don't believe our country for the next five to 10 years is going to be the kind of country that allows children of today to choose and be whatever they want to be i think our country has some growing up of its own to do before we really offer people equal access to opportunities so for me if i was my 11 year old son when i turned 15 or 16 years

Starting point is 01:53:43 old and i start to really care about something, I would like to be in a place where I can explore that thing. I don't think that's going to be in the United States. I think that's going to be in Europe. I think that's going to be in the Middle East. I think that's going to be in Latin America, where he will have all the advantages of the world outside of the United States. What do you think about what's going on at the moment with geopolitics as it relates to like China and the US? There's a bit of a power struggle going on, and there has been, but a lot of people forecast that China is eventually going to overtake, or maybe it already has, the US as the sort of global economic force.

Starting point is 01:54:17 Are you preparing for that? Do you think it's going to happen? I think that there's two realistic outcomes, and there's one less realistic outcome. The most realistic outcome is that the United States and China continue to compete and reach parity, equality with each other. That's the most realistic outcome. Maybe the United States remains 10% bigger. Maybe China gets 2% bigger economically, but they approach parity. They approach equality. I don't want to live in the United States when it loses so much status that another country reaches economic parity. Think about that for a second. The world is accustomed to one superpower. Once there are two superpowers, everything changes.

Starting point is 01:55:07 There's two massive languages, and you're going to have to choose which language you speak. There's two currencies. Which currency are you going to save your money in? There's competing priorities. There's competing politics. There's equally massive, sophisticated militaries. When you are in one of those two countries, at the moment that they reach parity, you are in the most dangerous position because the number one target for China will be the United States. The number one target for the United States will be China. Right now, there's not parity. There's not equality. So the United States has to worry about everybody. And China doesn't really have to worry about many people at all.

Starting point is 01:55:43 But as that equality gets closer and closer, there's more and more threat. Think about it in business terms. When you're the industry leader in your business- Google. to meet you, you have to worry about it. The leader used to be Yahoo, right? Yahoo had to see what it's like to lose and gain parity with Google only to then be eclipsed, right? So most probable outcome, we reach parity. Second most probable outcome is that China does supersede us by small amounts, right? 5% GDP, 10% GDP. And the United States has to regain its momentum to try to gain back the edge. So now you have this cycle back and forth, right? Where for five years, China is the leading GDP. For five years, the United States is the leading GDP. And you have this waffling back and forth, which makes you even less secure than if you were in direct parity.

Starting point is 01:56:45 But that's a scary place to be as well. You still have to lose all the influence to get there. And when you're there, you never know how long it's going to last. Do you think we're already engaged in a form of World War III? Yeah, absolutely. I think World War III is already happening. I think World War III is not what people think it was going to be. I think people were afraid that World War III was somehow going to look like another World War II. Instead, World War III is a war of proxy nations. It's a war where smaller third world countries are competing against each other and they're being funded by larger countries that are actually in conflict with one another. Ukraine and Russia. US is funding Ukraine. Russia is

Starting point is 01:57:25 obviously taking care of itself, but the real conflict in Ukraine isn't about Ukraine. It's about the West versus Russia. Same thing is going to happen with Taiwan and China. When the time comes that China makes its biggest move on Taiwan, it's already made the small moves on Taiwan. When it makes its largest move on Taiwan, it's going to become a question of China versus the West and whoever supports Taiwan. So going back to where we started then, the average Joe, the average Joe is listening to this conversation now

Starting point is 01:57:53 and what they really want is to make their life better in whatever subjective measure that they consider better to be. They want to start that business. They want to launch that project. They want to get outside of this sort of emotional prison that they live in where their life is dominated by perception, what they think, their own sort of confines of their identity. What is the sort of closing argument and closing advice you give to the average Joe to

Starting point is 01:58:14 liberate themselves so that they can pursue whatever they want to pursue? So the most important thing is to take action. That is the most, even if it's the wrong action, if you take the wrong step, if you take the first step in the wrong direction, the difference between you and the person who doesn't take a step at all is the world. You have to take the first step. You have to take some kind of action. Just by taking action, you show that you're not trapped by fear. You show that you're willing to challenge your own perception of the world and try to gain some perspective. It doesn't matter what that action is. I don't care whether you read a book,

Starting point is 01:58:49 whether you buy a program, whether you sell your first prototype, take some kind of action because nine out of every 10 people are not going to take any action. You already have an advantage just by trying. And so few people understand that. They think there's some kind of advantage in waiting. There isn't. The longer you wait, all you're really doing is giving the other nine people a chance to be the first one to take a step. If you take the first step, you beat the competition right out of the gates. And you know this as well as I do. Even if your first three or four steps are fumbles and trips and you fall on your face, by the time you stand up, you're four steps away from the rest of the competition. And you've learned a lot in those first four steps. So my suggestion is take

Starting point is 01:59:36 action. Take action using the skills that we talked about today. Take action using the skills that you've talked about on some other podcast. just take action. Identity. We talked about how the CIA kind of rewrite your identity a little bit so that, you know, it gives you some sort of cover. But one of the things that stops us taking action is our own identity. What have you come to learn and what do you think now about the role of identity, how it gets in our way and how we can liberate ourselves from it. The worst person to determine who you are is oftentimes you, because you see it all. You live in your own secret life. The rest of the world sees your public life. Even if your public life is accidental, the world sees you differently than you see yourself. So when you look at yourself, it's like looking through a magnifying glass. You see every

Starting point is 02:00:26 wart, you see every crevice, you see everything wrong because you have the magnifying glass. The rest of the world, not only do they not have a magnifying glass, but they're standing 10 feet away from you. So they see something very different than what you see. So a lot of times, whatever you think about yourself is actually inaccurate when you apply it against the test of perspective. Because what other people see and what other people think of you, you are usually very wrong from what they think. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. Now, the question that's been left for you in the diary of a CEO is very, very interesting.

Starting point is 02:01:10 What is something you used to strongly believe that you have fundamentally changed your mind on? I used to believe that people could be equal. And fundamentally now, I know that people will never be equal because equality is not really the thing that we're after. What we're secretly after that we don't want to admit to is we're always after being better, having more, being in a better position than everyone else. So we will constantly strive to take advantage of secrets, to take advantage of opportunities, to find an edge that we do not share with other people. But publicly, we will say that we wish there was more equality and that we want there to be more equality when secretly we don't. I used to be one of those people that wanted everything to be equal. And now I am one of those people who is very happy in a world where things

Starting point is 02:02:18 are not equal. Why? Because I see through the noise. I understand that what we want isn't what we actually say. So these politicians that are saying, you know, maybe on the left that are saying, you know, we want equality. We want everyone to be equal. You think they're bullshitting? Absolutely. That's not what they want. What do they want? What they want is more of the current status quo, which is to have conflict with the opposite side. And what they also want on top of that is to be in a position where the masses trust the politician

Starting point is 02:02:53 to be in control over more aspects of the population's life. Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I feel so inspired, a little bit excited and energized by this conversation and i'm i think it's so incredible that you've committed your this sort of chapter of your life to helping people unlock their full potential by un by knowing the way that humans work and being able to use the understanding of a human that was probably getting in their way

Starting point is 02:03:22 to free themselves and pursue whatever sort of goal they have in their lives that they think will provide them with fulfillment. Because that's really how I see what you're doing. You're taking a skill set that's been exclusive and given to only a few and giving it to many. You do that through Everyday Spy. Andrew, thank you so much. It's been an absolute honor. Thanks for having me man

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - CIA Spy: "Leave The USA Before 2030!", "Why You Shouldn't Trust Your Gut!", "I Held The Nuclear Codes Around My Neck" - Andrew Bustamante

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.