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

28:00What did you think about point I thought it was a prank call I thought I thought that the call wasn't real. I thought that the call was maybe with some kind of gimmick or maybe it was something else or it just didn't sound real. Especially not when she said she was going to like send me a paper airline ticket and she was going to send me all this stuff in the mail overnight FedEx but then it showed up and then when it showed up again that 27 year old single mail kicked in and I was like well now I have a ticket let's see where the ticket goes and let's go to the reservation counter at the rental car desk and is this a real rental car reservation it's a real reservation is there a real hotel and then you just kind of follow the bread crumbs.

28:39The rent's car reservations real the airline tickets real you fly out there you land what happens next. You get another phone call that says hey did you get it safe and then they tell you the address for where you're supposed to show up the next day and then you go it's a non -descript building and you walk in and for me I walked in there were 10 or so other people in the waiting room. None of us really knew what we were there for we all knew that we were there for something related to a government job. Everybody's dressed essentially the same way and you know you find out that this person's in finance and that lady came from social work and whatever else it might be and then you eventually somebody comes out and calls you into a room and then you go through the first what we call the first round of interviews and it's just kind of like a fit to see what you're interested in what you're not interested in etc and it was at the end of that first interview that the lady said to me that I might be a good fit for the national clandestine service at CIA which I didn't know what the next day was.

29:35I was at the time and then she basically broke it down and she was just like you and I did at the beginning of this conversation she's like essentially we want you to be a field officer or what you might know from the movies as a spy and of course for me I was I mean my seven year old self was like I'm going to be a what like you want me to be a spy you want me to like drive fancy cars and where to see those and always have a beautiful woman on my side like sign me up for that I mean starving children in Africa can wait. I want to do that but then of course comes the the by line afterwards where she's like you can't tell anybody that this is what you're now applying for we're going to move you on to the second phase of interviews we need to do you know go back to your hotel and go back to Mount Stramar for space in Montana and live your normal life and if anybody asks you why you're out here just tell them that you came out here applying for a government position and you don't know whether or not you're going to get it and in the meantime will be in touch and then they get in touch again and then they get in touch again.

30:32And then you go through multiple more rounds of interviews so they fly you usually back to the DC area and then the interviews just get kind of more intense you go from a fit in interview to a kind of like a test like a interview that's more of like a test with somebody else they ask you scenario based questions they give you puzzles. They ask you some light psychological stuff if you pass that you'll come back again and you'll do a whole round like a three day multiple day psychological evaluation multiple psychological tests intelligence tests IQ tests EQ tests and then you'll have a post interview with a psychologist who reviews the results of your psychological battery against like a therapy kind of session where they ask you questions much like you ask right.

31:24Like what was the primordial soup that you came out of and where you the most fucked up and where you the least fucked up and that kind of stuff and and if you pass all of that then eventually you get what's known as a conditional offer of employment or a COE and that's when CIA writes to you on a blank piece of paper that does not say CIA and they basically say we would like to offer you employment at this pay scale making this much money. You know if you accept your induction date will be on this date at this time and then just drive in through the front gates at this date in this time and your name will be on a roster in that job offer do they pay a lot of money no.

32:04No, no, they pay a lot of money in comparison to other government jobs because CIA is just one of the higher paying government agencies but it's not it's not a lot of money at all. I think when I it was 2007 when I was conditionally offered employment and I think my starting pay was 72 or 74 thousand dollars a year which was comparable little bit less than what I was making as an as an Air Force captain at the same time. But I was an Air Force captain living in Montana making 75 thousand dollars versus a brand new CIA recruit living in Washington DC making 72 thousand dollars when you got that letter in the post saying that you've been offered a role how did you feel great yeah I felt like I had done everything right right I felt like I mean there was a part of me that says that says and I still kind of follow this mantra like who gets to do this so that felt amazing and then there was a ton to use your word a ton of validation.

33:01Of course like now I get it now I know why I went to a college I didn't like now I know why I put up with a stepdad and listen to my mom and like I don't need love and you don't need support and you don't need a family that cares about you as a person all you need is to check the fucking boxes because this is where you get to go when you check the boxes and now that I've checked all the boxes I'm free. So it doesn't really work that way because when you're hired because you're you check boxes it just the boxes just change but you still have to check the boxes. And at that point it goes from interview to I guess training correct during that whole interview process you're not allowed to tell anyone I'm guessing right even your family.

33:45So what do you tell your family that you've been up to during that period. So this is what's nice about their recruitment process remember I told you earlier that I I accepted as a child that there are times that you have to lie and there are secrets that you have to keep. This was just a secret I had to keep and a lie that I had to tell so I told my family that I was looking at getting out of the air force I didn't really know what I wanted to do maybe I'd go work for the government and I was going to DC to do some government interviews. I was never close to my family from the time I left for the Air Force Academy 18.

34:15I mean I went home maybe once a year every time I tried to go home it was always a kerfluffle because my parents didn't want to buy the airline ticket because it was expensive and I didn't have money to buy an airline ticket so I had to ask them and it was the same song of dance every Christmas holiday right like I'd like to come home I don't have any money well we don't have any money either maybe you shouldn't come home. So it was really easy to be 27 years old almost 10 years after that I'm not really close to my family so I tell them as little as possible I had a girlfriend at the time she was a great girlfriend but she wasn't as great as being a CIA officer was going to be right I had friends at the time but they weren't as cool as being a CIA officer would be right so it was really easy to just start just cutting off the branches of my social tree because I was going to go do something awesome I didn't need anybody else.

35:03Did the CIA tell you to disconnect from these people at all? They told you that you would have to eventually and you know they explain how you're going to go into covert service if you're going to go into clandestine service you can't take a whole roll of decks of people with you so one of the things that they asked during our psychological evaluation was you know how much do you need close relationships and close peers and how do you feel about severing ties with what we sometimes call secondary or tertiary relationships. Friends college friends like a primary relationship is your spouse the secondary relationship is all your close friends a tertiary relationship is somebody who you work with so like how do you feel about cutting off all those not so important relationships and for me it was easy right now it's like let's let's go I'm going to go do something amazing I don't need college friends to go do something amazing do you think you're appearance and ethnicity factored into the CIA's decision to recruit you absolutely in 2007 so just to take everybody back to the CIA's decision to recruit you absolutely in 2007 so just to take everybody back to the CIA's decision to recruit you.

36:022007 was six years after 911 it was three years after the CIA 911 commission or the US government 911 commission came out which basically said that everything CIA had been doing up to 2001 was wrong. They were focused in a cold war era they were not focused on terrorism they were focused on you know Ivy League Caucasian graduates as being the next generation of CIA officer instead of diversifying for a diversified world. So without a doubt they were looking for different people they were looking for young people colored people you know LBGTQ plus people who could connect with the modern day threat around the world and then I think on top of being brown and ethnic I also came with a huge government file because I had been part of the Air Force since I was 18 years old so they knew everything about my health everything about my mental health everything about my you know academic athletic performance in college they knew everything about me and I think that's part of why my onboarding process took about nine months where the typical onboarding process takes about 18 months.

37:13How do they train you to become a CIA agent so a lot of the training part is classified still so I can't talk about it but but there's a school that we go to it's fairly publicly known but I can't acknowledge what it isn't isn't and we go there for many months and we basically were pulled out of every day life and we're put into a controlled simulated world and inside that simulated world they kind of control what's happening around us so if you can imagine almost like going from being taken out of your apartment where you live and now you're put into a different apartment but the apartment that you put into as part of a giant game and somebody else controls the all the game so they control the news that's on the TV and they control you know the cars that are on the road and they control everything except the weather basically so that they can create multiple different types of scenarios where you exercise the skills that they taught you from driving to first response first aid response to lying living and working under aliased identities all that stuff so you're put into a very controlled environment for a long period of time where they can test all of your your trade craft that you're taught.

38:24It's very expensive it must be very expensive for them to train a CIA agent right that's why they train us in batches so there's generally a two to three batches a year. That go through different types of training and there's different classifications of officers to right so your analysts are different than your technical officers who are different than your field officers so what they'll do is they'll batch you into or at least what they did in 2007 as they would batch you along with your discipline and then send a batch to training and then everybody goes through the same lectures during the day just like university and everybody goes through a series of exercises at different times of the day and different times of the week but essentially everybody goes through the same curriculum and everybody has the same grades and then those grades are all measured against each other and the bottom performers are cut out and the top performers get to stay.

39:13That curriculum what is involved in that curriculum you mentioned a few things there is I'm learning how to kill people involved in the curriculum no that is not involved in the curriculum not at the basic training level. Do they teach you that they teach some people that but they don't teach everybody that it depends on the discipline that you're part of if you're a paramilitary officer you need to learn how to kill and you learn how to kill in different ways kill quickly kill quietly kill with blunt weapons clear with bladed weapons or kill with bladed weapons kill with projectile weapons so kill with explosives you know dR explosives so it all depends on the caliber the level of officer that you're kind of put put into so pay paramilitary they must learn that but your standard human intelligence field collector they need to learn how to live and work without being caught so if you kill somebody it's a big deal you might get caught so it's much easier to teach that person how to manipulate how to collect secrets how to live and operate without ever being detected whereas a paramilitary officer doesn't need to learn all that they taught you had a lie they teach at a lie how do they teach someone had a lie.

40:19It starts with a foundation of making sure that you recruit people who are already liars and then once you when you're sitting across from a liar you can start to understand if they're a good liar or not very quickly you've probably talked to people who are bad liars.

40:41So you know when someone's a bad liar so from that you can identify people who are good liars and then when you do find a good liar you start to teach them what they already naturally do that makes them a good liar and then you start to teach them how to refine that skill and you start to teach them how bad liars operate and how you can detect a bad liar and how you gain advantages you know with lies and and how to handle as an example because you're not going to be able to do that. Because I promised you skills bad liars talk a lot good liars talk a little because the more you talk the more you run the risk of undermining your own lie bad liars make a lot of statements good liars ask a lot of questions because if you ask questions you're not really disclosing anything about yourself.

41:27So if you've ever had if you think back and you if you remember ever going to a party or ever having a date or ever being in a social environment where there was somebody there that made you feel so interesting but you didn't know anything about them you were talking to a very good liar. What about body language is that a factor in lie. Absolutely. I mean body language is a factor in everything but body language is especially a factor in lying because again going back to the idea of a skilled liar versus an unskilled liar. A skilled liar knows how to appear like they are telling the truth with their words and with their body whereas an unskilled liar often has a disconnect and their body will say a different message than what they're mouth is saying consider your your stereo stereotypical job your standard European footballer or your American jock a lot of times they'll be portrayed as like somebody you like.

42:20Yeah yeah they said bigger than life and all this other stuff right there their body shows confidence and openness but then when they talk they sound like idiots right I don't sure like you know totally like do that lady like whatever. They are there's a disconnect. They are voiced does not demonstrate the same confidence that their body demonstrates so you know that that person is lying. What they're lying about is not necessarily just the content of what they're saying but they recognize they don't they can't cognitively accept the fact that they are in a position where they are telling an untruth and that untruth at a minimum is that they are not super confident and super comfortable.

43:05They are actually uncomfortable and they are not feeling confident and that's why they're stammering over themselves. So when you are lying to someone based on your training would you think a lot about your body language. Yes. And what would you do what would you what were the principles of making sure your body language wasn't letting the cat out of the bag. Pussy. So one of the first things to do when you're when you're trying to lie to somebody and again we're now talking about how to lie to somebody. You shouldn't want to learn how to lie to somebody. You should want to learn how to know if somebody is lying to you.

43:34But we always start this way where we want to we're afraid to ask the real question which is how do I know if I'm being lied to because that shows vulnerability. But if you want to learn how to lie to somebody the first thing you do is you mimic the person look at you and I right now we are mirrored. Are your hands connected under the table. Yeah. So are mine are your feet crossed under your under your seat. Yeah. So are mine we are mirrored right now which means when you look at me subconsciously you see yourself. I want you to see yourself in this exercise because if you see yourself your initial instinctive response is going to be trust because who do you trust in the whole world.

44:13You trust yourself. So the first step to being able to lie effectively is to be able to mirror the person you're lying to if I was coming at you like. Right away you're going to be like I don't know who this guy is right and similarly if I was to be like. Just for people that are on audio he's just like doing different posture than body languages so that are far away from my own. Putting his hands on the table etc so okay make sense. So we want to mirror first and you mirror because mirroring creates a foundation of trust subconsciously creates a foundation of trust. And then once you have that foundation of trust you just start kind of pushing the envelope more and more with the untruth or with the fabrication that you're creating the lie right.

44:56Is there anything else on the subjective telling a lie to someone that's believable that we need to be aware of in terms of skills. Yes. So first the whole idea about there's there's two important ideas that get glorified in social media that are just inaccurate and the first is called eye movements. You can't actually tell if somebody's lying to you based on where they place their eyes. Because while there are certain elements of eye movements that have biological relevancy there's many many more things about eye movements that don't have biological relevancy right. So what I mean by that is if I ask you what's your oldest memory you just looked to your left it's natural to look to your left when you're from a western country because chronologically time lines start on the left.

45:48So when you ask somebody a question about time and they look to the left up down or in the middle generally speaking that has biological relevancy so it's a low probability that they're lying but they still could be lying. When you ask somebody a question they look to the upper right or the lower right or wherever they might look if if there's there's not necessarily biological relevancy because they could be looking up into the right because down into the left it's too bright. They could be looking in any number of directions because maybe they have you know a headache or maybe they have something else going on the ability to create some sense of probability about why they're making the eye movements they're making is too difficult.

46:26So you can't assess someone's honesty or dishonesty based off of eye movements even though you're going to hear that you can from Instagram influencers and you know discord and everywhere on the internet you're going to hear that there's some connection that you can make justifiably it's not true. The same thing is also true so it is also an untruth that you can rely on something known as micro expressions micro expressions being the number of times your eyes blink or the twitch in your face or if you're sucking on your lips these ideas that get glorified through social media as indicators of deceit.

47:05The truth is you don't know if someone is lying to you until you've had enough time with the person to establish what's known as a baseline a baseline means what's normal for you. So I'll just use you as an example 10 minutes before the cameras turned on you were a totally different person your energy is different you're so much more conversational like you are just you're an awesome friendly guy when the cameras are not on. But you turn into an interviewer when the cameras turn on totally rational totally logical makes total sense that doesn't mean that you're lying now and you were telling the truth then it means that the environment has changed and nobody would know that if there wasn't a baseline most people that watch you don't ever know what you're like outside of this baseline.

47:53So you have to get to know the person and then understand the variance that's unusual to understand if they're lying to you exactly we call it time on target you need time on target so that you can understand the delta the change between their baseline and whatever pressure you're putting them under. Was there any sort of consistent tell tell signs that someone was lying to you in an interaction like you know what you know certain you know nervous things that they do change you know what are those variances that you might see that you go this person's now lying. Yeah so with unskilled liars it becomes much easier because a lot of times with skilled liars with people who are either learned how to lie through formal training or people who have learned how to lie through the school of hard knocks.

48:36When there's people who are skilled liars it's difficult to find generic tells with people who are unskilled liars it's much easier to find generic tells there are people who you've heard of being on the hot seat. It's a phrase we use in Western culture pretty often like when someone is under pressure we call them being in a hot seat when you've got an unskilled liar they can't stop moving their body like they're just they're always uncomfortable and they just keep moving and they keep twitching and they keep fidgeting and it's like they're sitting in a hot seat. That is one of the biggest tells of an unskilled liar and again anybody who's ever had like a six year old or an eight year old or a 12 year old try to lie to them they know what that looks like they can't make eye contact they do a lot of like verbal noises that aren't actual words they can't get comfortable they keep moving around they keep shifting.

49:32Those are all those words came from real world examples of an unskilled liar trying to lie but you don't need micro expressions of the face or to know which way their eyes are tracking in order to pick up on that. Go back to your training then what were some of the other most important transferable skills that you learned throughout that process. The most interesting and useful things that we learned during training actually had to do with the psychological processes that people go through and being able to understand the process and then predict and identify when the process is happening. Those are the things that really make a huge difference yes it's cool to learn how to do a dead drop and yes it's cool to learn how to detect surveillance or how to drive a car through a roadblock right.

50:13Those are all very interesting things but the most useful things are the things that you can use all day every day through multiple types of interactions and there are a series of processes a number of processes that we learned that had to do with human psychology one of those processes is understanding the idea of core motivations core motivations are remember how we talked about manipulation and motivation are two sides of the same coin when you understand all the different options of the currency that you're working with you can. We can work with it more effectively so people are generally despite age race, creed, or religion people have four basic motivations and we call those for basic motivations rice or I see he stands for reward ideology coercion and ego reward is anything that you want money free vacations pat on the back women alcohol if that's something that you want.

51:11And me giving it to you gives you what you want and that's a reward people do lots of crazy things for rewards and these rewards change of a time and by based on person okay right the second primary motivators ideology ideology is the things that you believe in people do crazy things for the things they believe in whether it's their religion whether it's their country whether it's family whether it's what they believe is morally correct right so if you can assign if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology you can get them to do. Incredible things see is coercion coercion is all the negative things guilt shame blackmail anything that you do to force someone to take certain action by leaning into the negative element of motivation which is also known as manipulation that falls under the sea or coercion and then ego is everything that has to do with how the person views themselves so oftentimes ego gets oversimplified into thinking that it's just people who have a big ego right somebody like Donald Trump who has a big ego or you name the famous actor who has a big ego ego is also people who don't have big egos mother Teresa had an ego she wanted to sacrifice for other people she wanted other people to see her sacrificing for other people that is also ego.

52:32So with these four core motivations you have a rubric a process to understand why other people do what they do if you understand why other people do what they do all you have to do is connect what they care about with what you want them to do and you just increase the probability of them doing what you want them to do. Of these four core motivations are is there an order of the strength that they have over people so if you were really trying to get someone to do something you focus on this core motivation over that one yes absolutely ideology is the strongest ego is the second strongest reward is the third strongest and coercion is the weakest this is one of the things that movies get wrong movies try to make it look like you can blackmail somebody or hold the gun to their head and get them to do what you want them to do in the real world.

53:21Once you hold the gun to someone's head they never trust you again you can never get them to do something twice whereas if you appeal to their ideology doing this is good for your country doing this is good for your family doing this is good for your health if you can appeal to someone's ideology they'll do what you tell them to do for a long time because they'll trust you is this really the essence of manipulation that is the essence of motivation and manipulation the same coin you'll hear me come back to this because one of the things that you can do is you can do it. The reason why people really struggle with outside of intelligence is they feel like they have to label things is good or bad when you have moral flexibility you take away good and bad everything just becomes a question of utility or productivity if it's if you need someone to do something and you can motivate them then you should but if you need someone to do something and you can't motivate them that's a green light to manipulate them because you still need to do something.

54:21You need them to do what you need them to do if you feel bad about manipulating somebody you are not going to do well in the intelligence world. How might you so you said the ideology is the strongest of the four of the core of the core motivations how might you go about finding out someone's ideology in the context of business and life. A lot of times people will volunteer to you there's there's two ways if you're a keen observer people will volunteer to you you've already volunteered that you are ideologically predisposed to fatherhood you've already talked about it the reason that you're worried about fucking up your kids that you don't even have yet is because you're thinking about fatherhood so clearly you are ideologically predisposed to what it means to be a responsible father you want to be seen as a responsible father that plays into your ego as well so I'm sure when you're talking to your partner.

55:08If you guys are already looking at where would we go to school where would we live what kind of diapers should we use if you're even thinking about that you're thinking about it through the lens of the ideology of being an engaged present helpful loving father right so people will volunteer your customer base will volunteer to you what their ideologies are they'll volunteer their politics they'll volunteer their their pain from their childhood they'll volunteer their pain from business. If you listen if you listen the second way that you can get to understand the ideology of your customer base is through active marketing the right kind of marketing not mass marketing not the kind of garbage that you see on Instagram and YouTube about you know how to make people believe in your brand because you use the right colors but actual marketing where you present a message and that message was crafted with an emotion.

56:08Behind it people who respond to that intentionally crafted message are showing what their motivations are because they were clearly motivated enough by the message to take action you've heard a lot of people talk about narrative especially in politics there's you know oh there's the there's the liberal narrative and there's the Republican narrative and there's the conservative narrative and the church narrative and people talk a lot about narrative narrative is not the right kind of narrative. The power in influence the power in influence actually comes from messaging it takes two steps to get to a narrative it takes messaging first and then messaging builds a narrative if you think about messaging messaging is supposed to be an emotional thing just a statement just a message just like a text message right are you afraid of being the kind of father that is in present for your kids that creates emotion in the right ideologically predisposed to be a message that is in the right.

57:09There's no woman out there who's going to be motivated by that she might be motivated to tell her partner about that but it's not going to it's not going to resonate with her like it resonates with me as a father of young children but that's just the message then the narrative is not emotional in nature the narrative is logical in nature so you use an emotional message to communicate a logical narrative. Are you afraid of being the kind of father that wasn't that's not present for your child. Man that just like that pulls in my heartstrings well then all you have to do is sign up for this app that reminds you every Sunday to read your kids a story you're like oh that makes total sense all I need is a reminder and I'm going to be a good dad and that's messaging a narrative the same thing happens in politics the same thing happens in geopolitics the same thing happens the whole world over because in the intelligence world we understand messaging in there.

58:08We know how to use messaging and narrative it's how you elect a president it's the reason that that Saudi Arabia went to war with Iran over Yemen like it it's everybody understands at a national security level the idea of creating a message or a narrative using emotional messaging but when it comes to business people don't get it they they haven't learned that lesson yet because they've all been taught through an MBA program or something else that you sell to the world.

58:44And over so this is when we can crumpled the unmore convey the country and so forth and we made a dissatisfiedness that was happening from the beginning of the movie industry but losing to the same as in seems havel and Wall Austin things to do is actually dedicated to coping defense posed by using it and the matter it's like eight seconds. After seeing it in a week those two days because their top dreamed a BA is of you seven sixteen three minutes when cats believe they're doing it themselves will admit their father's sake? all of the CA recruiting process and all of my time in the military, I just felt like I was doing the right thing.

59:14I just felt like I was doing a good job. I felt like I was special, right? Like wow, I must be super special because I'm getting picked for the National Clandest and Service. So I felt like I was doing everything right. And then I actually ended up going through my training program where they confirmed that I actually was broken in certain ways. I was high performing because I had trauma as a child. I lie and I steal and I have no problem with sociopathy because I'm not mentally healthy, right? That's basically what they confirmed. Like you're wired in a certain way that's really useful, but you're actually not neurotypical.

1:00:00You're not successful in the way that you thought you were successful. But you are still very useful. And oh, by the way, you're even more special because now you work for CIA. So don't ever stop working for CIA because they know that what drives us is our ideology, right? Our ideology and then our ego. So they hook us that way. So for me, that was my first big aha moment because up until then I always thought maybe I understood the world, but nobody else seemed to understand it the way I understood it. Like I could see the hypocrisy in high school and I could see the hypocrisy in my mom and my dad and they would do things that were different than what they would tell me to do.

1:00:41And I don't understand how is the customer always right, but then like sometimes the company wins the lawsuit. Like it doesn't make sense. How is there a legal structure, but criminals don't go to jail in if there's a legal structure? Like I remember seeing it all and thinking that it didn't make sense, but never actually being confident enough to say anything about it because it was a secret. And I didn't feel comfortable sharing that secret. CIA then taught me your what you're seeing is actually the world as it really is. And let's train you to show you and give you a vocabulary to understand what you're seeing.

1:01:24Let's teach you about human psychology so you understand why it works the way that it works. Why everybody sees it and nobody talks about it, right? So that was my first big aha moment. And then my second big aha moment came when I when I left CIA and I was unemployed for like six months living in my in laws converted garage with a one year old child wondering how the fuck I did so many things so wrong that I couldn't get a job even though I was just part of the CIA. And in that in that time feeling like just the world's biggest loser, the only skill that I could lean on was what the CIA had taught me to do.

1:02:08So then I lied my way into a fortune 10 company and all of a sudden I wasn't a loser anymore. And once I realized that I could use CIA skills to succeed in business, that was my second big aha moment. So now everything I see I see through a lens of CIA skills in a business world. Perception versus perspective was one of the other things that I've heard you talk about. Was it quite a big I guess shifted understanding but something that the regular person doesn't really understand. Yeah, so the idea of perception and perspective, I have to define them first right perception is what you believe you see where you sit is how you perceive the world around you.

1:02:56Perspective is how other people see where you're sitting. So when I think about us right now across the table from each other, my perception is what I see of you. Your perspective is very different than my perception right at a minimum. I'm looking at you with a background that's different than when you're looking at me with a background. So the benefit, the advantage that CIA gives its field officers is that it trains us to recognize and distrust our perception because perception really only comes from from one source and that is your own five senses. You are the source of information for your perception.

1:03:40So for anybody who's ever seen like a little pile of socks in the lower left hand corner and they thought it was a rat and they jump until they realize it sucks. That is your perception lying to you. Perspective means that you get data objectively from the world around you. So if you're in your room and you see a pile of black in the corner, your perspective tells you this is your room. There's never been a rat in your room ever before that pile in the corner is probably something like socks. Your perspective keeps things objective. Perception makes things very subjective or very emotional. So CIA trains us to lean into our perspective, gain perspective, think about things objectively because if you lean on your perception, you're leaning on emotions and emotions are very likely wrong.

1:04:28How can I train myself to lean more on my perspective? There's two really quick things that you can do. The first is is immediately distrust your emotions. No right away when you're feeling emotions. In other words, what I'm saying is don't trust your gut, which is the antithesis of what most people tell you to do. Most people say trust your gut. I'm telling you right now your gut is more often than not lying to you because your gut is based in emotion. Your girlfriend's not about to dump you. Your boyfriend isn't cheating on you. You're not about to go bankrupt. Nobody cares about the zit on your nose.

1:05:05Right? That is most likely true. There's a small chance that your perception is correct, but when it comes to gambling, are you going to bet on the small chance or the bigger chance? You should always gamble on the bigger chance. The bigger chance you only really understand through perspective. If you have perspective on something, then you have multiple data points on something. So when you feel yourself getting emotional, stop and let your emotion happen for a second. I feel nervous. I feel anxious. I feel doubtful. I probably don't have to. You probably shouldn't, because whoever's sitting across the table from you, whoever's coming into the room with you, whoever else is on the bus with you, they are all focused on a thousand different things.

1:05:52And the things that they're focused on most likely don't include you. Sounds easier said than done. Correct. Is that a process of repetitions to train yourself to think like that? It is. It takes momentum. So what ends up having to happen is that you need to exercise it intentionally at first. And what happens is as you intentionally exercise your perspective over perception, what will start to happen is you will start to see that what you were worried about doesn't happen. And then once you see it not happen, once you see your perspective give you the correct information over your perception, once you see that happen once, then it starts to gain momentum.

1:06:38And then it happens again, and it gains more momentum, and more momentum, and more momentum. Until the time comes that you realize it's much easier. But it is. It's a learned skill. You have to learn to think objectively instead of subjectively, think rationally instead of emotionally. And a big part of what helps you do that is understanding that 90 % of the people out there, they're all trapped in their own perception. They're all trapped in thinking emotionally. They don't even know that there's an alternative. Just think about this man. The conversation we're having right now, the people who are hearing this conversation right now, who have never heard that there's a difference between perception and perspective are already better equipped than all the other assholes who have never heard this conversation.

1:07:21They're already one step ahead of their competition. They're one step ahead of their spouses, their partners, their bullies. They're one step ahead of everybody because now they can use the words perception and perspective, subjective and objective, emotional and logical and rational. They can use these words to define how they want to think, even if they don't think that way yet. That's the huge advantage to what CIA calls the trained and the untrained. Trained people at least are aware that there's an alternative option. Untrained people aren't even aware that there's an option. The vast majority of people out there are what I call bobble heads.

1:07:59They don't even know there's an option. They're completely unaware of an alternative solution and alternative process. So they're trapped in their perception. They're trapped in their emotion. They're trapped in their subjectivity. And that makes it so much easier for people like you and me and everyone listening right now to use rational, objective, perspective to get those people to do whatever we want them to do. You've had a lot of reasons success in business, with your company every day spy and other ventures that you've been involved in. What are some of the fundamental skills that you find yourself transferring directly from your CIA experience every day when you're closing business?

1:08:44At CIA, there's a saying at CIA that I realized is also a saying in business that I didn't realize until afterwards and it's called kissing a lot of frogs. And it's a salesman ship term outside of CIA where it means that you have to you have to call a lot of leads. You have to shake a lot of hands. You have to make a lot of pitches before one of them turns into a prince. At CIA, we have the same concept but for a different reason because finding a person who is willing to tell you state secrets, willing to risk their life to give away the secrets that they were entrusted with. That's what an actual asset does, right?

1:09:24When CIA sends a field officer to you name the country. When they recruit an asset from that country, what they are actually recruiting is a foreign national who is a local of that country who has access to state secrets, who is willing to share those state secrets in exchange for something else. Money, alcohol, pornography, you name it, right? Who knows what they're after? But your job is to find the person who has secrets and give the person the thing that they want in exchange for those secrets. That is a rare person to find. It is hard to find a willing collaborator from a foreign country who has access to secrets and is willing to share those secrets with you in exchange for some kind of remuneration.

1:10:12Very, very difficult to find. But if you can find a spy, if you can find a traitor, you can make a sale, right? The two skills are incredibly interconnected. So what I found is that the process and the skills that we use to find an asset translate immediately into business. Everything from how you talk to the person so that you can identify their core motivations, gaining perspective over that person's position in life. If you can gain the perspective of your customers, you already know what your customers thinking. You already know what they want. You already know what their problems are. You know what their problems are going to be because you can sit in their shoes, but they can't sit in your shoes, which gives you the advantage.

1:10:57So the process in espionage is a process called Sadrat, SADRAT. Very similar to the rice acronym I gave you earlier. Sadrat is a process of human intelligence conversion or collection. The Sadrat process is actually the foundation to my company's sales process. All of our marketing for digital sales, all of our human interactions, all of our upselling and everything else all falls into the same Sadrat process that I learned at CIA. Only we use it for sales and we use it for marketing. Sadrat. Sadrat stands for spot assess, develop, recruit, handle and terminate. That's what Sadrat stands for. And in classic, classic US government acronym jargon, handle starts with an H, but in the acronym we use the letter A.

1:11:50Spot assess, develop, recruit, handle, terminate. Spot means you find a potential client, right? Recruit means you sell that client on your product in exchange for your product and exchange for their money, right? Assess is a step that we use at CIA to determine whether or not somebody will be a good, productive client. Oftentimes in sales people skip that step. They don't think about a good, productive customer. A good, productive customer has lifetime customer value. A good, productive customer turns into referrals, turns into positive reviews and positive ratings. They have infinite value more than just the money they give you in exchange for your service.

1:12:36Assess is a critical piece in the CIA recruitment process. It's also a very important piece in my company. I'll tell you something which kind of validates that from my own experience before we continue on that point of assess. In the first couple of years of my first company, we would just take up any customer. And when we looked at our financial record for the previous year, what we noticed was that there was a cohort of customers that were exceptionally valuable. And even though we'd won business with this other set of customers, we're actually losing money because they were only lasting for a month.

1:13:04So we made this sort of framework to determine the customers that we should actually say no to, basically as you say, based on their lifetime value. And we figured out that there's a certain type of brand that has a certain size budget that has a certain number of employees that is trying to solve a certain type of problem that would be exceptionally profitable for us. So when we got the inquiries coming through our website, we were now looking at the inquiries through that lens and measuring them through that lens because it became so clear that all of our best customers fit into the top right of this sort of Venn diagram.

1:13:38And that's what I hear when you say, assess, and it was absolutely game changing for our business. But most entrepreneurs will just take every customer and they think of all of them as having the same potential in lifetime value. Exactly. You just nailed the word game changing. You can play the game by just selling to anybody. But if you want to change the game, you have to make sure that you're selling to a very deliberate cohort of customers because those customers not only yield more revenue per customer, but they bring in more customers like them, which is where you get an exponential level of not revenue, but profit.

1:14:11Just like you said, you talked about a very profitable group of clients, not a high revenue group of clients. So when you focus the conversation on profit instead of revenue, and you focus it on the right customer instead of just customer, it's game changing for your company. So you would assess targets in the CIA using the same sort of framework. Yep. Using the same framework because in recruitment operations, what you're looking for is people who will be good assets in the business framework, which you're looking for is people who will be good customers. An asset and a customer are almost the same thing, right?

1:14:47A customer is the most important asset of a company. And what does a customer do? A customer provides something of value in exchange for something they want. What does an asset do? They provide something of value in exchange for something they want. So it's really a one -for -one comparison as long as you understand the language of espionage and the language of business. So what we did in espionage is every time you're trying to develop a source, you're always asking yourself the question, will this source be a good, reliable asset in the future? Will they do what we tell them to do? Will they be able to provide information in the long term, not just once or twice, right?

1:15:29Is the information they provide high -value information? It's the same thing you're doing with a customer. Will this customer do what I tell them to do? Will this customer provide high levels of value? Will this customer last for a long time? Use the word espionage a few times there. What is the definition of the word espionage? Espionage is defined as the stealing of secrets. So espionage is always illegal. There's no country in the world that says that espionage is legal. So espionage is, it's when CIA commits espionage, when MI6 commits espionage, they have a car about in their law as it pertains to their own undercover clandestine services so that a American can conduct espionage overseas and not be prosecutable for that espionage under US law if they're part of CIA.

1:16:20Same thing is true in the UK. And MI6 officer can commit espionage overseas and not be held accountable for it under British law. It's a car about otherwise if you're a British citizen committing espionage anywhere in the UK or abroad, you are punishable under UK law. I've heard you say that espionage really is about getting people to let you into their secret lives. Correct. What is our secret life? So, you know, if you go back to an earlier partner conversation, we were talking about how when you trust people, you'll tell them your secrets, right? When you help people, they'll tell you their secrets.

1:16:57There are three lives that anybody lives. We have a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The public life is the life that we're all very familiar with, right? It's the life that you live for everybody else to see. Not just the people who watch your podcast and the people who, you know, work for you and your company, but your public life also includes what you show your friends. It includes what you show your church. It includes who you are when you walk down the street, the clothes that you choose to wear are a perfect example of your public life. It's what you want people to think of you.

1:17:28Remember the E in rice, Mother Teresa wanted people to see her a certain way. That is her public life. When you're in espionage, the goal is to get away from the public life because if you want someone to give you secrets, you can't get secrets from somebody who's in their public life because they're protected in their public life. So you have to move them from public into secret. And the middle step between public and secret is private life. So you have to move somebody from public life to private life. Private life is the life that your partner knows. Private life is the life that your closest friends know.

1:18:04Your mom and your dad may know it. It's the people who know that your feet secretly stink. It's the people who know that you don't really like to eat oysters because whatever they give you gas. That's all stuff that's private. Your business partners don't know that. Your customers don't know that. The people who watch your podcast don't know that. And it makes the people in your private life feel like they know you. And it's what makes it so that for you in your public life, you feel like you have meaningful relationships because instead of 200 people who you kind of know, now you've got 15 people who are in your private life.

1:18:38They know your home address. They know your birthday. You know, they know your favorite ice cream. It makes you feel good. Inside of someone's private life, they will share sensitivities, but they may still not share secrets because it's one thing to secretly tell somebody that you're worried about your business. You're worried about the next revenue cycle. You're worried about maybe your wife is having an affair. Those things are uncomfortable, but you'll share them with people in your private life. But you would never tell someone in your private life that you're having an affair. You would never tell someone in your private life that you hit your child.

1:19:16You would never tell someone in your private life that your parents sexually molested you or whatever else. Those dark, deep secrets only live in your secret life. The life that's so secretive that you don't even share it with the people in your private life. What we're trained to do is to follow a process that allows us to meet somebody in their public life, get them to let us into their private life, and then get them to let us into their secret life. Because it's a very like simple psychological process to get into someone's secret life. Because secretly, we all want somebody in our secret life.

1:20:00We all want to have someone we can tell our secrets too. We just don't trust anybody in our private life enough to get there. So if you know how to leverage perception and perspective, use the four core motivations. When you know how to leverage satirates to create trust, you can actually cut into someone's secret life. And once you're in someone's secret life, they never stop trusting you. They never let you leave. Because it was so rare and so hard to find you from their perspective. They don't ever want you to leave. So even if you even if you break their heart, even if you even if you lie to them, like their trust in you is so great and so strong and so subconscious, that you don't ever leave their secret life.

1:20:46I'm very keen to know how you get into someone's secret life and how they might get into your own. And we talked about some of those principles earlier. But I was wondering if one of the techniques you might use is by sharing your own fake secret life with them to create an element of comfort. I think I've heard and I think I know from doing this podcast generally that vulnerability creates vulnerabilities to some extent. If you open up to someone that they're more likely to open up to you. Correct. So you're getting into now a form of mirroring, much like we were talking about physical mirroring.

1:21:16Now what you're talking about is emotional mirroring. There's a new once there because you have to know when to mirror appropriately because if if you're mirroring somebody else and they know that you're mirroring them, then subconsciously they feel like they're in control. Okay, interesting. So what you need to do is you need to mirror just enough to get to the place where you can get them to mirror you. When they mirror you subconsciously they know that you're in control. So once you are in a position of power or control in a conversation, then you can use the ploy of fain vulnerability, which I wouldn't quite use it the same way you did.

1:22:01I wouldn't make up something vulnerable. Instead I would we call it opening a window or opening a window that opens a door. So we have these windows and doors in conversation. So opening a door means completely changing a subject. So if I were to just say right now I don't really like French food, that's opening a door. You as the interviewer can go through that door or you can close that door because it's not relevant. But if I open a window about how I have certain digestive challenges that I don't like to talk about, that's a window. You can always come back and push on that window and get me to go through a whole new door of conversation.

1:22:41So when it comes to vulnerability and conversing with somebody about vulnerability, you want to present windows and not present doors. So instead of saying something that's a fake vulnerability, you would say something that's a real vulnerability that may not be applicable to you. Like perhaps you say something like, you know, I I have been having massive arguments with my wife recently and sometimes it makes me just want to leave home. That's real. That's not saying I'm going to leave home. It's not saying what I'm arguing about. But if I believe that in your secret life, you are also fighting with your wife and you're living in a different room and you're not telling anybody about it, I want to show some sort of bridge between us that gets you to admit that to me.

1:23:27Because if you can admit that to me, maybe I can find out more about what you're doing to cope with the fact that your marriage is falling apart. Maybe you have a girlfriend, maybe you're on Tinder, maybe you're doing something else, right? Maybe you're drinking, maybe you're doing drugs. I don't know, but I need you to let me into that secret life. So I'm going to present a window and see if you go through that window. So say that I was the asset and you were the CIA agent. You have more experience in that role than I do. And I was sat in a bar and I said to you, yeah, God, this week's been really hard at home because of my wife.

1:24:01She's annoying me. What you were trying to get into my secret life? How might you maneuver from that? Right. So there's a the basic principle here that we would use is called the two and one combination. So two means two questions and one means one confirmation. So when you present to me a topic that I want to explore further, the most rudimentary of techniques out there is you present to me a topic I want to explore. So I ask a follow on question. You will answer my follow on question because you're predisposed to answer my question. I will ask another follow on question. You'll be predisposed to answer that as well.

1:24:40And then I'll say something that confirms what you're saying. That way it doesn't feel like you're being interrogated. Instead it feels like you're talking to somebody who gets you. So I'll confirm what you say. Like, oh, yeah, I mean, I had a girlfriend once and her feet sank so bad. And man, it just made me want to like sleep with her feet outside of the covers. And then you just stop there. Because you've asked to follow on questions in one confirming statement, the psychology of the other person is going to be to continue volunteering information. And then you just repeat the cycle. So they give you another piece of information.

1:25:16You follow follow a question, follow a question, confirmation, follow a question, follow a question, confirmation. To you, it feels formulaic. Listen, ask a follow a question. Listen, ask a follow a question. To them, it feels like they are talking to somebody who really, really cares. Just put yourself in the shoes. Practice a little perspective here. Imagine if you really were talking about something that was frustrating you and the person sitting next to you at the bar literally didn't do anything other than ask you follow up questions and agree with you. You're going to feel like, you get me, man, why can't my wife get me like you get me?

1:25:54Like you know what I'm talking about. I completely agree with you, man. Tell me more. Oh, dude. And then and you can see how we'll just human beings just fall right into the groove. The parallel here to business, but also the sort of transferable skills here are quite clear from what I heard when I'm doing an interview, when I'm meeting a candidate for a job, when I'm trying to sell to a client, really my disposition should be to be doing exactly what you said, asking them questions, confirming, asking them questions and confirming. Right. If you think about it, everybody's in a contest for control.

1:26:27Who controls a conversation? The person asking the questions or the person saying the most words. It's always the person asking the questions because the person asking the questions determines the direction of the conversation. It feels the other way around though. It feels like the person speaking the most has the most control. And what did I tell you about feelings? Don't trust them. Don't trust your gut. Don't trust your emotions, right? It feels like the person talking the most is the person in control. It is not. It is not. The person asking the questions is in control. Think about this interview right now.

1:26:58I will answer whatever question you bring up next. If I don't answer the next question you bring up, I will feel awkward because you and I both know who's in control of this conversation, even though I'm the one saying the most words. Interesting. The implications of this in sales, human resourcing, marketing, advertising, it's the reason my company has grown 300 % every year for the last three years. It's because the human condition is so predictable. People just want to feel heard. They want to feel listened to and they want to feel validated. You can automate that. You can automate the process that makes people feel heard, confirmed and validated.

1:27:47You can automate it and then they will sell themselves. That's how that's really good digital marketing. That's how it works. Really good direct sales. That's how it works. Really good salesmen have already learned this. Real good salesmen understand that it's all about getting a lead to talk about themselves as quickly as possible. And then once they start talking about themselves, you just ask questions. Let them lead themselves through the sales process. The problem is with most business owners out there who haven't been trained in what we're talking about, they feel like they have to talk the most.

1:28:23They feel like they have to get the customer to understand the benefits of the product. I need to get you to hear me. I need to get you to listen. I need to get you to understand the value of what I'm offering you. That's not what the customer wants. That's the sales person's perception. What the customer actually wants is a product that's going to solve their problems and the salesman that's going to help them. What's the kind of person that helps you? The person who asks questions. I'm really interested in this concept of change and how the C .I. jails into you that you need to accept change because in our all of our lives, one of the things that most of us are quite bad at is accepting change.

1:29:00We're very rigid. Again, maybe that's because of perception and ego and these kinds of things. But when I was reading through what they teach you at the C .I .A, they change your relationship with change. They do. A big part of the advantage of having change is the fact that it's not natural to accept change. If you can adapt to change faster than your opponent, you have a built -in advantage. You have an edge. These three principles, time, distance, and change in direction. These three principles that C .I .A teaches us concepts apply in multiple different ways. As an example, time means that you need to accept that things take time.

1:29:41That time is a resource for you to use. Too often, we feel like time is fleeting. Time is running out. We have to take action quickly. Time is against us.

1:29:54That's not a tool that you can use to break things down. Secrets don't withstand the test of time. How long will it take for you and I to get into each other's secret lives? Nine months. That takes time. Not many people would wait nine months for anything. Time is a huge advantage that you have. If all of your opponents are rushing and you're the only person who isn't rushing, time becomes a huge advantage to you that nobody else has. Explain that in the context of business then. In business, people are trying to make a rapid sale. Most people want an impulse buyer. What do I have to say right now to get you to buy my seven dollar thing?

1:30:33I don't really want you to buy a seven dollar thing. I want you to buy a ninety seven dollar thing. If it takes me three weeks to get you to buy a ninety seven dollar thing, it takes this other person three minutes to get you to buy a seven dollar thing. Who's the better salesman? Well, I would argue that it depends on what you're looking for in terms of long term. This person selling a seven dollar thing every three minutes has to find a new lead. They have to find arguably if they sell one out of every 10, if they convert a 10 percent, they need to find 10 new leads every three minutes to make seven dollars.

1:31:06If I convert at 10 percent, I need one person to buy a ninety seven dollar thing every three weeks. I have a much less demand on my time to find new leads. And I can qualify my leads better. And if someone's willing to spend ninety seven dollars on something, guess what that tells me about that person? They have more disposable income. The seven dollar person, I don't know anything about their disposable income. Do they have some? Do they not? Is that mom and dad's credit card? I don't really know. I'd rather spend three weeks of time cultivating a person who buys a ninety seven dollar something because then I can sell them a two hundred and ninety seven dollar something.

1:31:42And then I can sell them a nine hundred and ninety seven dollar something because I can test their threshold for price sensitivity. Was there any situations during your time abroad where you felt like like your life was at risk or any sort of really clear parent threat? Yes, there was there's one specific moment which I'm actively trying to get cleared by CIA to talk about where I felt like with high confidence that I had fallen under the scrutiny of a local country's surveillance team. So I was in a foreign country. I believed I fell under their surveillance apparatus and they were actively surveilling me.

1:32:22And the country that I was in and the job that I was doing in that country made me believe that if I had a surveillance team on me, their goal would be to apprehend me at a certain point in the operation, at a point where they could get the most propaganda and political leverage, etc. etc. So that occurrence happened in about 2011. And I'm trying to go through a process now to get that cleared by CIA. Up until about nine months ago, CIA was giving me the thumbs up that I'd be able to talk about it. But then geopolitical tensions in the world changed and CIA changed their mind along with that. So now I'm exploring what avenues I have to get them to adhere to their previous approval of letting me tell my story versus being forced to adhere to my continued secrecy agreement.

1:33:14So you were in a foreign country, you felt like you were under the surveillance apparatus of a foreign country. What gave you that impression? Was it looking over your shoulder and seeing something or? It's the process that we're trained to use for surveillance detection. So we're trained in a process where you run what's known as an SDR and in that SDR, you have steps methods that you use to determine whether or not you are being actively surveilled. And again, we use time to our advantage. So it's not like something happened in five seconds and I thought I was under surveillance. I intentionally carried out a series of steps over say three hours or six hours.

1:33:51And over that period of time, I had enough information enough data points to confirm with high confidence that I would be under surveillance. SDR. Surveillance detection route. Okay. And that could be like a car following you or it could be a person following you or a drone following you or your phone being acting in a certain way to make you believe that you're being digitally or cyber surveilled. Sex, P &A. It's a very real thing. It's a very real thing that's used in different ways based off of a country's civil rights. So in the United States, we don't really use sex, P &A. We don't really use it because it goes against the rights, the individual rights of the citizen who works at the intelligence agency.

1:34:38So if you tell a female intelligence officer that they must sleep with this target in order to get information, you're violating her rights as a US citizen. In China, that's not the same case. In Russia, that's not the same case, right? In the UK, they're also, they don't subscribe to forced sexual acts in service of collecting intelligence. Fost. Fost. But you can if you want to. What ends up happening is you can if you want to, and for those people who do, they end up creating what's known as an operational security risk. Because once sex is involved, the power shift becomes untenable. So if the whole goal of a handler is to maintain control over the asset, once sex happens, it's harder for the handler to maintain control over the asset in a objective relationship.

1:35:36Because now sex leads to feelings, like hormonally, it leads to feelings. The act of orgasm releases certain hormones that create senses of connection with another person. So when that oxytocin drops, when that neuro -upuneffron drops, your body starts to tell you that you are connected to another person, that is the antithesis of a proper asset handler relationship. So you start. And we call that falling in love with your asset. I wouldn't ask you if you ever engaged anything like that. I appreciate that. I was fortunate enough that I made all the connective hormones I needed to make with my wife, who was also CIA.

1:36:19Disguises. Did you ever wear a disguise? Absolutely. Yeah, disguises are something that are much more common than people would believe. And much less quality than people would believe. So most disguises, what we actually call disguises inside CIA, we call them costumes. We don't really call them disguises. Disguises is a word that's used in pop media and pop culture. In the real world, we call them costumes. And our costume departments, our disguise department, the whole objective behind a disguise or a costume is just to make you not look like you. Not to make you look like someone else, not even to make you look like a realistic person.

1:37:01It's just to make sure that you don't look like you. So consider your picture, what you look like, you have some very definitive features. Your nose, your forehead, your beard shape, your hair, the way that you hold your face, the neckline that you have. So if we wanted to change your appearance, just so that you didn't look like Stephen Bartlett, all we'd have to do is take away those things that make you you and turn them into something else. We could put a nappy red -headed wig on you, we could put giant oversized sunglasses on you, we could shave your face or paint your beard gray or even put a fake mustache on.

1:37:36We could put an oversized necklace around your neck. And now the picture of that is not going to look like the picture of Steve Bartlett. Those are all light disguises, they're right? Correct. Is that there's deeper types of disguises, right? I've always wondered if they like plastic surgery and if they give a bi -plastic surgery and those kinds of things. So there's three levels of disguise. There are some places that will go as far as permanent plastic surgery. But most Western services won't do that because it's, it doesn't help the officer. To have a permanent change to your body made, doesn't make you more effective at going undercover because now you're just permanently changed.

1:38:18So you still look the way you look. The value in a disguise is being able to reset the disguise, to reset the costume so that you don't look like yourself. So our three levels are level one, level two, level three. Light disguises, level one. Level two is long term disguise. Level three is something that we call prosthetic disguise. So light disguise is what we talked about. Oversized sunglasses and a nappy wig and all of a sudden you're a different, a different person, right? You're, you're Loyola. You're not Steve Bartlett anymore. Phase two is long term disguise. Long term disguise means it's still you, but we change you physically for a long term operation.

1:38:58So instead of having short hair, we grow your hair long. Instead of having a beard, we shave you clean. We lose some of that hard -earned body mass that you have or we gain body mass that you don't really want, right? Maybe we put some kind of fake, but long -standing tattoo on you, right? We do something with you that changes the way you look physically. It's still you. The reason that's important is because you always have to ask yourself the question, what will a police officer think when they storm into your hotel room at night? If you're wearing a light disguise and a police officer storms into your room at night, they're going to ask questions like, why do you have a wig?

1:39:35Or if you don't have a wig, you just wear a ball cap and a hoodie, there's nothing for them to ask, right? They're basically saying, oh, this is you. Your license says it's you and you wear this ball hat, this ball cap and this hoodie all the time, whatever. You're not going to jail for that. So level one and level two disguise are very safe. It's hard to get someone arrested using those two. Level three is what the movies are made out of. That's your prosthetics. If we put fake ears on you, if we put a fake nose on you, if we change your eye color, if we put in a fake missing tooth, right? Instead of a real missing tooth, if we do that kind of stuff to you, police officer breaks into your room in the middle of the night.

1:40:13Now they ask, why do you have a fake nose that you're not wearing right now? Why do you have fake eyebrows? Why do you have fake ears? Why do you have a blacked out tooth? Right? Now they look at your ID and you don't look like your ID. Much less common, I'm guessing. Very uncommon. Very uncommon. And you would use them strategically at different times. But if you watch too much mission impossible or alias, you start to think that people wear disguises all the time. There's so many problems to disguise. There's so many operational inadequacies to operational to disguise that we could have a whole conversation about it, right?

1:40:52Things don't stick to your face in the extreme cold. Things don't stick to your face in the extreme heat or when you're sweating your ass off in the Philippines. Things melt. Make up melts. The adhesive that sticks a fake mustache to your lip starts to disintegrate. Like there's all sorts of problems with prosthetics in real life that Tom Cruise doesn't have to worry about in the movies. When people think of spies doing espionage overseas wearing disguises and all these kinds of things, it does make you think they must be exceptionally good at dealing with fear because a lot of people would be too nervous or too anxious or whatever to not like crack under that kind of pressure.

1:41:28If you're meeting the guy that has the nuclear codes for a run or whatever and you've been working for nine months to meet this person, you know, you've got to have a good handle on your own anxiety and your own fear. Did the CIA target people that are good at that or did they train that or is it both? It's both. It's a great question. It's both. CIA wants people to carry a certain level of anxiety. Because when you carry anxiety, you're naturally paranoid, which means you have heightened observational skills. Most people who suffer from anxiety feel like they're inadequate in some way. In reality, they are hyperadequate.

1:42:07They are more than adequate. Anxiety is a super power through the eyes of the CIA. I would take somebody with anxiety any day over somebody without anxiety because anxiety keeps you alive. Anxiety keeps you sharp. Anxiety keeps you learning. It keeps you attentive. It's a good thing. But to your second point, you are also trained. You are trained to understand how fear works. And like to oversimplify it, your brain has two hemispheres, right? A left brain and a right brain. Your left brain is your logical brain. Your right brain is your emotional brain. Because you have two different hemispheres and they operate on a on two different bases, right?

1:42:48One is based in logic. One is based in emotions. They actually operate and they process at different speeds. Your logical brain processes much slower than your emotional brain, which is why it takes you an instant before you're scared. But it takes you maybe minutes, hours, weeks before you're convinced. So what ends up happening is fear in an untrained person going back to our conversation about trained versus untrained in an untrained person. Fear is an emotion that's processed by the emotional brain very quickly. So then they react instinctively to their fear. That's where a lot of people who suffer from anxiety get held back.

1:43:27When you can train someone to understand that the same thing that makes them emotionally scared is also being processed by their logical brain. Your brain is actually going through the process of determining how scared you really need to be. If you can just slow down the emotional brain and train the rational brain to work a little bit faster, your whole relationship with fear completely changes. How do they train you to slow down your emotional brain so that you don't react? That's a big part of the reason why you have a controlled training environment that lasts for multiple months. Because what they do is they inoculate you.

1:44:04It's called stress inoculation. They inoculate you with scenarios designed specifically to trigger your emotional response. Even though you have been trained to not trust your emotional response, they inoculate you so that over and over again you have to go through the process of, I feel fear, I have to not accept it. I feel doubt, I have to reject it. I feel like I'm being watched, I have to reject it. I have to give my rational brain a chance to catch up so that I can get objective facts about the scenario. There are some people who don't do it well. There are some people who never inoculate themselves against fear, so then they end up getting cut from the farm.

1:44:47For the average Joe that's listening to this now, or Jenny, the average Jenny, that's listening to this now. They live a life that's held them back because of their fear. They don't take the risk. They don't raise their hand to do the presentation. They don't lean into uncertainty. Based on your training in the CIA, what would you suggest that they should do to go over that fear? So they need to inoculate themselves as well. Inoculate means expose yourself in controlled ways to fear. Very similar to the way you inoculate against COVID, or you inoculate against the flu, right? You expose yourself to a strain that's weakened so that your body can gain some sort of familiarity with it.

1:45:28You do the same thing with fear. So if you're afraid to give that presentation, you're not ever going to change the fact that you're afraid to give a presentation, but you will be able to change something that you're less afraid of. So if you're afraid of going to the gym, if you're afraid of eating at a certain restaurant down the street, if you're afraid of stepping out of your front door, if you're afraid of asking your friend their opinion about whether or not you're overweight, find something small where you are less afraid of this than you are of this other thing, and inoculate yourself with this.

1:46:04Like lean into the small fears, the fears that you already know are kind of irrational and simple. And if you can overcome those, what will happen is you will start to gain momentum. And the thing that you do to inoculate yourself is to know upfront, you know you're going to have an emotional reaction. You already know it. It's the thing that you're afraid of. You can predict that. So you already know, I'm going to ask my buddy, Steve, if he thinks that I'm overweight, I'm terrified to ask him, he's either going to say yes or no, or he's going to take some cop -out answer and ask me what I think, but I already know that it's going to feel uncomfortable.

1:46:43But he's my buddy. It's low risk. Let's see how it at. Let's see what it goes. Right. So you go and you ask the question, you put yourself in the face of fear, you're still going to have the heart palpitations, the cold sweats, your emotional brain is going to take off, and all your physiology is going to let loose. But then Steve is going to tell you his answer. And it's over. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. And then when you do the same thing with your friend Jenny and the same thing with your friend Bruce and the same thing with your friend Robert, by the time Robert tells you his answer, your body is not reacting the same way as it did when you talked to Steve.

1:47:18Small inoculations are training your emotional brain to slow down and training your rational brain to speed up. So then you move on to the next most scary thing without going to the scariest of things. You know, I was thinking about that as you were talking and I was thinking gosh, I think a lot of people know that. I think they know that the way to get better at speaking on stage is to go and speak on stage, but they're still held back by, you know, god, if I do that, I'm going to mess up and then people are going to think I'm this, that and the other. And then I'll never x y z. Right. So you can say that to someone, but getting them to take that first step seems to be the impossibility like.

1:47:54And and here's where here's where the former CA officer and me comes out because if you're too afraid to do that, good, I don't want you to do it because you being unable to do it gives me the advantage. The person who's listening to this who says to themselves, I'm scared, but I'll do it anyways. That's the person who deserves the opportunity to change their life. The person who's listening to this that says, I'm too scared to do that. Good. I need you to stay exactly where you are because in our world, the the flat out truth is our world needs cogs. Our world needs people who are trapped in the consumer cycle.

1:48:36We need those people because the people who are trapped in that consumer cycle, the people who are prisoners to their fear are the people who run the economy. It's the people who are willing to break that cycle and capitalize on the fears that you can't overcome. Those are the people who actually provide you the service that you need because you can't do it by yourself. So I want to encourage the people who are willing to take the scary step. And I also want to discourage the people who already know that they're too afraid. We need both. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead.

1:49:18And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors.

1:49:52Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future -proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to netsuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's Guide to AI and a machine learning. That's netsuite .com slash Bartlett. Q1. You met your wife while you were an undercover CIA operative. I am still to this day very thankful that she is a poor judge of character. In 2014, you leave the CIA age 34 years old. You both resigned together. We both resigned together. Why? It was mostly my idea. My wife had a stellar career. We had a one -year -old child at the time and we were at a point in our career coming off of very successful operations together right before that where we were both middle management.

1:50:45That middle management lifestyle meant that we're spending 12 to 16 hours a day on the job, just like most people. But the difference is when you're spending 16 hours a day on the job, it means that you're in a skiff somewhere. You can't take your work home. You can't work from home. So you're literally absent from the house. So trying to coordinate two 16 -hour schedules along with a one -year -old, when neither of us signed up to be that kind of parent, we both wanted to be the kind of parent that was present for our children. And instead, we're giving our child to some daycare center and paying extra overage fees to how that daycare center keeps the baby for 12 hours a day.

1:51:24It's a sucky situation. So for family reasons, more so than for career reasons, we both decided, hey, let's double down on family and let's see if we can't start all over again. You're going to leave America in 2030? I'm going to try and leave America in 2027. I read that somehow. Why are you going to try and leave America in 2027? So I think the United States is going through a very difficult time right now. And I think most people understand that we are a young country. No matter how much we think that we are the best in the world, we are actually going through the early part of our adolescence as a nation.

1:52:01And you can see it playing out every day in the headlines. You can see it in our role in geopolitical events. You can see that we are suffering in terms of trying to identify ourselves. We don't know, do we want to be a real democracy? Do we want to be kind of a partial democracy? Do we want to treat everybody as equal? Do we not want to treat everybody as equal? We're struggling in the same way that you and I did through middle school, right? My children mean the world to me. And what I want to do is give them a life where they have the choice to do anything they want to do. Unfortunately, I don't believe our country for the next five to 10 years is going to be the kind of country that allows children of today to choose and be whatever they want to be.

1:52:51I think our country has some growing up of its own to do before we really offer people equal access to opportunities. So for me, if I was my 11 year old son, when I turned 15 or 16 years old and I start to really care about something, I would like to be in a place where I can explore that thing. I don't think that's going to be in the United States. I think that's going to be in Europe. I think that's going to be in the Middle East. I think that's going to be in Latin America, where he will have all the advantages of the world outside of the United States. What do you think about what's going on at the moment with geopolitics?

1:53:27Has it relates to like China and the US? There's a bit of a power struggle going on and there has been, but a lot of people forecast that China is eventually going to overtake or maybe it already has the US as the sort of global economic force. Are you preparing for that? Do you think it's going to happen? I think that there's two realistic outcomes and there's one less realistic outcome. The most realistic outcome is that the United States and China continue to compete and reach parity equality with each other. That's the most realistic outcome. Maybe the United States remains 10 % bigger, maybe China gets 2 % bigger economically, but they approach parity, they approach equality.

1:54:10I don't want to live in the United States when it loses so much status that another country reaches economic parity. Think about that for a second. The world is accustomed to one superpower. Once there are two superpowers, everything changes. There's two massive languages and you're going to have to choose which language you speak. There's two currencies, which currency are you save your money in. There's competing priorities. There's competing politics. There's equally massive sophisticated militaries. When you are in one of those two countries, at the moment that they reach parity, you are in the most dangerous position because the number one target for China will be the United States.

1:54:56The number one target for the United States will be China. Right now, there's not parity. There's not equality. So the United States has to worry about everybody. And China doesn't really have to worry about many people at all. But as that equality gets closer and closer, there's more and more threat. Think about it in business terms. When you're the industry leader in your business, Google, you don't have to worry about much. You have to worry about all the little guys, but nobody's really a direct threat. But as soon as somebody else rises to meet you, you have to worry about it. The leader used to be Yahoo.

1:55:28Right? Yahoo had to see what it's like to lose and gain parity with Google only to then be eclipsed. Right? So most probable outcome, we reach parity. Second, most probable outcome is that China does supersede us by small amounts. Right? 5 % GDP, 10 % GDP. And the United States has to regain its momentum to try to gain back the edge. So now you have this cycle back and forth, right? Where for five years, China is the leading GDP. For five years, the United States is the leading GDP. And you have this waffling back and forth, which makes you even less secure than if you were in direct parity. But that's a scary place to be as well.

1:56:11You still have to lose all the influence to get there. And when you're there, you never know how long it's going to last. Do you think we're already engaged in a form of wild or three? Yeah, absolutely. I think World War Three is already happening. I think World War Three is not what people think it was going to be. I think people were afraid that World War Three was somehow going to look like another World War Two. Instead, World War Three is a war of proxy nations. It's a war where smaller third world countries are competing against each other. And they're being funded by larger countries that are actually in conflict with one another.

1:56:45Ukraine and Russia. US is funding Ukraine. Russia is obviously taking care of itself. But the real conflict in Ukraine isn't about Ukraine. It's about the West versus Russia. Same thing's going to happen with Taiwan and China. When the time comes that China makes its biggest move on Taiwan, it's already made a small move on Taiwan. When it makes its largest move on Taiwan, it's going to become a question of China versus the West and whoever supports Taiwan. So going back to where we started then, the average Joe. The average Joe's listening to this conversation now, what they really want is to make their life better and whatever subjective measure that they consider better to be.

1:57:21They want to start that business. They want to launch that project. They want to get outside of this emotional prison that they live in where their life is dominated by perception, what they think their own sort of confines of their identity. What is the sort of closing argument and closing advice you give to that average Joe to liberate themselves so that they can pursue whatever they want to pursue? So the most important thing is to take action. That is the most, even if it's the wrong action, if you take the wrong step, if you take the first step in the wrong direction, the difference between you and the person who doesn't take a step at all is the world.

1:57:55You have to take the first step. You have to take some kind of action. Just by taking action, you show that you're not trapped by fear. You show that you're willing to challenge your own perception of the world and try to gain some perspective. It doesn't matter what that action is. I don't care whether you read a book, whether you buy a program, whether you sell your first prototype, take some kind of action because nine out of every 10 people are not going to take any action. You already have an advantage just by trying and so few people understand that. They think there's some kind of advantage in waiting.

1:58:33There isn't. The longer you wait, all you're really doing is giving the other nine people a chance to be the first one to take a step. If you take the first step, you beat the competition right out of the gates. And you know this as well as I do, even if your first three or four steps are fumbles and trips and you fall on your face, by the time you stand up, your four steps away from the rest of the competition. And you've learned a lot in those first four steps. So my suggestion is take action, take action using the skills that we talked about today, take action using the skills that you've talked about on some other podcast, just take action.

1:59:07Identity. We talked about how the CIA kind of rewrite your identity a little bit so that, you know, it gives you some sort of cover. But one of the things that stops us taking action is our own identity. What have you come to learn and what you think now about the role of identity, how it gets in our way and how we can liberate ourselves from it? The worst person to determine who you are is oftentimes you. Because you see it all, you live in your own secret life. The rest of the world sees your public life. Even if your public life is accidental, the world sees you differently than you see yourself.

1:59:44So when you look at yourself, it's like looking through a magnifying glass, you see every wart, you see every every crevice, you see everything wrong because you have the magnifying glass. The rest of the world, not only do they not have a magnifying glass, but they're standing 10 feet away from you. So they see something very different than what you see. So a lot of times, whatever you think about yourself is actually inaccurate when you apply it against the test of perspective. Because what other people see and what other people think of you, you are usually very wrong from what they think. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for.

2:00:25Now the question that's been left for you in the diary of a CEO is very, very interesting. What is something you used to strongly believe that you have fundamentally changed your mind on?

2:00:44I used to believe that people could be equal. And fundamentally now, I know that people will never be equal because equality is not really the thing that we're after. What we're secretly after that we don't want to admit to is we're always after being better, having more, being in a better position than everyone else. So we will constantly strive to take advantage of secrets, to take advantage of opportunities to find an edge that we do not share with other people. But publicly, we will say that we wish there was more equality and that we want there to be more equality when secretly, we don't.

2:01:34I used to be one of those people that wanted everything to be equal. And now I am one of those people who is very happy in a world where things are not equal. Why? Because I see through the noise, I understand that what we want isn't what we actually say. So these politicians that are saying, maybe on the left that are saying, we want equality, we want everyone to be equal, you think they're bullshitting. Absolutely. That's not what they want. What do they want? What they want is more of the current status quo, which is to have conflict with the opposite side. And what they also want on top of that is to be in a position where the masses trust the politician to be in control over more aspects of the population's life.

2:02:23And you thank you so much. Thank you so much. I feel so inspired, a little bit excited, and energized by this conversation. And I think it's so incredible that you've committed this sort of chatter of your life to helping people unlock their full potential by knowing the way that humans work and being able to use the understanding of a human that was probably getting in their way to free themselves and pursue whatever sort of goal they have in their lives that they think will provide them with fulfillment. Because that's really how I see what you're doing. You're taking a skill set that's been exclusive and given to only a few and giving it to many.

2:03:00And you do that through every day's spy. And so thank you so much. It's been absolutely honor. Thanks for having me, man.

2:03:29Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place. Their technology has been a real game changer, especially for my team at Flight Studio. As over the last year, we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

2:04:04We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business, head to NetSuite .com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. That's NetSuite .com slash Bartlett.