for 7 years I was working undercover as a spy and I needed to know how to manipulate how to live and operate
without ever being detected and how to collect Secrets okay I've got so many questions Andrew Bustamante he's a former CIA officer who uses spy skills to teach anyone how to master their minds talents and potential in business and everyday life when I left CIA I realize that I could use CIA skills to Succeed in Business one of the first things you should want to learn is how do I know if I'm being lied to as an example bad Liars that is one of the biggest tells of an unskilled liar next people have four basic core motivations reward ideology coercion and ego and if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology you can get them to do incredible things deception versus perspective what's that 90% of the people out there they're all trapped in their own perception in thinking emotionally and emotions are very likely wrong so CIA trains us to recognize and distrust our perception and there's two really quick things that you can do next sad rat it's an acronym and all of our marketing all of our human interactions falls into the same sad rat process that I learned at CIA because the human condition is so predictable so sad rat stands for and it's the reason my company has grown 300% every year for the last 3 years I want to know more was there any situations where you felt your life was at risk what do you think about what's going on at the moment with geopolitics do you think we're already engaged in a form of World War II and then why are you going to try and leave America in 2027 it's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show um and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show we now have five million subscribers on YouTube which is a number that I just can't comprehend and it's a dream that I absolutely never could have had we started the dire of a CO just over three years ago now and in my wildest expectations we might have had 100,000 subscribers by now so you can imagine how shocked I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations every week um and spend some time with us so thank you and I made a deal with you I made a deal that if you subscribe to this show that we would continue to raise the bar and in 2024 we're going to raise the bar like never before I've been working for the last N9 months on a surprise for all of you that have subscribed to the show and I'm very excited to deliver that for you the production's going to change we're going to go even further with our guests and we're going to tell even more Global stories so as always if you appreciate what we're doing here the simple free favorite I'll ask from you is to hit the Subscribe button let's get on with the episode Andrew you're well known for your time in the CIA because people are so intrigued and compelled by it how long were you in the CIA I was actually in the CIA for a comparatively short period I was only in for S years uh many people make a 30 or more year career out of CIA so it was really quite a small blip in terms of My overall life I wore uh the US military uniform for seven years before that as well so 14 years total spent in service to the United States and what is the CIA so the CIA is uh the United States's intelligence foreign intelligence collection uh platform their primary agency deemed with collecting foreign secrets that have any kind of impact in American National Security so if you think about it uh there are multiple what's called intelligence agencies in what's known as the intelligence Community or the IC CIA is just one of those 36 is uh community members in the IC however it is the one charged with centralizing all of the intelligence collected hence the Central Intelligence Agency so it's a hub in a large wheel of intelligence collection is that what a spy is is it the same thing as being a spy so I'm going to I'll geek out with you a little bit here because terminology is really very important so uh there are spies and spy is a vernacular that's used in common uh conversation that doesn't really have a definition in terms of the intelligence or Espionage profession you have handlers you have Assets in terms of traditional Espionage handlers are officers who collect intelligence assets are foreigners who provide intelligence to to the Handler so a CIA officer or an MI6 officer a mad officer an MSS officer depending on the country these are officers who collect Secrets they are therefore handlers and then all the people who provide them secrets are considered assets traditionally speaking when you talk about a spy some people think a spy is an asset or a Handler either someone who provides information or someone who collects information okay uh and and the term spy is just uh just confusing enough that often times people will project their own opinions on top of that word because they don't understand the real Nuance of Espionage so I thought of a spy as someone that goes to another country and collects information secretly and then sends it back to the country they came from so technically that is an intelligence operative okay or an intelligence officer also known as an operator or in media an operative uh sometimes it's also called an agent right an intelligence agent these are all kind of terms that get nebulous but what you're describing is a intelligence a trained intelligence officer no matter what country you're in whether you're in uh it doesn't matter what intelligence profession you're in either and there are multiple types of intelligence there's human intelligence signals intelligence measurements intelligence anybody who travels to collect secrets on behalf of their country is an intelligence officer is that what you were that's what I was you started a company after leaving the CIA called everyday spy correct 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 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 and what sort of means is that to 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 that I'm going to be able to break in my life so I 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 anxiet 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 a 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 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 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 yes and I'll 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 you 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 Shyer 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 we'll get into all of that but I want to understand where you came from because I think this is quite pertinent to both your work as a CIA officer but also there's um really interesting sort of psychological elements to why the CIA CH chose you that are deep within your childhood story going right back to the beginning of your life what is what is the most important context we need to understand to understand you I think the most important thing to understand from my childhood is that I was raised by my mom uh my father died my father was killed before I was born uh he died in a violent crime in California I didn't know him ever and my mom had to start life with a newborn son not just as a single mom but also as the single mom of a man who was killed in a crime um so it was my mom and my grandma that raised me from very young my mom is uh a woman of color she's she's Latina my father was American Indian so they there was an element of racial diversity in 1980 when I was born that also kind of played a role in all of that and the reason that that's important is not because of what happened in the past it's because from that Foundation my Mom married a Caucasian man who became my stepdad uh who became my adopted father as well and I had to kind of learn how to come of age or literally come of age in a household where I didn't know my father I had a stepdad who was Caucasian with two half sisters who were Caucasian and my stepdad's whole goal was to just pull my mom as far away from her Roots as possible because he didn't want to deal with all the drama that comes from being part of a Catholic Latin family and my mom was all for that but nevertheless like that was that was the kind of soup that I came out of what were the needs that were going unmet in your life at that point you do not ask easy questions man so uh uh I was not I I did not feel loved growing up I did not feel loved my mother loved me and I know logically and rationally that she loved me but my mother was a cold woman she was focused on Career Success she was focused on feminism she was focused on other things I I as an adult now uh my sisters and I often uh reflect on the fact that we think our mom was the kind of woman that didn't want to be a mom but it was expected of her to be a mom so therefore she became a mom so there wasn't a lot of love there wasn't a lot of emotional support there was plenty of academic support and it was always hard because the academic support came I think as a way of making sure that they didn't have to provide the other support cuz if you have an academically successful student who turns 18 they can get the [ __ ] out of the house and you can have your life back and I think that was the mission for my mom was just academic success academic success be successful so I don't have to take care of you because I'm not really good at this whole hugging loving thing uh and I just want you gone so I feel like that was that was my mom my dad and my mom I think had a marriage that was based in a common set of objectives more so than shared love and uh and they were just kind of pursuing those objectives and uh and I was fortunate because from that I was cultivated to be a hardworking academic success and that led to a full ride scholarship and that led to you know success in other parts of life but for sure it was it was an un it left behind a trail of always wondering who who who loves me in my family is love even important in a family does it matter or am I being too focused on this whole love thing uh as an example I tell the story because it's totally normal to me but a lot of other people find it surprising there was a day where my mom pulled me aside I was having an argument with my stepdad and I went to my mom looking for support and I asked her to support me you know I was like do do you love me right do you love me or do you love Dad more and she looked at me and she was like of course I love your dad more than I love you because you're my son I have to love you you were born to me I must love you but it's a choice to love your dad so I have to love him more because it's a choice and for me I will never forget that conversation I'll never forget the look on my mom's face it was so simple and so academic and so clear to her uh and it's never been something I could ever actually accept and even now as a husband and a father myself I don't understand how that was logically sound to her I don't know how you could ever actually prioritize who you love all of that as you've said as the result resulted in your acad mic success and your your focus and all those kinds of things but at what cost I mean it makes you kind of [ __ ] up man it makes you feel like first of all it makes you feel like your secrets are Justified it makes you feel like you must have secrets because there's nobody that you can talk to about certain things I I I remember for many years you you can't take you can't take your love life to mom and dad you can't tell them the girl that you think is cute you can't talk to them about not getting picked to go to the prom dance or anything like that you can't talk about that with them cu don't care and you can't trust your your sisters you can't trust your mom you can't trust your dad you can't trust the people in your own house so because you can't trust them and because you can't take certain things to them you must keep secrets and since you must keep secrets you must be allowed to keep secrets there must be secrets that are totally acceptable that they are also keeping from you so I grew up in a world where secrets were something that was very normal and then from that you start to learn that if secrets are normal then lying must also be normal and totally acceptable so there's a level of sociopathy that develops when you feel like you're on your own uh and that's something that most people out there who are loners who have grown up in that world they they learn to understand that there are certain elements of social behavior that are not culturally acceptable but as long as you don't talk about them you can practice them so that was uh that's a big part of what I learned personally was that Secrets how to keep secrets that secrets are normal how to lie how to lie without being caught and more importantly that that there is a very real difference between the people the people who are raised in a world where they trust people they trust others and because they trust others they have a built-in vulnerability a built-in deficiency of compared to the people who are raised in a world where they don't trust others because when you're raised in a world where you don't trust you can always learn to trust but when you're raised in a world where you trust first it's very difficult to train that person to know when to not trust someone else how do you feel about that wiring that you have because of that experience I mean it's sad I'm doing everything in my power to not wire my children the same way that I was wired so I do believe that there is a faulty wiring that happened but at the same time it's been very valuable to me it's been very productive and valuable in terms of what I've been able to experience what I've been able to see and do financially economically relationally i i i benefit and value and this is a big challenge that I have is as much as I sit here telling friends and like I'm telling you Secrets because this is what happens we tell people Secrets when they trust you when I share with you the challenges of growing up it's important to me that I don't sound like I'm complaining or whining because I had a fantastic foundation for Success after that but I defined success in all the ways that I was trained to define success financially economically empirically not based on how I feel internally have you had to do a lot of work to um counteract the potential consequences of that wiring as you become an adult and a father and all of those things it's something I think about a lot I think I've got my own pretty uh [ __ ] up wiring and I'm scared now because I'm on the footsteps of becoming a dad myself you know I'm with a partner I've been with her for four years we're talking about kids right now and I think Jesus Christ like there's a really you almost can foresee that there's a really high possibility I'm going to [ __ ] up as a dad because my brain is wired towards like validation and work Career Success and I'm a bit of a workaholic and so have you had to do a lot of work on that to absolutely so the first thing I'll say is you will [ __ ] up as a dad we will all [ __ ] up as parents the question is how big will we [ __ ] them up and I'm working very hard to make sure that the way that I [ __ ] up my kids is in small ways that they can fix in small ways but I already know like the sins of the father pass on so I'm just trying to minimize what I pass on that's negative and maximize what I pass on that's positive the the additional layer that's that is unique to myself and all uh professional intelligence officers is that when we are recruited into intelligence service specifically when CIA recruits field operators it's fairly transparent they tell you that you were recruited because you are a little [ __ ] up they tell you that you are you were recruited because of a certain psychological profile that makes it so that you pragmatically view things like secrets and lies there's a few different terms we call it uh moral flexibility depending on the situation there are some things that I would deem immoral but to do them in a different situation is totally acceptable and that's just something that I'm wired to be that's that's been wired to me since I was a kid but Cia understands how to take advantage of that how to use that in a way that benefits American National Security there's also an element of high performance that comes from being wired a certain way so there is a tie between childhood trauma and high performance it's a wellknown it's a documented connection but Cia has learned as has MI6 and mad and all the other intelligence Services of the of the world they've learned that when you train someone who has just the right amount of childhood trauma high performance when you get your hands on them at the right time in the right period of their life they can be trained to become extremely loyal highly productive field operators that that end up spending 30 plus years in service to their Nation when did they get their hands on you they recruited me when I was 27 years old uh coming out of the military in 2007 I was looking for whatever the next step was going to be uh and that was when I was approached by a CIA recruiter I heard that you got a popup on your computer screen yeah back in the day that's that's uh I was actually applying I was a nuclear missile officer for the CI excuse me I was a nuclear missile officer for the Air Force and a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force controls nuclear icbn so I wore the the little ring wait wait wait wait what's a nuclear ICBM so a nuclear ICBM is a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile so the large missiles that carry nuclear warheads for mutually assured destruction nuclear war type of stuff so you controlled the nuclear missiles I was half of who controlled them I wore one ring somebody else wore a different ring and that was that was how a nuclear missile got launched what what's what does the ring do so the ring is a key on the end of it is a key and when you get uh when you get a nuclear code that comes in the code you put it into a old school computer system and the two of you take your key ring and you insert it into the The Silo operating system and then you turn in unison and when you turn in unison it launches a nuclear weapon how did you get yourself to the point in life at 27 years old where you're holding a nuclear key around your neck I would love to say it was a series of good decisions but uh but it wasn't I just I was I did what I was told that's how I got there I did what I was told when I was in high school and I got good grades and then my mom told me that the best school of all the universities that chose me the best school I should go to is the Air Force Academy so then I accepted a full ride scholarship to the United States Air Force Academy where I did what I was told and I graduated as a lieutenant and then I followed what the Air Force told me to do from there and they they told me to learn how to fly and then they told me that they needed me to work in nuclear and space weapons instead so then I went to that school and I did well at that school and and I ended up just kind of climbing the ladder I I I did what I was told and and then one day I was I found myself 100 feet underground miserable it's it's a horrible job why you're uh so in 2007 when I was a nuclear missile officer you sit in a in a launch control capsule in LCC uh that sits 100 feet underground and you sit there on a 72-hour shift with one other person the other person who holds the other key and then you are one nuclear crew of maybe 30 different nuclear Crews who are all on deployment at the same time so at any given time in one air force base there's 60-ish people underground for 72 hours at a time and then in different missile base there'll be a different 60 people underground and your whole job is just to sit there and wait for nuclear war to break out and obviously nuclear war hasn't broken out and hopefully it never will break out so as you sit there underground not seeing sunlight and as you sit there in a in a capsule with one other person that you very rarely ever like you have a lot of time to reflect on what am I doing what am I doing with my life I'm a redundancy of a redundancy of a scenario that we all are working very hard to make sure never happens is this a productive life like am I am I making a difference am I leaving a mark in history sitting here not launching missiles waiting for a message to come in that I already know isn't going to lead to nuclear war it like it's it it's a very difficult and thankless job that even right now as you and I are having this conversation there are some 200 Americans sitting underground doing that exact job and that's just in the United States every country that has nuclear weapons is doing the same thing if an order had come in that instructed you to launch a nuclear weapon would you have done it absolutely that's what you do the other thing that's important to understand is we're redundancies of redundancies so we don't know if an order says to launch nuclear weapons we just know that an order comes in that says to insert the keys and turn them and if it's a valid order that comes in then the machine will let us insert our keys we will turn our keys and then the machine will do what the machine does sometimes that order that's coming in is saying launch nuclear missiles sometimes that order that's coming in is just a drill to make sure that the two people in the capsule turn their keys oh really so you never know the difference we just a redundancy of a redundancy man it it seems hard to me to understand how someone would stay in that job for a long period of time so they must have like really high attrition they have they have shockingly low attrition because they do such a good job of psychologically uh identifying the right people for that job were they scouting you do you think from a very um early age to eventually go into the CIA no I don't believe so I think CIA is far too practical to do anything that requires scouting people from a young age I think what more realistically happened is that they had a very simple algorithm that they had applied to every Government website so that when people of a certain um profile applied to a job on a government website then they get a flash on their screen just like I did that said hey we appreciate your application we'd like to have a different recruiter contact you for a different opportunity what were you applying for on that government website when that popup came up yeah I was applying for the Peace Corp I was trying to get into the US Peace Corp because after spending two years underground uh waiting to launch nuclear missiles I thought that it'd be great to get out of the Air Force and go do the exact opposite kind of like if you've ever had a really bad breakup you go looking for the exact opposite of the person you just broke up with that's that's how I felt and the peace corol does sort of humanitarian work around the world exactly right I mean I was looking to teach children English in Africa or save orphans or do micro Finance or build Huts like I was looking to to do something that built the world up instead of just waiting to tear the world down you get this popup as you're applying and it says um we another recruiter wants to speak to you or something what's to that effect what happens then so that's when being a 27-year-old single guy kicks in and you think to yourself there might be something better so once you think to yourself there might be something better it's really easy to say yes like I'll wait and that's all the that's all the screen was asking me to do is just pause my application for 72 hours so it's e to click yes and then you fall out of that website and you're just on hold for 72 hours either a better opportunity is going to happen and someone's going to call me or no one's going to call me and I can come right back and finish my application but just to say no means to miss the opportunity and that wasn't that wasn't me and then within 72 hours you get a call presumably within 24 hours I got a call yeah I got a call from an unlisted number it just said 703 and uh there was a woman on the other end of the line uh she gave me a first name but I don't remember what her first name was uh and she basically you know confirmed who I was and confirmed that I was applying to the Peace Corp asked me if I'd be open for other government opportunities and then she said that there might be opportunities in the National Security sector that I'd be interested in and she'd like to send me an airline ticket and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation to come up to DC to hear more about the job what did you think at that point I thought it was a prank call I thought I thought that the the call wasn't real uh I thought that the call was maybe it was some kind of gimmick or maybe it was something else or it just didn't sound real uh 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 uh 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 breadcrumbs the rental car reservation's real the airline tickets real you fly out there you land what happens next uh you get another phone call that says hey did you get in safe and then they tell you the address for where you're supposed to show up the next day uh and then you go it's a non-descript building and you walk in and uh 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 uh you know you find out that this person's and 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 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 uh I might be a good fit for the National Clandestine Service at CIA which I didn't know what that 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 was like essentially we want you to be a 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 gonna be a what like you want me to be a spy you want me to like Drive fancy cars and wear tuxedos 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 you to you know go back to your hotel and go back to malstrom Air Force Base 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 we'll be in touch and then they get in touch again and then they get in touch again and 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 interview to a kind of like a a a test like a um interview that's more of like a test with somebody else they ask you scenario based questions give you puzzles uh they ask you some light psychological stuff when you got that letter in the post saying that you've been offered a role how did you feel great yeah yeah I felt like I had done everything right right I felt like I mean there was a part of me that says that 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 of 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 [ __ ] 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 EX said 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 nope so what what did 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 at 18 I mean I went home maybe once a year every time I tried to go home it was always a kurur fluffle 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 and 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 CA 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 did the CIA tell you to disconnect from these people at all they told you that you would have to eventually and you know they 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 Rolodex 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 like secondary or tertiary relationships friends College friends like a primary relationship is your spouse a 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 I was 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 your appearance and ethnicity factored into the cia's decision to recruit you absolutely in 2007 so just to take everybody back 2007 was 6 years after 911 it was uh 3 years after the CIA 911 Commission or the US government 9911 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 uh and I think that's part of why my onboarding process took about 9 months where the typical onboarding process takes about 18 months how 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 uh but there's a school that we go to uh it's fairly publicly known but I can't acknowledge what it is and isn't and we go there for many months and we basically were we're pulled out of everyday life and we're put into a controlled simulated world um and inside that simulated World they kind of control what's happening around us so uh if you can imagine almost like going from uh being taken out of your apartment where you live and now you're put into a different apartment but the apartment that you're put into is 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 the cars that are on the road and 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 uh living and working under Alias 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 uh your tradecraft that you're taught it'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 uh there's generally two to three batches a year that go through different types of training and there's different classifications of officers too right so your analysts are different than your uh technical officers who are different than your field officers so what they'll do is they'll bat you into or at least what they did in 2007 is 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 that curriculum what is involved in that curriculum you mentioned a few things there is um 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 uh 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 you know dearm explosives so it all depends on the the caliber the level of officer that you're kind of put 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 taught 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 how to lie they teach you how to lie how do they teach someone how to lie it 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 people who are bad Liars talk to everything yeah yeah so 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 handlee as an example 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 so if you've ever had if you think back and you if 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 liing 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 their mouth is saying consider your your stereo stereotypical jock your standard European footballer or your american jock a lot of times they'll be portrayed as like somebody like yeah yeah they sit bigger than life and all this other stuff right their 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 dude that lady like whatever they are there's a disconnect their voice 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 they are actually uncomfortable and they are not feeling confident and that's why they're stammering over themselves so when you were lying to someone um based on your training would you think a lot about your body language yes and what would you do what would you what the principles of making sure your body language wasn't letting the cat out of the bag I so one of the first things to do when you're when you're trying to lie to somebody and again we're 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 but 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 m 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 you 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 you know right away You're G to be like I don't know who this guy is right and and similarly if I was to be like just for people that are on AIO he's just like doing different postures and body languages so that that are far away from my own putting his hands on the table Etc so okay makes sense so we want to mirror first and you mirror because mirroring creates a foundation of trust subconsciously it 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 is there anything else on the subject of telling a lie to someone that's believable that we 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 uh what's your old memory you just look to your left it's natural to look to your left when you're from a Western Country because chronologically timelines start on the left so 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 and to the right because down and to the left it's too bright and 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 the ability to create some sense of probability about why they're making the eye movements they're making is too difficult so 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 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 of Deceit the truth is you don't know if someone is lying to you until you have 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 so 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 that the change between their Baseline and whatever pressure you're putting them under was there any sort of uh consistent telltale signs that someone was lying to in an interaction like you know what I mean 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 to me yeah so with unskilled Liars it becomes much easier because a lot of times with skilled Liars with people who have either learned how to lie through formal training or people who have learned how to lie through the school of Hard Knocks when 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 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 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 uh noises that aren't actual words they can't get comfortable that keep moving around they keep shifting Shifty those are all 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 going 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 those 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 uh 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 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 stands for reward ideology coercion and ego reward is anything that you want money free vacations pat on the back uh 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 and these rewards change every time and by based on person okay 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 more Al 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 
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