Moment 169: CIA Spy Reveals How To AVOID Media Manipulation & Brainwashing: Andrew Bustamante

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

As part of your training to become a CIA officer, you must have learned how to manipulate people. That seems to me, from what I know of spies, pretty foundational to what it is to be a successful spy and to get information from someone else. In this conversation today, are we going to learn how through your training, you were taught to get information from people and make them do what you wanted them to do?

Andrew Bustamante (0:29)

Yes, and I'll be very frank here. I try to exercise something called radical transparency.

If you want to manipulate people, you will learn that from this conversation. If you want to manipulate people, I will teach you how to manipulate people. In just a simple conversation, you can learn those skills. But the thing to understand that's the most important is that whether you want to manipulate or not, others are manipulating you, just because you don't know what they're doing, right? The problem with being an intelligence operator is that to achieve the things you have to achieve, you sometimes have to do things that you don't want to do. In being a business owner, what I've discovered is that many business owners struggle because they feel like they have to do things they don't want to do. They feel like they have to be sleazy. They feel like they have to be tricky. They feel like they have to mimic, you know, shyster, bad guy, business owners, right? The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation. And that is a, that coin has value. Manipulation has value. But the other side of the same coin is motivation. If you can get people to do what they want to do, then you have motivated them. And that is worth just as much as getting people to do what you want them to do, which is manipulating them. When you understand all the different options of the currency that you're working with, you can work with it more effectively. So people are generally, despite age, race, creed or religion, people have four basic motivations. And we call those four basic motivations. RICE, R-I-C-E stands for reward, ideology, coercion and ego. Reward is anything that you want. Money, free vacations, pat on the back, women, alcohol. If that's something that you want and me giving it to you gives you what you want, then that's a reward. People do lots of crazy things for rewards.

Steven Bartlett (2:31)

And these rewards change over time.

Andrew Bustamante (2:33)

And by based on person. Right? The second primary motivator is ideology. Ideology is the things that you believe in. People do crazy things for the things they believe in, whether it's their religion, whether it's their country, whether it's family, whether it's what they believe is morally correct. Right? So if you can assign, if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things. C is coercion. Coercion is all the negative things. Guilt, shame, blackmail, anything that you do to force someone to take certain action by leaning into the negative element of motivation, which is also known as manipulation, that falls under the C or coercion.

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

Steven Bartlett (4:05)

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'd focus on this core motivation over that one.

Andrew Bustamante (4:17)

Yes, absolutely. Ideology is the strongest. Ego is the second strongest. Reward is the third strongest and coercion is the weakest. This is one of the things that movies get wrong. Movies try to make it look like you can blackmail somebody or hold a gun to their head and get them to do what you want them to do. In the real world, once you hold a gun to someone's head, they never trust you again. You can never get them to do something twice. Whereas if you appeal to their ideology, doing this is good for your country. Doing this is good for your family. Doing this is good for your health. If you can appeal to someone's ideology, they'll do what you tell them to do for a long time because they'll trust you.