The Manipulation Expert: CIA Spy Reveals You're Being Controlled! "You're Being Manipulated Without Realising It"! Andrew Bustamante

Andrew Bustamante (0:00)

The majority of people, they're still seeing the world through a lens that was built for them, and they want more, they just don't know how to do it. So what I teach, which is what CIA teaches, is how to see the world in the way it really is. Here's what I'm gonna tell you.

Steven Bartlett (0:14)

Andrew Bustamante is back, a former CIA officer and founder of Everyday Spy.

SPEAKER_3 (0:19)

A company on a mission to help you get anything you want in life with the skills the CIA taught him.

Andrew Bustamante (0:24)

We don't know the recipe for success. Our society doesn't teach us the plan, the framework, the process. That's what CIA did for us. They just taught us a simple system. And one gentleman, one of the frameworks that we taught him, helped him get a $32,000 raise. We had one person say, I followed your framework. I went over the interviewer. Now I have this job that I would have never gotten otherwise. But I'm not surprised when they happen because of course the recipes work because they were refined in the center of CIA. So first, we have an exercise called Get Quiet. And in a Get Quiet exercise, all you do is just... The reason that we do that is because we have the informational advantage going into any situation.

Steven Bartlett (1:01)

Interesting.

Andrew Bustamante (1:01)

Then there's the four C's of building influence rapidly. So if you want to build influence, the first thing we have to do is... And now you actually take the action to get what you want.

Steven Bartlett (1:09)

So what about persuasion then? How do I persuade somebody?

Andrew Bustamante (1:12)

Persuasion is a process that's much easier. It really is as simple as... Finally, the secret sauce at CIA that we know that most people don't understand is that now you can do whatever you need to improve yourself and your life.

Steven Bartlett (1:33)

Andrew, what is it you're doing in this season of your life?

Andrew Bustamante (1:37)

You know, it's an interesting question. I actually just lost my grandmother recently in the last week or so. And my grandmother was one of the two women that raised me. I didn't have a father. I mentioned that to you the last time I was here. And it was a moment that struck me because mortality became very real. It makes everything clearer. It makes you realize what actually matters and what doesn't matter. It shows you that the days that we have aren't actually guaranteed to us, even though we take them for granted every day. I don't know if my flight home is going to actually happen. I don't know if I'm going to step out of the studio and get hit by a car. I don't know if my child isn't going to get hit by a car playing in the driveway tomorrow. Because life is so fragile. And we don't think about it until we watch its fragility dissolve in front of us. We hear about tragedy, but tragedy is always happening somewhere else.

It's so real, and yet we don't realize it every day.

Steven Bartlett (2:42)

It's a good thing we don't.

Andrew Bustamante (2:45)

That's the truth. That's how it feels right now for me as well. I kind of wish I could go back to being ignorant again. It's that matrix, red pill, blue pill moment where I kind of wish I could go back in and forget that reality and forget that mortality is reality.

Steven Bartlett (3:00)

And so does that change your priorities in life in any way?

Andrew Bustamante (3:04)

It does. The biggest way that it's affecting me right now is really with business because we had a conversation not too long ago where I was very focused on trying to triple the size of the business this year because we had been tripling the year before and we had tripled the year before that and it became this arbitrary number, this scorecard where I wanted to continue having this achievement. And then what I found is that scaling a business is no easy thing and the struggles that come from scaling were consuming the majority of my focus all the time until this moment happened with my grandmother and then all of a sudden I realized I have a team of people who can scale the business. I don't have to scale it. I just have to empower the team to do what the team does. And my job is very different. My job is to enable, empower, encourage, direct, lead, manage their efforts. But it's their job to grow it. I can take some of that time and put it into the people that matter to me, the people that surround me, the people who have made me who I am, the people like the woman on the couch that I was visiting in her deathbed.