Transcript of Episode 519: Andrew Bustamante: Reading People, Predicting Behavior and Creating Leverage

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

You guys, we have a special treat on this podcast. This is one I've actually been wanting to do for a very long time. I'm like a gitty school girl because you're so interesting. We have Andrew Bustamante. He is a former CIA agent who wrote a New York Times bestselling book called Shadow Cell. He is going to talk... I'm not even going to give you any more than I'm not. I just want to say thank you for being on the show. I'm fascinated by you in every way. And what we do on this show to keep our focus and be alert is we take these magic mind shots. Do you want to do me the honors? They're really healthy. There's nothing in it except lion's mane, ashwagandha, all the things. It helps people stay focused and locked in. All right, let's get focused. This one has no caffeine, too.

Thank you for that. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I should actually like this, usually. Thank you. Do you like it? I can't drink more than five a day. It's good, right?

Yeah. It's a lot smoother than I expected.

It's super tasty, but I love them. But like I said, I can have... Because I do this podcast, I can't have them with every single... If I have one for every guest, I will literally be climbing off of the walls. You know what I mean? Anyway, so thank you for being on the show. You are very fascinating to me. Like I said, I I really have been a fan of yours for a very long time. Can you give a very brief overview? I started the show by saying you were a covert CIA agent. What does that even mean? Who are you? Just give everyone a very brief overview, and then we're going to dive right in.

Absolutely. Cia is broken into two parts. There's an overt part and a covert part. An overt is everybody who works for CIA. They can say they work for CIA, their paycheck comes from CIA, CIA. Their mortgage says they work for CIA. That's an overt employee. But then there's a covert employee who has all of that undercover. They work for a different company. They have falsified information for their mortgages, falsified information that goes to the IRS. It's all government sanctioned because the government has put them in that covert role, but that's your covert side. Undercover operations are known officially as covert operations, and the covert element of CIA is approximately 10% of the whole CIA.

How long was that whole experience for you?

I was active with the National Clandestine Service, which is the undercover element inside CIA for seven years.

Did you start in the covert or were you in the overt and then get moved to covert?

I started in the military, and then I got pulled into the Clandestine Service from the military, served my time in the Clandestine Service before they moved me into an overt status, which is what allows me to talk about my CIA affiliation now.

I was going to ask you, how does that happen? Now you're actually allowed to speak about it?

You're allowed to speak about your affiliation. Really, the only area of CIA that they protect for the rest of your life is called sources and methods. It's the active intelligence sources that you collected from, your operational sources, and the methods with which you use to collect that information. That's really a very narrow piece of classified operations, which is one of the One of the reasons I started my company and I started talking on podcasts is because there's so much that you can talk about, but there's a culture inside CIA of simply not talking. So it's irrelevant that you can share more than is shared because the culture is one where you just keep your mouth shut. Right.

So why is there like that? I assume that's why it was so exciting because it's like, oh, so you're not really telling people trade secrets by talking on podcasts and stuff like that. Correct. This is stuff that you're actually allowed to be speaking about.

Correct. This is what's so- Damn, I wanted to know the T, what's happening. Well, I mean, even if you did want to know, it's really not that interesting. Let me give you an example, right? So fighter pilots fly jets, and those jets have classified elements. Things about fighter jets are not allowed for public disclosure. Well, that makes you really curious, right? Yeah. Well, what's classified about the jet? It's not the weapon systems that they carry. It's not their top speed. It's not their max altitude. It's not the fact that they're stealth. What's classified is the compression ratio inside the left engine operating at 2,800 RPMs. That's what's classified. Oh, that's interesting. Which is really dull and boring, right? The same thing is true at CIA. The vast majority of what CIA does Where they travel, how they collect intelligence, what sabotage they put together. All of that is, for the most part, available. It's the details. It's how exactly you throw an Iranian centrifuge off course for three years to get it to blow itself up using a virus. That's the detail that's classified. You can see how much there is out there to talk about, and yet people talk about so little.

Well, you just said something like, how do you collect classified information? Are you allowed to talk about that part?

I mean, yeah, you collect classified information from human targets, from signals intelligence. We can talk about how the human intelligence process is groomed, how you groom a target to give you intel?

Yeah, I want to know about... Okay, so I want to start from the beginning. You're going to be here until tomorrow, or next Tuesday. I want to know how you got in. How you got into the CIA. What did they look for? What exactly was your job? Do you work with the Delta Force people? Tell me the difference between what you're doing and what a Delta Force person does. I want to know everything.

Yeah, there's a lot there. So let me start by saying that CIA is extremely different than a DOD service or military service. Cia is a civilian intelligence service, whereas Army is obviously a uniformed military service, and Delta Force falls under Army as a tier one special operations unit. Special operations within the military are different than CIA intelligence collection, even though CIA has an element of special operations inside of it.

Were you in that one?

Yes. That's called the Special Activities Division or SAD. I served... It's like building a career anywhere else. You You come in as a low-level employee, and as you have success in different tasks and different jobs, you climb up a managerial ladder. Sometimes, some people climb up a ladder and they get awarded a transfer to a different department. That was what happened to me. I came in as what's known as a CST, a Career Specialist Trainee. As you go through this process of being trained for your career, they identify other talents that you might have: language, creativity, planning, lying in disguise. As they identify different skills in you, you might get cross-trained into a different department like Special Activities Division, or the Department of Science and Technology, or the Open Source Center.

What did you start as and what was your special traits that got you into the Special Activities Unit?

I think a big part of what got me into Special Activities was that I had success against what's known as hostile targets or hard targets. Hard targets are those countries in the world that are the least likely to cooperate with Americans. When you carry out espionage, when you carry out intelligence operations, they don't happen in the places that you see in movies. They don't happen in casinos, in beautiful places in Europe. They don't happen in Lamborghini's. They don't happen at five-star hotels. They happen in shit. They happen in dark alleyways. They happen in criminal corners. They happen in sites of illegal boxing matches or illegal dog fights. That's where espionage happens. So the people who are successful in the world of espionage have to be able to thrive in those seedy environments. They're shitty people. One of my special traits is I'm a shitty person. Really? I don't really believe in fairness. I don't really believe in justice. I have very few issues lying to people. I don't think the world is fair. I have no problem dumping all of my previous relationships, whether it's with my parents or with my sisters and brothers or with my college friends.

So when CIA recruited me, they knew right out of the gates like, Hey, this guy, psychologically, is already going to be easy to make loyal to our mission. And that's what we all have in common inside CIA. All of us are willing to basically dump everything that we've ever built just for the chance of being on the leading edge of legalized criminal activity.

I love that you just said that. I mean, you're probably very comfortable saying that you probably said it a hundred times already, right? But in your life, thousands of times. So what made you be that way? Is it just who you are? Was it just life circumstances? How did they know that about you? What were you showing in your personality for them to even see that you were psychologically, not unwell is the wrong word, but just cold?

Unbalanced. I would agree. Cold. Yeah. I don't think the vocabulary you're reaching for is unfair in any way. Frankly, I didn't know what it was about me either. I actually thought that I was a fairly well-adjusted, intelligent, high performer, high achiever. I had great grades in high school. I did well enough in college. My paper record looked great. I had plenty of girlfriends. I had plenty of healthy relationships. I was never accused of being emotionally abusive or physically abusive or any of that other maladjusted stuff. So I always just thought I was normal in my own mind, and I was just constantly frustrated in the world because I could tell that there were just things about the world that didn't make sense. As a kid, I remember my dad trying to tell me that perception is everything. I remember my dad drilling this, Son, perception is everything. It doesn't matter what you think, it matters how you act. I just remembered, even as an 11-year-old, thinking, No, perception isn't real. What's real is real. Perception can't possibly be everything because it can't withstand what's real. If I stand in front of a car and I don't think it's coming because I have my back turned to it, that doesn't mean it's not going to hit me.

And little things like that just piled up. Life isn't fair. Okay, I get that life isn't fair, but the school is telling me that I have to be fair, and the justice system is telling me that I have to be fair, and there's equal opportunity going on, and who gets a job and who gets taken to college, so shouldn't life be fair? I just saw all these inconsistencies in what I was being taught versus how life actually worked. And that caused me a lot of frustration and angst growing up. I just tried to ignore both sides and navigate in between.

That's also just being self-aware. I mean, just being practical and honest. The truth is, there's a lot of jargon out there that's very PC to say, like life is due to one, to others, how you want to be treated. But that's not really what life is. Life is not fair. There's no Rimal reason a lot of times where one thing happens to one person and another person.

So why is it then, this is what got me. There were so many people who could live in that hypocrisy just fine. Do onto others as you would done onto you. People can say that and then at the same time not do to others what they would want done to themselves. Exactly. And they have no issues with it. I always had an issue with it. I was always like, Well, I don't really believe that that's true. So I do believe that I can slap you in the face and that's okay because you're a dick and I'm not a dick, or I'm defending this person that you're yelling at. It didn't make sense to me. Society and social structure didn't make sense to me. I didn't understand why until I got recruited by CIA. After I went through the CIA CIA psych evaluation, after I went through CIA's personality testing, after I got a chance to actually get debriefed by a CIA psychologist, that's when I started to understand what it was that wired me the way I was. I grew up in a traumatic home. My father was murdered before I was born. My mom remarried when I was five to a white guy, I'm Latino, who took us from our Latin roots all the way to Pennsylvania, where we tried to assimilate fully into a Caucasian neighborhood, and I wasn't Caucasian.

My whole family shares the same last name except me. They didn't give me the same last name as everybody else in the family. There's all these little things that when you're living in it, you're like, Well, that's just life. But the summation of them creates these exceptions to how you think, these things that put you outside of the social norms. That's what happened to me. That's not special to me. Millions of us live outside of social norms because we have been through physical abuse, emotional abuse, We lost parental abuse. We lost family members. We watched family members get hurt. We saw divorce or multiple types of divorce. We saw drug abuse. People have seen horrible things that make them question the order and structure of society. What was beautiful is that CIA has a methodology of finding those people.

How?

Through reviewing mass data, through reviewing performance records inside the military, inside university. Then, of course, once they identify identify you as a potential candidate, which they identify about 50,000 candidates a year. Then they put them through the vetting process. In that vetting process, you voluntarily take these personality and psychological exams. That's not like a 20-minute exam. It's like a seven-hour exam. Then they take those 50,000 candidates and whittle it down to about 300 new hires every year.

From 50,000, it goes down to about 300 every year for hiring. Then of the 50,000, are they Are they being recruited by the CIA or the people applying?

There's three routes in. Okay. The three routes are broken up like this, about 60, 20, 20. So 60% of people apply, and they're all overt. Hey, I'm really good at logistics, and I want to be a logistician. Hey, I'm really good at clothing repair, so I want to go into the disguise Department. Hey, I'm really good at financial stuff, so I'm going to go into the budget and finance office. So it's about 60% of people. 20% of people are recruited from college campuses, meaning the CIA goes to not only Ivy League universities, but they also go to community colleges. They go to all over the place where they know there's a history of recruitment, for example, Texas A&M. Not Ivy League, but has a long history of recruitment for CIA. So they are almost always on the Texas A&M campus.

Really? Why there?

Because that just happens to be, for unknown reasons, a hotspot of talent that fits the CIA requirement. So that's a nice way of saying fucked up people to Texas A&M. There are a handful of schools around the world where really fucked up people go to those schools. Just something that's appealing there. For Texas A&M, it's probably because they're hypernationalistic and hyperfocused on go Aggies and all that other stuff. Auburn is another one of those universities where CIA recruits heavily from Auburn, University of Florida, Party School. It's another school, completely different in terms of academic rigor than Texas A&M, but it's another hotspot for recruiting. About 20% of people are literally pulled off of college campuses in their undergrad years, in their graduate school, or even during PhD years. Then the last 20% is clandestinally recruited, recruited by a spotter or a talent person who sees them doing something else. They're succeeding in business, they're succeeding in the military, they're succeeding in the military. They're succeeding in education. They're succeeding in some volunteers circuit overseas. So real CIA officers see somebody, identify them as talent, and then basically recommend the HR department to pursue those people.

So they're not being necessarily recruited for the special agent part. It's for the overt. It's not necessarily for the covert part.

What happens is you're being identified as a fit for the culture of the agency. Right.

For the culture.

Because even if you're, whether you're overt or covert, there's still a culture of just general imbalance, right? Outsiders.

Did they come after you or did you apply?

I was actually leaving the military, trying to go into- What were you doing in the military? I was a nuclear missile officer with the Air Force.

The Air Force? Okay, that's what I think. Yeah.

I was applying to leave the Air Force to go into a volunteer service with the Peace Corps.

And it was during- They thought you'd be good for the special covert CIA?

I didn't think I would be, but But apparently, when you're going to make that transition from military to Peace Corps, it triggers a mass data warning that tells the recruiters, Hey, this could be a good fit. Then the recruiters called me, asked me if I wanted to come up and do an interview for a national security role. I didn't know what it was for, but I'm also the person that's like, Why not? Why not try? It was a very weird call, a phone call from somebody that only gives me their first name. This is like 2007, and I get a message on my on my collar ID that's only the first three numbers of the phone, so it's only the area code 703. The person says, Hi, my name is whatever, Kate. We think you'd be a good for national security. Would you be interested in coming up to an interview? I say, Sure. What's the job for? We can't tell you that, but we'll tell you when you get here in person. We're going to overnight you a hotel reservation and an airplane ticket, and all you have to do is show up. That was my instructions on the phone, which at the time, when I hung up my little flip cell phone- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

At the time, I was like, That is fake. That was a person probing me for my credit card number. That's Identification theft, for sure. Then the next day, no shit, a FedEx envelope showed up with a hotel reservation and an airplane ticket that was taking off in three days. I had to decide, Well, I guess I'm going to tell my boss I'm taking the weekend off or I was taking a long weekend because I'm going to take this airplane ticket, and I'm going to Virginia. Then when I got to the other side, that was where in the hotel, the reservation was real, just like the rental car reservation was real, just like the airplane was real. Then inside the hotel What was the next round of instructions? Go to this location at this time tomorrow, check in with this person. That was literally how my entire interview process went, one step at a time.

Then what happened?

I just kept doing what I was told to do.

What was number two? Then where did you go? Who did you meet? Where did they ask you?

So the next step, after I checked into the hotel and I went to my room, I had an envelope that told me that I had to be at a certain building. It was not CIA headquarters. It was some other building, and that I had to go to a certain room and check in and hand over my driver's license. I did all that. And then I went into this waiting room, and inside this way, it was a beige, not impressive building. And inside this waiting room, there were like nine or twelve other people. And they were clearly all there for the same reason I was there, because they were all dressed like you would expect anybody going through their first interview for the government would be dressed in their polyester suits and their white shirts and their red or blue ties and their pencil skirts and their jacket vests and whatever else. We literally sat there like the most awkward people in a dentist office that you could imagine. We waited while one at a time, somebody came out and called us back, and somebody came out and called us back. One person would go in, and then another person or two would arrive, and then another person would go in, another person or two would arrive.

It was like a big engine all day. I was in that waiting room for probably 30 minutes before my first interview, and my first interview lasted about two hours. And then I was escorted out a different door than I came in. So my guess is, over the course of an eight-hour day, they probably go through 30 or so interviews on interview day. Wow. Just churning people through. And that's your first round of interview. That's essentially the interview where they bridge the gap between, we see that you came, because I'm imagining a huge portion of people don't show up.

For sure. Yeah, they probably think, probably people thought it was bullshit. They weren't going to say the thing you thought. I would think the same thing.

So there's the people who show up. And then in that interview, they ask you, why did you come? What did you do? Tell me. It's your classic hiring interview. Tell me about some moment where you show leadership. Tell me about a big challenge in your life and all this stupid government in the standard government interview stuff. And then at the end, for me at least, they were like, We think that you would be a good fit to work in the National Clandestine Service of CIA. Are you familiar with what that is? I was not. I was like, I don't know anything about CIA other than what I see in the movies. They were like, It's nothing like it is in the movies, blah, blah, blah. But then they explained to me, The NCS is the undercover arm of CIA, and based on your applications or based on your data, we think that you'd be a good fit for that organization. If you would like to move forward, we will move your dossier forward for consideration as an NCS officer. And if you accept that, we need to start right now building your cover legend to explain why you're here, what you came here to do, what you're doing with your time right now, and you're going to be coming back to DC for more interviews.

So how will explain that to people? So they actually start teaching you how to lie in that first interview.

What did they teach you?

It's not really what they teach us as much as it's what they coach us to come up with on our own. So for example, she was like, Tell me what you told your friends about this interview. And I said, Well, I told them that I got a phone call about the national security sector, and it was a surprise, but I'm looking for a job. They're like, Great. Now what we want you to do is tell them that you came up here to talk to a contract company, right? Boos Allen, CACI, Mantec, there's hundreds of contractors in the Washington DC area. They're like, So just say that you came up to talk to a contractor. And then, are you going to tell them you were successful or not successful in that interview? And I was like, It would make sense for me to say I was not successful because then they're going to stop asking questions. And she was like, Exactly. So that's the coaching that they coach you through. And I was like, Well, if I say I'm not successful, but I have to come back, then why am I coming back? And she was like, Come up with a different reason for why you have to come back.

Do you have any family in the area? Do you have anything that you want to visit in the area? And I was like, Oh, yeah, I guess it makes sense. I could come back just to visit Washington, DC. And she's like, Exactly. So they start coaching you through the process of lying professionally. Everything we have ever done in our life is lying unprofessionally. Professionally. Lying without training, lying as an amateur, not lying as a pro.

So how do you lie as a pro?

There's a lot to lying professionally. Controlling your body language, making sure your body language and your verbal and nonverbal communication align is an important part of it. Knowing that professional liars actually talk very little, amateur liars talk a great deal. Because professional liars know the more you talk, the more difficult it is to remember the details of the lie that you're explaining, and then it also starts to make some misalignment between verbal and nonverbal cues. So professional liars tend to be quieter. They also tend to be simpler in their lies. And most importantly, professional liars only lie as little as possible in terms of how far they deviate from the truth. My name is Andy, but when I lie at a Starbucks, I tell them my name is Alex, because it doesn't make sense to call myself David. Because if I forget my name, that's going to be awkward. And similarly, if somebody calls the name Andy out at the front desk and I perk up and look, the person sitting next to me is going to be like, Why did you raise your eyes when they called the name Andy? But if somebody says Alex and I perk up, the same question could come up and I'm like, Oh, I just thought they said Andy.

When they actually said Alex.

Right. Did you know that instinctually, though, or it was through the training and how they prodded you a little bit?

Yeah, so I didn't know any of that instinctively. I thought I was a good liar, but I think I felt like a good liar as a kid and as a young adult, but I wasn't. I just was overconfident. It wasn't until I started to learn the actual process for fabrication that I really understood, Oh, this is how you do it for real. It was the fact that I was mentally acceptable. Mentally, I could accept that lying was useful. I had no problem learning the skill, whereas sometimes people have a moral issue with lying. As they learn how to do it better, it causes them anxiety or causes them guilt.

But it didn't cause you any, and they knew it. Yeah. Would you consider yourself a nice person or just someone who's pleasant, which means you can sit in this interview and be nice and smile and be pleasant, but you're not really a nice person, are you a kind person?

No, I'm not a kind person. I don't know I would define myself as a nice person either. I'm a very pragmatic person. There's people, a very small group of people that I genuinely care about. Then everybody else is...

You don't care.

It's not that I don't care is that they land on different levels of utility. We have a term that we're taught at the agency called operational utility. Operational utility means how useful is something to whatever outcome you're trying to achieve. I've always looked I had people at tasks as through a lens of operational utility, but I never had the term. When I was trying to do well on a math test, it wasn't because I wanted to prove to the teacher I was good at math. It wasn't because I wanted mom and dad to be proud of me. It wasn't because I was excited to test myself. It was because getting a good grade got me closer to the outcome that I wanted. That's operational utility. There are plenty of people out there who take the same test, and they're just trying to challenge themselves. There's people out there are trying to make mom proud. And there's people out there who are trying to really impress the teacher. I bet there are even people who take a math test and want to get a good score because they want the teacher to feel good. I don't understand those people as an individual.

All I wanted to do was get the good grade to move on to the next phase so that I could keep getting what I wanted.

So isn't that just called an opportunist?

And if you want to boil it down to some terms, right?

It's an opportunist.

It has to be something that is a benefit to you, not just the general opportunity.

No, but Isn't the term opportunist? If I'm an opportunist because I seek out opportunity that would benefit me, then that's the same thing as the operational utility, basically.

Here's how I was taught to see the two differently. People who are true opportunists pursue the path of least resistance. Let's just say that you're single, you're at a bar, and you've got two guys who are both hitting on you. One's fat and lazy, one's fat and ugly, one's dashing and debonair. The one that's fat and lazy is going to be a much easier mark for you. The one who's dashing and debonair is going to be a little bit more difficult of a mark for you. The true opportunist, picks the fat guy because it's less work. It's the path of least resistance. They get what they want, the man, the company, the money, the whatever, with less effort. Whereas somebody who's operationally utilitarian in nature will take the the other person because the more debonair person is going to be arguably more useful because now they look better in public and you're less embarrassed when you're seen with them and maybe you have a continuing relationship. But it's not the path of least resistance.

Right. Okay, that's an interesting way of perspective to look at it. Yeah.

Operational utility is about the outcome, not the effort. Whereas true opportunism is about the effort.

This is fascinating. I love it. Then they put you into the covert right away then. You got the job as the... What do you call that job?

I was a clandestine service trainee. What does that mean? It means that you're a trainee going into clandestine operations. It's very important at CIA that they differentiate between operators and trainees because most of the training is actually on the job training. There's no school that teaches you how to be a CIA officer. There's training programs along the way that are trained by operators, but it's not like there's a formal degree that you can get. After you go through all the interviews, you're basically offered a job, and then you show up on the first day of the job, and no shit, it is on the job training. They take you, and they put you in an office, and they tell you who your supervisor is, and then boom, that's it. You start learning how to find cable traffic, which is the way that we communicate with officers all around the world, how to read it, how to write it. They put you through training programs so that you learn how to use certain systems for things as boring as how you request leave, all the way to things as sexy as how you launder money. You go through all these different training programs that are between one and five days at a time, but essentially, you learn by doing the work every day.

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For my hormone balance, longevity, and of course, confidence. So you can see why I'm obsessed. Go to joinamp. Com/jen to learn more. That's joinamp. Com /jinn, because strength should fit your life. So you show up to your job, your office, day one. Did they teach you how to launder money? What were the most interesting things that you were taught on this job as a covert CIA agent?

The most interesting things were few and far between, to be honest. Really? The vast majority of the training that you get has to do with administrative requirements, organizational requirements, documentation, because it's all overseen by senior leadership, but also by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by other government organizations that make sure that you're doing things a certain way.

So what Okay, so give me the ones that were the most interesting. Don't tell me what the administrative nonsense is. I'm going to fall asleep. I want to know the stuff that was so intriguing.

There's a process called procurement. Procurement is the way that you get your hands on something that you're not supposed to have and that can't be affiliated with CIA or the United States. For example, if I have a case in Colombia that I want to pay with gold bullion that comes from India, I have to procure the gold bullion from India and then get it to Colombia without having any affiliation with CIA of the United States. That's called a procurement process. We are taught how to handle clandestine procurement so that we can make that whole transaction happen where essentially the gold disappears from India and appears in Colombia, and nobody has any records of it on either side. When you look at the transaction in between between, there's no footprint that has America or the United States. Without going into too many details, the way that you might make that happen is you might have a shipping agent that's from Sri Lanka, which is neighbors India, but it's not part of the country. That shipping agent actually facilitates the movement between continents. Then you might have a third country organization, something in Ecuador, that claims responsibility for the gold from Sri Lanka.

Then all you do is you take it from the Ecuadorian handling agent and smuggle it into Colombia. India, just like you smuggled it out of India to Sri Lanka.

Where are you doing all this? In an office? Are you in the field doing things? I know you're not like a James Bond at the casino, but where are you doing all these covert operations?

What happens with most clandestine operations is the person assigned the operation stays with the operation. Anywhere the operation goes, the primary mission planner or operator also goes. Make no mistake, 85% to 90% of Every operation happens in an office in something called a secure compartmentalized information facility, SCIF, what we call a SCIF. A SCIF has... There's no cellular signals in or out. There's no way for people to plant a bug. It's a secure area. Usually, it's a secure room inside of another secure room inside of a secure building. That's what a SCIF is. So when I say an office, you're working inside of a SCIF.

Do you remember a little while ago when those guys from government were on signal and they were talking about this huge government operation, and they're talking basically on WhatsApp or signal. Was that shocking to you, given the fact of how things you know go down normally, in the skiff where people have to have so much protection? How can they just willy-nilly be doing this whole thing on signal?

It was absolutely willy-nilly. It was not shocking to me because there was a trend that started with the Obama administration that didn't exist prior to Obama. If you recall, Obama made the first big splash in the information security space because he insisted on having a Palm pilot, a Blackberry, that went with him everywhere. He wanted an encrypted Blackberry. Do you remember that? I don't. It was huge news for his first term, the first maybe year and a half of his first term. He wanted to have instant access to his secure systems through his Blackberry. Well, that started a trend where now senior officers, new presidents, senators, congresspeople, everybody was like, Well, if the President can have a mobile secure device, I want to have a mobile secure device. Us. That just continued to digress and devolve into what we have now, which is basically Pete Hetzel, who's the Department of War Secretary, just using his personal cell phone and signal. Signal is something that we know is hacked by other intelligence services. So now they're just communicating on a commercial encrypted app, accepting the risks associated with it.

And that's okay by the government, I guess, because this whole government's different than probably even, as you said, everything digress, digress, digress.

It's not acceptable. It's not okay. But at the same time, this is what makes government so difficult. Administrations all have their own rules and their unspoken rules. It's not like there's a rule book that the President has to follow. There's not a rule book that the cabinet has to follow. It's defined every time there's a new President, and every time there's a new election cycle, and every time there's a new technology, it's rewritten. I don't think it should be that way, but at the At the same time, who's going to make the rule book that is going to evolve at the pace of technology?

No, exactly. But that's just a stupid move anyway.

Yeah, it was not a wise move, but I can see how it happened because it's just so much easier to- To do it on your phone, right?

How much safer a signal than what's up?

Yeah, it's just who owns the data is really. They're pretty much the same in terms of security. We're taught at CIA that there's a spectrum, and that spectrum goes between security and convenience. When you want something to be more convenient, it moves away from being more secure. When you want something to be more secure, it obviously is less convenient because everything has to land somewhere on that spectrum. What you saw with the current administration is that they wanted something convenient. Well, the convenient solution wasn't that secure. And likewise, if they want something secure, they're going to have to literally meet in a skiff, a room in a room in a building to have a detailed conversation. They can't just text message each other while they're on the golf course.

No, it's just absurd to me. I mean, that's what's actually interesting. I'm going to tell you a really random story. Many, many years ago, I got nominated to do a job in the government for the White House without giving all these crazy details. I didn't do it. However, I guess I was on some... Because I was on an email chain with the people, the White House, there was a liaison in the White House who was emailing me, and they forgot to take me off of the email chains. So even though I wasn't involved for over a year, I was getting all of these emails. It was so crazy to me that people assume a lot, right? People assume that because you're in this particular position in a particular place that has a lot of status or prestige, or you think a lot of things around it to guardrails, I guess you would say, it's actually not true. It's like the has no clothes or the Wizard of Oz. It's like the bigger it is, actually the worse it is in a way.

It goes to show, I think, a big part of what we were talking about earlier with the actual discrepancy between what reality is and what we think it is. And they're not the same thing. No. Our thinking is conditioned into us from the time that we're very young, very little. We're conditioned to believe that our parents are authorities, which means that we're conditioned to believe that anybody older than us is an authority. And then we're conditioned to believe that we have to obey authority to be successful. And all of this becomes ingrained in us in our formative years. So then by the time that you are actually able to think independently, you can't because you've been conditioned to think in a way that's reliant on others.

The irony with you is you're someone who doesn't like it from what you said. You're like, you don't talk to your mom or your dad. You can break off relationships or whatever it is. But that would say to me that you are someone who is not a conformist. But then usually you would think that a governmental job would go after somebody who likes conformity. Conformity. Yeah. Which means I would think you'd be the antithesis in a lot of ways to what they would go after.

And that's what I thought, too, until I actually got there. What CIA does differently than most organizations, right? Apple, Microsoft, SpaceX, they're looking for people who are proud of the business, people who want to wear the swag. Hey, I'm, you know, SpaceX, Dragon launch pad. They want people who want to belong to something. Cia doesn't want people who want to be CIA. Cia is looking for people who have a psychological need your external validation. And then CIA can become the single source for that external validation. They can become the secret organization that knows what you did in secret that can then tell you secretly, know you're changing the world. You know you're the one who just changed the whole trajectory of history. You just transformed the future. That's the validation that keeps a CIA officer going on for the next mission and the next mission. We have a saying inside CIA that we're too dumb to quit because you find yourself in these really shitty situations, and you know it's a shitty situation. You're like, How the fuck did I get here? How am I here? I'm sick to my stomach. I can't hold down water.

I don't speak the local language. And I can't call for help. I don't have anybody that's a local contact. And in three days time, I have to do a dead drop. How did I get here? But then at the same time, you're like, How fucking cool I get to do this. It's so twisted, but that's how we think, and It keeps us motivated until we come back and get off the plane and somebody's like, He just changed the world.

It's so true.

It's so sick.

It's so true, though. That is exactly true. But then, again, here you are Okay, so you did it for seven years, so it didn't pay very well, I would imagine. No.

I mean, it pays better than any other government job, but it doesn't pay well enough.

Okay, and then your wife was also a CIA agent, right? Correct. I guess you met her on the job. Yeah. Was she also covert or was she overt?

She was also clandestine, yeah.

She was also covert. Okay, but what I was going to say is, what did your other friends and family think you did? If you couldn't tell them you were working for the CIA, what did they think you were doing?

Well, I stopped talking to my family for the most part. I saw them maybe once every other year. But they just thought I was doing something for the military on the civilian side because that was more or less what I told them. I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm leaving the Air Force, but I'm going to go be a civilian in Washington, DC, and still help the military.

Okay, but most people, where did your wife's family I think.

My wife's family thought that she was... The CIA gave us cover organizations that we did work for.

Within the CIA? No. Okay. Wait, so what did they say? You're working at Vons or you're working at Whole Foods? What were you doing?

The your imagination is the limit, and the specific cover providers are still clandestine. So I can't talk about the specific government organizations or commercial organizations that give us cover.

Well, in Mission Impossible, what's his name in Mission Impossible? God, please help me. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. But he had talked about his character. Anyway, Ethan Hunt. Ethan Hunt. Yeah. Ethan Hunt was like, he would count on the road certain things. A really boring job that nobody would ever want to talk about or think about. Was it similar? Like they give you the most boring jobs in the world? Correct. To do that. Also, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, were they CIA?

Were they Delta? Yes, they were CIA. Mr. And Mrs. Smith, the movie was CIA, and Mr. And Mrs. Smith, the TV show currently, is this ambiguous secret organization.

Oh, okay. I don't know if you know this, but when people are recruiting for Delta, do they look for the same things that they look for for CIA? No.

They look for different things. I am almost certain that 100% of Delta recruitment comes from the army. You have to be active army before you can get pulled into delta. One of the things that is important, too, is what delta operators do is far more technical than what CIA officers do. In fact, just to give you an idea of how impressive delta really is, they learn from us how to do human operations, human intelligence operations, and then they use our skillset to do all the other stuff that they do. If you had to rack and stack, I would put tier one operators much, much higher than I put CIA operators. Cia operators have a simple fundamental skill of intelligence collection. Whereas your Navy SEAL Black Squadron or your Delta operators, these individuals have all of the other things they have to do, of which our skill is just one of them.

It's one of them. But you're very articulate. You are explaining this very well, by the way. I'm glad. I mean, that must be part of the training, right? Is that part of it? That is not.

No, That's something that I found later on was my natural skillset.

You're very good at that. Let's talk about the skills of intelligence. What are some of the top skills that you think you learned working for the CIA that you can then apply to real civilian life or the world?

Yeah, there are a lot of skills that you learn at CIA, but the ones that are most applicable really have to do with understanding and predicting and directing human behavior. Human beings aren't really that difficult to understand, and they're not that difficult to predict, which makes them not that difficult to control or direct. Those were the most useful skills that we learned at CIA.

Give me an example.

Let me give a very funny example. I do this oftentimes with people. We are conditioned to make certain body movements just based off of what we encounter. When we first met, I extended my hand, which even now, you know I'm not trying to shake You still did it. But you still feel the need to put your hand out. That's predictable directing human behavior with personal bubbles. I can literally move you. If we're standing next to each other, I can literally move you someplace where I want you to go just by invading your personal bubble. I know that if I silently stand too close to you, you will move away. People do this all the time. People do it in lines, they do it in elevators. What CIA does is teaches you how to do it intentionally with operational utility to achieve a certain outcome that you want. The same thing is true when it comes to getting someone to speak. You can get someone to speak when they don't want to speak. You can get someone to say things they don't realize they're saying by using tools of elicitation. Just as a real quick example, I'm going to stop talking.

Just count to yourself how many seconds go by before you start to feel like you need to say something because the silence is so awkward.

I mean, I would go... Even that was awkward, even though I knew you were doing it on purpose, it's still awkward.

It's still awkward. So that can force you to get someone else to speak. I was counting in my own head. It was about two and a half seconds before I could see the muscles on your face start to tighten into a smile where you're like, I could tell you felt awkward. Yeah. I mean, these skills are rudimentary. What we're going through right now are just simple things that we can demonstrate right now. If I started playing the national anthem, you know what you would do? What? Stand up, right? Because that's just what happens. When you play the national anthem, when we say, put your hand over your heart, people do. Take off your hat, people do. You don't even have to know why. If someone just walks up to a man and says, sir, can you please remove your hat? You know what that man is going to do? Remove his hat. Not even knowing why, but just because we've been conditioned to believe that there's some reason that we should obey the direction of somebody else. When a stranger tells us to do something, we feel like we need to do it. There are behaviors worldwide that fit these kinds of predetermined outcomes.

The personal bubble in Europe is very much smaller than the personal bubble in the US, but there's still a personal bubble. Different international anthems in different countries, but they still have the same reaction. People still stand up. They stop talking, they show a moment of silence, they turn towards a flag. So these are the indicators that we're taught to look for in very basic terms because they go on and on. They go through eye movements, facial movements, how you touch your face. There's all sorts of skills that you can see whether or not you're driving a behavior.

That's so interesting to me. What did you call it when you can move someone by doing that?

Directing human behavior.

No, but you're saying putting your hand out, for example, knowing that I was going to do the same thing. What is that called?

Yeah, we're predicting and directing human behavior because I know that culturally this is going to be meaningful to you.

So then are you always a few steps ahead of anybody when you want them to do something? You already know what's going to happen. You have a plan. If you want this person to do that thing, I need to do A, B, and C to get them there.

When there's an outcome I'm trying to achieve, yes.

But let's play this game. Let's say I was a girl that you wanted to go out with or vice versa. What would be your plan of attack? What would you do?

What's the situation? What's the scenario? Where are we at? How do we meet Can you give me some context?

Oh, gosh.

Yeah. Let's just say it's the real thing. Let's say you're the girl that I want you to go. I want you to go out with me, and we're in this situation that we're in right now. Okay, fine. Then I would most likely tell you that when I was with Tom and Lisa Lisa. Lisa's making a home-cooked dinner. She's making dinner tonight, and I have to be back at their house at 6: 00, and they wanted me to invite you to come along because they haven't seen you in a long time.

Okay. How would that make me... Okay, so I'd be like, Oh, that's so nice.

Do you want to come with me? Because Lisa's making dinner and she asked you to there.

Okay, that's... Yes. Do you want to come with me? Sure.

And that's how I would get you to move from this situation to come out with me.

But what if it wasn't the case? What if it wasn't Lisa?

None of that is real.

Okay, fine. So if it's not real, then I say yes, then what happens?

So I'm getting you to come with me for something that isn't real, right? So now when I come to pick you up, I'll be like, Well, I just got a phone call from Tom. They're not feeling well. Lisa canceled. But we're still together. And I know that this is your neighborhood. Do you have a good restaurant nearby that you would recommend? Right.

So you would do a setup?

Yeah, it's called a bait and switch.

A bait and switch. That's a good one. Okay. How would someone then... If someone wants to land a job, how would they get the person? Or actually, let me start. Instead of giving you scenarios, I You call a lot of these things on how to be likable and how to develop your people skills, let's say, right? What would be your number one way to get somebody to like you?

You want them to feel comfortable around you, which really means you want them to see themselves in you. You want to mirror back to them their behaviors, their language, their vocabulary, their tonality, their nonverbal and verbal communication, their values. So you're mirroring them? Correct. That's the term that we use as mirroring as well. When you mirror somebody, it's irresistible. Subconsciously, they can't ignore the fact that they feel comfortable around you because you are acting like they are acting.

If I'm talking, you'll match my tone.

And your vocabulary, your pacing, your volume.

Okay, so then how about this? Because I've seen that you've spoken about this. What is the difference between being persuasive and being influential?

Persuasion and influence are two tools that often get misunderstood or they get misidentified as being one and the same. Persuasion, as we're taught at CIA, persuasion is emotional, which means it can only happen when you're with a person because that's the only time that you can make the emotional connection to bond with them. So when I say you have to be with the person, that doesn't mean you physically have to be with them. It means that they have to be perceptive or they have to perceive that they are with you. So whenever you make a TikTok video, for example, who Whoever watches that TikTok video, to them, in their perception, they are in that moment with you, even though you are not in that moment with them. Makes sense? So persuasion has to happen in a moment where there's a connection between two people because Because persuasion is based on emotion. Influence is what happens when you are not connected to a person, you are not physically there, you are not represented, there's no perception of your presence, but they're still thinking about you. Something you said, something you suggested, something you did, something you recommended.

That's influence. So persuasion is how you start because you have a moment to build someone's emotion, their emotional connection, their emotional momentum. And then when you disappear and they think of you anyways, that's influence. The reason both of these are so powerful is because over time, your target, your target being the person who watches your videos and the person who thinks about you when they're not watching your videos, the human brain calculates, it tabulates every second that it's thinking about you, whether it's with you in a video or whether it's thinking about you on the toilet, your brain can't differentiate the difference between those two moments and the moments when we're actually sitting sitting together. Your brain sees it as all the same thing. For example, you've known about me for multiple years, it sounds like.

Two years, probably. Yeah.

You feel like there's a relationship with me that's different than the relationship I feel with you because you've had so much more exposure to me. And your brain has literally tabulated all of those moments and bits and bites and seconds and fractions of time. It's put all that together to basically say, Hey, you know this guy. He's familiar to you. You know what he's about. You know what he believes in. You guys are friends. You're going to get along. Your brain is telling your subconscious that already, even though there really isn't any proof that it's true.

A hundred %. That makes sense? Yeah, that's true. Although I don't feel like we're friends, but I do feel like a familiarity that you wouldn't feel because you've never seen me before. You have no idea who I am. You're probably like, who is this girl sitting in her podcast studio? You know what I mean? You just can't... This is like one of 50,000 podcasts you've I've probably done. Me, I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so excited to have him. I love his content, right?

And it's not necessarily something that I don't want to personally offend, obviously.

Trust me, you're not personally offending me at all. It takes way more than that, honey, to personally offend me. But this is the tool. No, I know. That's what I'm saying. I'm actually taking it as the information.

So think about everybody who's read a book, right? Your favorite author. You feel like you know that person. That whole idea of celebrity is really just this concept on a massive scale. It's why we feel like we have a bond with our favorite actors or our favorite actresses. It's why we feel like we understand our favorite journalists. It's why we feel like we understand our favorite painters, because we've spent so much time reflecting on them. That's influence that they've been able to put out there. Think about the influence of Vincent van Gogh or the influence of any member of the Beatles.

I understand what you mean. I guess my question was more about, did your time at the CIA teach you how to be more persuasive? What are some of the tactile or actionable things that you... Because now you have a company, right? It's called Everyday Spy, where you take these things that you've honed and learned and you apply them to everyday civilian life for people, correct? Correct. So what are some of these really important skills that could be very helpful and beneficial for people?

Well, persuasion is a great place to start because let's just assume that somebody already knows that influence and persuasion are not the same thing. Let's go ahead and also assume that they already knew that persuasion was tied to emotion. Those are two big steps because the average person doesn't really understand that, but let's just go ahead and start there. How do you teach someone the technical steps of persuasion once they understand that persuasion is based on emotion? You have to start teaching them how to identify emotional levers in their target. You are my guinea pig right now. When I look at you, I don't know what your emotional state is right now. I don't know if you're angry, if you're sad, if you're anxious, if you're worried. I don't know what you value. I don't know much about really anything, except that there's a newspaper or there's a magazine on the wall that says that that's by the Jewish Journal, and you made a comment earlier about being Israeli. That tells me that there's probably a connection between you and the Jewish faith or the Israeli nationality or at least the Jewish plight. There's something there.

From there, I can start exploring topics that are likely to trigger emotions. I can start talking about anti-Semitism. I can start talking about support for the Palestinian people. I can talk about injustices that are happening in Gaza right now. I can talk about injustices that are happening in the UN when they try to out Israeli leadership. I know that you've already admitted that you've had a meeting with leadership in Israel. I could assume that if If that's not Netanyahu, it's somebody else close to Netanyahu's circle, which is a chance for me to start talking about Netanyahu's corruption charges and the fact that his own people are turning against him. These are likely to be points that will trigger some emotional response. As long as I'm the one I'm walking, though, I won't know what emotions are being stirred up. So I need to make a statement, cry into an emotional topic, and then wait for a response. That's the only way I'm going to get the feedback to understand what is actually pushing levers and whether those are feelings of anger or remorse or sadness or something else.

Right. So you're able to pick up clues, basically. Well, they're very overt clues, but yeah.

So to you, they feel like they're overt. To the average person, they may not even think to pull topics from previous conversation and topics from around the room. That's an assessment tool. And that only works because I'm in your space. If we were meeting at a coffee shop down street, I wouldn't have these to pull from.

How would you do it?

You'd have to pull it a different way. How? A lot of it ties back to how you ask questions and the types of questions that you ask. There's two types of questions. There's open-ended questions and close-ended questions. If you ask open-ended questions, those are questions that don't have a simple answer. How are you? That's a close-ended question. Are you happy? Close-ended question. Are you hot in this room? Close-ended question. But how did you feel when you woke up this morning? That's a open-ended question. What made you choose this coffee shop for us today? That's a more open-ended question. These are questions that will lead to more conversation. That is what gives you the foundation to start probing. Then as you start probing, you can start looking for emotional responses.

Is that something that you teach people how to be more persuasive? Correct. What's another thing that you teach a lot of, the people that come to you? What's the number one thing that people actually ask you to help them with?

People come to us because they are good people who have been taken advantage of. Really? That's the vast majority of who comes to us. I actually just got off a call yesterday with a guy who built a $7 million business and was then forced out of his own business by two partners that he brought on 10 years ago because they were struggling friends of his. Over the last 10 years, they worked against him. They used his kindness, and they used his faithfulness, and they used his loyalty against him, and they took his business, and now he's got $6,000 in the bank and a family of four and nothing to show for it. He's like, How did I get to the... And he's 50 years old. He comes to me and he's like, I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how to fix it. And of course, he comes to me because he's like, I think what I want to do is run a public smear campaign against them to try to get my company back. And then you have to have that hard conversation where you explain good people are going to be good people their whole lives.

You can't be good 50 years and then break bad and then turn into a bad guy. So I had to explain to him, you're better off starting all over again because you know how to build a company than trying to become a bad guy and coerce these people into somehow giving you back your business. It's never going to work. And that is really what we deal with. We deal the most with very, very wealthy people who have been taken advantage of and who understand that they are either a poor judge of character or they have some gap in their knowledge when it comes to dealing with unscrupulous people, people who have been embezzled against, people who have been cheated on, people who have been robbed by loved ones. That's the vast majority of what we really do see from individuals asking for a consulting.

And then you're teaching them exactly what, though, if they come to you, not that guy, but another guy, how to what?

How do I identify when you're being misled? How do you identify misinformation, disinformation?

How do you identify this information.

It's all the same tools that we've been talking about, right? You have to understand how to assess, how to use certain questioning types.

So like you said, it's like how you ask the questions you ask, how you ask them.

I mean, For the purposes of a podcast interview, that's pretty much as deep as I can go. But with a client, I can actually go through the specific strategies. Here is a type of question that we can ask. Here's seven varieties of that question. Here are the seven different kinds of The responses you'll get from those seven different kinds of questions. We can give them a more- You can get more deep depending on the scenario. Correct. Because you have time, right? The CIA teaches us there's only three resources that matter: time, energy, and money. That's it. Everything else out there is an irrelevant resource. It bundles up into either time, energy, or money. Just because you have money doesn't mean you can make a change. Because if you don't have enough energy or enough time, the money doesn't help you. You can have all the time in the world, and if you don't have enough money, you can't affect the change. You need to have all three resources. When I work with clients, that's a lot of times where we start from is, Hey, these are the three resources you have. Which of these resources do you have in abundance?

Which of these resources do you have the least amount of? And oftentimes what we find is people have either a great deal of time and no money or a great deal of money and very little time. That helps adjust how we will train them. People who have a great deal of money and not a lot of time, we will put them into a very concentrated training. And vice versa. People who have more time than money, they'll go into digital training.

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The reason I struggle with this is because I would argue that most people don't know what outcome they want. I would argue that most people think they want something, but but they haven't thought it through. So they don't really know. And when you tell them to take certain actions, they'll take the action, they'll start to see progress, and then they might realize, Well, that's not really what I wanted in the first place. So now I've got to go back and change myself. So what I often try to tell people first is that whatever you think you want, there's a good chance that you're not self-aware enough to even identify correctly the outcome that you desire. You're still living in some echo chamber of what you were taught, of what you were conditioned to believe that you need to be. Do you actually need to be happily married, or is that just something that you believe because your mom and your grandmother told you that? Do you actually believe that you need to have kids? Do you believe that you need to be a mom, or do you actually want to be a mom? I'll tell you this.

I've had so many female clients, and they did not ever actually want to be mothers. They're mothers now, and they're very good mothers, and they're loving mothers, and they're dedicated mothers, but they didn't make that choice on their own before.

Well, yeah, because you said something earlier that's so accurate, I think, is that so much of it, a lot of how we live our lives is because we're programmed to live our lives that way. Because we all get married between 28 and 33. And if we don't, then it's something's wrong with us. So it's not about the person, it's about the time you get married, the timing of it. You have two kids. If you don't have one kid, you're like, Shunna. If you don't have any kid, Kids is too many. Exactly. Four is too many, one's too little. So we're all robots living these lives. And so when you do ask or question it, you're ostracized a lot of times to the world.

And who can you trust to answer your question? The lady over here who has four kids like you or the lady over here that has one kid when you already know that subconsciously you're judging both of them, too.

Exactly.

Because that's all you know. That's all you've been programmed to do.

Because you do talk a lot about this. You believe that we're all being manipulated to some level, right?

We've been conditioned. Conditioned is the right word for me.

Condition, not manipulated. Okay. I thought I saw you say that before. We've been manipulated. Maybe it's the way they just thumbnail it.

Yeah, that's probably how that was thumbnail. Because what ends up happening is manipulation is something very specific to me. Okay.

What is it?

And conditioning is something very specific. So manipulation is specifically when you get someone else to do something that's beneficial to you and not beneficial to them. That is the CIA definition of manipulation. You get them to do what you want them to do, and it's not in their best interest. That's manipulation. But the opposite of that, not the opposite like the opposite side of the spectrum, but like the opposite side of the coin is motivation. Because what is motivation? Motivation is getting someone to do what you want them to do, and it's good for them. It's in their best interest. So Motivation and manipulation are actually the same currency. It's like a quarter or a silver dollar. The value of the two is the same. They both result in you getting another person to do what you want them to do. But in manipulation, in motivating, you get them to do something that is not in their best interest, and in motivating, you get them to do something that is in their best interest.

Then what's the difference between motivating and persuading?

There's really not that much difference.

That's basically the same thing.

Both Manipulation and motivation would start with persuasion. However you get them to do what you want them to do, you're pulling on emotional lovers to get them there.

How do you teach people or what did you learn of the best way to motivate somebody?

The best way to motivate them is also the best way to manipulate them, and that's really to tap into something called a core emotion. Human beings have many, many emotions. There's a tool out there that actually, of all places, it's actually crept up in the world of therapists, of cognitive behavioral therapy. There's a tool called the Wheel of Emotions. The Wheel of Emotions is this fantastic visual tool that basically shows you all the emotions that we talk about, and it boils them into six primary core emotions. Every human being is wired with a particular single core emotion that is stronger to them than any other emotion. We all have it. There's six of them. More than 60% of us really only have the same three. So 40% of the population is motivated by three, 60% of the population is motivated by the other three.

What are they?

So the six different emotions, fear, sadness, anger, are the most common. Fear, sadness, and anger. And then you have disgust, happiness, and surprise. Disgust, happiness, and surprise are the other three. So 40% of the world is at their core. They are singularly the most motivated or the most persuaded, the most emotional about disgust, happiness, or surprise, and 60% of us feel sadness, fear, or anger. When you identify a person's core emotion, it basically means that is the emotion that they use to drive every behavior. I, you were asking me, do I consider myself a nice person? Nice is not really a word in my vocabulary. I at my core, I am an angry person. All of my decisions are based on anger. At some level, they all boil out of anger. Anger at some injustice, anger at some lack of opportunity, anger at myself for some shortcoming or some flaw or some habit that I can't change. I'm motivated by anger. My wife is a sadness person. Her core is sadness. The decisions that she makes are based at their core in some element of something sad. How sad is it that I can't change that?

How sad is it that this has to happen? How sad is it that the government can't do a better job or that humanity is so selfish? Whatever. Then there's plenty of people who are motivated by fear the same way that I'm motivated by anger, the same way that my wife is motivated by sadness.

Did you learn all of it? Okay, so let's say then if you know that, then what? You can tap into that person. Let's say if someone's motivated by fear. A lot of people I know are motivated by fear.

60% of the population is motivated by fear, sadness, or anger.

I wonder, of the 60, how many are motivated by fear?

The top two are fear and anger. Yeah.

Anger Two.

You will meet... Now that we're having this conversation, I can almost assure you that if it's not one of the three of us in this room, it's somebody who's listening to this right now is feeling validated because they already knew they were an angry person. They already knew it. They were just waiting for someone to say, It's okay. It's okay to be angry all the time.

For me, it's fear. For you, it's anger. Then what is yours? It's anger. Oh, it is? So then two anger, one fear.

And what's beautiful is it's Ed, right? Yeah. So Ed, nothing about this guy makes you feel like he's an angry guy. No, that's so true. Because he's had to find his whole life, he's had to find a way to bury it and hide it because it's not socially acceptable. So That very likely means all the kindness and the patience and the smiling is all indicative of something he's using to hide the fact that he feels self-conscious about the fact that he's angry all the time.

Do you find that? Are you a good expert in reading people?

I wouldn't say I am the best, but I have learned how to read people quickly and fairly accurately.

What are some ways people... Because I find that interesting. I find that people who usually smile the most and are the most nice on the outside are usually some of the most angry people on the inside.

What you just said is what's known as an assumption.

Yes, it is known as an assumption.

Assumptions are when you jump to a conclusion based off of previous experience.

Okay.

Whereas what we use is something called assessment. Assessment means that you are building an opinion in real-time based off of indicators that you're being shown. For example, in this conversation that we've had, which everybody has been witnessing, they have seen your behaviors and they've seen my behaviors, and they've made an assessment off of the behaviors that they're seeing. You are very energetic. You have a lot of movements, rapid movements, quick movements. You interrupt yourself when you talk, you speak in short snippets. You don't always finish sentences. You started with a sweater on. That sweater is now not only off, but it's actually on the treadmill behind you. You know what I mean? That goes to show how kinetic you are. Are you that kinetic by nature, or are you that kinetic because you're feeding off of my energy being here, Or are you kinetic because you've had too many of your stimulant drinks?

Magic mind, yeah. There's no stimulant in this, by the way. I think it's just... Yeah, okay. I don't know the answer. Oh, sorry. I thought you wanted to.

I don't know the answer. I would love to know the answer. But what I'm saying is my assessment is not why you are the way you are. It's just that this is what I've seen since sitting in this chair with you.

Yeah, that's interesting. I hate sitting still. It's really hard for me, and I've been sitting still for many hours, but that's besides the point.

That's right on the point for me. Oh, yeah. Now that tells me that if I want to win favor with you, I need to get you out of a chair. Now, if I'm going to invite you to come out and hang out with me, we're going to go walk LACMA, or we're going to go to a park, or we're going to go do something physical where we're moving. Because if I put you in a chair, you're not going to be comfortable.

Right. I'll be comfortable for a while, but then I'll get annoyed. You know what I mean? You're good at connecting dots fast about people.

I'm using it. The most important thing I want people to take away from this right now is that it's not about jumping to a conclusion. It's about recognizing that you don't have to conclude anything. It is a cultural paradigm, something we've been conditioned in, to make us think that we have to conclude. We have to close an idea. We have to shut a door. We have to finish. That's something that's been conditioned into us, but it's not true. We can have ongoing assessments. Your marriage can be an assessment that lasts 30 years. Every day you wake up in shoes, do I like the way this is going or do I not like the way this is going? Too many of us feel like, Well, I said yes, and I put on the ring, and now it doesn't matter anymore. I'm doomed. I'm trapped. Because we feel the need to close a door. We've been conditioned to believe that we can't have ongoing open loops in our head. We can't have We can't have no opinion. We have to have an opinion. In fact, you can absolutely have no opinion. You can still be developing your opinion.

Right.

That's such a good point. I feel like we're living in a world now where everyone has to have an opinion and share their opinion, where it's causing such a divisiveness in the world. Exactly. Have you seen anything quite like this? Did you spend a lot of time with this stuff, with the world? You were saying before we started, when I was asking you or saying things that you're interested in now, you're saying Venezuela. We're talking about the Israeli Hamas thing. All of these things, is that just something that you're hyper-focused on because of the place where we're at in life, where everything is very polarizing? Or is that just something you're just very interested in because they're just interested in politics?

I'm actually less interested in geopolitics. I'm less interested in war. I'm less interested in the specific conflict zones, Ukraine and Israel. That's not really what interests me. What interests me is when you start to see how human behavior is consistent. That's always been the thing that's been so fascinating to me. Human beings are the thing that fascinates me because no matter how diverse we are, we're still so similar. But we all focus on how different we are. We don't focus on how similar we are. We focus on skin tone and age and gender and marital status and education level, nationality, passport, language. We're like, Oh, this person is I'm Palestinian, and I'm Israeli. This person is Ukrainian, and I'm Russian. This person is Mexican, and I'm American. Everybody is biologically 99. 9% the same. Our brains are almost identical to one another. Unless we fall onto a neurodivergent spectrum or a chemical imbalance in our brain, we're almost identical. If you close your eyes and have no conversation at all, you really wouldn't know that the people sitting in the room are at all different from you at all. But yet we focus so much on our differences.

It's because we focus on our differences that it makes us so susceptible to being persuaded and manipulated. Because now we can just say, Hey, you know what? Oh, my gosh. I was having a conversation recently with somebody who was making the argument to me that Jews put Jewish people before anybody else. They're like, Jews always put Jews first. That's the way that their religion works. That's the way that they're programmed. I disagree with that. I've read books, I've studied with phenomenal Jewish officers, and what I've learned is that Jews actually put their community first. That wherever they lay their roots, they value that place so much that they want to improve their community. So it's not based in faith, not based on identity, not based on nationality. They just literally want to make the world better where they're living because they know it's better for them. And then as it grows, more Jewish people come, and then there becomes a Jewish community in addition to the local community.

Yeah, that's such a silly comment to say, because I actually would say the opposite. I'm in the Jewish community, and there's a lot of Jewish people I know who do not put Jewish people first. They put for the greater good of this or for that.

But it goes to show- It does. It really goes to show. That's just one example of where people have reached a conclusion that's an errant conclusion, focusing on where we're different instead of where we're the same. If you focus on we're the same, it becomes obvious. Well, hey, if there's 10 people and we're all sharing this space, we should make this space the best we can make it.

Exactly.

But that's not how people think. Instead, we assume that Mexicans are different than Americans, and we assume that the Chinese are bad, and we assume that this is how the United States ended up having Japanese internment camps inside the United States for people who were Japanese living in the United States. We focus on all these wrong things. I look at the world through a lens of what are human beings doing to other human beings and why are they doing it? It's fascinating to me how often the reason that we treat each other so inhumanely is because we've been persuaded, manipulated, or motivated to do so.

Who is doing the manipulation and the persuading?

We all are. We all are. Because we are not asking ourselves the question, what is the outcome that we want? Think about the family unit, the mom and the dad who have a two-year-old. How many different ways are they manipulating that two-year-old? They're manipulating them to eat a certain food, to go to bed at a certain time, to not yell at mom and dad. They're literally trying to shape everything. Why are they trying to shape everything? Because they've carefully thought out what they want that child to be when that child is 30? No, they haven't thought about the outcome. They think the outcome is, I want to get a good night's rest tonight. Well, you can get a good night's rest tonight manipulating your child, but then when your child's 25 and all they've ever known is how to listen to you, how is that child We're ready to be a contributing member of society? Whereas I have literally seen clients completely transform their behavior by asking themselves, am I raising my kid for them or am I raising my kid for me?

Well, most people would say they're raising it. They would never admit raising it for them. But they are. Yeah. You have kids, right? I have two. Two kids. How old are your kids?

Twelve and eight.

Twelve and eight? Okay. Mine are 10 and 12. Beautiful ages, right? They're good ages. Yeah. I don't know. I was looking at your summer that I some of your stuff, and it says that you want to leave the US because you don't like what's going on here. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, I want to leave the US not necessarily because I don't like what's going on here, or not necessarily because I like what's going on somewhere else better than here, but because my children have only ever known the United States.

Oh, well, that's different. That's not the same thing.

Correct. But click bait is different, right? Very different. So my children have lived abroad for a year, and they have traveled abroad pretty significantly. But they're getting to the age now where they're being conditioned by their community. They're getting conditioned by the average American experience, by what they hear at school, by what they see on their tablets, by what they hear from their friends. And that's shaped by what their friends say and what their teachers say, which is shaped by the neighborhood that we live in and the culture that we live in.

Do you like school then? Like traditional school? No.

I've homeschooled both of my kids since they were born. This is the first year that my daughter ever went to a formal school, and that was in large part because she was just born to go to school. We were very, very particular in picking a private school that had the same values and behavioral freedoms that we wanted for her so that they would help her find her own way. But even still, we were planning on leaving the country and pulling her out of that school.

Really? Wait a second. This is important for me anyway. You met your wife, who's also a CIA agent. Were you guys dating when you're both in the CIA? Then what agent was she?

She was what's known as a targetter. She came on as a trainee just like I did, but her training track was taking her to be a human intelligence targetter. Human intelligence targetters are targetters. They're people who find human targets. When they find those human targets, they determine if those human targets are targets for collection, meaning that target has secrets that we want to collect, or whether they're targets for neutralization, which means we need to kill that target.

Well, she has a cool job. Why is she not doing this type of interview?

She She has an anxiety disorder as well.

Really? Yeah. Hold on a minute. Your wife, who is like a covert CIA agent, finding target, and that she has the- Correct.

She has an anxiety- That's what made her so good at the job.

Because she was Hyper vigilant, hyper focused, or because she don't want to make a mistake.

She could work long hours. She was very diligent. She double and triple-checked her work. She would never leap to conclusions. She was just as wired as I was to need external validation. She's also on that fucked up scale, but just in a different way. Whereas for me, I needed novelty. I needed unpredictable. I needed an open space and more danger than I could really even identify. She needed a closed room with no windows and a database of anything she could possibly have interest in and nobody to interrupt her for 16 hours. We needed different things, but we were still out for the same outcome. We still needed that attaboy, that pat on the back, that you're changing history moment.

She would actually go and find targets. How would she do it?

She would do it all through confidential databases, clandestine databases, stolen databases. When you hear about a data breach, have you ever thought about why there's a data breach? No. Nobody ever does, because the data breach becomes data that goes into some other tool that you can use to cross-reference. When the Chinese come and break into our city bank data, you're like, Oh, well, clearly they're trying to steal people's money. No. What they're looking for is they're looking for connections between people. They're looking for people's home addresses. They're looking for their history of transactions. They're looking for information, what we call a data lake. They're looking for information inside the data lake that helps them to create some operation. That's exactly what my wife used to do for CIA.

How long was she there for?

Same as me. We entered duty the same week, and then we actually We left service the same week as well.

By coincidence?

No, we left together. But it was coincidental that we joined at the same time. We joined at different times, but our training dates aligned because she had an anxiety disorder. When she was supposed to show up the first day. She had a nervous...

Like a panic attack?

Yeah, panic attack. Ended up going to the hospital, ended up spending a week and a half in the hospital getting IV fluids and everything else because she couldn't go to work. Of all the places she ever thought she would work, she Never thought she would work at CIA. My wife used to work for a nonprofit called Jewish Family Services.

Yeah. Your wife's Jewish?

No, she's Buddhist. My wife is a Buddhist social worker who worked for a Jewish nonprofit in Florida because that's what she wanted to do with her life. She wanted to dedicate herself to helping underprivileged people who were trying to reintegrate into society, people who were refugees, people who were in some way, shape, or form needed help. The first company, the first non-profit to hire her was the Jewish Family Services. Wow. That's where she came from. She was recruited by CIA out of that. She was not trying to work for CIA. She thought CIA was the devil, But she was also $80,000 in law school debt. Cia was like, Hey, we see that you have $80,000 in law school debt. If you come work for us for five years, we'll forgive your debt. We'll pay for it.

How did they even find her?

The same way that they find all of us. There's somebody who spots you.

I know you explain that. How did she get found?

She was applying for government jobs, but her government jobs were different than my government jobs. She was looking for a stable Health and Human Services, Government Accountability Office, Department of Transportation. She was trying to go anywhere in the US government except CIA.

What made both of you leave?

We wrote a book about our most significant mission together, the book Shadow Cell that we were talking about earlier. During that operation, we got pregnant. We weren't trying not to. We weren't trying to get pregnant, but we found out that we were pregnant. We were undercover on an operation and pregnant together. As soon as we found out we were pregnant, we started communicating with CIA and we're like, Hey, there's a baby coming in nine months. We're not leaving the op. We're going to stay here and we're going to do what we have to do. But we're going to need your help when the baby comes so that you can give us the space to focus on being parents for a year or two so that we can get this kid into school. Because what we don't want to do is It's like, leave them with a Filipina babysitter 18 hours a day and then find out a year later that they think that the Filipina is mom and they don't recognize us. We start telling CIA, Hey, we're going to plan for this. Cia says, That's wise. You should have a plan for what you're going to do postpartum.

We want to take care of Ghi. We want to take care of you. That's good. Well, then the baby actually comes. Once the baby actually comes, CIA's story changes. All of a sudden now it's, Well, you guys are too important to the mission. Family has to come second. Mission always comes first. You knew that when you signed up. So you can't stop traveling. You can't stop this. We're not going to slow down. You just had this fantastic operation overseas. How can you just stop for two years to raise your kid? That's not going to work. Well, we realized in that moment that CIA's interests were not the same as our interests. I came from a very difficult childhood. I did not want my children to have a difficult childhood. I grew up without a father. I didn't want my kids to grow up without a father. My wife had the opposite experience. She had a very enriching, very loving household, and that is exactly what she wanted to her children, too. Cia was putting us in this box where they seemed to assume that we were going to put country before we put family, and that's just not how we were wired.

This was 2014. I would argue that what my wife and I were feeling was pretty culturally consistent with what many people were feeling at that age in that time frame. We were not putting career before everything. That was an older generation that used to do that. We were not unquestioning of authority. We would question authority. It was a previous generation that didn't question authority. We weren't out for the retirement stipend. We were out for building a life that had purpose and meaning. Cia miscalculated the cultural priorities that we had. As a result, when they gave us no other choice, we were like, Well, then we're just going to resign. We're just going to leave.

Wow. The CIA not keep up with the cultural times and evolve with the new way people are doing or conducting?

That's not just CIA, that's federal government. Federal government does a very poor job of understanding the intersection between generational development, generational changes, and priorities, because the government really doesn't understand how anybody doesn't think the government's the most important thing. How could you not think that working in the government is great? How could you not think that working in the government is the best job ever? How could you not want to work for CIA? They can't even fathom that because they're not a professional incentivized organization. It's not like Booz Allen or SpaceX or anybody else. They have to create a work environment that people want to work in. The government has never had to do that. The government has always been the place where you work when you're nationalistic or when you want stability.

The people who work in the overt positions, are they allowed to tell people they work for the CIA? Absolutely. It's just the covert Correct. Okay. Then what about for you? What would you say is your top skill now? What are you a master at now because of all of this?

I wouldn't call myself a master of anything. I think I'm a constantly evolving student like so many of us. I will say that the thing that I'm given the most credit for is my ability to communicate complex ideas into simple tools, like simple explanations.

Well, because what would you... Okay, so for the at For the average person listening, like a civilian, I still want to know some tactical things that people can get better at to help them with being a leader, with decision making, with finding the career they want. What are some things that are blind spots that we're not even thinking about that we can improve?

One of the biggest blind spots is something that I call perspective versus perception. I told you the story about how my dad used to say, perception is everything. Perception is actually not everything. Cia taught me the truth of it. I would love to teach my dad this now if he would be receptive, which he probably isn't in his 80s.

Do you talk to your dad now?

No, I haven't talked to him in a long time. But perception is how you see the world around you. That's perception. We all live in our own perception. The person who's trying to get a new career, the person who's trying to build a relationship, the person who's trying to save a marriage, the person who's trying to reach their child, the person who's trying to finish college, they wake up every day in their own perception. They execute the day in their own perception, eating when they're hungry, going when they are ready to go, showering when they want to shower, going to sleep when they want to go to sleep, reading what they want to read, watching what they want to watch, talking about what they want to talk about. That's how we all live our life in our perception. Well, CIA taught us that to gain power over other people, you need to step out of your perception and step into a of perspective. Perspective means collecting the objective information in the environment around you and then using that as your foundation of truth, not your perception. If I'm sitting there talking to a person, I want to understand how they view the moment that we're in.

Because if I don't try to gain that perspective, I will be trapped in my own perception, assuming that I know what's happening in this moment. Does that make sense?

Yes.

That is one of the biggest tools that we can give people because 99. 9% of people naturally default to their own perception or their own perspective. Excuse me, their own perception.

I know. To get out of our own perception and seeing the perspective of somebody else.

Correct. For example, I know that in this room you're hot, you feel warm because you took off your sweatshirt and- Oh, yeah, I threw it on the treadmill.

Yeah.

And that was a multi-step process for you to do that. I feel like the room is comfortable. So my perception is that the temperature in the room is comfortable. But if I assume that that's the truth, then I'm going to have to assume that there's something wrong with you for taking off your warmer layer. But if I instead change my perspective, I'm like, Oh, she thinks the room's hot. Now that gives me a chance to change the temperature in the room, ask somebody else to change the temperature in the room, offer you a cold drink. And now these are all things that you are also already thinking about. And when I reflect them to you, you start to feel validated. You start to feel like I'm understanding you without you even having to say anything.

What if you're dealing with something that's not so benign, the temperature in the room? If you're dealing with a real life issue or a decision or a perspective, perception that's very, very different.

Okay. I actually deal with this quite a bit. I don't know what example you have in your mind, but one of the first thing that comes to my mind is when bosses have fire employees. Okay. Right? So the boss calls an employee into the room. The employee is obviously there with a very different expectation than why the boss is there. Right? Yeah. And many bosses struggle with this because they feel guilty about taking the person's job, and it's going to cause him so much stress, and it's not even the boss's decision. It's what he was told to do on a Friday at four o'clock. It's a very difficult position. What I always try to tell them to do is, Hey, put yourself in your employee's shoes. Take your perspective, take your perception of the situation away and dawn the perspective of the actual situation. It's Friday. How does your employee feel on a Friday? It's four o'clock. How does your employee feel on a Friday at four o'clock? What are they thinking about? They're thinking about logging off. They're thinking about going home. They're thinking about a nice weekend with their family. They're thinking about all sorts of things that are completely different than what you are thinking about in that moment.

If you really want to get this situation, you want to connect with your employee first. It's Friday. You've done great work all week. You must be excited about getting home. What are you doing this weekend?

Then you're going to fire them after that?

Absolutely. Because what the boss is actually afraid of is making the employee feel bad when they get the bad news.

Well, they're going to feel bad. It doesn't matter if you ask them how they're excited about their... If you ask me, Am I excited about the weekend? I said, Yeah, I'm so excited. And then you're like, Okay, well, you're fired. That doesn't make it better.

If you do it that way, you're right. It doesn't make it better. No. But if you validate, if you understand what they're doing, maybe what they're excited about has nothing to do with what you're excited about. Maybe what they're going to say is, Yeah, I was. I mean, really, I'm just stressed out because I'm going to go have to do work all weekend because I'm so far behind and there's no way to get out of this and I'm going to miss my son's soccer game. But it's going to be okay because he's got 10 more soccer games this season, whatever else. You have no idea. This is the whole point of perception and perspective. You have zero idea what they're actually thinking until you step out of your perception and get into the actual objective truth of the situation. You do not lose when you gain more information and more perspective in a situation. You can change the words that you use, you can change your framing, you can change how you share the news, you can change when you share the news. You have lots of power when you gain perspective. But if you're trapped in your perception, you're just sitting there sitting there worried the whole time.

Then you stumble through this whole thing where it's like, Hey, corporate decisions have been made and you've been downsized, and I'm sorry to tell you that, but that's the way it is, and you need to clear your desk out by five o'clock. To the other person, guaranteed, that will make them feel like you're against them. That will make them feel horrible. But if you take the time to gain some perspective, maybe what you can say is, Hey, the company has been going through some hard times lately, and as a result, they're selecting people that have to be let go early. You're on that list, but I want you to know I've already considered three recommendations that I think you should go work for. I'm happy to write you a recommendation letter. The company is requiring that I give you this information before five o'clock today, but you're welcome to stay in your desk as long as you need to. If you need any help over the weekend, give me a call. Completely changes the feeling of the same feeling.

All right. I like that one. Give me another one. I like that one.

What I'm trying to get across is that when you put yourself in someone else's shoes, my kids.

No, no. That one I got, the perception perspective. Another difficult situation. I want another thing that someone that might have a blind spot on that can be helpful for them. So there's a- Decision making for negotiation.

Yeah, that's exactly where I was going. I was telling you earlier about something called a core emotion. Core emotion being the one driving emotion. There's a separate entity, a separate behavioral practice that's called the core motivation. We all a core motivation as well. There's four primary motivations, and they fall into an acronym called RICE. Reward, Ideology, Coerasion, and Ego. R-i-c-e. Reward, Ideology, Coerasion, and Ego. All of us are motivated by all four of those motivations to different extents at different times in our lives. Reward is, of course, something that you want, and you're motivated to get what you want. Ideology is what you believe in, and we're, of course, motivated to do what we believe in. Coercion, the letter C, is all the things that cause us guilt or shame, or embarrassment, or humiliation. We're motivated not to feel guilty, not to feel ashamed, not to feel sad. Then E, ego, we're all motivated to personify and be interpreted as a way that we want to be seen, whether we want to be seen as strong, or we want to be seen as patient, or we want to be seen as giving or forgiving, or we want to be seen as courageous.

So all of us have all four of these motivations at play, just like we all have the six primary emotions always at play. But each of us is primarily motivated by one of those four motivations at any given time above all the others.

Do you think that people can learn, or is it more innate to be emotionally intelligent?

I would say that you have to learn to be emotionally intelligent more so than have it be an innate skill. And it's because emotional intelligence requires you to not only be self-aware of your emotions, but empathetic enough to recognize the emotions of another person. That's hard to do that automatically. Usually, it takes effort to be able to classify, identify, and characterize the way that those emotions blend.

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It's true. When you stop talking, it forces the people around you to start talking. And oftentimes, they haven't thought about what they want to say before they speak because they're just trying to fill the silence. So it's a great tool to get people to start sharing more than they thought they would share because they haven't thought about what they would say in silence. They've thought about how they would respond to your questions, but they haven't thought about they would respond to silence.

But what if someone's shy? I'm highly sensitive because I'll talk because I don't want to make the other person uncomfortable that they don't have to carry the conversation. So to speak.

So when people are shy, you start to understand how people respond to silence in different ways. Yeah.

It is awkward.

It's awkward to everybody, but the way that they alleviate the awkwardness is different. Some people alleviate the awkwardness by talking. Others alleviate the awkwardness by doodling in their notepad. Others alleviate the awkwardness by turning to their cell phone. Others alleviate the awkwardness by spinning in their chair. But people start to manifest signs of discomfort.

Well, I think also we're living in a time when people are so socially inept because they're so used to being on their phones or when they have they'll scroll TikTok or whatever, so they don't know how to interact. So it's even more difficult sometimes. So people are not talking.

Right. We're not living in an era where people are getting better at social skills. No. We're living in an era where people are getting worse at social skills, which makes the training of social skills all the more valuable.

So much more valuable. Do you teach these to people?

Absolutely. Just like we've been teaching them all day today.

Yeah. Like body language, stuff like that. What are a couple of key body language things that would be important for people to look out for?

So again, I'll use you as a guinea pig, right? The position that you're in right now, it's a very closed position.

It is?

It's a very closed body language position.

I thought it was being very open.

No, you got your hands crossed in front of you and you have your feet crossed underneath you. Okay, sorry. You don't have to... Your feet are still crossed.

Oh, damn.

You don't have to change the way that your body is, but your body language is helping me to make an assessment about how you might be feeling in the moment, right? I get the impression that from your closed body language, what you're actually doing is you're trying to get in as many questions as you can get in in this last segment of the podcast because you realize that you haven't been addressing all the questions that you wrote earlier. No, no, no. So there's all this mental energy going into it, which is making your body close off. That would be my assessment of what's happening with the closed body language.

That's your perception.

That's my perception.

Perception. Interesting.

So that is what we teach with body language, closed and open body language, and then other indicators from how people touch their face to their blink rate to whether or not they interrupt or how they speak. And that's all nonverbal cues before we get to the verbal cues of what they say, the frequency that they speak, the content of what they're saying.

You know what I find interesting? I think body language is way more effective than just what people say in words. I'm always watching people, I'm always psychoanalyzing how they're sitting or how their face is when I'm talking to them versus words, because words are very easy. Anyone could say words. But what you said earlier, I found interesting. It's very hard to do for liars, right? Like making your... You said two things. You got to have your cues, your- Verbal and nonverbal cues. Verbal and nonverbal cues match. That's very difficult to learn how to do that. So you're probably a master at figuring that. You probably can spot a liar very easily because of that.

Again, I'm not going to claim to be a master, but- Someone's very good at it. Yeah, but I've learned and practiced more of the skills than the average person for being able to identify a liar, but also to create lies that appear as truths.

How long were these missions? Because you said you and your wife were on these long mission. How long is a mission?

They're always different lengths. So a long mission Mission might be multiple years living and working undercover in an environment that is intentionally crafted. But a short mission could just be a few days. I mean, a really short mission could even be a few hours, really, where you could theoretically just Donna what we call a throwaway alias, which is just... Most of us have used throwaway alias. If you've ever given somebody a phone number and said your name was not what the real name was and your phone number was not what the real phone number is, that's a throwaway alias. It's completely fake. There's no backstopping. There's no reality behind it, but it helps you get through the outcome that you desire, which is getting the guy to go away, right?

Right, exactly.

So throw away aliases are very easy operations. You could do that, walk out your door and go to the Starbucks and just order a coffee in a different name, and you've got to throw away alias operation. But more complex and sophisticated operations where you're actually shaping cover legends, cover identities, alias documentation, et cetera, those are usually for longer term operations. It is rare to have a mission go longer than three years.

That's so long.

Yeah, that's why it's so rare, because for someone to be in that level of stress for that long, it starts to have long term mental effects on them. As their mental capacity diminishes, the risk of the operation going upside down increases.

What was that operation? Do you have a completely different name, a completely different everything? Are you trying to get information out of somebody? Is that what you're trying to do? Did your wife pick a target, and then you have to go in and get them? How does it go?

I mean, that's exactly it. Our book, Shadow Cell, walks you through everything that you just talked about. So cool. Yeah. It literally walks you through how we identify targets, how we approach those targets, how we go about cleansing our cover alias. So even when you travel from point A to point B, if you're traveling to, let's just say, Turkey, and you're going to be a certain person in Turkey, and you're traveling from the United States, do you take a direct flight from the United States to Turkey? If you do, do you leave the United States in your real name, or do you leave the United States in your alias name? And then what does that mean for your footprint in Turkey? So if you leave the United States in your real name, you land in Turkey in your real name name, and then you dawn an alias. Now, if the Turkish police look for you, there's no record of you ever coming into the country. If you leave the United States in your alias name and you land in Turkey and the Turkey authorities ever go look for you, now they see that your alias came from the United States.

So you have to have a way of cleansing your route. So what we'd go over in shadow cell is how you might leave the United States and go to Mexico. So you leave the United States in one name, arrive in Mexico in that name, and then you swap identities. So you leave Mexico to go to Turkey. So now when Turkey looks for you, they see that you came from Mexico. But when the Mexican government goes to look for you, they don't find you at all because you didn't arrive in Mexico in that alias. Alias. You left Mexico in that alias. But the Mexican government and the Turkish government are unlikely to cooperate. So now you've essentially protected your American identity from the Turks.

So could you have gotten killed on any of these missions?

We all can get killed on any of our missions. And you're committing espionage. Espionage is one of the few criminal offenses that are consistent worldwide. They are illegal everywhere, they are punishable by death everywhere, and they're non-extraditionary everywhere, which means that if you're arrested in a foreign country committing espionage, they do not have to send you back to your home country. They can try you and kill you in their country because that's where you committed espionage. It's one of the few categories of crime that has that harsh of a penalty everywhere.

Do you miss working there?

I don't miss it. My wife misses it quite a lot. Really? Yeah. I don't miss it because since starting my own business on the outside, I have a bigger impact. I can meet more people and change more lives tangibly. So my external validation is so much easier to achieve right now. I can get it from customers. I can get it from clients. I can get it from corporations that I teach. I can get it from claps in an audience.

Exactly.

I can get it from views on a podcast, right? Yeah, you get that. So I'm so much more independent now than I ever was when I was at CIA. But my wife misses the secrets. She misses really knowing what was going on in the world because she She really liked that stuff. I never really cared about the combustion pressure rate inside the left engine of the J20 Chinese jet fighter. I didn't care about that. She did.

She did care about that. What do you teach the corporate people? If I were to hire you, if I was a company, what would I bring you in for, typically?

The top two things that I get hired for with companies is talking about sales process, because all sales is, is persuasion and influence, reading body language, being able to close the gap between lead and sale as quickly as possible. And that's the same thing that CIA does. Human intelligence operations is really nothing more than selling treason in exchange for secrets. It's just salesmanship. You're selling a Patriot on the idea of giving you secrets favorites, which makes them a traitor. And in exchange for their treason, you're going to give them something that they want, whether it's Gold Bullion from India, or whether it's Johnny Walker green if they're in North Korea, or a visa to get their kid into an American college. Whatever it takes, you're just making a sale. Then the second thing that we get hired for is HR-related things like communication, leadership training, et cetera. But the HR department recognizes that it can be very difficult to inspire or encourage people to take action, and they're always looking for credible voices. My voice is one that is deemed to be more credible.

Yeah, based on your experience, for sure. If nothing else, it's cool to hear from someone who... Still, because everyone loves the movie, it's Mission Impossible. I don't care what anybody says. Even though it's not the same as a movie, those are the movies that people are so... Everyone loves James Bond and Ethan Hunt and all these things. So even if you're not really, you're the closest that we have to a real life- Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne.

Even though there is no such thing as a real life. I know. James Bond or Jason Bourne, and that's okay. But we should all be very happy that there are people out there who are doing the real Because the real job is genuinely dangerous, and it is genuinely thankless. The men and women who serve in the ranks of CIA really are just being manipulated because they have the same mental issues that we all have. They're looking for someone to validate their hard work.

What's the typical time frame that people stay covert operators?

It's usually somewhere between 9 and 12 years.

That's a long time.

It's a long time. And that's three to four years of that, you're in training, and then you're operating for multiple tours. Generally speaking, a tour lasts somewhere between one and three years, depending on if it's a high-risk tour, like a warzone, or a low-risk tour, collecting secrets from Europe, thing. After an officer's third tour, so approximately six years of active service, that's usually when they start to be pulled out of more sensitive clandestine operations and put into more overt operations. Overt operations might look like something that we call liaison operations. If you're working with the French military, the French military might know that you're the CIA representative. So it's quasi-overt. You've been declared to the French, but your mortgage at home still says your cover identity. So you start to get moved out of the covert world slowly. And then by the time you're a senior officer, you're a full on overt CIA officer.

Do most people eventually move from covert to overt?

Historically, the vast majority of CIA officers stay CIA until the day they retire. Really? And then in order for them to continue working post-retirement, which many do, they retire on a Friday and they come back to work on a Monday as a contractor, making three times as much money, right? Yeah. That's the government door. But in order for that to happen, they have to be overt. Their cover has to be rolled back. So in their last five or so years, they become overt officers. Then they retire. Then they take a job with Kaki or Mantek or Bruce Allen Hamilton or Raytheon, and then they're right back in the next day as a former CIA officer who's now on a Raytheon contract.

Oh, my gosh. So who When you were there, the 14th, so you were under who? President Obama, was it?

President Obama. Right before President Trump.

Okay. What did you guys think of President Trump and Obama when you were there?

So President Obama actually had a really good reputation with CIA because of things that the American people didn't realize he was doing. He's one of the most lethal presidents in history. He used CIA's covert action arm to kill a lot of people. That's part of how he got Osama bin Laden on his watch, too. He exercised the rights and privileges of the President in his utility of CIA. We love that because that's us getting to do the stuff that we get to do. Following the President's directives, Carrying out secret operations, lots of high fives and fist bumps and parties on Fridays. That was a great time to be at CIA. Really? Then when Donald Trump took over in 2016, my wife and I had already left. We left in the last two years of the Obama administration. But our peer group that stayed behind come 2016, when there was such a hubris between CIA and the White House, CIA was claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian collusionist, and Donald was saying CIA was broken, they had no job. If they don't serve the President, they really have no purpose. Donald Trump knew that, which is why he stopped utilizing CIA, and he started going to contractors to be his intelligence collection platform.

You saw this massive movement of people quitting and resigning from CIA. We saw our friends who didn't leave in 2014, then leave in 2016, along with thousands of other people. That was a very hard time for CIA, and it was a very hard time for CIA officers who left CIA.

Wow. So it was a whole disruption. Were you surprised when he got reelected?

I wasn't surprised when he was reelected. I have been surprised at how different his relationship is with CIA this time around. Really? Yeah. With Director Radcliffe in place, CIA is very quiet now about Donald Trump. They've learned their lesson.

Yeah, they have learned their lesson for sure. Well, he's just quiet. He's making everyone... If you want to work with him, you better play ball the way he wants to play ball.

Correct. Which is not that different from how other presidents have behaved. The difference is that Donald Trump is very open about that, whereas most other presidents try to keep behind closed doors.

Do you like Donald Trump?

I don't know that I like or dislike any president. I respect the office. That's a shit job. Being the President of the United States is a really shit job. You never know what you're going to be thrown into. You can't deliver on promises you made on the campaign trail. 100% of the time, you can't do it because you don't even know what the real state of the world is.

You're not in. You're not even in the sandbox. How do you even know?

Correct. What I find with Donald Trump is that his strategy in the White House is refreshing to me in that he's just breaking all the old shit that didn't work. He's not necessarily fixing anything, but by breaking it, somebody has to fix it. It's like going into your kitchen and and hating your countertop and hating your dishwasher and hating your refrigerator, but you just keep using it. And we've all been there. We're like, I hate this fucking refrigerator, but you keep using it and you keep watching your milk spoil, and you keep watching your food spoil and you keep watching. But you don't replace the refrigerator. Donald Trump comes into the same kitchen. He's like, I don't like that refrigerator. And he smashes it with a sledgehammer. And then he walks out of the kitchen. And then you're stuck there and you're like, well, now we have to fix the refrigerator.

That's 100% true. That's a great analogy, actually. I love that. Oh, my gosh. Okay, hold on. I know you've been sitting here forever. I don't have to ask you all these questions. Would you just come back again?

Yeah, I'll absolutely come back. You're a ton of fun.

Are you kidding me? Oh, thank you. Can I feel I was like, I was not... I didn't look at what... I actually have two questions off. Oh, I do want to ask you one question. I would be remiss, okay? I have to. I want to talk to you about the Epstein files. What do you think of this? I know that you don't work for the CIA anymore. But what do you think is going on with this whole situation?

I actually don't believe that there's an association between CIA and the Epstein files, really, at all. I would argue that when I look at the case and I look at the details, Epstein looks much more like an FBI intelligence source, what's known as a clandestine or covert informant. He looks much more like an FBI CIA than like a CIA asset. Because what Epstein was connected to, the personalities, the criminal activity that he was a part of, that network is very, very valuable to FBI, but not so valuable to CIA. Because FBI's job is to enforce the law. And many of the connections that Jeffrey Epstein had were with American politicians, American businessmen who were carrying out illegal activity, suspected illegal activity, outside of the United States. Well, that's the prime directive for FBI, is to find corrupt politicians, to find people who are abusing and breaking American laws that are in positions of power. As much as nobody wants to hear it, in the eyes of the Justice Department, criminal sexual offenses are not as important as criminal corruption cases. Right. So the Justice Department would look at his activity with underage girls, and they would say, That's illegal, but we can forgive that if you help us with this.

And then that would put him into a position where he's essentially on in a contracted protective state with the US Department of Justice, meaning they will not hold him accountable for his crimes as long as he provides us information and input that leads to the arrest of somebody else.

So you think there's a big possibility he was an FBI mole?

An FBICI, yeah. An FBI informant. And when you start to look at all the evidence through that lens, it creates a much more realistic high probability explanation than anything else that we've seen. Even when you think about when government officials have come out and said that he's an intelligence asset, intelligence assets is a generic term. If he's helping in any intelligence capacity, that doesn't mean CIA, that can mean any intelligence capacity. If he was a clandestine informant for FBI, that is an intelligence capacity. He could have been an intelligence asset for FBI, just like he could have been an intelligence asset for DEA, an intelligence asset for Homeland Security.

But he was technically in jail, though. He was in Correct. Then who killed him?

That's what we don't know.

What do you think? What's your opinion?

I don't think it's likely that he killed himself.

Oh, definitely not.

I don't think that's very likely. Then the question becomes, if he didn't kill himself, then who killed him? This is all assuming that he was killed, which there's only one person, two people who witnessed the body, one of which was his brother, the other one was the person who did the autopsy, right? So only two people have verified that the body was even captured, and then none of us have... There's been no validation of it since then.

Oh, right. So no one found the autopsy person and the brother were the only two people?

The brother who identified him, correct. Technically, there were guards who moved the body, but nobody validated the body belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, except for, as I understand it, the brother who visualized it and confirmed it to the coroner who did the autopsy.

So what does that mean?

It means that body could have been somebody else. If you want to go to the extreme conspiracy theory, he could still be out there, or for whatever reason, they didn't want the body to be identified. They didn't want the body to be accessible by anybody else. So they found the body and then whisked it away, which why would you do that? So there's all these open- Didn't we see him with the neck and the whole...

He looked pretty dead. But then again, I guess these days you could do anything and everything.

I think that's one of the big open questions is just, how much do we trust that the body that was recovered was valid validated to be his and was demonstrably proven without a shadow of a doubt to be his. We don't know. Why was there missing footage? There's so many open questions about the Epstein case, then I think that's why it continues to permeate media. But In my opinion, he didn't kill himself. So that gives us either he was killed by someone else or he is alive. Of the two, probability he's probably not alive. That would be a really big conspiracy to keep the guy alive. So then That only leaves that he was killed. So then it becomes who killed him and why was he killed? Was he killed? Because there is absolutely a very real culture in prison that pedophiles are harshly treated. So he could have been killed just because of his criminal offenses. But if he was in any way protected, which just based on his money, he should have been protected, how did they get access to him? Then if he was, in fact, implicated in some government corruption, anything, then that leads to the primary conspiracy theory that somebody killed him to quiet him.

What about that Giselle? Not Giselle. What's her name? Whatever.

Yes. The woman who was associated with him who supported the child, the human trafficking?

Do you think she has information? She's still in jail. You don't think she has a deal with Trump? Because no one's... Why have they not released the files and all the things?

Correct. I think that's all a valid question. The way that I look at this, it very much continues to look like he is protected as an information source for the US government.

Even dead, even if he was dead.

Yeah, because even though he might be dead, there are still thousands of other FBI, CIA CIs that are out there. There are people working on drug cases. There are people working on fentanyl cases. There are people working on child molestation, human trafficking, weapons smuggling. There's all sorts of CIs out there, and they've all been told the same thing, We will protect your role as a CI. We will keep that secret as long as you keep helping us with the case. So as soon as FBI says, Epstein was a CI, every other CI out there is going to be like, Fuck this. I'm done cooperating.

But if they're done cooperating, won't they just be thrown in jail?

Or try to escape. Either way, what FBI is trying to do is not arrest CIs. They're trying to arrest real big bad guys.

Right. They're using them as a conduit.

Correct. So if they lose the cooperation of their CIs, basically Basically, they shut down overnight. They have no cases anymore, and they can't let that happen. Because you have to think of how bad a crime must be for you to use a lower-level criminal to gain access to the network.

You don't have any friends in the inside telling you anything?

Do I? Yeah. Absolutely, I do. But I'm not going to talk about what they're telling me.

Well, you don't want to tell me right now on the podcast. Why not? No, but because I thought also Donald Trump, his name is all over the thing. I thought it's not coming up because he's trying to protect it, protecting himself.

I think that's what most people are thinking. Yeah, I think most people probably are assuming that Donald Trump is trying to protect himself. Without a doubt, Donald Trump is the person who would try to protect himself, but so did Biden, and so did Clinton, and so did Obama. So that's not anything unique about Donald Trump trying to protect himself and distance himself from drama.

And by the way, aren't they all in the Epstein files? Correct. Like, Deepak Chopra is in the- You're going to find Clinton in there. You're going to find- Yeah, Clinton's in there, too. It's not like he's the only Correct. But he was a good friend of his. You always saw him hanging out with him.

What's really going to be interesting to me is if the files are released, how frustrated are the American people going to be when they find out that releasing the files doesn't mean the public gets access to the files. Releasing the files means that the legislative branch gets access to the files.

Oh, really?

Yes. Oh, I thought. The public does not get access until after all of government has had a chance to go through and identify and redact any information that would compromise efforts of the government. So the justice department is going to redact anything that could compromise a case. The legislative branch is going to redact anything that's going to compromise them.

There's four people left on that list. Correct.

And then the public is going to have access, and they're still going to be like, Why is it redacted? I know. It's so true. It's like people don't understand how this works.

It's so crazy. Is she going to be let out of jail?

I have no idea. A lot of the law enforcement side of this is very much up in the air because they have to determine criminal intent, criminal prosecution. Then they have to go to court, then they have to prove it in front of a panel of their peers, and then they have to go through all the appeal processes. It's a long process to actually convict someone of a criminal offense.

But she's in jail this whole time.

I get it, but that's not the same thing as being convicted. You can be in jail and then be found innocent and let go.

But still, she's spending her time in jail, although she's pretty... Okay, I will let you go because I know, although I do have pages of questions, but that's fine. When are you coming back to LA?

I come back to LA multiple times a year. I'm actually hoping to come back again around Christmas time.

Again? Why so soon?

Because LA is very close to Colorado. Colorado is where home is. Yeah. Then, I mean, honestly, it's because I know how beautiful this city is during Christmas, and I would love to bring my eight-year-old daughter to LA to see Christmas in LA.

Oh, that's so cute. So you are a nice person, Ascaril. To my daughter. To your daughter, but not to everybody else. Just to a very core group of people. I get that. Okay, Andrew Bustamante. You don't have your book here. I should have brought mine, but it's called... Well, you can talk about it. It's called Shadow Cell. And it's available everywhere. And you are so interesting. You really are. You did not disappoint, even though, as you called it, I feel like I'm friends with you, and you're probably like, Who's her first name again? But thank you for being on this show. It's so nice to meet you. And you guys can find them on, obviously, Instagram. What's your name on Instagram? At Everyday Spy. At Everyday Spy. Okay. All right. I know it's been like 100 hours. Bye. Bye.