CIA Spy: "Leave The USA Before 2030!" Why You Shouldn't Trust Your Gut! - Andrew Bustamante

For 7 years I was working undercover as a spy and I needed to know how to manipulate, how to live and operate undetected and how to collect secrets. Well, I have many questions. Andrew Bustamante, is a former CIA officer who uses spies. He skills to teach anyone how to master their minds, talents and potential in business and everyday life. When I left the CIA, I realized that he could use the CIA skills to be successful in business. One of the first things you should want to learn is how do I know if I am being lied to as an example.

Bad liars, which is one of the biggest signs of an unqualified liar. The following people have four basic motivations: reward, ideology, coercion, and ego, and if you can talk to someone through the lens of their ideology, you can catch them. do amazing things deception versus perspective what are those 90% of people out there? Everyone is trapped in their own perception when thinking emotionally and the emotions are very likely to be wrong, so the CIA trains us to recognize and dis

trust

our perception and there are two things that are really quick. what you can do next, Sad Rat is an acronym and all of our marketing, all of our human interactions fall into the same Sad Rat process that I learned at the CIA because the human condition is so predictable that Sad Rat represents and is the reason why which my company has grown 300% every year for the last 3 years I want to know more Was there any situation where you felt

your

life was at risk?

What do you think about what is happening right now with geopolitics? Do you think we're already involved? a form of World War II and then why are they going to try to

leave

the United States in 2027? It's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show and so many of you have decided to subscribe to our show. I have five million subscribers on YouTube, which is a number I simply cannot fathom and is a dream I could never have had. We started the terrible CO a little over three years ago and in my wildest expectations we could have had.

I already have 100,000 subscribers, so you can imagine how surprised I am that so many of you have chosen to tune into these conversations each week 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 program, we will continue to raise the bar and in 2024 we will do it like never before. I have been working for the last N9 months on a surprise for everyone who has subscribed to the show and I am very excited to be able to tell you that the production is going to change, we are going to go even further with our guests and we are going to tell even more stories global, so as always, if you appreciate what we're doing here, The simple, free favorite I'll ask you to do is hit the Subscribe button.

Let's continue with the episode. Andrew, you're very well known for

your

time at the CIA because people are very 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 S years. Many people make a career of 30 or more years in the CIA, so it was really a bit of a blip in terms of my life in general. I wore the US Army uniform for seven years before that, so 14 years total were in the service of the United States and what is the CIA, so the CIA is the intelligence foreign intelligence gathering platform. of the United States, its primary agency concerned with the collection of foreign secrets of any kind. of impact on American national security, so if you think about it, there are multiple what are called intelligence agencies in what is known as the intelligence community or the IC.

The CIA is just one of those 36 community members in the IC, yet he is the one charged. centralize all the intelligence collected, therefore the Central Intelligence Agency, so it is a center in a big wheel of intelligence gathering, what a spy is is the same as being a spy, so I'm going to do it. a little bit here because terminology is actually very important, so there are spies and spy is a vernacular that is used in common conversation that doesn't really have a definition in terms of the intelligence or espionage profession, you have handlers, you have assets in In terms of traditional spy handlers, they are officers who collect intelligence assets, they are foreigners who provide intelligence 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, therefore they are handlers and then.

All the people who provide them with secrets are considered assets. Traditionally speaking, when you talk about a spy, some people think that a spy is an asset or a controller, whether it's someone who provides information or someone who collects information, that's fine, and the The term spy is just, just confusing enough that a lot of times people project their own opinions onto that word because they don't understand the true nuance of espionage, so I thought of a spy as someone who goes to another country and secretly gathers information. and then sends it back to another. the country they come from, technically it's an intelligence agent, okay, or an intelligence officer, also known as an operator or in the media, an agent, sometimes also called an agent, right, intelligence agent, all of these are terms that get confusing, but what we're describing is an intelligence, a trained intelligence officer, it doesn't matter what country you're in, if you're in uh, it also doesn't matter what intelligence profession you're in and there are multiple types of intelligence, there are signs of human intelligence, measurements of intelligence. intelligence, anyone who travels to collect secrets on behalf of their country is an intelligence officer, what you were, that's what I was, started a company after leaving the CIA, it's called an everyday spy, correct for someone who just You clicked on this podcast and now you're trying to understand.

The value they will get from you by understanding the work you do as a spy every day. What will they get out of this conversation? This conversation is designed so that I can explain how spy skills have very real value. at Breaking everyday barriers and that is 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, my mission in my company was to break that barrier using a proven real-world espionage skill or technique and what kind of means is that and to what end, so if I'm the average citizen listening to this now, when you say breaking barriers, what are those barriers? to be able to break through in my life, so I intentionally use the term breaking barriers because we all have different barriers.

What is the reality of life? We all run into barriers that are similar, but we run into those barriers at different times for some people. an income barrier they are born with for other people the barrier they are born with is not having a father for other people they run into a financial barrier when they are 18 and have to

leave

home Some people never know about financial barriers, but they do know the educational barriers because they suffer from dyslexia or ADHD. There are people who have barriers that are due to anxiety. The reality is that there are actually about 12 barriers that we will all experience. in our lives but we will experience them at different times for some of us it won't happen until we are parents for others it happens as soon as we reach adulthood the idea is that the CIA is very familiar with the barriers and what they teach us as The officers that they go through their training programs is not just the details of the trade, it's really about understanding that any barriers that we as individuals face can be overcome, but we can also predict the barriers that other people will encounter and if you know another person's barrier and you understand their barrier better than them when you help them get 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, it seems that way to me What I know about spies is pretty fundamental to what it's like to be a successful spy and get information from someone else.

In this conversation today, we're going to learn how, through your training, you were taught to get information from people and make them do what you wanted. to do it, yes and I'll be very frank here. I try to exercise something called radical transparency. If you want to manipulate people, you'll 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 most important thing to understand is that whether you want to manipulate or not, others are manipulating you just because you don't know what they are doing.

The problem with being an intelligence operator is that to achieve the things you need to achieve, sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do as a business owner. What I have discovered is that many business owners struggle because they feel like they have to. things they don't want to do they feel like they have to be sleazy they feel like they have to be complicated they feel like they have to imitate you know, the shy, bad business owners, right on the other side if you think about 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 the same. like getting people to do what you want them to do, which is manipulating them, we'll get into all that, but I want to understand where you're coming from because I think this is pretty pertinent to both your job as a CIA officer and Um, a guy. of really interesting psychological elements about why the CIA CH chose you that are deep in the story of your childhood and that go back to the beginning of your life.

What is the most important context that we must understand to understand you? I think it is the most important. What you have to understand about my childhood is that I was raised by my mother. My father died. My father was murdered before I was born. He died in a violent crime in California. I never met him and my mother had to start her life with. a newborn son not only as a single mother but also as a single mother of a man who was murdered in a crime, so it was my mom and my grandmother who raised me from a very young age, my mom is a woman of color, she is Latina .

My father was American Indian, so there was an element of racial diversity in 1980, when I was born, that also played a role in all of that and the reason why that is important is not because of what happened in the past, but because from there. Foundation, my mom married a Caucasian man who became my stepfather, who also became my adoptive father, and I had to learn to come of age or literally come of age in a home where I didn't know my father. stepfather who was Caucasian with two half sisters who were Caucasian and my stepfather's goal was to simply get my mother away from her roots as much as possible because she didn't want to deal with all the drama that comes with being part of a Catholic community.

The Latin family and my mom were totally fine with it, but nevertheless, that was the kind of soup that I came out of what were the needs that were not being met in your life at that moment, you don't ask easy questions, man, like that that uh uh me It wasn't me I didn't feel loved growing up I didn't 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 professional success, she was focused on the feminism, I was focused on other things now, as an adult, my sisters and I often reflected on the fact that we thought our mother was the type of woman who didn't want to be a mother but was expected to be, which is why she became in mom, so there wasn't a lot of love, there wasn't a lot of emotional support, there was a lot of academic support and it was always difficult because the academic support came, I think as a way to make sure that they didn't.

You have to provide the other support because if you have an academically successful student who turns 18, they can get out of the house and you can get your life back and I think that was my mom's mission was just academic success, academic success, being successful. so I don't have to take care of you because I'm not very good at this whole hugging and loving thing, uh and I just want you to go away, so I feel like that was my mom, my dad and my mom, I think they had a marriage that it was based on a set of common goals rather than shared love and uh and they were just pursuing those goals and uh and I was fortunate because from that I was cultivated to be a successful working academic and that led to a fulfilling life. traveling on a scholarship and that led you to experience success in other parts of life, but it sure was one thing that left behind a trace ofalways ask myself who, who, who loves me in my family, is love even important in a family, does it matter?

Am I too focused on this whole love thing? As an example, I tell the story because it is totally normal for me, but it surprises many other people. There was a day when my mom took me aside. She was having an argument with my stepfather and I went to my mom for support and I asked her to support me, you know, I was like do you love me, do you love me or do you love dad more? And she looked at me and said, of course I do. I love your dad more than I love you because you are my son I have to love you you were born for me I must love you but it is a choice to love your dad so I have to love him more because it is a choice and for me I will never forget that conversation.

I will never forget. The expression on my mother's face was so simple, so academic and so clear to her, uh, and it has never been something that I could accept, and even now, as a husband and father, I don't understand how that was logically solid. her, I don't know how you could prioritize who you love, all of that, as you've said, as a result, resulted in your academic success and your concentration and all that kind of stuff, but at what cost I mean? You're kind of cheerful, man, it makes you feel like, first of all, it makes you feel like your secrets are justified.

It makes you feel like you have to have secrets because there's no one you can talk to about certain things. I remember for many years. You can't take your love life to mom and dad. You can't tell the girl you think she's cute. You can't talk to them about not being chosen to go to prom or anything like that. I can't talk about it with them because I don't care and you can't

trust

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 I can't trust in them and since 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 and that they also keep from you, so I grew up in a world where secrets They were a very normal thing and then 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 who are loners and who have grown up in that world 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, 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 getting caught, and most importantly, that there are a very real difference between people people who grow up in a world where they trust people, they trust others and because they trust others they have an inherent vulnerability, an inherent deficiency compared to people who grow up in a world where they don't. They do Trust others because when you grow up in a world where you don't trust, you can always learn to trust, but when you grow up in a world where you trust first, it's very difficult to train that person to know when not to trust someone.

If not, how do you feel about that wiring you have because of that experience? I mean, it's sad. I'm doing everything in my power to not wire my kids up the same way they wired me up so I think there's some 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, benefit and value, and this is a The big challenge I have is sitting here telling my friends and telling them Secrets because this It's 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 it doesn'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 I was trained to define success financially, empirically, not based on how I feel internally. doing a lot of work to counteract the potential consequences of that wiring as you become an adult and a parent and all that stuff is something I think about a lot.

I think I have my own pretty wiring and Now I'm scared because I'm in the steps of becoming a father. You know, I'm with a couple. I've been with her for four years. We're talking about kids right now and I think Jesus Christ is like you really exist. I can almost foresee that there is a very high possibility that I will become a father because my brain is programmed for validation and work. Professional success and I'm a bit of a workaholic, so you've had to work a lot. On that, absolutely, the first thing I will say is that you will be a father and we will all do it as fathers.

The question is how big we will be and I'm working very hard to make sure we do it the way I do. my children are little things that they can fix in little things, but I already know that the sins of the father are transmitted, so I am just trying to minimize what I transmit to them as negative and maximize what I transmit to them as positive and the additional. The layer that is unique to me and all professional intelligence officers is that when we are recruited into the intelligence service, specifically when the CIA recruits field operators, it is quite transparent, they tell you that you were recruited because you are a little bit higher up, they tell you that you are You were recruited because of a certain psychological profile that makes you pragmatically see things like secrets and lies.

There are a few different terms we call it moral flexibility depending on the situation. There are some things that I would consider immoral, but do them. in a different situation it's totally acceptable and that's something that I'm programmed to be and that's been programmed for me since I was a kid, but Cia understands how to take advantage of that and how to use it in a way that benefits American national security. There is also an element of high functioning that comes from being wired in a certain way, so there is a link between childhood trauma and high functioning.

It's well known, it's a documented connection, but Cia has learned just as MI6, Mad and every other intelligence service in the world has learned that when you train someone who has just the right amount of childhood trauma, high performance, when You put your hands on him at the right time in the right period of his life, he can be trained to become extremely loyal and highly productive field operators who end up spending more than 30 years serving their nation. When did they put their hands on you? I was recruited when I was 27 years old. I got out of the military in 2007.

I was looking for what the next step was. It was going to be uh and that's when a CIA recruiter approached me. I heard he had a pop-up window on his computer screen, yeah, back in the day, that's, uh, he was actually applying. He was a nuclear missile officer for the CI, excuse me. was an Air Force nuclear missile officer and a nuclear missile officer in the Air Force controls the nuclear ICBN, so I used the little ring, wait, wait, wait, wait, what is a nuclear ICBM? that carry nuclear warheads for mutually assured destruction nuclear war type of thing so you controlled the nuclear missiles I was half of the one controlling them I was wearing a ring someone else was wearing a different ring and that's how a nuclear missile was launched what what is it What does the ring do?

The ring is a key on the end it's a key and when you get a nuclear code that comes in the code you put it in an old school computer system and you two take your keychain and you insert it into The Silo operating system and then You spin in unison and when you spin in unison you launch a nuclear weapon. How did you get to a point in life at age 27 where you are holding a nuclear bomb? key around your neck I would love to say it was a series of good decisions, but it wasn't, I just 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 out of all the universities that they chose me as the best school I should go to is the Air Force Academy, so I accepted a full scholarship to the Air Force Academy from the United States where I did what I was told and graduated as a lieutenant and then followed what the Air Force told me to do from there and they told me to learn to fly and then they told me they needed me to work in energy nuclear and space weapons instead, so I went to that school and did well in that school and ended up just moving up the ladder.

I did what I was told and then one day I found myself 100 feet underground miserable, it's a horrible job, why are you like this? In 2007, when I was a nuclear missile officer, you sat in a launch control capsule at LCC, which was 100 feet underground, and you sat there on a 72-hour shift with another person. another person who has the other key and then you are a nuclear crew of maybe 30 different nuclear crews that are all deployed at the same time, so at any given time at an air force base there are about 60 people underground for 72 hours at one time and then at a different missile base there will be 60 different people underground and your whole job is to just sit there and wait for a nuclear war to break out and obviously nuclear war hasn't broken out and hopefully it never will break out .

While you're sitting underground not seeing sunlight and while you're sitting in a pod with another person you rarely like, you have a lot of time to reflect on what I'm doing, what I'm doing with my life. I am a redundancy of a redundancy of a scenario that we are all working very hard to make sure never happens. Is this a productive life? Am I making a difference? Am I leaving a mark on history by sitting here not launching missiles waiting for a message? coming that I already know won't lead to a nuclear war, it's like it's such a difficult, thankless job that even right now, as you and I are having this conversation, there are about 200 Americans sitting underground doing exactly that job. and that's just in the United States, all the countries that have nuclear weapons are doing the same thing if an order had come ordering you to launch a nuclear weapon, would you have done it?

That's what is done. The other thing that is important to understand is. We are redundancies of redundancies, so we don't know if an order says to launch nuclear weapons, we only know that an order comes that says insert the keys and turn them, and if it is a valid order that comes, then the machine will do it. let's insert our keys, we'll turn them and then the machine will do what it does sometimes that order that comes in says launch nuclear missiles sometimes that order that comes in is just a drill to make sure the two people in the capsules turn their keys, oh , really, so you never know the difference, we're just a layoff man's layoff, I find it hard to understand how anyone could stay in that job for a long period of time, so they must have really high attrition.

Do they have surprisingly low attrition because they do a very good job of psychologically identifying the right people for that job? Were they scouting you? Do you think from a very young age he would eventually join the CIA? I think the CIA is too hands-on to do anything that requires scouting people from a young age. I think what happened more realistically is that they had a very simple algorithm that they had applied to all the government websites, so that when people of a certain profile applied for a job on a government website and then a flash on your screen, just like I did, that says, "Hey, we appreciate your application.

We'd like a different recruiter to contact you for a different opportunity. What were you applying for on that government website when?" That popup appeared, yes, I was applying to the Peace Corps. I was trying to get into the US Peace Corps because after spending two years underground, waiting to launch nuclear missiles, I thought it would be cool to get out of the Air Force and go do the exact opposite, like if you ever had a really bad breakup, you look for the exact opposite of the person you just broke up with, that's how I felt and the peace choir does kind of humanitarian work around the world. exactly right, I mean, I was looking to teach English to children in Africa or save orphans or do microfinance or build huts like I was looking to do something that builds the world instead of just waiting to tear down the world.

You get this popup like you're applying and it says, um, another recruiter wants to talk to you or something, what happens then, that's when being a 27-year-old single guy kicks in and you think there could be something better, like this that once you think that it couldthere's something better, it's very easy to say yes, like wait and that's all the screen was asking me to do is just pause my app for 72 hours so I have to click yes and then you get out of that site website and you're on hold for 72 hours, or a better opportunity comes up and someone calls me or no one calls me and I can come back and finish my application, but just to say no means missing the opportunity and 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 that just said 703 and uh there There was a woman on the other end of the line she gave me a name but I don't remember what it was his name, and basically, you know, confirmed who I was and confirmed that I was applying to the Peace Corps.

She asked me. if I would be open to other government opportunities and then she said that there might be opportunities in the Homeland Security sector that would interest me and that she would like to send me a plane ticket, a hotel reservation and a rental car. booked to come to DC and hear more about the workWhat did you think at that moment? I thought it was a prank call. I thought the call wasn't real. I thought the call was maybe some kind of trick or maybe it was something else or just not. It doesn't ring true, especially when he said he'd like to send me a paper plane ticket and that he was going to mail me all this stuff overnight by FedEx, but then it showed up and then when it showed up again, I got an email from 27 years 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 counter and is this a real rental car reservation?

It's a real reservation. there's a real hotel and then you just follow the breadcrumbs the rental car reservation is real the real plane tickets you fly there you land what happens next uh you get another phone call saying Hello, did you get in safely and then they tell you? the address where you're supposed to show up the next day and then you go, it's a nondescript building and you walk in and for me, I walked in, there were about 10 other people in the waiting room, none of us really knew what we were there for, we all we knew we were there for something related to a government job, everyone was dressed essentially the same and, you know, you find out that this person, finance, and that lady came from social work and whatever else. could be and then eventually someone 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 kind of a meet and greet to see what you're interested in and what you're doing.

I wasn't interested in ETC and it was at the end of that first interview that the lady told me that I might be a good candidate for the CIA's National Clandestine Service, which I didn't know what it was at the time and then she basically broke it down and she it was like you and me at the beginning of this conversation, she said essentially we want you to be a field officer or what you might know from the movies like a spy and of course for me it was me. I mean, my seven-year-old self was like, I'm going to be a Do you want me to be a spy?

Do you want me to like it? Driving fancy cars and wearing a tuxedo and always having a beautiful woman by my side like signing up for I mean, starving children in Africa can wait. I want to do that, but then, of course, comes the line afterward where it says, "You can't tell anyone that this is what you're applying for now. We're moving you." Moving on to the second phase of interviews, we need you to know, go back to your hotel and go back to Malstrom Air Force Base in Montana and live your normal life and if anyone asks you why you're here, just tell them you came. here applying for a government job and you don't know if you're going to get it or not and in the meantime we'll be in touch and then they'll get in touch again and then they'll get in touch again and then you go through several more rounds of interviews, for which usually takes you back to the DC area and then the interviews get a little more intense, you go from a proper interview to some sort of test, like an interview that's more like a test. with someone else they ask you scenario based questions they give you riddles uh they ask you some light psychological stuff when you got that letter in the post saying you were offered a role how great did that feel?

Yes, yes, I felt like I had. everything good, well, I felt like there was a part of me that says what it says and I still follow this Mantra like who can do this, so it felt amazing and then there was a lot of use of your word, a lot of validation of how now I understand now I know why I went to a college I didn't like now I know why I put up with a stepfather and I listened to my mom and I said: I don't need love and you don't need support and you don't need a family that cares about you like person, all you need is to check the boxes because this is where you get 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 get hired because you check the boxes, you just 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 the entire interview process you cannot tell anyone.

I guess not even your family. No, so what did you tell your family that you've been doing during that period? This is the great thing about their recruiting process. Remember I told you before that I accepted as a child that there are times you have to lie and there are secrets you have to keep. This was just a secret I had to keep and a lie I had to tell, so I told it to my family who was looking to get out of the Air Force. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, maybe I was going to 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 went to the Air Force Academy at 18, I mean, I came home maybe once a year, every time I tried to come home it was always stupid because my parents didn't want to buy the ticket. by plane because it was expensive. and I didn't have money to buy a plane ticket, so I had to ask them and it was the same song and dance every Christmas holiday, like I'd like to come home. I don't have money, well we don't. You also don't have any money, maybe you

shouldn

't come home, so it was very easy to be 27, almost 10 years after that.

I'm not very close to my family, so I tell them as little as possible that I had a girlfriend at the time. She was a great girlfriend, but she wasn't as cool as a CIA officer would be. I had friends at the time, but they weren't as cool as it would be to be a CA officer, so it was very easy to just start cutting off the branches of my social tree because I was going to do something amazing. I didn't need anyone else. Did the CIA tell you to disconnect from these people? They told you that you would have to do it eventually and you know.

They explain how you're going to go into the covert service, if you go into the clandestine service, you can't take a whole Rolodex of people with you, so one of the things they asked during our psychological evaluation was, you know? How much do you need close relationships and close companions and how does it feel to cut ties with what we sometimes call secondary or tertiary relationships? University friends. As a primary relationship is your spouse. A secondary relationship is all your close friends. A tertiary relationship is. Someone you work with, how does it feel to cut off all those not-so-important relationships?

And for me it was easy, right? I thought, come on, I'm going to do something amazing. I don't need friends from college to do it. Go do something amazing. Do you think your appearance and ethnicity influenced the CIA's decision to absolutely recruit you in 2007, so just to take everyone back, 2007 was 6 years after 9/11, it was 3 years after the CIA 911 Commission or the US government's 9911 commission? came out that basically said that everything the CIA had been doing up until 2001 was wrong, they were focused on a Cold War era, they weren't focused on terrorism, they were focused on, you know, Caucasian Ivy League graduates like the next generation of CIA officers instead of diversifying for a diversifying world, so without a doubt they were looking for different people, they were looking for young people, people of color, you know, LBGTQ as well as people who could connect to the modern threat across the world and then I think, in addition to being brown and ethnic, I also came with a huge government record because I had been part of the Air Force since I was 18, so they knew everything about my health, everything about my mental health, everything about my you know, academic sports performance in college, they knew all about I, uh, and I think that's part of why my onboarding process took about 9 months, whereas the typical onboarding process takes about 18 months.

I talk about it, but there's a school we go to, it's pretty publicly known, but I can't recognize what it is and what it isn't, and we go there for many months and they basically took us out of everyday life. and they put us in a controlled simulated world, um, and within that simulated world, they control what happens around us, so, if you can imagine, it's almost like they took you out of your apartment where you live and now they put you . to a different department, but the department you're located in is part of a giant game and someone else controls the entire game, so they control the news that's on the TV and they control the cars that are on the road and and they control everything except the weather, basically, so they can create multiple different types of scenarios in which you exercise the skills they taught you, from driving to First Responder first aid, to lying, to living and working under Alias ​​identities, all of that, so you .

They put you in a very controlled environment for a long period of time where they can test all of your trade skills that they taught you which is very expensive, it must be very expensive for them to train a CIA agent, that's why they train us. batches, so there are usually two or three batches a year that go through different types of training and there are also different classifications of officers, so your analysts are different than your technical officers, who are different than your field officers, so that what they will do is They will attack you or at least what they did in 2007 is that they will group you together with your discipline and then they will send a batch to training and then they will all go through the same lectures during the day, like in University and they will all go through a series. of exercises at different times of the day and different times of the week, but essentially they all follow the same curriculum and they all have the same grades and then those grades are compared to each other and the worst performers are eliminated and the top performers get to maintain that curriculum what is involved in that curriculum you mentioned some things there are um learning to kill people involved in the curriculum no that is not involved in the curriculum not at the basic training level they teach you that uh they teach you something people that but they don't teach everyone that depends on the discipline you are part of if you are a paramilitary officer you need to learn to kill and you need to learn to kill in different ways kill quickly kill calmly kill with blunt weapons, of course , with knives or kill with knives, kill with projectile weapons, so kill with explosives, you know, disarm explosives, so it all depends on the caliber, the level of the officer they put you in, so they must be paramilitary . learn that, but your standard human intelligence field forager needs to learn to live and work without getting caught, so if you kill someone it's a big deal, they might catch you, they teach you, so it's a lot easier teach that person how to manipulate and collect secrets. how to live and operate undetected, while a paramilitary officer doesn't need to learn everything they were taught to lie, they teach you to lie, how they teach someone to lie, you start with a foundation to make sure you recruit people who are already liars and then once you are sitting across from a liar you can start to understand whether they are good liars or not very quickly.

You've probably talked to people who are mean. Liars talk with everything, yes. Yes, so you know when someone is a bad liar, so from there you can identify people who are good liars and then when you find a good liar, you start teaching them what they already do naturally that makes them into good liars, and then you start teaching them how to refine that skill and you start teaching them how bad liars operate and how you can spot a bad liar and how to get advantages that you know with lying and how to handle it as an example because I promised you speaking skills. bad as liars.

Many good liars talk a little because the more you talk the more you risk undermining your own lie. Bad liars make many statements. Good liars ask a lot of questions because if you ask questions you don't reallyyou are giving anything away about If you have ever had it, think back and remember if you ever went to a party or you ever went on a date or you were ever in a social setting where there was someone who made you feel so interesting but you didn't. . I don't know anything about them, you were talking to a very good liar.

What about body language? Is it a factor in outright lying? I mean, body language is a factor in everything, but body language is especially a factor in lying because, going back to the idea of ​​a skilled liar versus an unskilled liar, a skilled liar knows how to appear like he's telling the truth. with their words and with their body, while an unskilled liar often has a disconnect and their body will say a different message than their mouth says. You're your stereotypical sportsman, your standard European footballer or your American sportsman, a lot of times they'll be portrayed as someone like yeah, yeah, they sit larger than life and all this other stuff, their body shows confidence and openness, but then when they talk , they sound like idiots right, I'm not sure you totally know, dude, that lady likes whatever it is, there's a disconnect, her voice doesn't show the same confidence that her body does, so you know that person is lying.

Lying is not necessarily just the content of what they are saying but they recognize that they don't, they can't cognitively accept the fact that they are in a position where they are telling a lie and that lie, at the very least, is that they are not very confident. nor are they super comfortable, they actually feel uncomfortable and don't feel safe and that's why they stutter about themselves. So when you were 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 do? What are the principles to make sure that your Body language didn't let the cat out of the bag, so one of the first things you should do when you're trying to lie to someone and again we're talking about how to lie to someone.

You

shouldn

't want to learn how to lie to someone you should want to learn how to know if someone is lying to you but we always start this way when we want to, we are afraid to ask the real question, which is how can I do it? I know if they are lying to me because that shows vulnerability, but if you want to learn how to lie to someone, the first thing you do is imitate the person looking at you and right now we are reflected, your hands connected under the table. yes, mine are also your feet crossed under your seat, yes, mine too, we are mirrored in this moment, which means that when you look at me you unconsciously see yourself.

I want you to see yourself in this exercise because if you see yourself, your initial instinct The answer will be trust because who you trust in everyone you trust yourself, so the first step to being able to lie effectively is to be able to reflect the person you are lying to if they were coming towards you like you know. Right away, you have to say: I don't know who this guy is, and similarly, if it were to be just for people who are in AIO, he would do different postures and body languages ​​so that they are very far away. for my part, putting your hands on the table, etc., okay, it makes sense, so first we want to reflect ourselves and you reflect, because reflecting creates a base of trust unconsciously, it creates a base of trust and then once you have that foundation of trust, you just start being kind. of going further and further with the lie or with the lie that you are creating the LIE, right?

Is there anything else about telling a lie to someone that is credible that we should be aware of in terms of skills? Yes So first, the idea that there are two big ideas that are glorified on social media that are just inaccurate and the first one is called eye movements, you can't actually tell if someone is lying to you based on where they place their eyes, because if Well there are certain elements of eye movements that have biological relevance there are many more things about eye movements that have no biological relevance, so what I mean by this is that if I ask you what your old memory is, you simply 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 someone a question about time and they look to the left, top to bottom or in the middle , generally speaking, that has biological relevance, so it is a low level. probability that they are lying, but they could still be lying when you ask someone a question, they look to the top right or the bottom right or wherever they look, if so, there is not necessarily biological relevance 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 direction because maybe they have a headache or maybe they have something else in 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 judge someone's honesty or dishonesty based on eye movements, although you'll hear that you can from Instagram influencers and you know Discord and everywhere on the internet. you are going to hear that there is some connection that you can justifiably make, it is not true, the same is also true, so it is also false that you can rely on something known as microexpressions.

Microexpressions are the number of times your eyes blink. or the Twitch in your face or if you are licking your lips these ideas that are glorified through social media as indicators of deception, the truth is that you don't know if someone is lying to you until you have had enough time with the person to establishing what is known as a baseline a baseline means what is normal for you so I will just use you as an example 10 minutes before the cameras went on you were a totally different person your energy is different you are just much more talkative You're an awesome, friendly guy when the cameras aren't on, but you become an interviewer when the cameras are on.

Totally rational. Totally logical. It makes a lot of sense. That doesn't mean you're lying now and you were telling him. The truth is that it means that the environment has changed and no one would know that if there was no baseline, most people who observe you never know what you are like outside of this baseline, so you have to know the person and then understand the variation that's unusual to understand if you're being lied to exactly, we call it time on target, you need time on target so you can understand the Delta that was the change between your baseline and whatever pressure you were at. is subduing them. there are some kind of consistent telltale signs that someone was lying to you in an interaction like, you know what I mean, what you know, sure, you know, nervous things that do change, you know what those variations are that you might see, that you go with this person now. lie to me, yes, so with unskilled liars it becomes much easier because many times with skilled liars with people who have learned to lie through formal training or people who have learned to lie through the school of Hard Knocks when there are people who are skilled liars, it's hard to find generic information with people who are not skilled liars, it's much easier to find generic information, there are people you've heard of who are in the hot seat, it's a phrase we use in the culture In the Western world quite often, like when someone is under pressure, we call it being in a bind when you have an unskilled liar who can't stop moving their body like they're always uncomfortable and they just keep moving and they keep squirming and they keep fidgeting and it's like if they were sitting in a hot seat, which is one of the biggest signs of an unqualified liar and, again, of anyone who has ever had a six-year-old, an eight-year-old, or a 12-year-old. tries to lie to them they know what it looks like they can't make eye contact they make a lot of verbal noises that aren't real words they don't feel comfortable they keep moving they keep moving Shifty that's all those words come from real world examples of an unskilled liar trying to lie , but you don't need micro facial expressions or knowing which direction their eyes are going to pick that up, going back to your training, so what were they?

Some of the other most important transferable skills you learned throughout that process. The most interesting and useful things we learned during the training actually had to do with the psychological processes that people go through and the ability to understand the process and then predict and identify when. the process is happening those are the things that really make a big difference yes it's cool to learn how to do a dead spot 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 series of processes that we learned that had to do with human psychology one of those processes it's understanding the idea of ​​core motivations, core motivations are, remember how we talk about manipulation and motivation, they're two sides of the same coin, when you understand all the different options of the coin that you're working with, you can work with it. more effectively so that people in general are 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 you want, money, free vacations, pats on the back, uh, women, alcohol, if that's something you want and if I give it to you I give you what you want, so that's a reward, people do a lot of crazy things to get rewards and these rewards change every time and depending on the person, okay, the second main motivator is ideology, ideology is the things that you believe in people. doing crazy things for the things that they believe in, whether it's their religion, whether it's their country, whether it's their family, whether it's what they believe in, is more correct, so if you can assign, if you can talk to someone through the lens of their ideology, you can get to do incredible things C is coercion coercion are all negative things guilt shame blackmail anything you do to force someone to perform a certain action by relying on the negative element of motivation which is also known as manipulation which falls under the sea ​​or coercion and then the ego is all that has to do with how the person sees themselves, so a lot of times the ego is oversimplified by thinking that it's just people who have a big ego, right? someone like Donald Trump who has a big ego or the name of the famous actor who has one. a big ego ego are also people who do not have big egos Mother Teresa had an ego that she wanted to sacrifice for other people, she wanted other people to see her sacrifice herself for other people, that is also ego, so with these four central motivations you have a rubric a process for understanding 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 matters to them with what you want them to do and you will simply increase the likelihood that they will do what they do. What you want them to make of these four core motivations is: is there an order of force that they have on people? So if you were really trying to get someone to do something, you would focus on this core motivation over that one. Yes, absolutely, the 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 movies get wrong. The movies try to make it seem like you can blackmail someone or put a gun to their head and make them do it. what you want them to do in the real world, once you put a gun to someone's head, they will never trust you again, you will never be able to get them to do something twice, whereas if you appeal to their ideology, doing this is good for your country, doing it is good. For your family to do this is good for your health if you can appeal to someone's ideology they will do what you tell them to do for a long time because they will trust you.

Is this really the essence of manipulation? So that's the essence. of motivation and manipulation, same coin, you'll hear me come back to this because one of the things that people really struggle with outside of intelligence is that they feel like they have to label things as good or bad when their moral flexibility is taken away. . The good and the bad, it all simply becomes a matter of usefulness or productivity. If you need someone to do something and you can motivate them, then you should do it, but if you need someone to do something and you can't motivate them, that's the green light to do it.manipulate them because you still need them to do what you need them to do if you feel bad about manipulating someone you will not do well in the world of intelligence how could you say that ideology is the strongest of the four core of the main motivations How might you discover someone's ideology in the context of business and life?

Many times people offer it to you voluntarily. There are two ways if you are a keen observer. People offer themselves to you. You've already volunteered it. you are ideologically predisposed to fatherhood you have already talked about it the reason you are worried about your children that you do not have yet is because you are thinking so clearly about fatherhood that you are ideologically predisposed to what it means To be a responsible father, you want to be seen as a responsible parent, it also plays to your ego, MH, so I'm sure when you talk to your partner, if they're already looking at where we would go to school, where would we go? live what kind of diapers should we use if you're even thinking about it, you're thinking about it through the lens of the ideology of being an engaged, present, helpful, loving parent, so people will volunteer, your customer base will become He will volunteer for you. what their ideologies are, they will volunteer their politics, they will volunteer their pain from their childhood, they will volunteer their pain from business, if you listen, if you listen, the second way you can come to understand the ideology of your customer base is to through active marketing, the right kind of marketing, not mass marketing, not the kind of rubbish you see on Instagram and YouTube, you know how to make people believe in your brand because you use the right colors, but real marketing where you present a message. and that message was crafted with emotion behind it.

People who respond to that intentionally crafted message are showing what their motivations are because they were clearly motivated. Enough for 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 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 the narrative is not the power of influence the power of influence actually comes from the messages it takes two steps to get to a narrative messages are needed first and then the messages build a narrative if Do you think about sending messages?

Messages are supposed to be something emotional just a statement just a message like a text right? Are you afraid of being the kind of parent who is not present for your children and creates movement in the right ideologically predisposed person? There's no woman out there who's motivated by that, maybe she's motivated to tell her partner that, but it's not going to resonate with her the way it resonates with me as a parent of young children, but that's just the message. so the narrative is not emotional in nature. 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 who wasn't? That is not present for your son. Oh man, that's right. It moves me, so all you have to do is sign up for this app that reminds you every Sunday to read your kids a story and you think, oh, that makes so much sense, all I need is a reminder and I'll do it. a good father and that is sending messages a narrative the same thing happens in politics the same thing happens in geopolitics the same thing happens around the world because in the world of intelligence we understand the messages and the narrative we know how to use the messages a narrative that's how a president is elected is the reason Saudi Arabia went to war with Iran over Yemen, that's how everyone understands at the national security level the idea of ​​creating a message or a narrative using emotional messages, but when it comes to business , people don't understand it.

However, they haven't learned that lesson yet because they've all been taught through an NBA program or something else that you sell toothpaste by creating more toothpaste with brighter colors on more shelves thinking about ideology and everything. what you just said there you have your experience of the last I don't know 20 30 years really made you rethink and look at the world completely differently because if you are so focused and able to detect and understand messages and narratives, you should see them everywhere you go and in everything you do. Well, there were two big aha moments for me and the first was in the beginning parts of my CIA training.

I mean, when I went through the whole CIA recruiting process and my entire time in the military, I felt like I was doing the right thing. I just felt like I was doing a good job. I felt like I was special. Wow, I must be super special because I'm being picked for the National Clandestine Service, so I felt like I was doing everything right. and then I ended up going through my training program where they confirmed that I was actually broken in certain aspects. I was a high achiever because I had trauma as a child. I lie and I steal and I don't have a problem with sociopathy because I'm not mentally healthy, that's basically what they confirmed, like you're wired a certain way, that's really helpful, but you're not actually neurotypical, you're not, you don't have Successful the way you thought you were successful, but you are. is still very useful and by the way you are even more special because now you work for the CIA so never stop working for the CIA because they know that what drives us is our ideology our ideology and then our ego so they hook us in that way, for me that was my first big aha moment because until then I always thought that maybe I understood the world, but no one else seemed to understand it the way that I understood it.

I could see the hypocrisy in high school and I could see. the hypocrisy in my mom and dad and they did things that were different than what they told me to do and I don't understand how the customer is always right but sometimes the company wins the lawsuit like they do. It doesn't make sense how there is a legal structure but criminals don't go to jail if there is a legal structure like I remember seeing it all and thinking it didn't make sense but I was never really confident enough to say anything about it . I did it because it was a secret and I didn't feel comfortable sharing that secret.

The CIA taught me that what you are seeing is actually the world as it is and we are going to train you to show you that and give you a vocabulary to understand. what you're seeing, we're going to teach you about human psychology so you understand why it works the way it works, why everyone sees it and no one talks about it properly, so that was my first big aha moment and then my second big aha moment came when I left the CIA and was unemployed for about six months living in my father-in-law's converted garage with a one-year-old wondering how I did so many things so wrong that I couldn't get a job even though I I was alone, I was part of the CIA and at that time I felt like the biggest loser in the world, the only skill I could rely on was what the CIA had taught me to do, so I lied my way into a Fortune 10 company and everyone Suddenly I wasn't a loser anymore and once I realized I could use CIA skills to be successful in business, that was my second big moment, so now everything I see I see through a lens. lens of CIA skills in a business world.

Perception versus perspective of the world. It was one of the other things I heard you talk about. I guess it was a pretty big shift in understanding, but it's something the average person doesn't really understand. Yeah, so the idea of ​​perception and perspective. I have to define them. The first correct perception is what you think you see, where you sit is how you perceive the world around you. Perspective is how other people see where you are sitting, so when I think about us right now, facing each other, my perception is what I believe. I see that your perspective is very different from my perception, at the very least, I am looking at you with a background that is different than when you look at me with a background, so the benefit is the advantage that the CIA gives to its field officers. is that it trains us to recognize and distrust our perception because perception really only comes from one source and that is your own five senses, you are the source of information for your perception.

So for anyone who has ever seen a little pile of socks in the bottom left corner and thought it was a rat and jumped until they realized they were socks, that's your perception lying to you. Perspective means that you obtain data objectively from the world around you, so if you are in your room and you see a pile of black in the corner your perspective tells you that this is your room there has never been a rat in your room before that pile in the corner is probably something like socks you know perspective keeps things objective perception makes things very subjective or very emotional so CIA trains us to lean on our perspective gain perspective think about things objectively because if you lean on your perception you are relying on emotions and it is very likely that the emotions are wrong.

How can I train myself to rely more on my perspective? There are two really quick things that The first thing you can do is immediately distrust your emotions. Know immediately when you feel 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. Trust your instinct. I'm telling you right now. Most of the time your gut lies to you because your gut is based on emotion. Your girlfriend is not willing to leave you. Your boyfriend is not cheating on you. You're not about to go bankrupt.

Nobody cares about the pimple on your nose, right, it's most likely true. There is a small chance that your perception is correct, but when it comes to betting, are you going to bet on the small chance or the big one? You should always bet. the greater the possibility the greater the chance that you will only truly understand through perspective if you have perspective on something then you have multiple data points about something so when you feel yourself getting excited stop and let your emotion happen for a second, right? I feel nervous, I feel anxious. I feel hesitant, okay, it's probably not necessary, you probably shouldn't do it, because whoever is sitting in front of you, whoever walks into the room with you, whoever is on the bus with you, they're all focused on a thousand different things and things what they are focused on most likely they will not include you sounds easier said than done, the correct thing is that it is a process of repetitions to train yourself to think like this, it takes U impulse, so what ends up having to happen is that You need to exercise it intentionally at first and what happens is that as you intentionally exercise your perspective on perception, what will start to happen is you will start to see that what you were worried about is not happening and then once you see it, it is not happening.

It will happen once. you see that your perspective is giving you the right information about your perspective perception, once you see that happen once, it starts to gain momentum and then it happens again and it gains more momentum and more momentum and more momentum until the time comes when you You realize it's a lot easier, but 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 people are trapped in their own perception everyone is trapped in emotional thinking they don't even know there is an alternative just think about this man the conversation we are having right now the people who are listening to this conversation right now who have never heard that there is a difference between perception and perspective they are already better equipped than everyone else who has never heard this conversation they are already one step ahead of their competition they are one step ahead of their spouses their partners their bullies are one step ahead of everyone because Now you can use the words perception and perspective, subject and objective, emotional, logical and rational, you can use these words to define how you want to think, even if you don't think that way yet, that is the great advantage of what the CIA calls the trained. and the trained and untrained people are at least aware that there is an alternative option the untrained people are not even aware that there is an option the vast majority of people out there or what I call stubborn people do not even know that there is an option option are completely unaware of an alternative solution, an alternative process, so they are trapped in their perception, they are trapped in their emotion, they are trapped in their subjectivity and that makes it much easier for people like you and like me and everyone those of us listening to right now use Rational Objective Perspective to get those people to do what we want them to do. has had a lotrecent success in business, you know, with your company, spy every day and other companies 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 close deals at the CIA.

There's a saying in the CIA that I realized is also a saying in business that I didn't realize until later and it's called kissing. a lot of M frogs and it's a sales term outside of the CIA where it means you have to call a lot of potential clients, you have to shake a lot of hands, you have to make a lot of pitches before one of them becomes In a prince, in the CIA we have the same concept, but for a different reason, because finding a person who is willing to tell you state secrets and who is willing to risk his life to reveal the secrets that he was with, that's what a real asset is. you do the right thing when the 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 local to that country, who has access to state secrets and that you are willing to share. those state secrets in exchange for some more money alcohol porn whatever, who knows what they are looking for, but their job is to find the person who has secrets and give them what they want in exchange for those secrets, which is a rare find. person, it is difficult 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.

It's very, very difficult to find, but if you can find a spy. you can find a trader, you can make a sale successfully, the two skills are incredibly interconnected, so what I discovered is that this is the process and the skills that we use to find an asset immediately translate into business, from how you talk to the person so you can identify their core motivations get perspective on that person's position in life if you can get your clients' perspective you know what your client thinks you know what they want you know what their problems are you know what their problems are 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, so the process in Espionage is a process called sad rat sad d r a t, very similar to the acronym for rice that you gave. previously Sadat is a human intelligence gathering or conversion process, the sad rat process is actually the basis of my company's sales process, all of our marketing for digital sales, all of our human interactions, all of our upselling and everything the rest, it all falls into the same sad rat process that I learned at the CIA only we use it for sales and we use that for marketing Sadat Sadat means spot assessment develop recruiting manage and finish that's what Sadat means uh and in the classic classic jargon from the US government acronym handle starts with an H, but in the acronym we use the letter A spot assessment develop recruiting handle finish spot It means you find a potential client.

Recruiting correctly means that you sell that customer your product in exchange for your product in exchange for their money. The correct evaluation is a step that we use at the CIA to determine whether or not someone will be a good productive client. Many times, sales people skip that step. Yes, they don't think about a good productive client. A good productive client has value for them. the customer for life a good productive customer turns into referrals turns into positive reviews and positive ratings have infinite value more than just money they give you a The exchange evaluation for your service is a critical piece in the recruitment process of the CIA and is also a very important piece in my company.

I'll tell you something that validates that from my own experience before we continue with that evaluation point in the In the first two years of my first company, we would simply eliminate any clients and when we looked at our financial history from the previous year, what we noticed was that There was a cohort of customers that were exceptionally valuable and although we gained business with this other group of customers, we were actually losing money because they only lasted a month, so we created this kind of framework to determine the customers that we should actually tell It doesn't basically, as you say, based on its lifetime value and we found out. that there is 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 receive inquiries through our website now we were looking at inquiries through that lens and measuring them through that lens because it became very clear that all of our best customers fit into the top right of this type of sales diagram and that's what I hear when you say SS and it was Absolutely a game changer for our business, but most entrepreneurs will simply take each customer and think they all have the same potential in lifetime value.

To change the game, you need to make sure you sell to a very deliberate group of customers because those customers not only generate more revenue per customer, but they also attract more customers like them, which is where you get an exponential level of not revenue but Profits, just like you said, you talked about a very profitable group of customers, not a group of high-income customers, so when you focus the conversation on profits instead of revenue and you focus it on the right customer instead of only on the client, it changes the game. your company, so you would evaluate targets at the CIA by using the same type of framework, yes, using the same framework, because in recruiting operations what you are looking for are people who are a good asset in the business framework that you Looking For. are the people who will be good customers an asset and a customer are almost the same true a 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 offer something of value and exchange it for something they want?

So it's really a one-to-one comparison, as long as you understand the language of espionage and the language of business. What we did in Espionage is that every time you try. To develop a font, you always ask yourself: Will this font be a good and reliable asset in the future? Will they do what we tell them? Will they be able to provide information over the long term, not just once or twice? The information they provide with high value information is the same thing you are doing with a client. Will this client do what I tell them? this customer will provide high levels of value this customer will last a long time will use the word espionage a few times there what is the definition of the word espionage Espionage is defined as the theft of secrets, so espionage is always illegal.

There is no country in the world that says espionage is legal, so espionage is. When the CIA commits espionage, when MI6 commits ESP ESP, they have an exception in their law when it comes to their own covert clandestine services so that an American can conduct espionage abroad and not be prosecuted for that espionage under the law. American if he is part of the CIA. The same is true in the UK and MI6. An officer can commit espionage abroad and not be liable for it under British law. Otherwise, if you are a British citizen who commits espionage anywhere in the UK or abroad, you are punished under UK law.

I have heard you say. that spnr is really about getting people to let you into their secret lives, correct what our secret life is, so, you know, if you go back to an earlier part of our conversation, we were talking about how, when you trust the people, you tell them. your secrets just when you help people, they will tell you their secrets there are three lives that anyone lives we have a public life a private life and a secret life the public life is the life that we are all very familiar with, right? the life you live for everyone else to see not only the people who watch your podcast and the people you know work for you and your company, but your public life also includes what you show your friends, it includes what you show them show your church. who you are when you walk down the street the clothes you choose to wear is a perfect example of your public life is what you want people to think of you remember the e in rice Mother Teresa wanted people to see her affirm that is her way of life public when you are in Espionage the goal is to get away from public life because if you want someone to give you secrets you can't get secrets from someone who is in their public life because they are protected in their public life, so you have to pass them on from public life to the secret and the intermediate step between the public and the secret is the private life, so you have to move someone from public life to private life.

Private life is a life that your partner knows about. Private life is the life that your closest friends know. I know your mom and dad may know, they're the people who know your feet secretly stink, they're the people who know you don't really like eating oysters because anything that gives you gas, that's a private thing that your business partners do not do. You don't know that your clients don't know that the people who watch your podcast don't know and that makes people in your private life feel like they know you and that's what makes you in your public life feel like you have meaningful relationships because in Instead of 200 people you know now you have 15 people who are in your private life, they know your home address, they know your birthday, you know, they know your favorite ice cream, it makes you feel.

Well, within someone's private life, they will share sensitivities, but they may not share secrets yet because it's one thing to secretly tell someone that you're worried about your business, that you're worried about the next revenue cycle, that you're worried , maybe for your wife. is having an affair those things are uncomfortable but you will share them with people in your private life but you would never tell someone in your private life that you are having an affair you would never tell someone in your private life that you hit your child you would never tell someone someone in your private life that your parents sexually abused you or anything else.

Those deep, dark secrets only live in your secret life, the life that is so secret that you don't even share it with the people in your private life. What we are trained to do is follow a process that allows us to meet someone 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 is a very simple psychological process. get into someone's secret life because secretly we all want someone in our secret life we ​​all want to have someone we can tell our secrets to also we just don't trust anyone enough in our private life to get there so if you know how leverage insight and perspective use the four main motivations when you know how to leverage the sad rat to build trust you can actually get into someone's secret life and once you're in someone's secret life they never stop trusting you , they never let you go because that's how it was.

It's so weird and so hard to find you from their perspective, they never want you to leave, even if you break their heart, even if you lie to them, like their trust in you is so big and so strong. and so subconscious that you never abandon its secret life. I really want to know how you get into someone's secret life and how they might get into your own. We've talked about some of those principles before, but I was wondering. Yes one of the techniques you could use is to share 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 in general that vulnerability creates vulnerability to some extent. Yo. If you open up to someone, they're more likely to open up to you, right, so you're entering into a form of mirroring much like we were talking about physical mirroring, now what you're talking about is emotional mirroring. There's a nuance there because you have to know when to appropriately mirror yourself, because if you're mirroring someone else and they know you're mirroring them, then they subconsciously feel like they're in control. Okay, it's interesting, so what you need to do is you need to reflect enough to get to the place where you can get them to reflect you.

When they subconsciously reflect you, they know that you are in control, so once you are in a position of power or control in a conversation, then you can use the vulnerability ploy who wouldn't use it the same way you did. I wouldn't invent something vulnerable. We would call it opening a window or opening a window that opens a door so that we have these windows and doors. In a conversation, opening a door means completely changing the subject, so if I said right now that I don't really like French food that opens a door, you as the interviewer can walk through that door or you can close that door because it's not relevant, true, but yesI open a window on how I have certain digestive issues that I don't like to talk about, that's a window, you can always go back and press that window and have it go through a whole new door of right conversation, so when it comes to vulnerability and talking With someone about vulnerability, you want to present windows and not present doors, so instead of saying something that is a fake vulnerability, you would say something that is a real vulnerability that may not apply to you, like maybe Say something like you know, I have Been having massive arguments with my wife recently and sometimes it makes me want to leave home, that's real, that doesn't mean I'm leaving home, it doesn't say what I'm arguing about, but yes I think in your secret life you're fighting too with your wife and you're living in a different room and you're not telling anyone.

I want to show some kind of bridge between us that makes you admit that to me because 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 I was the active one. and you were the CIA agent, you have more experience in that role than me um and I was sitting in a bar and I said, yes, God, this week has been very difficult at home because my wife is bothering me, what, what and you.

We were trying to get into my secret life, how could you maneuver from there? So here's a basic principle that we would use it's called a two and one combination, so two means two questions and one means a confirmation, so when you present me with a topic that I want to explore further, the most rudimentary technique there is, You present a topic that I want to explore, so I ask a follow-up question? You will answer my follow-up question because you are predisposed to answer my question. ask another question next, you will be predisposed to answer it too and then I will say something that confirms what you are saying that way, it doesn't feel like you are being interrogated, but like you are talking to Someone who understands you, so I will confirm what you say , oh yeah, I mean, I had a girlfriend once and her feet stunk so much and, man, it made me want to sleep with her feet out of the sheets and then you just stop.

There, because you've asked two follow-up questions and a confirming statement, the other person's psychology will be to continue volunteering information and then simply repeat the cycle of being given other information and following up with the follow-up question. confirmation of follow-up question follow-up question confirmation of follow-up question to you it feels asked listen ask a follow-up question listen ask them a follow-up question it feels like i'm talking to someone i really care about, just put yourself in the place, Practice a little perspective here, imagine if you were actually talking about something that frustrates you and the person sitting next to you at the bar literally did nothing but ask you follow-up questions. and I agree with you, you'll feel like you understand me, man, why can't my wife understand me like you understand me, like you know what I'm talking about?

I completely agree with you man, tell me more, oh man, and then and You can see how humans just fit into the rhythm, the parallel here with business, but also the kind of transferable skills here are pretty clear so I heard when I'm doing an interview when I'm meeting with a candidate. for a job, um, when I'm trying to sell to a client, really my setup should be to do exactly what you said, ask them questions, confirm, ask them questions and confirm well, if you think about it, everyone is in a contest to control who . controls a conversation the person asking the questions or the person who says the most words is always the person asking the questions because the person asking the questions determines the direction of the conversation feels backwards even though it feels like the The person who talks the most has the one who has the most control and what did I tell you about feelings, don't trust them, don't trust your instinct, don't trust your emotions, right?

It feels like the person who talks the most is the person in control, it's not, it's not the person. asking the questions is in control think about this interview right now. I will answer any questions you pose below. If I don't answer the next question you ask, I will feel uncomfortable because you and I know who is in control of this conversation. although I say the most interesting words about the implications of this on sales, HR, 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 for people. they just want to feel heard they want to feel heard and they want to feel validated you can automate that you can automate the process that makes people feel heard confirmed and validated you can automate it and then they will sell themselves that's how that's really good digital marketing that's how works great direct sales this is how it works this is how it works really good salespeople have already learned this really good salespeople understand that it's about getting a prospect to talk about themselves as quickly as possible and then once they start To talk about themselves they simply ask questions, let them guide themselves through the sales process, the problem is with most business owners who have not been trained in what we are talking about, they feel like they have to talk more, They feel like they have to do it. get the client to understand the benefits of the product I need you to listen to me I need you to listen to me I need you to understand the value of what I offer you that is not what the client wants that is the seller's perception what the client really wants is a product that will solve your problems and a salesman who will help you what is the type of person who helps you the person who asks questions I am really interested in this concept of change and how it works CIA It instills in you that you need to accept change because in all our lives one of The things that most of us are pretty bad at is accepting change, we become very rigid again, maybe that's down to perception, ego and this sort of thing. but when I was reading what they teach you at the CIA, they change your relationship with change, they do, so a big part of the advantage of having change is the fact that it's not natural to accept change, so if you can adapt To the change. faster than your opponent, you have a built-in advantage, you have an advantage, so these three principles, time, distance and change of direction, these three principles that the CIA teaches as concepts are applied in multiple different ways, for which, as an example, time means you must accept. that things take time that time is a resource that you can use too often we feel that time is fleeting time is running out we have to act quickly as if time is against us that is not really true in fact time is a tool you can use to break things down Secrets Don't stand the test of time how long will it take you and me to get into each other's secret lives? 9 months that takes time, not many people would wait 9 months to do something well, but time is a big advantage that you have if all your opponents are rushing and you are the only person who is not rushing time becomes a big advantage For you, no one else has explained that to you in the context of business, so in business people are trying to make a quick sale, most people want an impulse buyer, right?

What do I have to say right now to get you to buy my $7 item? I really don't want you to buy something for $7. I want you to buy something for $97 if you have to. three weeks to get you to buy something for $97, it takes this other person three minutes to get you to buy something for $7, who is the better salesperson? Well I would say it depends on what you are looking for in terms of long term for this person to sell a $7 thing every 3 minutes they have to find a new potential customer they have to find possibly if they sell one in 10 if they make a 10% conversion they need to find 10 new leads every 3 minutes to earn $7 if I convert at 10% I need one person to buy something $97 every three weeks.

I have much less demand on my time finding new leads and I can qualify my leads better and if someone is willing to spend $97 on something, guess what that tells me about them? Does the $7 person have more disposable income? I don't know anything about their disposable income. Do they have anything? It is not like this? Mom and dad's credit card. I really do not know. I would rather spend 3 weeks cultivating a person who buys $97 and something because then I can sell them $297 and then I can sell them $997 and something because I can test their price sensitivity threshold.

Were there any situations during your time abroad where you felt his life was at risk? any kind of threat to parents really clear, yeah, there was a specific moment where I'm actively trying to get clearance from the CIA, uh, to talk about where I felt with great confidence that I had fallen under the scrutiny of the surveillance team of a local country so I was in a foreign country and I thought I fell under their surveillance apparatus and they were actively monitoring me and the country I was in and the work I was doing in that country made me believe that if had a surveillance team on me, their goal would be to stop me at a certain point in the operation, at a point where they could get the most propaganda and political influence, etc., etc., so that event occurred approximately in 2011 and I'm trying to go through a process now to get it. that was approved by the CIA until about nine months ago, the CIA was giving me the go-ahead that I could talk about it, but then the geopolitical tensions in the world changed and the CIA changed its mind along with that, so now I'm exploring which Avenues, I have to get them to comply with their prior approval of allowing me to tell my story instead of being forced to comply with my agreement of continued secrecy, so you were in a foreign country and you felt like you were under the apparatus of surveillance of a foreign country.

You got that impression, were you looking over your shoulder and seeing something or is that the process that we are trained to use for surveillance detection, so we are trained in a process where you run what is known as SDR and in Does that SDR have steps? methods you use to determine if you are being actively surveilled or not and again we use time to our advantage so it's not like something happened in 5 seconds and I thought I was under surveillance. I intentionally carried out a series of steps for, say, three hours. or six hours and during that period of time I had enough information, enough data points to confirm with high confidence that I would be under surveillance.

The SDR surveillance detection path is fine 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 acts in a certain way to make you believe that you are being digitally or cyber-surveilled, sex , everyone's favorite topic, it's something very real, it's something very real that is used in different ways depending on the civil rights of a country, so in the United States we don't really use sexpionage, we don't really use it because it goes against of the rights, the individual rights of the citizen who works in the intelligence agency, so if you tell an intelligence officer that he must sleep with this target to obtain information.

You are violating her rights as an American citizen in China. That is not the same case in Russia. That is not the same case in the UK. It is not the same case in Russia either. It is not the same case in the UK. You don't subscribe to forced sexual acts to gather intelligence, forced, forced, but you can, if you want, what ends up happening is, you can, if you want, and for those people who do, they end up creating what is known as a operational security risk because once sex is involved the power shift becomes unsustainable, so if a Handler's entire goal is to maintain control over the asset once sex occurs, it is more difficult for the Handler maintain control over the asset in an objective relationship because now sex leads to feelings like hormonally. 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 neuroepinephrine hits you, your body begins to tell you that you are connected to another person who is the antithesis of a Proper asset manager relationship with them, so we call that falling in love with your asset.

I wouldn't ask him if he ever participated in anything like that. I appreciate that I was lucky enough to produce all the hormonesconnectives I needed to produce with my wife who was also CIA costumes, have you ever worn a costume? Absolutely yes, costumes are something that is much more common than people would believe and of much less quality than people would believe, really yes, so most costumes are what we actually call disguises within the CIA. , we call them costumes, we don't really call them costumes, costumes is a word that is used in pop media and pop culture in the real world, we call them costumes and our costume departments, our costume department, the whole goal behind a costume or a disguise is simply making you look like you, not to make you look like someone else, not even to make you look like a realistic person, it's just to make sure you don't look like yourself, so consider your photo of what you look like. you see.

You have something very definitive. present your nose, your forehead, your beard, shape your hair, the way you hold your face, the neckline you have, so if we wanted to change your appearance so that you didn't look like Steven Bartlett, all we would have to do is do. It's taking away those things that make you you and turning them into something else, right, we could put a red diaper wig on you, we could put on giant oversized sunglasses, we could shave your face or paint your beard gray or even give you a mustache. fake. We could put an oversized necklace around your neck and now the image of that won't look like the image of Steve Bartlett.

Those are all light disguises, although it is true that there are deeper types of disguises. I've always wondered if like plastic surgery and you know, if you give a spy plastic surgery and that kind of thing, then there are three levels of disguise, there are some places that will go as far as permanent plastic surgery, but most of the Western services won't do it because it doesn't help the officer to like having a permanent change made to his body, it doesn't make him more effective at going undercover because now he's just permanently changed so he still looks the way he does. see, the value of the disguise is able to reset the disguise to reset the disguise so that you don't look like yourself, so our three levels are level one, level two, level three, light disguise is level one, level two is a long-term costume, level three is something we call prosthetic costume. such a light disguise is what we're talking about oversized sunglasses with a diaper wig and all of a sudden you're different, a different person, right, you're Loyola, you're not Steve Bartlett anymore.

Phase two is a long-term disguise. -Full-term costume means that you are still you, but we change you physically for a long-term operation, so instead of having short hair, we leave you long hair, instead of having a beard, we shave you and lose part of that hard-earned body mass. you have or gain body mass that you don't really want, maybe we give you some kind of fake but long-standing tattoo, right, we do something with you that changes your physical appearance, you are still you, the reason it is important is because you always have than asking you what a police officer will think when he breaks into your hotel room at night, if you are wearing a light disguise and a police officer breaks into your room at night, you will be asked questions like why do you have a wig or if You don't have a wig, you just wear a cap and a hoodie?

There's nothing you can ask, right? They're basically saying, "Oh, this is you," your license says this is you and you use this ball. hat, this cap and this hoodie all the time, whatever it is, you won't go to jail for it, so level one and level two disguises are very safe, it's hard to arrest someone wearing those two, level three is what movies are made of. those are your prosthetics if we give you fake ears if we give you a fake nose you, if we change your eye color, if we give you a fake missing tooth instead of a real missing tooth, if we do that kind of thing to you, a police officer breaks into your room in the middle of the night and now they're asking you why you have a fake nose that you're not wearing right now why you have fake eyebrows where why you have fake ears why you have a darkened tooth right now they look at your ID and you don't look much like your id Less common I guess, 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 the people we dress up as all the time there are so many problems to disguise. too many operational deficiencies too operational to disguise that we could have a whole conversation about it, like things 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 they break your ass in the Philippines things melt, makeup melts and the adhesive that sticks a fake mustache to your lip starts to disintegrate like there are all kinds of problems with prosthetics in real life that Tom Cruz doesn't have to worry about in the movies When people think about spies spying abroad in disguise and all that kind of stuff, it makes you think that 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 it. crack under that kind of Pressure: if you meet the guy who has the nuclear codes for Iran or whatever, and you've been working for nine months to meet this person, you know you have to keep a good handle on your own anxiety and your own fear.

Did the CIA target people who are good at that or train that or is it both is it both is a great question is it both? The CIA wants people who have a certain level of anxiety because when you have anxiety you are naturally paranoid, which means they have greater observation skills. Most people who suffer from anxiety feel inadequate in some way. In reality, they are hyper-adequate. They are more than adequate. Anxiety is a superpower. Through the eyes of the CIA, I would choose someone with anxiety over someone any day. without anxiety because anxiety keeps you alive anxiety keeps you alert anxiety keeps you learning keeps you attentive is a good thing but as for the second point you are also trained, you are trained to understand how fear works and you like to oversimplify it your brain has two right hemispheres, 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 two different bases, the right one is based on logic, the another is based on emotions, they actually operate and process at different speeds, your logical brain processes much slower than your emotional brain, that's why it takes you an instant before you get scared, but maybe it takes 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 is processed by the emotional brain very quickly, so who then instinctively react to their fear, that's where many anxiety sufferers get held back.

When you can train someone to understand that the same thing that scares them emotionally is also being processed by their logical brain, your brain is actually going through the process of determining how scared you really should be if you can slow down the emotional process. brain and training the rational brain to work a little faster, your whole relationship with fear changes completely. How do they train you to slow down your emotional brain so you don't react? That's a big part of the reason you have controlled training. environment that lasts several months because what they do is inoculate you, it is called stress inoculation, they inoculate you with scenarios specifically designed to trigger your emotional response, although you have been trained not to trust your emotional response, they inoculate you so that over and over again time again you have to go through the process of I feel afraid I have to not accept it I am afraid I have doubts I have to reject it I feel like they are watching me I have to reject I have to give my rational brain a chance to catch up so I can get objective data about it scenario and there are some people who don't do it well, there are some people who never get vaccinated against fear and then they end up getting kicked off the farm, so for the average Joe that's listening to this now or Jenny, the average Jenny who's listening this now and they live a life that has held them back because of their fear, you know, they don't take the risk, they don't raise their hand to make the presentation that they don't.

Don't lean on uncertainty based on your CIA training, what would you suggest they do? Should they do to overcome that fear? That's why they need to get vaccinated themselves too. Inoculate inoculate means inoculate means expose yourself in a controlled way to fear, very similar to the way you get a Covid vaccine or a flu shot, you expose yourself to a strain that is weakened so your body can become familiar with it, you do the yourself afraid, so if you're afraid to give that presentation, You're never going to change the fact that you're afraid to give a presentation, but you can change something that you're less afraid of, so if you're afraid to go to the gym, If you're afraid to, uh, eat at a certain restaurant down the street if you're afraid to walk out your front door if you're afraid to ask your friend's opinion on whether or not you're overweight look for something small where you're less afraid to this thing that you are from this other thing and get vaccinated with this how to lean on the little fears, the fears that you already know are somewhat irrational and simple and if you can overcome them, what will happen is that you will start to gain momentum and what you do to get vaccinated it's knowing it in advance you know you're going to have an emotional reaction you already know it's what scares you you can predict it so now you know I'm going to ask my friend Steve, if he thinks I'm overweight, I'm terrified to ask him, either he'll say yes or no, or he'll accept a Cop Out answer and ask me what I think, but I already know he'll be uncomfortable. but he's my friend he's low risk let's see how it happens let's see what goes well then you go and ask the question you put yourself in front of the fear you're still going to have heart palpitations the cold sweats your emotional brain you're going to take off and your whole physiology is going to let go , 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 as bad as I thought." It's 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, when Robert tells you his answer, your body doesn't react the same way it did.

When you talked to Steve, the little shots are training your emotional brain to slow down and training your rational brain to speed up, so you can move on to the next scariest thing without moving on to the scariest things. You know, I was thinking about that while you. You were talking and I was thinking, Oh my God, I think a lot of people know, I think they know that the way to get better at speaking on stage is to go and talk on stage, but they're still held back by, you know, God, yeah Yeah. I do that, I'm going to mess up and then people will think I'm this that and that and then I'll never do the former CA officer comes out because if you are too afraid to do that well, I don't want you to do it because not being able to do it gives me the advantage of the person who is listening to this who says to himself I am afraid but I will do it all Anyway that's the person who deserves the chance to change their life the person who is listening to this saying I'm too scared to do that right I need you to stay exactly where you are because in our world, the absolute truth is that our world needs gears, our The world needs people trapped in the cycle of consumption, we need those people because the people who are trapped in that cycle of consumption, the people who are prisoners of their fears are the people who run the economy, they are the people who are willing to break that cycle and capitalizing on the fears that you can't overcome, those are the people that really provide you with the service that you need because you can't do it. for yourself, so I want to encourage people who are willing to take the scary step and I also want to discourage people who already know they are too afraid.

We need both, as you know, we are sponsors of this podcast and I am an investor in the company. I've talked about this many times before, but I'm obsessed with finding 1% profits in everything I do. I am a big believer in the theory of marginal gains, especially in health and fitness, seeing 1% and small improvements in my scream data, whether with my sleep or my heart rate variability or other health indicators, gives me this incredible feeling of forward movement and, over time, the end result of these gains means a better, healthier version of myself in the long run.

Wow, this thing on my wrist has really allowed me to understand actions that I don't necessarily needchange completely, but things that I can modify to become the person I want to be and go in the right direction with my health, so if you are obsessed with finding those 1% marginal gains, like me, I'm going to join. woop.com or where you can try whoop for 30 days risk-free and with no commitment to see how impactful it can be for you. You met your wife while you were an undercover CIA agent. Yes, she was, uh, I still am. this day I'm so grateful that she misjudges character in 2014 you left the CIA at 34 you both resigned together we both resigned together why it was mostly my idea my wife had a stellar career uh we had a one year career -it was a eldest kid at the time and we were at a point in our career after very successful operations together just before that, where we were both kind of middle management and that middle management lifestyle meant we spent 12 to 16 hours a day. day. at work like most people, but the difference is that when you spend 16 hours a day at work, it means you're on a boat somewhere where you can't take your work home from where you can't work. at home, so you're literally away from home, 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 that kind of parent. that was. present for our children and instead we take him to a daycare and pay additional overage fees for that daycare to keep the baby for 12 hours a day.

It's an unpleasant situation, so for family reasons rather than professional reasons, They both decided Hey, let's double down on family and see if we can't start over. Are you leaving the United States in

2030

? I'm going to try to leave the United States in 2027. I read it somehow. Why are you going to do it? trying to leave the United States 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 we are the best in the world. we are actually going through the first part of our adolescence as a nation and you can see it every day in the headlines, you can see it in our role in geopolitical events geop, you can see that we are suffering in terms of trying to identify we don't know we want to be a democracy real we want to be some kind of partial democracy we want to treat everyone as equals we don't want to treat everyone as equals we are fighting in the same way that you and I did in high school, my children mean everything to me and what I want to do It is to give them a life in which they have the option to do what they want, unfortunately I do not believe in our country. over the next 5 to 10 years it will be the kind of country that allows today's children to choose and be whatever they want to be.

I think our country has to grow on its own before we really offer people equal access to Opportunities, so for me, if it was my 11 year old son turning 15 or 16 and I really started to worry about something, I would like to be in a place where I can explore that, I don't think it's going to be in the United States I think it's going to be in Europe I think it's going to be in the Middle East I think it's going to be in Latin America where it will have all the advantages of the world outside the United States what Do you think about what's going on right now with geopolitics as it relates to China and the United States?

You already have the United States as the kind of global economic force. Are you preparing for that? Do you think it's going to happen? I think there are two realistic outcomes and there is one less realistic outcome. The most realistic result is that the United States and China continue to compete and reach parity between us, that is the most realistic. result maybe the United States will remain 10% larger maybe China will grow 2% economically but they are approaching the parity are getting closer to equality I 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 used to one superpower, once there are two superpowers everything changes, there is two massive languages ​​and you will have to choose which language you speak, there are two currencies, which currency you are going to save your money in, there are competing priorities. there are competing policies there are equally massive and sophisticated armies when you are in one of those two countries the moment they reach the parody you are in the most dangerous position because the number one target for China will be the United States the number one target for the United States The States will be China right now, there is no parity, there is no equality, so the United States has to worry about everyone and China doesn't really have to worry about many people, but as that equality gets closer and closer, there is more and more threats.

Think about it in business terms, when you are the industry leader in your business, Google, you don't have to worry about much, you have to worry about all the little ones, but no one is really a direct threat, but as soon as someone else stands up to face you. You have to worry about that, the leader used to be Yahoo, right. Yahoo had to see what it's like to lose and win on par with Google only to then be eclipsed, so the most likely outcome is that we reach second place. The most likely outcome is that China will replace us, in small amounts, we have 5% of GDP, 10% of GDP and the United States has to regain its momentum to try to regain the advantage, so now we have this one-way cycle and return in which for five years China led the GDP for five years.

America is the main GDP and you have this back and forth hesitation that makes you even less confident than if you were in a straight parody, but that's a scary place too, you still have to lose all leverage to get there and when. You are there, you never know how long it will last. Do you think we are already immersed in a kind of World War II? Yes absolutely. I think World War III is already happening. I think World War III is not what people think it was. I think people were afraid that World War II would somehow look like another World War II.

Instead, World War III is a war of proxy nations, it is a war, it is a war in which smaller third world countries compete against each other and We are being financed by larger countries that are actually in conflict with each other , Ukraine and Russia. We finance Ukraine. Russia is obviously looking out for itself, but the real conflict in Ukraine is not about Ukraine, but about the West versus Russia. The same thing is happening. What will happen to Taiwan and China when the time comes when China makes its biggest move on Taiwan, it has already made small moves on Taiwan, when it makes its biggest move on Taiwan, it will become a matter of China versus the West and whoever supports Taiwan.

Back to where we started, then, the average citizen. The average citizen is listening to this conversation. Now what they really want is to improve their life and whatever subjective measure they consider best, they want to start the business they want to launch. that project that they want to get out of this type of emotional prison that they live in, where their life is conditioned by perception, what they believe, their own identity limits, what is the type of final argument and final advice. you give the average jo free to pursue whatever he wants, so the most important thing is to take action, that's the ultimate, even if it's the wrong action, if you take the wrong step, if you take the first one. step in the wrong direction the difference between you and the person who doesn't take any steps is the world you have to take the first step you have to take some kind of action just by taking action you show that you are not trapped by fear you show that you are willing to challenge your own perception of the world and try to gain some perspective, no matter what that action is.

I don't care if you read a book, if you buy a program, if you sell your first prototype you take some kind of action because nine out of 10 people are not going to take any action you already have an advantage just by trying and very few people understand that they think that There is some kind of advantage to waiting. No, the longer you wait, all you're really doing is giving the other nine people a chance to be the first to make a move. If you take the first step, you will beat the competition from the beginning and you know it too. like I do, even if your first three or four steps are mistakes and stumbles and you fall on your face when you get up, you're four steps ahead of 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 in some other podcast just take action identity we talk about how the CIA rewrites your identity a little bit to You know it gives you some kind of cover, but one of the things that prevents us from acting is our own identity, what have you learned and what do you think now about the role of identity, how it gets in our way and how we can free ourselves from The worst person to determine who you are is often you because you see everything 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 how you see yourself then when you look at yourself it's like looking through a magnifying glass you see every wart you see every crack you see everything wrong because you have the magnifying glass the rest of the world not only doesn't have a magnifying glass, but they are 10 meters away from you, so they see something very different from what you see, so many times everything you think about yourself is actually inaccurate when you apply it against the perspective test because what other people see and what other people think about you are usually very wrong about what you think, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest without knowing who will leave it for now, that is the question.

What he was left with in the Diary of a CEO is, um, very, very interesting, something that he used to firmly believe in and that he has fundamentally changed his mind about. I used to believe that people could be equal, and fundamentally, I now know that people never will be. equals because equality is not really what we seek, what we secretly seek and do not want to admit is that we always seek to be better, to have more, to be in a better position than everyone else, so we constantly strive to take advantage of the secrets to take advantage of opportunities to find an advantage that we don't 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.

I was one of those people who wanted everything to be the same and now I am one of those people who are very happy in a world where things are not the same because because I see through the noise I understand that what we want is not what we really say, so these politicians who say that maybe on the left they say we want equality, we want everyone to be equal, you think they are lying at all, that's not what they want, what they want, what they want is more of the current status quo which is have conflict with the opposite side and what they also want in addition to that is to be in a position where the masses trust that the politician will have control over more aspects of the lives of the population Andrew, thank you Thank you very much, thank you very much, I feel so inspired, a little excited, and energized by this conversation, and I think it's amazing that you've committed this kind of chapter of your life to helping people unlock their full potential. by knowing the way humans work and being able to use the understanding of a human that was probably getting in the way of breaking free and pursuing whatever kind of goal they have in their lives that they believe will bring them satisfaction because that's really How I see what you're doing, you're taking a skill set that has been exclusive and given to only a few and you're giving it to the many, you're doing it through the everyday spy, Andrew, thank you very much, it's been an absolute honor , thanks for inviting me.