The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 169: CIA Spy Reveals How To AVOID Media Manipulation & Brainwashing: Andrew Bustamante

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

In this moment, the former CIA intelligence officer Andrew Bustamante discusses the crucial techniques of manipulation, which he describes as a core part of CIA training. Andrew  introduces the R.I.C.E. analogy, which stands for Reward, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. This framework is essential for understanding the motivations of others, allowing you to connect with them, build relationships, and influence their actions. According to Andrew, reward involves anything the other person desires, while ideology reflects the person’s core beliefs and is the most powerful element of the acronym. Coercion involves using negative behaviours on someone such as guilt or blackmail, and ego relates to how the other person sees themselves. Andrew translates this manipulation technique to marketing. He suggests that by sending targeted messages to your audience and assessing their responses, you gain insights into their ideology, providing you with useful information for future sales. Listen to the full episode here - Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/vgYbIohXXKb Apple -  https://g2ul0.app.link/r9qufpkXXKb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Andrew: https://everydayspy.com/

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 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 thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. As part of your training to become a CIA officer, you must have learned how to manipulate people. 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, 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 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 shyster, bad guy, business owners, right? The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation. And that is a, 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,

then you have motivated them. And that is worth just as much as getting people to do what they want to do, 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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. And you just increase the probability of them doing what you want them to do. 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 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 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. How might you, so 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 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 politics. They'll volunteer their pain 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 kind of garbage that you see on Instagram and YouTube about 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 narrative, especially in politics. There's, 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. 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 that reminds you every Sunday to read your kids a story. And you're like, oh, that makes total sense 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 gonna 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 taught through an MBA program or something else that you sell toothpaste by creating more toothpaste with brighter colors on more shelves.