Moment 207: CIA Spy Reveals How To Read Anyone Like A Book!

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

For someone that's just clicked on this podcast now, who's trying to understand the value that they're going to get from you by understanding the work that you do at Everyday Spy, what are they going to get from this conversation?

Andrew Bustamante (0:11)

This conversation is designed to, for me, to be able to explain how spy skills have a very real value in breaking everyday barriers. And that's the mission of my company at Everyday Spy. We use spy education to break barriers, social barriers, financial barriers, educational barriers, cultural barriers, language barriers. If there is a barrier in life, I made it my mission in my company to break that barrier using a proven real world skill or technique from espionage.

Steven Bartlett (0:41)

And what sort of means is that to what end? So if I'm, you know, the average Joe listening to this now, when you say break barriers, what are those barriers that I'm going to be able to break in my life?

Andrew Bustamante (0:51)

So I intentionally use the term breaking barriers because we all have different barriers. What the reality of life is that we all come into barriers that are similar, but we come into those barriers at different times. For some people, there's a barrier in income that they're born into. For other people, the barrier that they're born into is that they don't have a father. For other people, they come into a financial barrier when they're 18 and they have to leave home. Some people don't ever know financial barriers, but they do know educational barriers because they suffer from dyslexia or they suffer from ADHD. There are people who have barriers that are due to anxiety. The reality is, there's really 12 or so barriers that we will all experience in our life, but we will experience them at different times. For some of us, it won't happen until we become parents. For others, it happens as soon as we hit adulthood. The idea is that CIA is extremely familiar with barriers. And what they teach us as officers going through their training programs is not just the details of tradecraft, but it's really to understand that any barrier that we as individuals face, they can get us through. But we can also predict barriers other people will run into. And if you know somebody else's barrier, and you understand their barrier better than they do, when you help them through that barrier, they will tell you secrets.

Steven Bartlett (2:11)

They will tell me secrets. 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, is 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 (2:40)

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. The problem with being an intelligence operator is that to achieve the things you have to achieve, you sometimes have to do things that you don't want to do. In being a business owner, what I've discovered is that many business owners struggle because they feel like they have to do things they don't want to do. They feel like they have to be sleazy. They feel like they have to be tricky. They feel like they have to mimic shyster bad guy business owners. The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation. And 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.

Steven Bartlett (4:02)

Is learning how to kill people involved in the curriculum?

Andrew Bustamante (4:05)

No, that is not involved in the curriculum. Not at the basic training level.

Steven Bartlett (4:09)

Do they teach you that?

Andrew Bustamante (4:10)

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 need to 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, de-arm explosives. So it all depends on the caliber, the level of officer that you're kind of put into. So 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.