I ended up being picked up by CIA. One of the main things that they're looking for when people come into CIA is actually a history of childhood trauma. CIA teaches you all the skills that you need in order to attract someone of the opposite sex or the same sex.
Power is measurable. When you want to project power, it really isn't anything more than one of the core things that a skilled liar does that an unskilled liar doesn't do. Is reward, ideology, coercion, and...
ego are the four primary motivators that you can use to manipulate anyone. When you think somebody is lying to you, you can test them with an emotional question. Every time we meet a new person, the first thing that we're truly doing on a basic instinctive level is we are asking ourselves, is this a threat to me or is this not a threat to me?
When you want to appear as non-threatening, you should not demonstrate power. What tactics do you use to talk to a female that you're attracted to? It's called parallel conversation. CIA actively recruits people with anxiety because anxious people are naturally more attentive.
Anxiety is a superpower in the world of espionage. There's also a technique that CIA calls stress inoculation. All human beings are at their core pack animals. We crave human connection.
We have a fascinating guest joining us today. His name is Andrew Bustamante, and he's a former covert CIA intelligence officer and the founder of EverydaySpy.com. How cool is that? Andrew, thank you so much for your time and for joining us today.
I'm super excited to be having this conversation right now. I know it's going to be extremely interesting, both for myself and our listeners. Absolutely. I'm excited to be here as well, Francesca. I have a great fondness for Romania and for Romanians because I've had a chance to work with some of your intelligence officers.
And you have a really fantastic intelligence team that comes out of Romania. That's actually born of Soviet roots, but has reinvented itself as a Western ally. So I don't know whether you knew that or not, but you come from fantastic ilk. I had no idea. Tell me more about that.
Oh, my God, that's crazy. So it's true. So the Romanian Intelligence Service actually does a lot of fantastic work when it comes to countering illicit finance, countering nuclear proliferation, countering terrorism all across Europe throughout NATO as a NATO ally. And in bringing some of the KGB best practices to Western partners that otherwise would never have had a chance to know how the KGB operated or to apply KGB tactics into Western intelligence models.
So really a fantastic country that you come from. a huge ally to the West. Wow, that is so interesting. I had no idea.
I'll look more into it after this conversation. This is so fascinating. Amazing.
But like, how are you? How does the day of a former CIA spy look like? It's a pretty typical day.
I mean, it doesn't look that much different from the average person, except that what I'll say is CIA taught me to have a lot of discipline around certain behaviors. And to worry less about other behaviors. So, for example, I'm very disciplined about sleep and I'm very disciplined about exercise because those are areas that have huge impact on your cognitive functions.
But I'm less interested in I'm less worried about diet. I'm less worried about social stress or social pressure. Those are areas that actually don't have as much of an impact on your cognitive functions or on your long term physical health. So it's there.
It's been great. Because CIA gave me a foundation that's been really useful in everyday life, as well as in corporate and business life that most average people don't get. So they taught you how to sleep well, not how to eat well. Well, they told you that you must sleep well, but you don't necessarily have to eat well. That is so interesting.
I think that's very controversial because there's so many people talking about diet and how to eat, but you're saying it's not that important. Correct. I mean, in a hierarchy of priorities, because here's the truth, CIA prioritizes everything because there are certain operations, certain missions, certain countries, certain threats that are a clear and present danger.
And then there are others that are a long-term simmering or strategic danger. So when you have to dedicate money and time and lives right now, you're going to assign those to the highest priority threats. And then the lower priority threats, you'll deal with a different day. That's how...
Terrible things happen, but that's also how wonderful things happen. 9-11 happened because we deprioritized terrorism at a time when it shouldn't have been deprioritized. CIA prioritizes everything. So there are different threats that are clear and present. And then there are some threats that are more long-term and strategic.
And when you have limited time and money and people and resources like CIA does, you have to dedicate those resources to the top priority things, essentially the things that will make the most impact in the least amount of time. And they take that same model and they apply it to how we think, how we train, how we take care of our bodies, our mental health, our physical health. And one of those things that has a huge impact immediately is sleep.
One of the things that has a less significant impact right away is diet. So if you can make your diet healthier, that's great. But you can't let yourself sacrifice sleep because sacrificing sleep reduces your ability to think, your ability to process, your ability to remember, your ability to engage and converse.
All of those things are critical to the success of not only a spy, but... a career professional, a spouse, a business owner, like without the ability to remember a conversation and think and process critically, you're kind of lost and you feel lost in the water, which is what in part feeds people's caffeine addiction because they trust caffeine to make up for lost sleep, which is a falsehood. That's so interesting.
Now I'm really curious, what does your sleep and everyday schedule look like? How do you organize, you know, based on these priorities? Yeah, absolutely.
So I prioritize sleep at the top of my list, meaning I give myself no less than a six to eight hour window of sleep every day. That doesn't always mean that I get six hours minimum of sleep because sometimes, you know, my children will wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I have a call late at night that that turns my brain on and I'll have a hard time shutting my brain off. But I give myself those eight hours of window in order to sleep.
So sometimes that sleep is seven hours. Sometimes that sleep is eight hours. Sometimes it's eight and a half hours.
I also do not wake up to an alarm. It's important to let your body decide when it wakes up so that you don't force yourself and you don't interrupt your circadian rhythm, which is something that unfortunately most people who work nine to five don't either a, they don't have a choice or B, they haven't created a lifestyle that allows them to wake up naturally. So they go to bed at midnight to a 5am alarm. When in fact, what your body really wants is to wake up naturally on its own, to interrupt its own circadian rhythm when it comes to a natural completion. So for me, I get a full night's sleep.
I do not wake myself up. I do not wake myself up with an alarm. I let myself wake up naturally. And then the first thing I do is actually hydrate.
Before I eat or drink anything, I drink water first. And I drink water first because water hydrates all of your internal systems. It hydrates your stomach.
It immediately is processed by your intestines. It goes to your heart. It goes to your colon.
It goes to your bladder. It goes to your brain. And all that hydration jumpstarts the body. But it takes about 15 minutes.
So for people who wake up and don't drink water, instead they drink caffeine or they drink coffee. The thing that is actually waking them up isn't the caffeine. It's the water in the coffee.
But then what the caffeine is doing is immediately conflicting or creating problems with their mental and their biological processes, which is why people poop after they drink caffeine or why people get shaky after they drink caffeine. Because the caffeine is messing with your body when the actual benefits that you're getting are really primarily from the water. So you can actually skip the coffee, skip the tea, cut straight to water and get 80% of the same benefits that you're actually looking for.
Do they teach you all of this as part of your training? They do. They teach you all of this because when you're an operator in the field, you don't have the luxuries of what we have here in America. You don't have fresh berries.
You don't have fresh eggs. You don't have coffee. You don't have hot water.
You don't even have clean water in all the places that you might operate. So instead, they have to create a process that you can follow every morning. no matter where you're deployed, whether you're in Africa, South America, Russia, China, Mongolia, Australia, Canada, France, anywhere you might be, you want to have some kind of consistent dietary, consistent morning process that you can rely on and you can do it every day. That makes a lot of sense. I want to know a bit more about, you know, how did you actually become a spy and what was like the recruitment and training process like?
So I kind of became a spy a little bit accidentally. I was trying to get out of the U.S. Air Force. I was a military officer and I was trying to leave the Air Force and go into doing something more humanitarian.
I was actually trying to apply to the Peace Corps. Because what I really wanted in my life was like a hippie chick that was going to be my girlfriend and a tent where we could have sweet, sweet lovemaking sessions. And I wanted to save all the Nigerian like children and orphans from pain. Like that was that was my mission after I left the Air Force.
But apparently in the process of signing up for the Peace Corps, CIA found my application and tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, if you think you'll like that kind of job, we've got a job that you might also be interested in. And that's how I ended up being picked up by CIA. Now, I still had to go through an interview process, just like you said.
And that interview process is really less about an interview and more about a series of tests, psychological tests, memory tests, critical thinking tests. We also go through a series of role play or scenario based testing, which is when a panel of people say, hey, this is the situation. What do you do? Or a specific person sits across the table from you and says, hey, we're going to do a role play. This is the situation.
This is who I am. What are you going to do? And we literally role play, act it out.
And they'll assess your performance based on the role play. Because what they're really looking for is your critical thinking, your decision under presser. Do you comport yourself well under moments of hostility or moments of confusion or moments of high emotion, high stress? That's the process really to determine whether or not you ever truly get the interview. Only after they know that you've passed all the exams do you ever sit down with somebody who asks you, what are you the most proud of?
And what have you done in your career that you are impressed with? And what is your 10-year goal? Nobody talks to you about those things until after they know that you're worth talking to. Are there certain things you're looking for in terms of like skills or talents or, I don't know, personality type?
You know, what I discovered about how CIA recruits, I didn't learn until later in my career. When I was first recruited, I think I was just too excited to be someone who's potentially going to be a CIA officer. Like every time I flew to Washington, DC, every time I got to sit in on the interview, even when I was strapped to the polygraph machine, I was excited.
I was like, oh my gosh, like this is like the movies. I get to do this. Who gets to do this? I was just excited.
It wasn't until after I became a middle ranking officer that I discovered what we were actually looking for. And the way CIA works is like this. It's a large ecosystem. There's multiple specialties.
I mean, of course, there's linguists and of course, there's case officers and of course, there's analysts. But there's also disguise specialists and mission planners and finance people and budget people. So there's a large contingent of very different types of skills. CIA has mastered its hiring process so that it knows what types of personality traits and personality types are going to be the most successful. for the longest period of time in each of those career fields.
Because if you think about it, nobody lasts longer than seven to 10 years really anymore. So CIA needs to know before they spend $150,000 training you, they need to know that you're going to make it longer than two or three years, right? So there's a great deal of investment in psychological understanding, and a great deal of investment in training. And also, Francesca, Frankly, there's a lot of investment in brainwashing people who come in so that their ego and their values and their personal motivations are heavily tied to the job. So one of the main things that they're looking for when people come into CIA is actually a history of childhood trauma, because people who have childhood trauma are often seeking validation externally.
So we become very loyal. to the idea and opinions of others. Well, CIA knows how to shape that trauma to make you very loyal to CIA, to make you seek validation from CIA and your supervisors. And that's a great way of keeping people for a long period of time after you've put so much training and investment into them.
That is extremely fascinating. I wouldn't have thought about this. That's so cool. What area of the CIA were you working in? So CIA has four primary different directorates.
Those directorates are science and technology, analysis, logistics, and operations. Logistics is sometimes known as support. I was on the operations side. Specifically, I was part of the National Clandestine Service, what was known as the NCS, which sometimes is also called the Directorate of Operations. It kind of has two names at one time.
And that's how I got into the world of clandestine field operations. And that was my specialty, was in collecting. clandestine secrets from foreign adversaries that could be used to keep America safe. Wow.
Do you have a favorite mission from all the missions that you went on? Maybe one where you had to wear a disguise or something like that? I actually do, but my most favorite mission is one I can't share because it's still classified.
But I do have a story that I don't think many people know about, right? I had an opportunity to engage in an operation in Africa to support a democratic movement against a coup attempt that was actually carried out by a radio DJ. So if you can believe this, a radio DJ...
successfully executed a coup in a country in Africa. You can, I mean, if anybody who's talented with Google can find this for themselves. And it was one of those operations where you sit back and you can't help but laugh. You can't help but laugh and be like, this is, who gets to do this?
Who gets to travel to support democracy, to fight for freedom against a coup attempt that's being led by a disc jockey, right? That's the kind of stuff that nobody... ever thinks about. Yes, there are all the counterterrorism operations, and there's the cool stuff that happens in the war zone.
And there's all the very dangerous, sexy, mysterious stuff that you read about in spy books and watch on spy movies that happen all over the world. But never in a million years did I anticipate that I would be working in Africa against the DJ who was trying to destroy democracy. That's insane. And I think that speaks a lot about I guess some of the misconceptions or myths that Hollywood like promotes, what would you say, you know, are the biggest myths and what's reality?
The biggest myth in Hollywood about CIA officers is that we are born special. Like there's something special about us. Like we have some kind of superpower.
We're so smart that we learn five languages. We're so gifted that we can, you know, put on a disguise and speak with an accent and, you know, you know, fire any kind of gun under the sun. We know how to drive fast and shoot out the window, right?
Those are things that are complete fabrications that are perpetuated by spy media. In reality, CIA officers are just very normal people. We are everyday people, but we are everyday people that have a specific skill that CIA thinks is needed at a specific moment.
So for example, I was just a brown guy who studied Chinese, who was in the Air Force at a time when what CIA was looking for was brown people with a high security clearance that they could use against terrorists. Right. In 2007. So that's how I became interesting. But 1999, when there was no war on terror, CIA was very interested in Caucasian men and Caucasian women that could be used to fight.
Russia in a Cold War that was extended, right? The Cold War that ended in with the fall of the Berlin Wall was really still the war that continued until 2001. So it's always different. Even now, if you think about it, with the conflicts in Iran and the conflicts in the Middle East, who do you think CIA is interested in?
People who would pass as Muslim. CIA wants women because women can live and work and operate. in parts of Muslim countries where men aren't even allowed, right? So that's the kind of, when we had a war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of a sudden the top language was Pashtun.
When our primary threat was Russia, the top language was Russian. When our top threat becomes China, the top language in demand is going to be Chinese. So it's not that there's these gifted superheroes that CIA goes and finds. CIA goes and finds normal people that are good at something.
And then CIA knows that because they're good at that one thing, they can be trained to be good at all the other things that they need to know. That's so interesting. And I'm curious.
Think about it. Think about all the people who don't take the time to become good at one thing. Think about all the people out there who know that they're good at something. They know they're good at puzzles.
They know they're good at. athletics. They know they're good at remembering things.
They know they're good at languages, but their job or their lifestyle never lets them master it because they're too busy being a cook or being a waiter or also taking care of two kids or being a spouse of a military member. So they never get to master the thing that they're good at. The sad part is because they never get to master the thing that they're good at, they never get to unlock the cognitive processes that allow them to discover mastery.
And if you can't discover mastery in one thing, you'll never discover mastery in something else. That's very interesting. Do you also need to, did you ever need to like seduce or attract someone in a mission or, you know, do CIA spies do that?
Do they teach you how to seduce and attract with your sexuality? So this is, this is a sensitive area because CIA teaches you all the skills that you need in order to attract someone of the opposite sex or the same sex. And they teach you all the skills that you need to know how to.
seduce, which really means attract someone sexually. They teach you all the skills that you need in order to do that as well. However, we don't engage in operations where the end goal is some kind of sexual encounter because CIA is a Western service. It's an American intelligence service.
And everybody who is part of CIA, every officer inside of CIA is an American citizen. And those American citizens carry their American rights. And there is a protection in American rights that make it so that you don't ever have to engage in sexual exploitation on behalf of your employer, especially not if your employer is the federal government.
So you might know how to seduce and attract people, but you'll never be called on to have sex with somebody. So depending on the operation, you might choose to be attractive so that they pay attention to you. but you would never be forced to have a sexual encounter.
Oftentimes what we will do is we will actually engage somebody who we know is attracted to us. But then when it comes to sex itself, we will distract or we'll redirect that person towards some other sexual target, right? So for example, I may be working with a gay target that I know is attracted to me.
I'm not going to have sex with my gay target. What I might do though is... by a male prostitute who does have sex with my gay target.
And I can pick that prostitute and pay for that prostitute using US dollars. And I can make sure that I know who that prostitute is personally and physically, because I know what my target is attracted to. But now what I get all the benefits of being in control of this relationship without any of the compromises that come from physically engaging in the sexual aspects of a relationship. Does that make sense? That makes a lot of sense.
That's so interesting. And I'm so curious now, like how, what do they teach you? How do they train you to become attractive or seductive? What are some tips or tricks?
A lot of what CIA teaches us, Francesca, is what you teach your followers, if you can believe it, right? They teach us, they teach us body language. They teach us micro expressions. They teach us physical dynamics and they teach us nonverbal and verbal communication cues.
Things that, that trigger a predictable response in the psychology of the human brain because all human beings have one thing in common, the way their brain is created. Skin color can be different. Accents can be different. Language can be different. But the brain still operates the same way.
The cognitive functions of the brain are the same. Sometimes they are higher order processing. Sometimes they are lower order processing.
Only in the event that you have a brain that is not neurotypical, for example, autistic or some kind of retardation or whatever else, only in a brain that is not neurotypical, do you lose the ability to predict the outcomes of certain behavioral inputs. So whether you're talking to a Senegalese male who has no education, or whether you're talking to a very well-educated British citizen, you can still trigger the same behaviors if you use certain verbal and nonverbal cues. Can you give me some examples of some verbal or nonverbal cues?
You're using one right now. A smile is a very powerful nonverbal cue that is internationally recognized as a warm, open behavior. Similarly, crossing the arms is the opposite of a smile, right?
This is a very closed form of body language. Anywhere in the world, if you cross your arms, the nonverbal cue that you're sending is a defensive cue, right? leaning towards somebody, opening the chest and leaning towards somebody, that is a sign of energy.
Now that energy can be communicated in different ways. That's why sometimes people associate energy and power as being the same thing. So they'll call it a power move to lean into somebody.
But in fact, what you're doing is it's an energetic move. You're applying energy to the situation. And if you know how to predict the response of your target, sometimes they'll respond by bringing more energy to you. That's what happens in a romantic relationship.
I lean into somebody who's attracted to me. And what do they do? They lean into me.
But if it's a threatening situation or like a boss and coworker, you might lean into somebody who then backs away because it's more of a conflict or a threat. You mentioned the word power there, and I wanted to ask you, how can someone project power in an interaction? There's a number of things to understand about power, right? Power is measurable.
Power is a real thing. It's not just a mental thing. It is a very real thing.
And the power center of the human body is the chest. That's where your heart is. That's where your lungs are.
That's where the... The spinal cord is the central nervous system. All of those things. If you were to call them something different, take them out of the human body and put them in your house. Right.
What is the primary source of power in the house? Well, it's the place where the electricity comes into the house, the central circuit breaker. What's the center for for hot water in your house?
The hot water heater. What's the center for for actually converting energy into. a food source.
It's in the kitchen where there's a stove and a microwave and an oven, right? So there are certain parts of the body that are centers of energy, just like there's certain parts of the house that are centers of energy. It just so happens that in the human body, most of our centers exist in our chest and really our upper abdominal center, right? Where the stomach and the digestive enzymes are.
So when you want to project power, it really isn't anything more than presenting the center of energy on your body. So you can do that with something as simple as posture, just by lifting your shoulders up and back and putting your chest centered forward. You can do that from a sitting position.
You can do that even from a sitting and leaning back position. You can still open your chest and put out that center of power. This is what is so frustrating.
Francesca, we have a term in the United States called jocks. I don't know if you've ever heard of the term jocks. I have, yeah. One of the things that all of us remember hating about jocks in high school and college is that they would sit back in their chairs cocky with their chest wide open.
That was the power move. That's the thing that made us so angry. The thing is, we didn't know that in college and high school.
We just thought that there was something about them. What was bothering us was that they were projecting their power into the room while the rest of us were leaning forward with our shoulders forward on our desk. or sitting there with our arms crossed, hiding our power, right?
This is what happens when you see women, especially women influencers, talk about demonstrating power as a female. They usually tell you that you have to open up your chest in some way, throw your arms over your head, you know, stand with proper posture. It's not about the spine.
It's about the chest. It's about projecting all that energy forward. So depending on how you want to show that power, maybe you want to show that power by showing that uh like you're showing your spouse or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, that you are a powerful partner.
You can do that by laying in bed with your shoulders back, by sitting up in bed with your shoulders back, by sitting at the table with your chest forward, by going out in public with your chest forward. You can show power to the people you care about, but you can also show power to a threat. If you think about a mugger or a criminal or somebody who's trying to take advantage of you. They're not trying to take advantage of you personally.
They're trying to find a weak person to take advantage of. So oftentimes, one of the visual cues that a criminal is looking for in people is that they are condensing their power. They're covering their power because somebody who's projecting power is more likely aware, prepared, and self-respecting enough that they may have self-defense tools on them.
But somebody who's cowering or clutching their power is more likely to be able to their handbag or or wrapped up in a jacket or whatever else that person is already subdued it's that person is already uh muting their power that's so interesting i feel like i've heard about this before for sure like they go after the vulnerable people they're they're not gonna go after the people that show confidence and power yeah that makes so much sense and that's so interesting um the other thing i was thinking about is i imagine that as a you spy, you need to lie a lot and you need to be really good at it, right? Do they train you how to lie or manipulate people? And what are some of the things you've learned? Really? I mean, all of CIA training is training you how to lie.
That's the job. The job is to pretend to be someone you're not in a place for a reason that isn't the real reason to do an act that isn't the real act. and then to escape with the secrets that you've stolen that were never supposed to be stolen. Right. So all the other stuff, all the shooting and the driving and, you know, water survival and how to jump out of planes and how to dress and how to put on a disguise.
All of that stuff is just fun, extra stuff around the core of the skill, which is really deception and deceit. So you do have to become very good at lying. One of the things that CIA actually looks for in its recruitment process is two fold.
One, somebody has to be willing to lie. There are lots of people who are not willing to lie. There are lots of people who have a physiological response that prevents them from being comfortable lying. So that's why there's so many psychological batteries.
So that you can find the people who are naturally gifted, if you will, at lying. Because they're willing to lie. They're naturally comfortable with lying. And oftentimes people with trauma. are also people who are very comfortable at lying.
Because let's be honest, if you've had trauma as a child, lies and deception became part of your core programming so that you could survive. You had to say you were fine when you weren't. You had to say you were happy when you weren't.
You had to sit there and smile when you felt like crying, right? That's part of what happens to you when you've got childhood trauma. So the first thing that we need to understand about a good spies, that they have to be willing and capable physiologically of lying. And then on top of that, then that's where the training comes in, where they train you how to sync your verbal and nonverbal cues so that I don't verbally tell you something that's untrue while physically showing you that I'm lying. And then they also teach you how to refine your lies.
For example, one of the core things that a skilled liar does that an unskilled liar does. doesn't do is skilled liars know you have to practice your lie. You have to learn how to think the lie and say the lie before the moment of lying.
It's called a brain body connection, right? In this case, the brain is connecting to the mouth and the tongue of the body. So oftentimes when unskilled liars lie, they stumble over their words or they double back or they blubber or they look around, they look confused, they can't say it quickly and smoothly.
And we've all caught people in a lie because they weren't very smooth and confident with it. Whereas a skilled liar knows you have to practice the brain body connection of actually telling the lie. So that's two different ways that a skilled liar can be developed. What are some other manipulation tactics that they teach you about?
One of the biggest ones is something called primary motivations. All human beings, anybody with a neurotypical pink brain has four core motivations. And those four core motivations break into an acronym that we call RICE, R-I-C-E.
Reward is the R. Ideology is the I. Coercion is the C. And ego is the E.
So reward, ideology, coercion, and ego are the four. four primary motivators that you can use to manipulate anyone. Unfortunately, they are also the same four core motivations that you and I have that allow others to motivate or manipulate us. Reward means that you're getting something, whether you're getting a free gift or whether you're getting someone's attention or whether you're getting the opportunity to apply for a job. If you're getting something, then that's a reward motivator.
ideology means it's what you believe in. People who believe a certain religion, people who believe in a certain set of politics, people who believe in the future and hope for the future, people who believe in fatalistic thoughts. That's all ideology. And if you give somebody what they ideologically believe, if you tell somebody or repeat or present or appear like you have the same ideology, then they can manipulate you easier.
than if they appear as somebody with a different ideology. I'm going to skip coercion because it's a different one. I'm going to jump to ego.
Ego is one of the stronger ones because ego doesn't mean egotistical. Ego means how you want to be viewed by the people around you. We all have an ego.
That's a basic psychological principle. We all have an ego. Not all of us are egotistical, however. Some of us, our ego is to be in the background.
Some of us, our ego is to be very self-sacrificing. Some of us, our ego is to be part of a larger community or larger purpose. So we actively take steps to fulfill our ego presence. When somebody else knows what your ego is and they feed your ego, You trust them and that gives them leverage to manipulate you.
This is what happens oftentimes in churches when you hear about priests who abuse their trust in their congregation, when you hear about embezzlement by senior executives in a company, right? They're taking advantage of the ego of the people that they know so that they can get something that they want. The last of the four motivations was coercion, the C in the RICE acronym.
Coercion is anytime somebody. uses something negative against you. This is where blackmail comes into play. Anything that makes you feel guilty or embarrassed or ashamed or afraid, all of those levers are considered coercion. And coercion is a very powerful tool to get people to do what you want.
It's a very powerful tool to manipulate people. But the difference between coercion and the other three fundamental motivators is that coercion can really only be used once. Once somebody makes you feel bad about you, you never trust that person again.
Once somebody holds a gun to your head, you never get close enough for them to hold a gun to you again. Once somebody slaps your face, you don't ever let them slap you again, right? You never trust them again. Whereas when somebody gives you a gift or when somebody says they believe in the same religion that you believe in, or when somebody comes to you and they're part of the same community that you're part of, you will trust them again and again and again.
That's so interesting. And I'm just thinking like how that applies to religious and cults and like, you know, the level of manipulation that happens there. I'm fascinated by that.
And I was just thinking about that. But that's really fascinating. And think about the role that the four core motivators play.
Think about the role that Rice plays in abusive relationships. Why do women stay with abusive partners? Why do men stay with abusive women? It's because...
Some part of all four of those core motivations are present. Yes, the man might be slapping her, but he is also somehow feeding her ego or feeding her ideology. Yes, the woman might call her man horrible, horrible names.
She might even cheat on her man. But what keeps him coming back? Something about the other three motivations, right?
There's some element of all four that end up making abusive relationships a reality. Very fascinating. How do you know if someone's lying to you? How can you determine that?
First, I want to say that when you're trying to catch a liar, you cannot rely on any of the garbage that online influencers try to tell you. You can't see it in the way that their eyes look one way or the other. You can't see it in their blink rates. You can't see it because of some typical body language movement because... Every human body is different.
So people just react differently. So you can't apply one behavior to all people. What you can do, however, is you can compare a baseline. A baseline means if I know you, Francesca, and we spend some time together, let's just say four hours. Four hours is a pretty decent amount of time to get a baseline on a person's personal behavior.
Because if I'm with you for four hours. You either like being around me or you don't like being around me. If you do like being around me, then I'm going to see that your energy stays high the whole time. If you don't like being around me, I'm going to see your energy change over those four hours. So I can still get a baseline for you in both situations because you're either going to be high energy because you like being around me or I'm going to have seen your energy change to a lower level of energy because it's draining to be around people you don't like.
But once you have a baseline, that's how you can then start to test if people are lying to you. Because you can see a lie is a very energy intensive act. It takes energy and focus and attention to detail to lie well. Remember we talked about nonverbal and verbal communications have to be in sync. That takes a lot of energy.
You have to be able to remember the lie that you told. And you have to be able to repeat that lie consistently with a brain body connection. That's very difficult, right?
Even gifted liars, even people who naturally are good at lying and who have lied a lot in their lives, they still make a lot of predictable mistakes when you measure them against a baseline. But if you don't have a baseline, it's very difficult to tell if someone's lying to you. There are certain tactics you can use with somebody who's brand new, like a salesperson or...
a new date or a new boss. There are certain things that you can try, but they're not as reliable as the internet tries to make you believe. What are some things you can try? So for example, let me give you a few different techniques.
There's something called the emotional question. When you think somebody is lying to you, you can test them with an emotional question. Because when you ask a question that triggers an emotion, that emotion is natural, right?
So I'll do it with you right now, right? So Francesca, tell me about one of your favorite memories as a little girl. It was probably walking in the botanical gardens in Romania with my mother.
So I'm going to stop you right there. Okay. For anybody who's watching right now, they just saw your face do a few important things. First, they saw you actually look up and to the left, which is the chronological order of how we read. Right.
It's a natural timeline. You read from left to right. You remember from back in time to the current day.
And that's what you were doing. You were recalling a memory. Well, when you recall a memory, you physically reference like you read.
You look in the upper left-hand corner and you reference to the right-hand corner. Maybe you look up. Maybe you look down.
Maybe you look straight ahead. But you naturally reference from left to right because that's the way you were taught to read. That's the way you see a timeline. That's the way everything happens.
in a Western world, right? Second, they saw that you immediately had a reaction. As soon as I asked the question, you immediately had a reaction where you were trying, you, you were, you could see on your face that it was positive.
You could see in your face that it was not threatening. You could see your face relax, right? You could see all of these things happen. So I had high confidence that you were telling me a true response because I asked you an emotional question. Okay.
I'm going to ask you another emotional question, but I want you to lie to me. All right. I want you to lie to me. What did it feel like the first time a boy either cheated on you or lied to you? It felt really good.
I was so happy about it. So you could see as soon as I asked the question to you, you could see the tension in your face as you tried not to display what you really felt. Because when I asked you the question. you had a real memory. You had a real feeling.
And that feeling was not a comfortable, happy feeling. So your face went flat. When I asked you about a happy memory, your face like came to life. When I asked you about a negative memory and you lied about it, your face was flat as you processed how you were going to lie about it. It's very nuanced, but for the people watching, they can see it.
When you watch this playback, you will see it yourself, right? You also didn't see your eyes referenced the same way that you actually referenced the memory that I asked you to reference. You referenced a different way because as soon as you thought to look back in your own history, you also tried to resist that feeling because you didn't want to show me the true feeling.
These are ways that anybody can test to see if a liar is lying to them because they can use an emotional question because the person who's lying cannot resist feeling the real emotion. It's a great trick if you think someone's cheating on you. It's a great trick if you think you have a friend who's not really your friend. It's a great trick if you think that there's somebody who's not telling you the truth about their past.
You can ask emotional questions and see their response. I'm definitely going to test this out. This is incredibly interesting.
And I'm going to replay to see how I responded. What other things have you learned about human nature as part of your training? you know, what do people really want and need? It's a great question, right?
So there's a few things. First, at a very basic level, there's a survival instinct in human beings that's always present. And because of that survival instinct, the natural first response for all humans is to assess something new, new people, new information, new food. They assess it as either a threat or a non-threat. That's the first thing that's just two options.
Every time we meet a new person, go to a new restaurant, get in a new car, the first thing that we're truly doing on a basic instinctive level is we are asking ourselves, is this a threat to me or is this not a threat to me? A threat to my reputation, a threat to my ego, a threat to my family, a threat to my success, a threat to my sense of purpose. All people, if they have Pink matter and a neurotypical brain, all of us, look at every piece of new everything. through this lens of threat or non-threat.
And then sometimes we make a decision very quickly in a few seconds. Oh, this is not a threat. I like this car. This car feels good to me. Or I don't like this car.
The seat is uncomfortable and I can't see through the windows. That's all threat response. It's threatening my survival. It's threatening my long-term success, my ability to keep my family safe, my ability to have a positive reputation, right?
So that's one thing that's really important. And very similar and very... very much aligned with that, is this understanding that all human beings are at their core pack animals. We are tribal creatures. We crave human connection.
We cannot be without it. Even when we think we don't want to be around people, what we actually want is to be around people like us. That's why introverts love to be with other introverts.
They just don't necessarily love to be with them talking, but they love to sit next to another introvert on the couch. They love to sit quietly in the same library and read in silence. They love to be part of the same Facebook group, which is why there's introvert Facebook groups.
So even people who think that they're antisocial or think that they want to be alone don't really want to be alone. They crave connection with people who are like them. And when you understand that all people are craving human connection, it gives you a huge advantage over all the people out there who have not yet realized all people crave human connection. So you can always connect with a person, always, no matter how prideful or wealthy or ignorant or angry, no matter what they're feeling, there is an opportunity to connect with them if you understand that secretly, deep down. They are craving human connection from someone who they do not determine to be a threat to their survival.
Right. So survival instinct and human connection go hand in hand. And it's a huge benefit for anyone in business, relationships or family life when they understand that.
What are some things someone can do to appear as non-threatening so that they can connect with anyone? That's a great question. There's a number of things that you can keep in mind.
So first of all, when you want to appear as non-threatening, you should not demonstrate power. So remember how we talked about the center of power being your chest? You don't want to demonstrate that power because you never know if someone's going to see that power as a threat to their survival instinct. So instead, you want to always subdue your power. That doesn't mean you want to block yourself off.
If you block yourself off, you can still appear as a threat. It looks like you're hiding something or holding something back. What you want to do is you want to mute your power, roll those shoulders forward and slouch a little bit.
Right. And now people still see your energy center, but they don't feel like you're hiding something. And they also don't feel like you're overly aggressive. So you want to always start when you meet a new person, always start in an energy neutral position.
Right. Something casual, something where you're not featuring your strength and you're not featuring your suspicion. And then.
The next step after you present yourself as neutral is something we call mirroring. So look at the person across from you and go from your neutral position to mirroring whatever they are doing. If they're leaning forward, you should lean forward. If they've got their arms crossed, you cross your arms.
The reason is because there's an inherent bias in the human brain. There's a cognitive bias to trust what looks the same, the same as us. So if I'm showing suspicion of you and you show suspicion of me, cognitively, that's a good thing. I trust you more because we're connected. But if I'm suspicious of you and you're just a wide open textbook and you're high energy, that doesn't make me feel like we're the same.
But if you've ever seen two naturally extroverted, bubbly people meet, especially for the first time and they're. big as day and they're high energy and they're speaking with their hands. It just goes on and on and on because they're mirroring each other.
And it's just building more and more trust and more and more confidence that they're the same, that they're going to get along. And that's something that you can actually control when you want to. When you meet a boss, you can mirror your boss. When you meet a client, you can mirror a client.
When you're trying to have When you're trying to avoid an argument, but you need to have a hard conversation with your partner, you can mirror your partner. And it's going to inherently create trust in their subconscious. These tricks are so useful.
Do you have any other spy tricks that you can share with us? No, there are so many, Francesca, because we don't call them tricks. We call them tactics. We call them tactics. Spy tactics.
Spy tactics that build trust. Spy tactics that build confidence. Spy tactics that give you an unfair advantage. There are spy tactics that you can use for everything from how to shoot a gun to how to tie your shoes.
There's spy tactics for how you pack a bag. There's spy tactics for what you eat and drink in the morning. There's spy tactics for how you talk to somebody who's senior to you.
How do you talk to somebody who's younger than you? How do you talk to a female? How do you talk to a female that is attractive to you?
How do you talk to a female who is not attractive to you? How do you talk to a female who is older than you and also attractive to you? We can, I mean, there's tactics for all of it because At the end of the day, what a spy is trying to do is achieve a very specific outcome.
And the only way that you can get your outcome is if you understand how to take advantage of the subconscious of your target so that you can deliberately move the conversation in a direction that benefits you. That does not mean manipulate everyone. What it means is when you are.
on a mission with a specific outcome that you're trying to achieve, you take deliberate actions to trigger with high probability the outcome that you desire. Now I want to know, what tactics do you use to talk to a female that you're attracted to? That's a great, okay.
So if you're talking to a female that you're attracted to, but you do not want her to know. that you are attracted to her. It's called parallel conversation. You don't talk to her really at all directly.
Instead, you talk to somebody who is parallel to her. So if you want to approach a girl at a bar that you're attracted to, but you don't want her to know that you're attracted to her, don't talk to her when you walk up to the bar. Talk to the person sitting next to her at the bar.
Maybe it's a boy. Maybe it's a girl. Maybe it's an old person. Maybe it's a young person. maybe there's nobody else at the bar.
So you talk to the bartender, but you do not show her that you're attracted to her because subconsciously what will happen is you will engage in a conversation. That conversation will be between you and the person you're talking to, which means two centers of energy start to generate shared energy. That is going to naturally attract the curiosity of the third person. If you've ever found yourself listening in on someone's conversation, when you were like, why am I even doing this?
That's why. It's because they started a conversation. They created an energy center that your body couldn't resist because of survival instinct. What if they know something I don't know? What if they talk about something I don't realize?
What if one of them is crazy? Your survival instinct takes over and it forces you to listen in. And that's why some of us try to not eavesdrop. We're like, oh, I shouldn't be listening to them, but I keep listening to them. I'm not even interested in what they're talking about, but I keep listening to them.
So it's called parallel conversation. If you ever want to talk to a female that you are attracted to without letting her know that you're attracted to her. Is that a spy tactic? Don't let her know you're attracted to her?
Absolutely. It absolutely is. Because in every relationship, you have to consider the dominance in the relationships and the leverage. that you have over each other is what determines the dominance that you have. So if you're trying to approach a target, remember, in CIA speak, we're not approaching a date.
We're approaching a target of interest. That target of interest is a bad guy, usually. They're a drug dealer.
They're a smuggler of children. They're the wife of a senior general, right? They're somebody important.
So you want to never give them the leverage to have dominance over you right out of the gates because it's confusing to the relationship. Instead, you have to find a way to approach them on equal footing. If I talk to you, you have the dominant position because I'm deferring my attention to you before you defer your attention to me. But if I talk to somebody next to you and you then join the conversation, I have dominance to you. Because you are showing me attention before I'm showing you attention.
Now, if you want to talk to somebody who you are attracted to, then you do want to give them the benefit of dominance. Because what you want to do is you don't ever want to come across as a threat to them. One of the ways that you can make sure that you don't trigger a threat response is by letting that person know they're in the dominant position.
So you would find a way, a reason, a cause to approach them that is not threatening to them. So you come up to them and maybe you ask them a question that's unrelated to them. Right. You ask them, you know, do you know where the restroom is? Or you ask them if they've been to this, you know, if they have you been to this bar for even as cliche as that is, have you been here before?
strangers ask each other that all the time. They ask themselves, they ask each other, have you had this? Have you had coffee here before?
Do they have good food here? Like, have you ever had their pizza? Like we say that stuff to waiters.
We say that stuff to bartenders. We say that stuff to baristas. We say that stuff to same sex people in a social scenario.
So it's not actually cliche because it really is something that's used. But the goal is to ask a question that's unrelated to the fact that you're attracted. But what you're doing is you're creating a shared energy that is not threatening energy. Because if I come up to you and I say something like, I'm lost and I'm looking for the nearest hamburger place, you don't feel like I'm here to threaten your survival.
You feel like I'm some dumbass who's lost asking about a hamburger place in a wine bar. That's all I need because now I am closer to my objective of getting you to trust me as a non-threat. When in fact, I am a threat.
You see what I'm saying? Something else I want to ask you is, how do you deal with fear and anxiety in high pressure situations as a spy? Do they look for people that are low in anxiety?
You know, this is a great question that shows some of the myth in Hollywood and the myth in the general public's understanding of spies. The best spies are not actually people who don't have anxiety. The best spies are people with high anxiety. And CIA actively recruits people with anxiety because anxious people are naturally more attentive.
They are naturally more suspicious. They are naturally more observant. They naturally have a stronger recollection, right? It's a superpower.
Anxiety is a superpower in the world of espionage. However, if it goes untrained. it can be very damaging because anybody who has anxiety knows the spiral that comes out of anxiety.
So what CIA does is they teach us how to recover, recuperate, and maintain our energy reserves, our mental health, because they also know that they're tapping into our anxious tendencies. So that's another reason why sleep is so important. That's another reason why diets, not the food that you eat. but the order of what you eat, such as water first, is so important. That's why exercise is a priority for us, because these are all things that counter and combat anxiety, right?
Sunlight or vitamin D combats anxiety. Routines and schedules combat anxiety. One of the things that my wife is also a CIA officer, and my wife has a general anxiety disorder, like a clinical disorder.
And one of the things that keeps her Sane is a routine that goes wherever she goes. So she can always have hard-boiled eggs. Anywhere in the world, you can find eggs, and you can boil them, and you can eat them.
Very, very predictable for her. Anywhere in the world, you can make some kind of hot tea, right? Whether that is cinnamon tea or mint tea or green tea or jasmine tea, you can make it pretty much anywhere. So steeping some kind of plant in hot water. to make tea is another thing that she uses.
So that's part of her routine. There isn't a day that goes by that she doesn't have some kind of hot drink first thing in the morning after she's had her water. And when possible, in most cases, she also has either boiled eggs or scrambled eggs or some kind of cooked egg.
It's a very predictable, calming, anti-anxietal routine. That's amazing because it's such a simple thing that you can do. just having a routine, but it's so effective. And one of the things that people don't realize is that 90% of your anxiety that you will feel during the day is actually determined in the first two hours of your day.
So if you start your day and there's a lot of changes or there's a lot of threats or there's a lot of confusion, you've just determined with almost 90% certainty that you will have. lots of anxiety throughout the day. But if you can start the first two hours of your day in a low anxiety state, then you can present and protect your energy reserves for the rest of the day. And that's something that a lot of people get wrong.
They think that they should start their day with caffeine and checking their phone and catching up on the news and all these things that cause them anxiety. And all they're doing is they're ruining the rest of their day. When instead, if you just set an alarm on your phone. for when you can pick up your phone. Don't set an alarm for when to wake up.
Set an alarm for when you can pick up your phone. So then you wake up, you can't even touch your phone. So you can't go looking for things that make you anxious.
Instead, you go for a walk, drink some water, eat your eggs, drink your tea, read a magazine, read your favorite book, and then your phone alarm goes off and then you can check the news. Completely transforms the level of anxiety that you feel throughout the day. That's so useful. And if you are in a high pressure, high anxiety situation, what is something that you use to calm down your nerves? So, I mean, this is where it really gets to a lot of the same cognitive behavioral therapy that anybody with anxiety has experienced before, right?
There's breathing techniques like box breathing, right? There's also breathing techniques that intentionally hyperventilate or hyperoxygenate your bloodstream. Because all that extra oxygen in your bloodstream will go into your brain and help you quickly, cognitively rationalize your way through the emotional feelings that you're having. There's also a technique that CIA calls stress inoculation, which means that you intentionally find moments of stress in a safe environment.
You intentionally find moments of stress in order to inoculate your body with what that stress feels like so that when you feel the stress again, it's not the first time. Do you remember when we were talking about the recruitment process for CIA? Yeah. We were talking about how they put you through role plays and they put you through scenarios. A big part of why they do that is because they are testing whether you have been inoculated to stress and confusion or whether those moments will cause you to freeze.
And there are some people who freeze because they've never been inoculated to that kind of stress. This is what happens when you have somebody who grew up in a quiet home because they were a single child. And then they end up going to a birthday party at another home where they have six children.
And you can see that child frozen like, what is this chaos happening all around me? They've never been inoculated to that much noise, that much activity, that much chaos. So you can always inoculate yourself as an anxiety, a person of anxiety.
or an anxious person, you can always inoculate yourself to the stressors that other people experience in a safe environment. You can ask your friend to take you to a concert. You can ask your friend to take you to a busy restaurant. You can ask your friend to pretend they're a boy flirting with you. You can ask your friend to pretend they're a girl rejecting you.
You can do all of these things so that you experience the stress, and you learn the feelings, and you cope and process the anxiety. before it actually happens. That's extremely useful. It sounds a bit like exposure therapy. Yes, that's exactly.
That is the commercial term for what the military and government call stress inoculation. Okay. And my last question to you is, what advice would you give someone that wants to become a CIA spy?
I would say two things. First, thank you for wanting to defend our country because we need... strong, capable, courageous people to start working and become clandestine officers at CIA. The second thing I would say is you must understand that once you take that path, you are no longer the priority.
Your family is not the priority. Your children, your mother, your father, your spouse, none of those people are the priority. The priority becomes the protection of American national security, the primacy.
of American power becomes the primary objective. So you will leave your family. You will lie to your family.
You will hurt your own body in pursuit of whatever the policymaker and the president decide is principal to maintaining American primacy. That might be a big deal. That might be something like a war in Ukraine or a war in Afghanistan, or it might be something that you think is trivial. like oil prices or rice prices or the trade of soybeans.
But your opinion will never matter again. Because once you sign up for that task, you are a tool for American national security. So you have to be willing to basically let go of everything. Very interesting.
Andy, thank you so much for this. This conversation has been so insightful and so interesting. I'm sure our listeners will learn so much from this.
Thank you so much again. Absolutely. It's my pleasure, Francesca.
And if anybody wants to learn more, more of the tips, more of the skills, more of the tactics, you can find me online at social media at Everyday Spy on all the different social media channels. You can also visit my homepage, everydayspy.com, or you can subscribe to my podcast on YouTube or on Apple or on any of your podcast channels with the Everyday Spy podcast. Yes, absolutely. I'll link in the description below as well so everyone can check it out. You have a great day.
YouTube channel. I checked it out. So I encourage everyone to go there. Thank you, Francesca.