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 like, I'm like a giddy schoolgirl 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, we're going to, I'm so, I don't, I'm not even going to like give you any more than that. I just want to say thank you for being on the show. I am fascinated by you in every way. And what we do on these show, 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. And it helps people stay focused and, you know, kind of locked in. All right, let's get focused. This one has no caffeine too. Thank you for that. Yeah. Oh, I should actually be like this usually. Thank you. Do you like it? I can't drink more than like five a day. So it's good, right? Yeah, it's a lot smoother than I expected. It's really, it's super tasty, but I love them. But like I said, I can have like, because I do this podcast, I can't have them with every single. If I have like 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've loved, I really have been like a fan of yours for a very long time. Can we just kind of, can you kind of give like a very brief overview? I started the show by saying you are a covert CIA agent. What does that even mean? Who are you kind of just give me, give everyone like kind of like a very brief overview and then we're going to dive right in. Absolutely. So 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, they can say they work for CIA. Their paycheck comes from 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. So undercover operations are known officially as covert operations and the covert element of CIA is approximately 10% of the whole of CIA. So how long were you in 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. And did you start in the covert or were you in the overt and then get moved to covert? So 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, so how does that happen? So now you're actually allowed to speak about it? You're allowed to speak about your affiliation. 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 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 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. And this is what's so... Damn, I wanted to know the real... the tea what's happening. Well, I mean, even if you did want to know, it's really not that interesting. So 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 weapons 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, lots of time for research today. 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 kind of sabotage they put together, all of that is for the most part available. Right. Okay. 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 kind of detail that's classified. So 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? Yeah. You collect classified information through 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 start from the beginning. You're going to be here until tomorrow, until next Tuesday. I want to know how you got in. How you got into the CIA, what do 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 1 Special Operations Unit. So 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. So I served. It's like building a career anywhere else. 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, and as you go through this process of being trained for your career, they identify other talents that you might have, language, creativity, mission planning, lying in disguise. So 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. So what did you start as and what was your special traits that got you into the Special Activities Unit? Well, I mean, 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 Lamborghinis. They don't happen at five-star hotels. They happen in shit. Yeah. They happen in dark alleyways. They happen in criminal corners. They happen in, you know, sites of illegal boxing matches or illegal dogfights. That's where espionage happens. So the people who are successful in the world of espionage have to be able to thrive in those kind of seedy environments. They're kind of shitty people. One of my special traits is I'm kind of a shitty person. Really? Like, 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 kind of on the leading edge of, legalized criminal activity. I love that you just said that. I mean, you probably have very comfortable saying that you probably said that 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, you know, just kind of, not unwell is the wrong word, but like just... Unbalanced. I would agree. Cold. Yeah, I don't think your, 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 mean, 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, you know, accused of being emotionally abusive or physically abusive or any of that other maladjusted stuff. So I always just kind of 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. And I just remembered even as like an 11 year old thinking, no, but 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 kind of piled up. Life isn't fair. Like, 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? And I just saw all these these inconsistencies and what I was being taught versus how life actually worked. And that caused me a lot of frustration and angst growing up. So I just tried to ignore both sides and navigate in between. That's also just being self aware. I mean, just being like practical and honest. Like the truth is there's a lot of jargon out there that's very PC to say like life is due to one that you, you know, to others how you want to be treated. But that's not really what life is. Life is not fair. There's no rhyme or 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 on to others as you would have done on to you. People can say that and then at the same time not due to others what they would want done to themselves. 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 kind of slap you in the face and 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. Right. 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 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 kind of 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. So 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. And that's what happened to me. And that's not special to me. Millions of us live outside of social norms because we have been through physical abuse, emotional abuse, 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. And then of course, once they identify you as a potential candidate, which they identify about 50,000 candidates a year, then they put them through the vetting process. And 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. And then they take those 50,000 candidates and whittle it down to about 300 new hires every year. So from 50,000, it goes down to about 300 every year for hiring. And then of the 50,000, are they being recruited by the CIA or are the people applying? There's three routes in. And the three routes are kind of broken up like this, about 60, 2020. 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 go to Texas A&M. Yeah. Right? There are a handful of schools around the world where really fucked up people go to those schools. That's just something that's appealing there. For Texas A&M, it's probably because they're like hyper-nationalistic and hyper-focused and go Aggies and all that other stuff, right? Auburn is another one of those universities where CIA recruits heavily from Auburn. University of Florida, party school, another school, completely different in terms of academic rigor than Texas A&M, but it's another hotspot for recruiting. So about 20% of people are literally pulled off of college campuses in their undergrad years, in their graduate school, or even during PhD years. And then the last 20% is clandestinely 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 education, they're succeeding in some volunteer 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 also, 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. Oh, the Air Force, I guess what I think. Yeah, yeah. So I was applying to leave the Air Force to go into volunteer service with the Peace Corps. And it was during... They thought you'd be good for the special covert CIA? That's, I didn't think I would be. But apparently, when you're going to make that transition from military to Peace Corps, it triggers a mass data kind of warning that tells the recruiters, hey, this could be a good fit. And 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 kind of person that's like, why not? Why not try? And 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 caller ID that's only the first three numbers of the phone. So it's only the area code 703. And the person says, hi, my name is whatever, Kate. We think you'd be a good fit for national security. Would you be interested in coming up to an interview? And 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. And 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, this, that is fake, right? That was a person probing me for my credit card number. That's like, that's identification theft for sure. And 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. So I had to decide like, well, I guess I'm going to tell my boss I'm taking the weekend off or I've taken a long weekend because I'm going to take this airplane ticket and I'm going to Virginia. And 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. And then inside the hotel was the next round of instructions. Go to this location at this time tomorrow, check in with this person. And that was literally how my entire interview process went one step at a time. And 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. So I did all that. And then I went into this waiting room and inside this way, it was a beige, like not impressive building. And inside this waiting room, there were like nine or 12 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. And we literally sat there like the most awkward people in dentist office that you could imagine. Right. And we waited while one at a time, somebody came out and called us back and somebody came out and called us back. You know, 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. And it was kind of like a big engine all day. So 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 an 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. Probably people thought it was bullshit. They were going to like say what you thought. I would think the same thing. So there's the people who show up and then in that interview, they kind of 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 showed leadership. Tell me about a big challenge in your life and all this kind of 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? And I was not. I was like, I don't know what I don't know anything about CIA other than what I see in the movies. And they were like, it's nothing like it is in the movies, blah, blah, blah. But then they explained to me like the NCS is the undercover arm of CIA. And based on your applications or based on your, 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, your dossier forward for consideration as a, 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 you explain that to people? So they actually start teaching you how to lie in that first interview. Where did they teach you? It's not really what they teach us as much as it's what they kind of coach us to come up with on our own. So for example, she was like, tell me, 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, and it was kind of surprised, but I'm looking for a job. And 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? Booz Allen, CACI, Mantek, 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 kind of 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, 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. 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. Right. 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. Right? 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. Right. 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. So they, did you know that instinctually though, or did that it was through the training and how they kind of like prodded you a little bit? Yeah. So I didn't know any of that instinctively. I think I thought I was a good liar, but I don't think I, I think I felt like a good liar as a kid and as a young adult, but I wasn't. I just was overconfident. Right. And 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, like mentally I could accept that lying was useful. So I had no problem learning the skill, whereas sometimes people have a moral issue with lying. So 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. And like, so would you consider yourself a nice person or just someone who's like pleasant, which means like you can sit in this interview and be nice and smile and be pleasant, but you're not really like a nice person, like kind. Are you a kind person? No, I'm not a kind person. I don't know that I would define myself as a nice person either. Yeah. I'm a very pragmatic person. Yeah. So there's, there's people, a very small group of people that I genuinely care about. Right. And then everybody else is kind of. You don't care. No, it's, it's not that I don't care. It's that they land on different levels of utility. Yeah. We have a funk, 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 at people at tasks as through a lens of operational utility, but I never had the term. Right. So 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. Right. 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. And there's people out there who 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 it's not just called an opportunist? And if you want to boil it down to some terms, right? Right. It's an opportunist. It just, it has to be something that is a benefit to you, not just the general opportunity. Well, no, but not if, but isn't the term opportunist like if I'm an opportunist, because I'm, I like, I like, I seek out opportunity that would benefit me. Then that's the same thing as the operational utility, basically. Here's, here's how I was kind of taught to see the two differently. Okay. People who are true opportunists pursue the path of least resistance. So 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, like one's fat and ugly, one's dashing and debonair, right? 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, 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 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. It's not the outcome, not the effort. Whereas true opportunism is about the effort. This is fascinating. I love it. So then they put you into the covert right away then. You got the job as the, what do you call that job? Yeah. So I was a clandestine service training. What does that mean? It means that you're a trainee going into clandestine operations. You do a very, 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. So 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. So they take you and they put you in an office and they tell you who your supervisor is and then boom, that's it. And 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, how to, like for things as boring as how you request leave, all the way to things as sexy as how you launder money. So you go through all these different kind of training programs that are between one and five days at a time, but essentially you learn by doing the work every day. Today's episode is powered by AMP. You know those days when you're just done. I mean the meetings, the kids, the to-do list, and you still want to move your body, but the gym feels a million miles away. That's exactly why I love my AMP. AMP is a smart, AI-powered strength training device that sits right in your home. It's super sleek, literally looks like you got it at the Apple Store, and it also counts your reps, it adjusts your weights for you, and you're always training under the perfect amount of tension. So whether you've got 15 minutes or 45, AMP adapts in real time to make every workout simple, effective, and completely personal. And the app is super cool too. It has hundreds of different workouts, strength, pilates, mobility, recovery, and it's so easy to use. It's literally been a game changer for me. I don't have to plan my workouts or wonder what I'm going to do. I just turn on my AMP and it takes care of the rest. And as a mom and a business owner and a podcaster, that convenience means I stay consistent and, you know, strength training, especially for women, is so key. For my hormone balance, longevity, and of course confidence. So you can see why I'm obsessed. Go to joinamp.com slash gen to learn more. That's joinamp.com slash gen 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. 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 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. So 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. So for example, if I have a case in Columbia 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 Columbia without having any affiliation with CIA of the United States. So that's called a procurement process. So 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 Columbia and nobody has any records of it on either side. And when you look at the transaction in between, there's no footprint that has America or the United States. So 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. And then you might have a third country organization, something in Ecuador, that claims responsibility for the gold from Sri Lanka. And then all you do is you take it from the Ecuadorian handling agent and smuggle it into Columbia, just like you smuggled it out of India to Sri Lanka. Where are you doing all this in an office? Where are you in the field doing things? I know you're not like a James Bond at the casino, but where are you kind of doing all these covert operations? So what happens with most clandestine operations is the person assigned the operation stays with the operation. So anywhere the operation goes, the primary mission planner or operator also goes. So 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. Like 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 the government were on signal and they were like talking about these like, you know, this huge government operation. And they're like talking basically on WhatsApp or signal. Was that shocking to you given the fact of how things you know go down normally like in the SCIF where people have to have so much protection? How can they just willy nilly be like 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 kind of 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. And 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. Oh. And that just continued to kind of digress and devolve into what we have now, which is basically Pete Hedzeth, who's the department of war secretary, just using his personal cell phone and signal. And signal is something that's 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 kind of digress, digress, digress. I mean, it's not acceptable. It's not okay. But at the same time, this is what, what makes government so difficult. Administrations all have their own rules and they're unspoken rules. It's not like, 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 is kind of rewritten. I don't think it should be that way. But at the same time, who's going to make the rule book that is going to evolve at the pace of technology? No, exactly. So that was like, but that's just like a stupid move anyway. I mean. Yeah, it was not, it was not a wise move. But I can see, I can see how it happened because it's just so much easier to do it on your phone. Right? Like, I mean, how much more, how much safer a signal than like what's up? Yeah, it 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. So when you want something to be more convenient, it moves away from being more secure. And when you want something to be more secure, it obviously is less convenient because everything has to land somewhere. So 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, it's absurd to me that that's like, but that's, I mean, that's what's actually kind of 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 this crazy details. I didn't do it. However, I guess I was on some kind of like, because I was on an email chain with the people, the White House, that's like, there was like a liaison in the White House who was the, who was emailing me. And they forgot to take me off of the like email like chains. So even though I wasn't involved for over a year, I was still in the White House. Over a year, I was getting all of these emails. It was so crazy to me that like, there's like, people assume a lot, right? People assume that because you're in this like particular position in a particular place that has a lot of like status or prestige, or you think a lot of like things around it to guardrails, I guess you would say. It's actually not true. That's what's really, like, it's like the, it's like the emperor has no clothes or the Wizard of Oz. Like it's like kind of like the bigger it is, the, the actually the worst it is in a way. And it goes to show, I think a big part of what we were talking about earlier with the actual discrepancy between what reality is. Right. And what we think it is. And they're not the same thing. No. And our thinking is conditioned into us from the time that we're very, very young, very little, right? 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, Right. You can't because you've been conditioned to think in a, 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, like you're like, you know, talk to your mom, you're a dad, you can, 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 conform. Conformity. Yeah. Which means like you're the, 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 or 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 Launchpad. Like 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 for external validation. And then CIA can become the single source for that external validation, right? They can become the secret organization that knows what you did in secret, that can then tell you secretly, you know, you're changing the world. Yeah. You know, you're the one who just changed the whole trajectory of history. You just transformed the future. And that's the kind of validation that keeps the 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. Like 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 that keeps us motivated. So 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 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? Did you meet, I guess you met her on the job. Yeah. She also covert or was she over? She was also clandestine. She was also covert. Okay. But what I was going to say is what did your other friends and family think you did? Did they, if you couldn't tell them you were working for the CIA, what did, what did they think you were doing? Well, I mean, 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. Cause 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. So, but most people, where'd your wife's family think? My wife's family thought that she was the CIA gave us cover organizations that we did work for. And within the CIA. No, no, no. Okay. So what did they say? You're working at, at Vaughns or you're working at Whole Foods? Like what were you doing? The, the, the kind of 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. So you know, admission impossible, you know, what's this, you know, what's his name in mission impossible. God, please help me. It's like one of my favorite movies of all time, but yeah, talking about his character. Anyway, Ethan Hunt. Yeah. Ethan Hunt was like, he like would count on the road, you know, certain things that was a really boring job that nobody would ever want to talk about or think about. Right. Was it similar? Like they'd give you the most boring jobs in the world. Correct. Like to do that. Also, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, were they CIA? Oh. Were they Delta? Yes. They were CIA. Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the movie with CIA and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV show currently is like this ambiguous secret organization. Oh, okay. Now, when I don't know if you know this, but when people are like recruiting for like Delta, do they look for the same things that they look for for CIA? They look for different things. And I am almost certain that a hundred percent of Delta recruitment comes from the army. You have to be active army before you can get pulled into Delta. And 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 skill set to do all the other stuff that they do. So if you had to kind of rack and stack, I would put Tier 1 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. That's one of them. But you're very articulate. Like you are explaining this very well, by the way. I'm glad. So, I mean, that must be part of the training, right? Like is that part of the... That is not. That's something that I found later on was kind of my natural skill set. You're very good at that. So, let's talk about the skills of intelligence. So what are some of the top skills that you think you learned working for the CIA that you can then apply to like real civilian life or the world? Yeah, there are a lot of skills that you learn at CIA, but the ones that are the 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. And those were the most useful skills that we learned at CIA. Give me an example. So let me get a very funny example. I do this often times with people. We are conditioned to make certain body movements just based off of what we encounter, right? So when we first met, I extended my hand, which even now, you know, I'm not trying to shake your hand, but you still feel the need to put your hand out. That's predictable directing human behavior, right? 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. And 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 kind of 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 mean, I like, I would go, I wouldn't 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. 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? Stand up, right? Because that's just what happens when you play the national anthem. When we say, when we say, you know, put your hand over your heart, people do take off your hat. People do. You don't even have to know why. If 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 they're still a personal bubble. Different national 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 kind of indicators that we're taught to look for and in very basic terms, because they go on and on. They go through, you know, 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. So that's so interesting to me. So like, what did you call it when you can move someone by doing that? Directing human behavior. No, but you're saying like putting your hand out, for example, in no way that I was going to do the same thing. What is that called? Yeah, we're predicting. Predicting, yeah. Directing human behavior, because I know that culturally this is going to be meaningful to you. So then do you have, are you always like a few steps ahead of anybody when you want them to do something? Like, are you very, you know it, you already know what's going to happen? Like, you have a plan. Like, 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. So like, 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? Kind of give me some context. Oh gosh. Yeah. Like if this is, 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. Right? Then I would, I would most likely tell you that when I was with Tom and Lisa, Lisa's making a home cooked dinner. She's making dinner tonight and I have to be back at their house at six o'clock and they wanted me to invite you to come along because I 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 be 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? None of that is real. Right. Okay, fine. So if it's not real, then I say yes, then what happens? So if it's not, so I'm getting you to come with me for something that isn't real. Right. Right. So now when I come to pick you up, I'll be like, well, Tom, 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, you would do a setup. Yeah, it's called a bait and switch. A bait and switch. That's a norm. That's a good one. Okay. How would someone then, if someone wants to land a job, how would they like get the person or actually let me start, let me, let me, instead of giving you scenarios, like I do a lot of these things on like how to be likable and how to be, how to develop your people skills, let's say, right? How 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. So you want to mirror back to them, their behaviors, their language, their vocabulary, their tonality, their nonverbal and verbal communication, their values. And so you're mirroring them. Correct. That's what the term that we use is 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. So you, so if I'm talking, you'll match my tone. And your vocabulary, your pacing, your volume. Okay. So then how about this? Okay. So what is it? Cause I see, 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, they get misidentified as being one in the same, right? 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, 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? Mm hmm. So persuasion has to happen in a moment where there's a connection between two people 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. And 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 together. Your brain sees it as all the same thing. So 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 bytes 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. You, your brain is telling your subconscious that already, even though there really isn't any proof that it's true. A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, 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 at like sitting in her podcast studio? You know what I mean? Like you just kind of came. This is like one of 50,000 podcasts you've probably done. Me, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so excited to have him. I love his content, right? It's and it's not necessarily something that I want to. I don't want to personally offend, obviously. Trust me, you're not personally offended 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. Like that's that's I'm actually taking it as like the information. So think about everybody who's read a book, right? Your favorite author, you feel like you know that. Yeah, you that the whole idea of celebrity is really just this concept on a massive scale. That's why we feel like we have a bond with our favorite actors or our favorite actresses. Yeah, why we feel like we understand our favorite journalists. That'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, you know, the the 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, like what are some of the tactile, like tactile or actionable things that you because you 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. Yeah, because let's just assume that somebody already knows that influence and persuasion are not the same thing. And let's go ahead and also assume that they already knew that persuasion was tied to emotion. So those are two big steps because the average person doesn't really understand that. But let's just go ahead and start there. So how do you teach someone the technical steps of persuasion? Once they understand that persuasion is based on emotion, right? You have to start teaching them how to identify emotional levers in their target. So you're you are kind of my guinea pig right now, right? Mm hmm. So when I 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. So 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. So there's something 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 you've already admitted that you've had a meeting with leadership in Israel, I could assume that 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 kind of emotional response. As long as I'm the one talking, though, I won't know what emotions are being stirred up. So I need to make a statement, kind of pry 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 they may not even think to pull topics from previous conversation topics from around the room. Right. That's an assessment tool. I'm and that only works because I'm in your space. If we were meeting at a coffee shop down the street, I wouldn't have these to pull from. So how would you do it? You 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. Right. You 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. So how are you sets of close-ended question? Are you happy? Close-ended question. Are you hot in this room? Close-ended question. But, you know, how did you feel when you woke up this morning? That's a more open-ended question. Right. Right. 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. And that is what gives you the foundation to start probing. And then as you start probing, you can start looking for emotional responses. So is that something that you teach people how to be more persuasive? Correct. What's another thing that you teach a lot of that 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 seven million dollar 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. And over the last 10 years, they kind of they they worked against him. They used his his kindness and they used his faithfulness and they used his loyalty kind of against him and they took his business and now he's got $6000 in the bank and a family of four and nothing to show for it. And he's like, how did I get to the 50 years old? And 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 it's and then you have to have that hard conversation where you explain good people are going to be good people their whole lives like you can't you can't be good for 50 years and then break bad and then turn into a bad guy. So I had to explain to him like you're you're better off starting all over again because you know how to build a company than trying to become a bad guy and 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 who understand that they are either a poor judge of character or they have some sort of 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 that's the vast majority of what we really do see from from individuals asking for a consulting. And then you're teaching them exactly what though, like if they come to you, not that guy, but another guy, like how to what? How do I identify when you're being misled? How do I identify misinformation, disinformation? How do you identify misinformation? It's all the same tools that we've been talking about. You have to understand how to assess, how to use certain questioning types. So like you said, it's not it's like how you ask the questions you ask, how you ask them. I mean, for 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 responses you'll get from those seven different kinds of questions we can give them 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. Right. So you need to have all three resources. So when I 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 us adjust how we will train them. Right. People who have a great deal of money and not a lot of time, we will put them in a very concentrated training. And vice versa, people who have more time than money, they'll go into digital training. You know, I'm all about finding an edge. The small daily habits that give you more energy, focus and resilience. But that's why I am hooked on monobitality. Most people are mineral deficient and that means low energy, brain fog, slow recovery and dull skin. But mana flips the switch by giving your body a complete spectrum of minerals. It actually knows how to use. 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I would argue that most people think they want something, 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 kind of 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 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. Right. 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 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 Shanna, if you don't have any kids. Four 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. Like we're all, like you believe that we're all being manipulated to some level, right? Like we've been conditioned. Condition is the right word for me. Condition, not manipulated. OK, I thought I saw you say that before, like we've been manipulated. Maybe it's the way they just thumbnail it. Yeah, that's probably how it was thumbnailed. Because what ends up happening is manipulation is something very specific to me. OK, and conditioning is something very specific, right? So manipulation is specifically when you get someone else to do something that's beneficial to you and not beneficial to them. OK. That is the CIA definition of manipulation. Right, 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. Right. 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 manipulating, 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. So then what's the difference between motivating and persuading? There's really not that much difference. So that's basically the same thing. Both manipulation and motivation would start with persuasion. Whether you, however you get them to do what you want them to do, you're pulling on emotional lovers to get them there. So how do you how do you teach people or what did you learn of how 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 like cognitive behavioral therapy. There's a tool called the wheel of emotions. And the wheel of emotions is this fantastic visual tool that basically shows you all the emotions that we 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 percent of us really only have the same three. So 40 percent of the population is motivated by three. Sixty percent 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 discussed happiness and surprise. Discussed happiness and surprise are the other three. So 40 percent of the world is at their core. They are singularly the most motivated or the most persuaded, the most emotional about discussed happiness or surprise. And 60 percent 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 and I am an angry person. All of my decisions are based in 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. Right. I'm motivated by anger. My wife is a sadness person. Her core is sadness. The decisions that she makes, 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? And then there's 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? OK, so OK, so let's say then if you know that, then what? You can you can tap into that person's. Let's say if someone's like motivated by fear. Most a lot of people I know are motivated by 60 percent 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, too. The you will meet it 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 OK. Yeah, it's OK to be angry all the time. That's so interesting. So for me, it's fear for you. It's anger. Then what is yours? Oh, it is. So then two angers, 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, it'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 kind of angry all the time. Do you find that like are you a 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. So what are some ways people because I find that interesting. I find that people who usually smile the most and are the most like nice on the outside are usually some of the most angry people on the inside. So what you just said is what's known as an assumption. Yes, it is an assumption. Assumptions are when you jump to a conclusion. Yeah, based off of previous experience. OK, 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. Right. So 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? Like that goes to show how kinetic you are. And 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 of your magic mind? Yeah, there's no stimulant in this, by the way. I think it's just it. Yeah, OK, I don't know the answer. Oh, sorry. 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 don't like to 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. But that's right on the point for me. Oh, yeah. Now, now that tells me that if I want to kind of 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 frustrated. No, I mean, that's so you are good. You're good at like connecting dots fast about people. And 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. Right. Because we feel the need to close a door. The 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 kind of causing such a divisiveness in the world. Exactly. Have you seen anything like, have you seen anything quite like this? Like this is, did you spend a lot of time with this stuff, with the world? Like you were saying before we started when I was asking you or saying like things that you're interested in now, you're saying Venezuela, you know, we're talking about the Israeli Hamas thing. Like all of these things that, 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. Right. We focus on skin tone and age and gender and marital status and education level, nationality, passport, language. And we we like, oh, this person is 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 percent 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. Right. 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. Right. But yet we focus so much on our differences. And 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? I was, oh my gosh, I was having a conversation recently with somebody who was 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 just the way that's the way that their religion works, that's the way that they're they're programmed. And I disagree with that. I've read books. I've studied with 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 kind of not based in faith, not based in identity, not based in 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. Or but it goes to show. A dose. Yeah, it really goes to show like 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 where 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. So instead, we we assume that Mexicans are different than Americans and we assume that the Chinese are bad and we, you know, we assume that this is how the United States ended up having, you know, Japanese and prison internment camps for inside the United States for people who were Japanese living in the United States. We just we focus on all these wrong things. So I look at the world through a lens of what are human beings doing to other human beings and why are they doing it? And 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. So who is doing the manipulation and the persuading? We all are. We all are. Because we all we are not asking ourselves the question, what is the outcome that we want? Think about the 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, you know, not yell at mom and dad. They're they're they're literally trying to shape everything. Yeah. Right. Why are they trying to shape everything? Because they've carefully thought out what they want is 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 is 25 and all they've ever known is how to listen to you, how is that child ready to be a contributing member of society? Whereas I have I have literally been clients completely transformed their behavior by asking themselves, am I 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? 12 and eight. 12 and eight. OK. Minor 10 and 12. Beautiful ages, right? They're good ages. Yeah. Where like I was I don't know. I was looking at your summons or 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. Yeah. That's not the same thing. Correct. But clickbait is different, right? Very different. So my 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, like 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 they what their teachers say, which is shaped by the the neighborhood that we live in and the culture that we live in, right? Do you like school then, like traditional school? I've home, 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. So we were very, very particular in picking a private school that kind of 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 are planning on leaving the country and pulling her out of that school. Really? So wait a second. So you I don't want to this is important. This is for me anyway. You met your wife, who is also a CIA agent, like were you guys dating when you're both in the CIA and then what kind of what kind of agent was she? She was what's known as a target. So she came on as a trainee just like I did. But her training track was taking her to be a human intelligence target. So human intelligence target is our target is their people who find human targets. And 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. But while she has a cool job, why is she not doing this? This type of interview, she's she has and she has an anxiety disorder as well. Really? Yeah. Hold on a minute. Your wife, who is like a covert CIA agent, finding targets and that she has the exact 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 didn't want to make a mistake. She could work long hours. She was very diligent. She doubled and triple checked her work. She would never leap to conclusions. She was just as wired as I was to need external validation. Right. She's also on that fucked up scale. Yeah. Just in a different way. Whereas for me, I needed novelty. I needed unpredictability. I needed an open space and 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. Like we needed different things, but we were still out for the same outcome. We still needed that at a boy that pat on the back that you're changing history kind of moment. So she so she would actually go and find targets. How like how would she do it? She would do it all through through confidential databases, clandestine databases, stolen databases. Like 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. So when the Chinese come and break into our Citibank 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 kind of operation. And 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 left service the same week as well. Like coincidence or no, no, no, no, we left together. But no, yeah, 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. So when she was supposed to show up the first day, she had like a nervous, a nervous panic attack. Yeah, panic attack. Ended up going to the hospital, ended up spending like 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, right? People who were refugees, people who were in some way, shape, or form needed help. And the first company, the first nonprofit to hire her was the Jewish Family Services. Wow. And that's where she came from. And she was recruited by CIA out of that. So she was not trying to work for CIA. She never, she thought CIA was the devil, but she was also $80,000 in law school debt. And 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. Right. I know you explain that. How did she get found? So she was applying for government jobs, but her government jobs were different than my government job. So 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? So 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. So 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. Like 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 like leave them with a Filipino 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. Right. So we start telling CIA, hey, we're going to plan for this. And CIA says that's wise. You should have a plan for what you're going to do postpartum. We want to take care of G. He we want to take care of you. That's good. Well, then the baby actually comes. And once the baby actually comes, CIA story changes. And 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. Like you, 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. Like 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 give her children to. So 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. And I would argue that what I was, 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. So CIA miscalculated the cultural priorities that we had. And as a result, when they gave us no other choice, we were like, well, we're just going to resign. We're just going to leave. Wow. So the CIA not keep up with the cultural times and evolve with like the new way people are doing or conducting. That's not just CIA. That's federal government. The government does a very poor job of of understanding the intersection between generational development, generational changes and priorities. Because the government really doesn't 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. Right. Right. 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's always been the place where you work when you're nationalistic or when you want stability. And 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 people. Correct. OK. And then what about for you? What would you say is your top skill now? What are you like a what are you a master at now because of all of this? And I wouldn't call myself a master at 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 get? So for the like for the average person listening like a civilian, I still want to know some like tactical things that people can get better at to help them with being a leader, with decision making, with, you know, finding the career they want. Like what are some like 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 persuasion versus I'm sorry, perspective versus perception. I told you the story about how my dad used to say like, you know, perception is everything. Perception is actually not everything. CIA taught me the truth of it. So I would love to teach my dad this now if he would be receptive, which he probably isn't in his 80s. But 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. And we all live in our own perception. So 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� They execute the day in their own perception, eating when they're hungry, going when they're 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 position 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. Right? So 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. No. Your own perception. I know. It's like, that's a, I know. Okay. So to get out of our own perception and seeing the perspective of somebody else. Correct. So for example, I know that in this room, you're hot. Like you feel warm because you took off your sweatshirt and. Oh yeah. You put your sweatshirt on the sweatshirt. 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. Right. 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, like the temperature in the room, right? Like if you're dealing with like a real life issue or like a decision or perspective perception, that's very, very different. Okay. I actually deal with this quite a bit. If you want, I don't know what example you have in your mind, but one of the first thing comes to my mind is when bosses have to 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 them 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. Right. And it's a very difficult position. So what I always try to tell them to do is, hey, put yourself in your employees 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. So if you really want to get through 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? And 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. What 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. Right? 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 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. So there is no, 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. Right? You have lots of power when you gain perspective. But if you're trapped in your perception, you're just sitting there worried, sitting there worried the whole time. And 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. And that 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's 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 of 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. The 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, the perception. That's what 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. The, 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 have a core motivation as well. There's four primary motivations and they fall into an acronym called rice. Reward, ideology, coercion and ego, R-I-C-E. Reward, ideology, coercion and ego. All of us are motivated by all four of those motivations to different extents at different times in our lives. Right? 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, right? And then ego, we're all motivated to, 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. Let me share my daily routine game changer with you. It's the Momentus 3. I've been using their protein, their creatine and Omega-3 combo for months now and the results are undeniable. These nutrients are key for long-term health and performance, but hard to get enough of through diet alone. The CREA Pure Creatine boosts both physical and your mental performance. The grass-fed weight tastes great with no weird aftertaste and the Omega-3 is a must for recovery. Since adding these, my energy, my recovery and my overall well-being has really improved. So if you want better performance, this is the way to go. Visit LiveMomentus.com and use my code Gen for 35% off your first subscription. That's LiveMomentus.com code Gen for 35% off your first subscription. Trust me, you'll be happy you did. You talk about in your book, we didn't really get that much into the details, but I have seen you talk about this as well. The importance of using silence as a tool and it's very underrated because you were saying before, it's very uncomfortable for people to sit in quiet and I think I saw something you did. You're like, if someone can sit quiet for 10 seconds, they'll get 30% more information. It's true. When you stop talking, it forces the people around you to start talking. 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 how they would respond to silence. But what if someone's shy or they're like, I'm highly sensitive because I'll talk because I don't want to make the other person uncomfortable that they'll 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. 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 like 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 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 area where people are getting better at social skills. We're living in an area 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, 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 is a very closed position. It is? It's a very closed body position. I thought it was being very open. No, you've got your hands crossed in front of you and you have your feet crossed underneath you. Oh, 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 kind of 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 kind of 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 kind of 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? That the body language is way more effective than just what people say in words. Like I'm always watching people, how they're, how they're, I'm always over a psychoanalyzing what people are, how they're sitting or what, how their faces when they're taught, when I'm talking to them versus words. Because words are very easy. You can, people, 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've got to have your cues, your verbal and nonverbal cues match. And that's very difficult to learn how to do that. So you're probably a master at figuring that, like 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, 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, that appear as truths. Well, how long were these missions? You said you and your wife were on these long mission, like how long is a mission? They're, they're always different lengths. So a long, a long mission might be multiple years living and working undercover in a, in an environment that is intentionally kind of 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, you could theoretically just don a, 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 throwaway alias are very easy operations. You could do that, you know, walk out your door and go to the Starbucks and just order a coffee and a different name and you've got a throwaway 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. And as their mental capacity diminishes, the risk of the operation going upside down increases. What was that operation? Like, are you like, 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? Do you have like a, did your wife pick a target and then you had to like go in and get the, like, 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. So it literally walks you through how we identify targets, how we approach those targets, how we go about cleansing our, our cover alias. So even when you travel from point A to point B, if, 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 and then you don 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 to 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 routes. So what we'd go over in, 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. 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've gotten killed on any of these missions? We all can get killed on any of our missions. And there's, 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. So it's one of the few kind of 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? 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, like you get that. 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 really liked that stuff. I never really cared about the combustion pressure rate inside the left engine of the J-12 Chinese jet fighter. I didn't care about that. She kind of did. She did care about that. What do you teach the corporate people? Like 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, which makes them a trader. 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 from, you know, 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. And then the second thing that we get hired for is HR related things like communication, leadership training, etc. 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. And my voice is one that is deemed to be more credible. Yeah, based on your experience for sure. And if nothing else, it's cool to hear from someone who were still like, everyone loves the movies like Mission Impossible. I don't care like what anybody says, even though it's not the same as a movie, those are the movies that people are so. But everyone loves James Bond and Ethan Hunt and all these things, you know. So even if you're not really, you still come, you're the closest that we have to like a real life. Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne. Yeah, 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 job. Because the real job is genuinely dangerous and it is genuinely thankless. And the men and women who serve in the ranks of CIA really are just being manipulated because they have the same kind of mental issues that we all have. Right. And looking for someone to validate their hard work. What's the long, what's the typical timeframe that people because they stay covert operators? It's usually somewhere between nine 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 war zone or a low risk tour, like, you know, collecting secrets from Europe kind of thing. Right. 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. So 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. Right. 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? Almost. The vast majority of 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. That's the government door. But in order for that to happen, they have to be overt. They have to have been, 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 khaki or Mantec or Booze Island Hamilton or Raytheon. And 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, okay, the 14, so you were under who? President Obama was it? President Obama. Right before President Trump. You were. Okay. What did they, 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, right? That's part of how he got Osama bin Laden on his watch too. Yeah. He exercised the rights and privileges of the president in his utility of CIA. And 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, like lots of high fives and fist bumps and parties on Fridays. Like that was a great time to be at CIA. Really? And 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 Trump was saying CIA was broken. They had no job. Like if they don't serve the president, they really have no purpose. And Donald Trump knew that, which is why he stopped utilizing CIA. And he started going to contractors to be his intelligence collection platform. And you saw this massive movement of people quitting and resigning from CIA. And that's, we saw our friends who didn't leave in 2014, then leave in 2016 along with thousands of other people. And 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. Well, he's just quiet. He's making everyone, like 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 it's, 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, what you're going to be thrown into. You can't promise, you can't deliver on the 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. Right, you're not in. You're not even like in the sandbox. How do you even know? Correct. Yeah. 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. Yeah. He's not necessarily fixing anything, but by breaking it, somebody has to fix it. Right. So it's kind of like going into like 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. Right. And you keep, 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 so, that's a great analogy actually. I love that. Oh my gosh. Okay, hold on. I know you've been sitting here forever. I just want to, I don't have to ask you all these questions. Would you, would you just come back again? Yeah, absolutely come back. You're a ton of fun. Thank you. Can I feel bad? Like I was like, I was not, I, I didn't look at what I actually like too cool. I actually like 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 CI 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 kind of directive for FBI is to find corrupt politicians, to find people who are abusing and breaking American laws that are in positions of power. Oh, okay. And 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 U.S. 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 like an FBI mole on some kind. An FBI CIA, yeah, an FBI informant. 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. He's helping in any kind of intelligence capacity. That doesn't mean CIA. That can mean any intelligence capacity. And if he was a clandestine informant for FBI, that is an intelligence capacity. So he could have been an intelligence asset for FBI, just like he could have been an intelligent asset for DEA, an intelligence asset for Homeland Security. But he was technically in jail, though. He was in jail. 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? And 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 been no validation of it since then. Oh, right. So that's it. That's no one found. Like the autopsy person and the brother was the only two people? The brother who identified him. Correct. The, technically, there are 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 there could not, that body could have been somebody else if you want to go to the extreme kind of 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, there's all these open... Didn't we see him with the neck and the whole, like he looked pretty dead, but then again, I guess these days you could do anything and everything. And that's, I think that's one of the big open questions is just how much do we trust that the body that was recovered was validated to be his and was demonstrably proven without a shadow of a doubt to be? We don't know. Why was there missing footage? And there's so many open questions about the Epstein case that I think that's why it continues to kind of 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, right? So he could have been killed just because of his criminal offenses. But if he wasn't any way protected, which just based on his money, he should have been protected. How did they get access to him? And then if he was, in fact, implicated in some kind of government corruption anything, then that leads to the primary conspiracy theory that somebody killed him to quiet him. What about that Giselle? What's her name? Whatever. Yes, the woman who was associated with him who supported the human trafficking. Do you think she has information? Why is she still in jail? You don't think she has a deal with Trump? Because no one's, like why have they not released the files and all the things? Correct. And 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 U.S. government. Even dead, even if he was dead. Yeah, because even though he might be dead, there are still thousands of other FBI 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, oh Epstein was a CI, every other CI out there is going to be like, fuck this. Yes. I'm done cooperating. But if they're done cooperating, won't they just be thrown in jail or? 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 like a conduit. Correct. So if they lose the cooperation of their CIs, basically they shut down overnight. They have no cases anymore. And they can't let that happen, right? Because that's, 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. Right. And 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 the podcast. Why not? No, but so because I thought also Donald Trump's name is all over the thing. I thought it's not coming up because he's trying to protect it. I think that's what most people are thinking. Yeah, I think most people probably are assuming that Donald Trump's trying to protect himself. Without a doubt, Donald Trump is the kind of 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 every Deepak show person in the- You're going to find Clinton in there. Yeah, Clinton's in there too. It's not like he's the only one. Correct. But he has a good friend of his. You always saw him hanging out with him. What's going to be, 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, that the legislative branch gets access to the files. Oh, really? Yes. The people, the public does not get access. They don't? And 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 the case. The legislative branch is going to redact anything that's going to compromise them. There's like four people left on that list. Correct. So it's like, and then the public's 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. Like it's a long process to actually convict someone of a criminal offense. But she's in jail this whole time. So I mean, I get it, but you know, that's not the same thing as being convicted. You can be in jail and then be found innocent and let go. Yeah, but still she's like spending her time in jail, although she's pretty, you know. 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. So 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. And 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 after all. 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. Yep. And it's available everywhere. And you are so interesting. You really are. You did not disappoint even though, you know, as you called it, I feel like I'm friends with you and you're probably like, who's this, what'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 him on obviously Instagram. What is, what's your name on Instagram? At Everyday Spy. At Everyday Spy. Okay. All right. I know it's been like a hundred hours. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.