CIA Spy on Mind Games, World War 3, China, Russia and the New World Super Power | Andrew Bustamante

So for anybody that doesn't know you're a former CIA legitimate spy which is crazy and the reason I find that interesting is because you would have to be a master of psychology your own and others and this also gets into where we are in the world right now I've heard you say that we are potentially already in the beginnings of World War III which hits a little too close to home in terms of how I view what's going on but here's a quote the core element of being able to control a relationship is understanding the Pink Matter truth of feelings what all people feel becomes their point of view on what reality is so when you understand it and you learn how to manipulate how people feel then you can essentially direct them to feel any way you want them to feel woof I mean I sound like a sick bastard sometimes man hearing my own words back to me like what kind of evil person came up with that idea I'll assume that we're going to use these for good both as a screenwriter and as an entrepreneur the idea of being able to take somebody's perspective to actually think like they think is really important so the that the idea that you capture in that quote is what I call frame of reference now in my marriage the biggest arguments that I have with my wife are always where I'm I'll be saying to her I'm not able to penetrate your frame of reference and people feel a certain way they see the world a certain way and if you can't get inside that then you're in trouble and so what I like about the quote is basically what I'm taking from that is if you can see their perspective the the elements that Cobble it together that make them feel the things that they feel then you can steer that relationship now again I'll assume we're steering it for good for the purposes of this conversation but I do really want to understand more about that one how do you take somebody's perspective how do you build something where you can reasonably I can be able to mind read but you can reasonably understand where they're coming from the first big thing that you hit on uh and I'm actually gonna I'm gonna tweak what you said it's not about getting into people's perspective most people don't have perspective the average person has no perspective they live in a world of perception how they perceive the world around them most individuals at least that's what we learn at CIA individuals live with a frame of reference around themselves they're the center of the movie they're the star of the show they're the center of the universe that is an inherently human thing to do because humans in our evolutionary process and the Pink Matter that is our brains we're always worried about survival we've never outgrown that the technological development and the technological evolution of the world has happened exponentially faster than the human evolvement the human evolution of the world so while you and I are sitting here in 2023 we our brains work in essentially the same way as they worked in 1823 but the world around us is extremely different we don't need to worry about Survival anymore now we're supposed to be worrying about how to thrive how to meet our objectives how to meet our goals if you think about it humans just 200 years ago humans had to worry about how do I make it to the next day how do I just survive they were always focused on the here and now and how do I make it work today so I can live again tomorrow you and I don't worry about how to make it through today most people are thinking about what am I gonna do this weekend what am I going to do next week when is my upcoming vacation we don't worry about the Here and Now but the brain is still wired to live first and foremost in this survival mindset the survival process so the Pink Matter that exists in your brain and mind and everybody around us is still very much focused on the self as the most important element and because of that it views everything around its everything around the environment and around the individual through a lens of perception what I perceive is real to me to hell with what you perceive what I perceive is the truth my stepdad used to lecture me about perception is reality perception is reality Andrew perception is reality and I disagreed with him from the time I was 12 years old I was like no dad reality is reality if I perceive a car coming down the road and it is in line to hit me if I perceive that it's not going to hit me doesn't make a difference right reality is reality what CAA taught me was a better way of explaining what reality actually is and reality is that 98 of human beings are trapped in their own perception so the two percent that live in the real world that have perspective they are able to manipulate the perception of everybody else okay so when you were in training did you have to like are there um like five bullet points or whatever that you begin to go okay people are they're in survival mode um they're looking at the world through their own eyes they have fears like is is there a framework by which you begin to understand the other person yes uh there is it doesn't really boil down to five bullet points but it does boil down to essentially like a handful of short lectures right but walk me through it so here's here's how I imagine you I don't know if this is real or not but the very first thing I wrote down when I started researching it was how the hell do you manage your own anxiety when you're in spy mode and you can't give yourself away but you have to figure something out about that person so I imagine you walk up to them whatever that you know framework is the rubric that you're determining who they are by I imagine it kicks in right away how do you start categorizing them when you first walk up so when you first walk up to somebody you've got to keep in mind that nobody is what they appear to be nobody every every human being has three lives it's what we're taught three lives there's a uh public life a secret life and a private life right so the order is public life private life Secret Life the public life is what we're all presenting to each other it's what we want to appear as in public right you want to look cool and Suave and handsome and you want to sound nice and you want to surround yourself with nice things because that's what you want the public to perceive about you it may not be real but it doesn't have to be real if they perceive it to be true then you have won because you have just proceed you have just manipulated their perception that's why broke ass high school and college kids will still wear nice name brand stuff so they don't pers they don't look like they're broke ass students right I was one of those students so I remember then you've got your private life now your private life is what your closest confidants know about you so what your wife might know about you what your close friends know about you what your parents know about you so publicly nobody knows my feet smell bad privately my wife knows my feet smell bad right but I'm never going to make that part of my public Persona because it goes against what I'm trying to display as an image so here you've got these two lives when you meet a stranger they're presenting their public life always most of your connections most of your friends unless they are in the private life they are all in the public life your co-workers your customers these are all people who you are dealing with you're interacting with on a public life to public life level we haven't even talked about the secret life right the secret life is the life that you don't share with anyone it's that place where your darkest thoughts your biggest uh vulnerabilities it's where they live and convince you every day not to share them with your spouse not to share them with your parents the things that make you feel horrible about yourself the things that you that you wonder if they're really true but you're afraid to even ask the question because what would they think they the public life they the private life how would people judge me we all have a secret life too for some people secret life is big for some people's secret life is quite small but you've got these three lives so when I approach somebody in spy mode or in business mode or in Social mode I know I'm dealing with a public life first so are you trying to peel beneath that sometimes spy mode in spy mode I'm sorry no no please this is so interesting to the average person you have no idea like this is like movie [ __ ] in in spy mode you have two objectives objective number one is to get into someone's private life as quickly as possible because if you're not unless you're in someone's private life you'll never get into their secret life objective number two once you're in private life is to become one of the few people that will ever penetrate their secret life and there's only one reason why you want to penetrate someone's secret life because once you're there you never leave once someone has trusted you with a secret life Secret their their fealty to you their loyalty to you is beyond question forever because they believe that you have earned that right to their secret life they believe that you two are inherently connected star-crossed lovers Soul matches they rationalize it however they need to rationalize it but essentially all they did is they just in a moment of vulnerability they let you into one of their deepest darkest secrets so they have been leveraged like debt they have been leveraged now so their deepest darkest secret hinges on you keeping it a secret and that is interpreted as loyalty they interpret that as this is the most trusted Confidant this is my most trusted Lieutenant this person gets me this person understands me I need to be I need to have I need to do life with this person so when you're a spy and you get into someone's secret life that means you get all the secrets if they're a general in a nuclear program in a hostile country you can just ask them a question hey who are your missiles pointed at what's the temperature sure that you guys use or how often do you enrich your uranium what's your primary source of uranium you can ask them anything because they don't even care about that that's all stuff that they basically have in their private life you're in their secret life that stuff's yours they'll just give it to you the stuff they really care about is I'm really not happy I'm I'm trapped in this marriage that was arranged by my parents and what I really like is this kinky thing with this whatever that's going to get me you know killed in my own country but I can tell you about it so how do you how do you get into that mode I'm guessing you have to understand something about them first so you have to know what makes them tick you have to understand what's going to make them suspicious what's going to trip them up are those like generally true or do you have to tailor them to that specific person they you come in to any operation against a human being so human intelligence is called human human operations human intelligence operations whenever you come into a human's operation you're using a generalized dossier of the target set so if I know I'm talking to an Asian person who has traveled to Europe maybe educated in Europe their parents are well to do they live in China but they were born in Cambodia you can kind of come up with a general sense of the person walk me through that though so are you thinking okay if you're born in Chinese culture it's more collective in nature so you probably feel a tremendous sense of pressure from your family and so how do I leverage that or no you have a certain reaction to Authority and if I can position myself like like are you thinking like that you are exactly that's exactly how you're thinking so there's a couple things to keep in mind so first is that there's three developmental stages to the human brain there's three developmental stages to the human brain there's from birth to seven years old from birth to seven years old we're all sponges we don't differentiate between true and untrue information there's just information right this is one of the reasons why my son when he was four just fell head over heels in love with his grandpa his Grandpa's wrong pretty much all the time he just lies he tells stories that that never happened he just makes stuff up right oh the reason this is happening is because of that and I'm like no that's that's not true at all my four-year-old son doesn't care or when he was four he didn't care but Babu who he calls his grandpa Babu Babu tells the best stories so now my son is 10. he has left that first developmental stage but because of those years spent with his grandfather he is now predisposed to believe his grandfather the second developmental stage happens from 7 to 13. in that period of time you can start to differentiate true and untrue information but you choose which information you want to give more value to so you're still absorbing it you still retain it but you might have a preference for one information for one bit of information or the other right so now this is the place where it's like yeah I know I ate broccoli once and it wasn't terrible but I don't really want to eat it anymore before that you're just like and if you if you give a four-year-old broccoli they'll put it in their mouth so 7 to 13 people start to have a preference for the information but they still absorb it all puberty from 13 to 25 nobody thinks about this puberty lasts until you are 25 years old that period of time cognitively is characterized by the fact that you resist some forms of information so now you actually have a cognitive capacity to hear something and reject it and not even let it come into your brain at all so 7 to 13 you hear it you retain it whether you like it or not zero to seven everything comes in 13 to 25 you're actually rejecting information so when we create a dossier on somebody we're looking at those first 25 years where did they spend the first seven years oh they spent it in China lots of stuff we can ask we can high probability assume a number of things because they spent the first seven years in China oh they spent their first seven years in Alabama they've spent their first seven years in in New York New York they spent their first seven years in Canada lots of stuff you can pull from the foundation of how they were programmed seven to thirteen they did this okay so they were exposed in some places like Saudi Arabia North Korea turkey uh Syria you can assume that some pieces of information they were just never exposed to right they were predominantly exposed to one style of information and if they were given other information they may have absorbed or they would have absorbed it but the chances are they were never exposed to it and then you look at them from their puberty years 13 to 25 where were they what were they doing what college did they go to what high school did they go to what countries were they in because now you know well what would they have been exposed to what would they have rejected based on their predisposition to these other formative years and now you're talking them in their 35 or 45 after 25 neuroplasticity is still a thing for the entirety of your life meaning your brain can always learn something new but your world view has been set by 25. so unless something comes in and challenges your worldview and you give it permission to challenge your worldview you're never going to change the way you think after the age of 25. so we can largely assume that every person that we're talking to especially at their government engineer super Secret Squirrel stuff they probably haven't been challenging their worldview since the time that they were 25. so now we have a we have these different levels that we can use to make probabilistic assumptions about how they think and what they believe when you have that dossier that generalized dossier then you can go into a more granular dossier about what they drink what they eat who they hang out with are they cheating on their spouse how often do they use their phone all the really Nitty Gritty detail stuff to create a picture of how you want to talk to this person so that your first introductory line essentially predisposes them to want to talk to you for the entire conversation and that's so interesting so do you did you take classes on like okay if you grew up in an American large city here are going to be you know some of the things you would have taken in by the time you're 13 or if you grew up in the Middle East then it's you know you're going to be probably Islamic culture here like the main things you're going to need to know about somebody like that so at CIA it's organized according to disciplines so they do a really good job of making sure that people are compartmentalized in terms of their skill sets so that no one person can do everything and they also capture the efficiency of scale by having some people be really good at one skill so they can essentially like a like an industrial revolution uh as what is it called uh assembly line so somebody says we need to Target nuclear engineers in Iran and here is a list of and then a different person a different discipline says here's 12 nuclear Engineers that travel outside of Iran that we think we can actually get in front of and then they give those 12 to an analyst team and now your analytical targeters create that generalized dossier and then that those analytical targeters give it to human targeters who create the nitty-gritty dossier those human targeters then give it to actual field officers or case officers and say here are the 12 people here's everything we know about their background here's everything we know about them individually here's what we know about their pattern of life where they hang out what they like to order at their favorite restaurants and what days of the week they're going to be in those restaurants and then they give it to the field officer so the field officer can review the whole case and say here's how I'm going to do this here's the day the place here's my opening line here's where the conversation is going to go we create our conversation map a map of how we expect the conversation to go with all of the different break-off points where it might go awry and how we bring it back together and then we go and we execute and we execute what's known as a bump or a cold introduction with a known Target of interest and a bump is your meat cute it's where you're gonna bump into them I assume is where that comes from from their perspective yeah you're just bumping into them yeah yeah right from their perception you're just same place same time and it's totally by happenstance because they're living in their world if they actually lived outside of their world they would realize an entire team of people just orchestrated this singular moment where I say exactly the right thing to you at exactly the right time to make the conversation continue Jesus are humans laughably predictable laughably predictable even I am laughably predictable man yeah like it's you you and your team invited me here knowing with high confidence how I was going to react what I was going to say unpredictable we all are it's something that makes us human it's just how you use another human's predictability that kind of defines whether you're Typecast as hero or villain so rough swags how many like personality types do we break into there's science that basically I'm I lean heavily on the Myers-Briggs type indicator it's what I was taught at the agency it's what I've seen work in the field so that's where I lean on and they break people into 16 category types would that be in your dossier that would be in your dossier your Myers-Briggs would be the estimated Myers-Briggs type indicator for you would be in your dossier whoa the field officer actually meets you would then be able to tweak it further because again public life private life secret life you might we might assume that you're an introvert and then I meet you and you seem to act very extroverted so now are you the introvert that we assumed or are you the extrovert that you present yourself to be only way we're going to find out is by continued consistent experience with you over time right if I can get into your private life and especially if I can get into your secret life then I'll know then I'll know whether you're introverted or extroverted whether you're just playing an extroverted role for the societal opinion of you right but yeah it takes time so that would be in Udacity so I would say roughly 16 types but then I would also double that because every type is going to have the the true personality of who they actually are versus that public life personality of who they're trying to present themselves to be and because each type each of those 16 personality types are predisposed to a certain type of behavior publicly they're also predisposed to a certain type of behavior privately so how different would their Myers-Briggs be from so they're presenting themselves as one personality type but in reality not reality in secret life they're a different personality type would those often be very Divergent sometimes not so sometimes they're very Divergent it really depends on the individual let me give you an example right when we think about personalities let's talk through a lens of resources right individual resources so human beings we're taught that human beings only have three resources that matter there is time energy and money that's it every other resource boils down to one of those three resources time energy and money for you to accomplish anything it takes a certain balance of time energy and money so when it comes time for you or I to live our public life we go to a restaurant we go to uh I was just at Megacon a big comic book conference right I was there with my kids and my wife it takes a certain amount of money to buy the ticket money to take to invest in the hotel room and everything else it takes a certain amount of energy to put up with all those people and the lines and your kids going crazy for Megacon and your wife trying to get in line to meet Beverly Crusher right from Star Trek so there's a certain amount of energy that goes into it and then of course there's a time element when you meet with somebody you have to understand how they're three those three resources are being used at any given time so if you meet somebody at the beginning of the day they're most likely fully resourced you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today you meet somebody at the end of the day the gas tanks are at different levels energy might be lower time is probably running on empty uh money might be might be safe that's it helps to know the financial status of your client or your target right so it you have to understand how people's resources are different the more a person's resources are depleted the closer they get to their true Myers-Briggs Personality that is interesting when they're fully resourced they can fake it they can act extroverted they can take extra time to think something through they can be non-judgmental but when they're tapped when the end of the day comes and they're fried that's when you see who they really are so a big part of the process of bringing someone from public life to secret life is to drain them of their resources systematically so that you can see who they really are because it's when they're in that low point that you can essentially replicate or mirror their core personality back to them and then they let you into that secret life they're not you're not going to let someone into your secret life who's different than you so you have to mirror back to them what you believe their true personality to be and then they're like if you like that let me show you this other thing dude that's crazy okay it's not that different man than what we what you and I just did off camera when we were talking about 100 were you folding your arms on purpose uh no because at one point I noticed we both had our arms folded and I was like okay are we mirroring right now like what are we doing no I was not I was not mirroring you there I was not mirroring you there um I was I'm just a little bit cold sometimes in uh in these Studios but uh the fact that we connected on a genuine common interest and then from there the I don't know if you noticed how quickly the conversation turned into very private conversation right and this was me predictably responding to your questions you were the one in control of that conversation why did you homeschool your kids why do you do this why did you leave agent like you were asking the questions I'm responding you're the one in control questions are always being asked by the person in control of the conversation I was just responding in a predictable way because we had just connected over something that made me bring you into my private life man this is really useful so when I think about this obviously again I understand how quickly this stuff can be nefarious but I also understand how this can be really useful in my marriage first of all like understanding my wife being able to take her perspective understanding her perceptions uh that stuff is incredibly incredibly helpful and the times where I'm unable to pierce her um her frame of reference in my language I'm like oh we're derailing because I can't I can't get you to see that you have a frame of reference on this and I often use the David Foster Wallace quote of this is water it's like your frame of reference is so ever present you you don't even realize you have one and so the thought of there being a dossier on me somewhere that's like got their you know an estimate of my Myers-Briggs and that for sure like so I think of it not as I present a fake version but there are I think of my personality in slices and so every slice that I present to people is real but I'm only going to show my wife all of my slices to your point that consistency is the most difficult thing um I I just wouldn't be able to be like with my wife as long as I've been with my I've been together 22 years I wouldn't be able to be fake for that long like at some point The Jig is going to be up you're gonna like slip up and so that like my wife sees all of my slices everybody else sees some version thereof and what's interesting is as you understand more and more of somebody's slices two things happen you can you can begin to predict their behavior and I'm obsessed with the human brain as a prediction engine and my whole thing like we're we're living through a moment where Thomas Soul has the perfect quote to sum it up and people have this as a paraphrase but people have exchanged what worked for what sounds good and this goes back to your idea of well you can say that a truck's not heading towards you but if a truck is heading towards you it's heading towards you and so there is there's what's really happening and then there is your perception of what's happening and in in a desire to look at the world through a lens of just pure acceptance no judgment our prediction engines are breaking and we're no longer dealing with what I'll call is close to ground truth as you can get you and I may disagree a little bit on how much of the world is objectively true physics is true but like we don't even understand physics fully right we're still able to do like incredible [ __ ] right so like we're we are existing at some layer of abstraction all right rain this back in because I could really derail on that uh but in my marriage so my ability to predict the outcome of my behaviors as they Echo back off of my wife or just my ability to predict her native reaction or actions on something is extraordinarily helpful but I do a lot of this intuitively and so hearing it like broken out like I don't even know my wife's Myers Briggs I know my own but even I don't even remember what they mean anymore I did it so long ago um when you think about this stuff and I know you work with corporate clients how how much do you really try to get people to solidify this and how much of it is just people play by ear when it comes to how I teach others I know that it's like uh you called me a master earlier and I am not a master I think the the more you learn about something the more you become an expert in something the more you realize how much there is to learn so I do not consider myself a master of human psychology or a master of human behavior I don't consider myself a master really if anything except being a masterful student of continuing to learn more maybe so when I teach a client my objective as a service provider is to bring them maximum Proficiency in the minimum amount of time they don't need to learn how to use this 12 different ways they hired me for one specific purpose what I know being a business owner is that if you can meet someone's expectation once they'll come back and they'll give you a second chance to meet a different expectation so when a corporate client comes to me and says I want to learn how to use these skills in my human recruiting process right my my human resource process then let's do it right I don't tell I don't make I don't distract them by telling them how to incentivize their High performers I don't distract them by telling them how to improve their relationship I don't distract them by telling them how to improve themselves you want to use this skill in your human resource sourcing and Staffing here's how we do it right and then when they have success doing that that's when they come back and they're like that was amazing how else can I use this or where else can I use that or here's my next problem my c-suite doesn't get along how do I get my c-suite to get along how do I increase communication between my program management team and my budget and finance team right now they bring you specific problems and you solve those specific problems that's how I end up teaching it because people understand their problems people don't necessarily have the consistency or the self-discipline it takes to master multiple areas of a certain skill it's not a luxury many of us have is there a question so going back to your HR example do you think there are Universal questions that will prompt people to reveal themselves in general would be my ideal but we can limit it to HR if we have to so I would my instinct is to say yes but I'd have to think through what those questions would be and how would I use time to think about it here's the one that I use in interviews because this is so culture is everything to me like you might be really smart but if you're not a good cultural fit then we have a problem this goes back to what I was talking about we're living through a cultural moment where people go they're they're not um they are so trying not to upset or offend anybody that they don't realize that people are predictable like you were saying that they fall into certain categories boys and girls is the easiest one for me as somebody who writes Comics like I just had to realize oh 12 year old boys are into this 12 year old girls are into this and they are wildly Divergent desires and look that's on average it's not everybody and of course they're going to be some 12 year old boys that prefer the girls comics and vice versa um but in an interview the question that I ask is when was the last time you were offended okay now that matters to me a lot what are you hoping to discover from that question I am trying to figure out what their um if they have thick skin and very specifically what was it that triggered you because that to me gets me their frame of reference because I think everybody's offended by something and the question is what and if that if what you give me is something small then I know okay there's no way like you're gonna in a business where it's it's just data like it's either working or it's not we're not competing against each other we're competing against the market and competitors and this is running a business is the the closest that most of us will come to a quote unquote life and death situation where you can literally go out of business nobody has a job the company is now dead uh and as the person you know that started the company that's like real stuff like that's really high stress and so I need to know if in that dog fight if I'm gonna have to worry about overly worry about how I say things it's a fair question um I would now that you've given me time to stall and and think through it I would start with a question that has more to do with how they process information I would start with a question like how would you plan your ideal vacation that is a good Universal question for me because it's going to tell you how they process information how quickly they responded to tasking um the time and resource demands that we'll go into any future tasking you give them while they're on the job and the reason I come up with that is there's a there's an exercise at CIA that they put us through called the four temperaments and they break these four temperaments down into four different animal categories basically so the four animal categories are lions foxes cheetahs and bears interesting right tell me more so your lions are people who have a temperament to organize your foxes are people who have a temperament to create ideas to create your cheetahs are people who have a temperament to take action and your bears are people who have a temperament to build relationships so why those animals none of those seem self-evident I don't know other than the cheetah the fox is also relatively clever right I don't know why um I was just taught and I just do what I'm told yeah so what ends up happening is you ask in in a high performance team a high performance team is a four block team right if you can imagine a square with four blocks inside it and each of those blocks has is rep is representative of one of those animal temperaments you need each of them in a high performing team you can have a good team that doesn't have all four but if you want a truly high performance team you need all four present somebody to organize someone to create ideas someone to build the relationships someone to execute when you are looking to Source somebody into HR you already know who you're looking for we need bears we need cheetahs we need Lions we need foxes you should already know because you can run the temperament of your existing staff and if you want to build a high performance team you need all four blocks present so you just find the missing block and then you start sourcing for that the questions that you want to ask you want to ask questions that disarm the person interviewing because guess what every person you interview is in what stage of their life or they're in what of their three very Public public life I need this job I want this job I'm super ex I'm prepared for this job right I'm prepared for this interview public life so you need to disarm them if you're going to find your way into their private life if you want to see how they actually behave you can't ask them questions about the job you also can't ask them questions that go against HR policy you know federal policy about what you do in an interview so you have to ask these elicitation questions these parallel questions and a question like how would you plan your perfect vacation is completely disarming to somebody so if they say well the first thing I would do is I would make a list of all the places I want to go and how much it costs to be there and you know what the high season and low season is now you know you're talking to a lion Lions want to organize right if you talk to somebody what's your ideal vacation oh man I'm just going to jump on the next plane to Fiji you know you're talking to a cheetah cheetah just wants to take action what the hell are you going to do when you get to Fiji I have no idea but I'm on the next plane right if you ask somebody what they're going to do for their ideal vacation and they come back and they're like you know I've thought about this a lot and I'm either going to Antarctica or I'm going to Africa or I'm going to you know Saudi Arabia because there's all this cool stuff going on in all three places and they've got fantastic reviews you know you're talking to a fox because a fox is full of ideas and if you ask somebody where are you going on your perfect vacation I'm going to go anywhere my husband wants to go I'll go wherever my best friend takes me you know you're talking to a bear it's all about the relationship with the bear Nothing Else Matters right so when you ask a one-off question you disarm the person you already know they're coming in armed up because they're in their public life so you've got to disarm them to get into their private life and then you need to ask something that's going to give you some insight into how they're going to react on the job I don't disagree with your question about asking somebody the last time they were offended but you run the risk of making an assumption that isn't accurate because you're asking them about something that that they are publicly their public life is going to influence their answer significantly because they know they're trying to get a job so they might say oh well I don't really want to admit that I was offended when my son you know ate the last bowl of Cheerios because that's going to sound childish so I'm going to say something else instead what can I say that's really smart yes I hear all of that and I haven't gotten any of the really cool like Cheerio answers but one I know ever asked that question in the beginning so we're going to be deep in the interview by the time I pull that one out but when people speak they cannot help but reveal themselves and so no matter what lie they're trying to tell like even the fact that they stumble in hem and ha is like already information now maybe it's because they're not easily offended and so they're like Jesus wow I really have to think about that but usually within the context of the interview it becomes pretty apparent by the time we get to that question whether they're stalling to buy time trying to come up with something but then other times and I don't know if people just are they're so caught off guard that they'll give you a real answer and it's like whoa uh yeah it's pretty pretty revelatory the one that I do along the lines of what's your vacation is describe your closet how do you organize your closet or what does your closet look like right now don't give me your ideal closet I want to know what does your closet actually look like and that will get like if I need somebody that's super detail-oriented and they're like okay my closet is organized by color or designer or it's like okay cool like this is somebody that really like there's a method to the madness um that can be pretty useful now bringing this into the world of relationships you and your wife both have a CIA background she wasn't an operative though so I don't know if you guys are like constantly trying to evaluate each other like take each other into the perfect setting but how do you um how do you guys deploy these knowing that they are you have to have psychological um awareness Savvy too in my opinion have a high functioning marriage how much of this do you bring into your relationship we bring a lot of it in uh it's an it's silly to not bring it in we were both we both joined CIA because we love this stuff we independently join the agency we independently were vetted recruited trained and brought in we didn't meet each other until we were in complementary Fields inside CIA right and then after meeting each other after building a relationship after falling in love after getting married then CIA turned us into a tandem operational couple because it was just the perfect cover two two CI officers married in real life can basically operate anywhere with very little outside support so that was that was our Nexus that's where we were kind of forged in fire um now as business owners because my wife is a co-owner of the business and parents and spouses outside of CIA we really lean heavily on the tools and the language that CIA gave us to understand human psychology probably the most impactful piece of everything they gave us that plays into our marriage our relationship now I was telling you about the three different developmental periods right zero to seven seven to thirteen thirteen to twenty five and over we have this concept of CIA that we call the Thousand personalities every everybody has a core personality that under-resourced drained of all you know additional all excess time money and energy this is who a person is but then you have a thousand personalities that you can play depending on what the like what the scale is of your time energy and money so this idea of a thousand personalities has been incredibly valuable in marriage because it makes it so that you can be gracious and forgiving to any of the Thousand personalities that present themselves at any time that you are also in one of your thousand personalities and it really boils down to these for us my wife and I it boils down to these three developmental phases sometimes she's dealing with me and I am little Andy Andy zero to seven sponge Andy hurt child Andy you know my father died before I was born so sometimes she's talking to Andy who was raised by just his mom and his grandma and when she's talking to that Andy or when that is the Andy responding to some disaster in Life or business right she can call it out she can say hey I'm not trying to hurt little Andy's feelings here right I need to talk to adolescent Andy I need to talk to puberty Andy right does that wind you up in the moment like does that annoy you or are you like oh word thank you that's exactly what it is now because we speak the same language because I speak to her I speak to her little jihi right my wife's name is G I speak to her little jihi I speak to her teenage G I speak to her grown-up G I speak to her c i a g he I speak to her mom jihi I speak to her wife jihi I speak to her business jihi that's and and now we're we're not trying to point fingers and Trigger each other because we're not saying hey you're being a child we're saying I need to speak to this personality right I'm having a problem I need this problem solved and the best person that I know to solve this problem is business jihi right so I understand that you're in the middle of making a peanut butter sandwich and I understand that you didn't get enough sleep last night and I understand that you're really hoping that you get your bath later tonight all of those things are valid but for this five minute conversation I need to talk to business ghee right and she can do the same thing to me that's really potent uh it's interesting how we bring these different frames of reference you can snap yourself into actually feeling differently like I can I would never have used those words um but I can snap myself out maybe that's not quite the word I can wildly diminish my anxiety which has always been my struggle by I'll say the phrase remember who you are and what I mean I'm snapping myself into what you'd probably refer to as business Tom or entrepreneur Tom where it's like oh yeah remember the things I've done what I've accomplished all the like mental faculties that I have at my disposal that for whatever reason right now like don't feel accessible it's so weird it is that I can shift into that and I can feel small and scared and all that and then I just say that phrase and I'm like my chin comes down my brow froze and I'm like oh that's right like I know who I am and what I can do and so the Thousand personalities knowing that you're in one of these different ways you are those other things too though brother like I'm not I'm not I'm not diminishing your you know remember who you are mantra but I I want to encourage you also not to diminish you are all the other things too you are still the zero to seven you're still a childhood Tom is that useful absolutely that's useful despise those moments and that might be why the experience happened at all and some part of that experience shaped who you are now so there's a resource in those experiences when you carte blanche reject them because you despise them you use a term like that I'm sure there are things that happen between zero and seven that you don't despise oh I didn't mean the age only that feeling of being anxious and oh that feeling isn't too weak for something hate yeah that feeling sucks but we're talking about a feeling we're not talking about a rational frame of reference right we're talking about a feeling so as an example in marriage especially your spouse because your spouse is the closest person to your secret life perhaps your spouse is in your secret life which would be awesome if you have your wife and your secret life my wife is very much in my secret life your spouse understands you at a very deep level if she's in your secret life or he's in your secret life and sometimes they suspect that what they're dealing with is some sort of memory trauma Behavior conditioning that happened when you were a child zero to seven so they they get the benefit of being able to call that out if that's what's happening or if they suspect that's what's happening when you engage in that kind of openness and say this is what I was like as a kid for me I was always competing for attention my mom's attention because my mom was a single mom she was working two jobs sometimes three she was going to school I spent a lot of time with my grandma all I wanted was mom because what does every child under the age of seven want mom they say they want dad sometimes but they want mom they want that nurturing loving maternal figure and I didn't have that very often so I learned very young that I had to compete to get Mom's attention and that competing to get Mom's negative attention was not a good way of doing it so acting out was not productive instead I had to excel I had to exceed I had to be super helpful around the house I had to be super independent if I could make myself if I could get up at six o'clock in the morning on Saturdays I could watch my cartoons pour a bowl of cereal be awake and be alert and be fed by 6 30 in the morning when my mom woke up and she'd be like Andrew did you feed yourself good job and what are you watching and let me sit with you and then I got Mom's attention so my wife knows that when I'm showing that attention-seeking behavior to her to clients to whatever else she knows that it's going to drain my resources very quickly so she'll call it out she'll be like hey is this little Andy trying to seek attention because he sees some sort of opportunity or is this business Andy cultivating a client with Biz Dev or whatever and then I can look back and say oh yeah it's a great call girl like if I'm putting this much energy into a client it better be the right client if I'm putting this much energy into whatever some the the neighborhood watch Parent then it better be for a good reason because I'm going to drain resources when I drain those resources who's going to pay the penalty my wife my kids my staff so it's really useful to me to have her be able to communicate to me in those terms and for me to understand that there are advantages that come from zero to seven seven to thirteen I mean my worst years of my life were from 13 to 25 I was I mean those were hard horrible years most people those are hard horrible years right is there something specific uh I I was in the military I should have never been in the military like ROTC I was an Air Force Academy graduate so um so 13 to 14 right when I was going into puberty my dad was my stepdad was a Vietnam vet and was lived we ran he ran a very military household as it related to me the stepson so part of me was always prepared to go into the military because my dad told me right you're out of the house at 18. you're either going in the military or getting a job you're not going to college because we don't have any money for you to go to college so that was always my rubric right I'm going to get a job and I'm or I'm going to go into the military but I don't have a home April 18th the day after I turned 18. I no longer have a home and my dad made it very clear like this is how it's going to work were you still in high school I was my senior year 18 and 18 I was going to I was going to graduate in May and April was my birthday so you didn't even get to finish high school so I'm sure that they would have I got to finish high school and but I needed a plan right right like I had to demonstrate that I had a plan it wasn't like I was going to graduate high school and be able to stay at home right and I kind of knew that so you know back up 1617 I'm making this plan for when I turn 18 because I've been conditioned by my stepdad since I was like 12. you're out of the house at 18. and college is not an option so I happen to find that a military school the Air Force Academy is a full ride scholarship to a university and it's also in the military so what is little Andy zero to seven Andy thinking well maybe I'll make my stepdad happy if I go into the military maybe I can erase all of these years of pain and torment and trying to impress him if I just show him that we're the same and I joined the military should not have joined the military it just wasn't a good fit for me it was a very very difficult time and from about 16 on all I was doing was trying to qualify for the Air Force Academy trying to you know demonstrate my military discipline in my military structure and submit to Authority and everything else you know I was doing everything through a lens of you know trying to prove that I'm successful in this realm that's what so many of us do without even realizing that we do it or why we do it I I wouldn't change any of it for the world because I now have those experiences to pull from as I make my own decisions now but a lot of that came because I was able to make my own decisions it was it was me trying to fit into the rubric of following orders and being Elite that took me to CIA on my own volition I don't know that that would have ever happened so I have to look back at little Andy and teenage Andy and Adolescent and Andy and and all the trauma and all the challenges that drove me through what what I experienced because they contributed to why CIA recruited me yeah do you think that they contributed to why you're a high achiever absolutely so another one of the first lessons that you get at CIA at least in CIA field operations one of the first lessons they tell you is that there's a strong connection and empirical connection between childhood trauma and high achievement the science is out there that I've looked it up on my own the the connection is extraordinary that people who who experience the right amount of childhood trauma the right amount being enough that you had to prove something but not so much that you had to adopt external coping mechanisms right whoa Wells that like drugs correct drugs uh addictions to pornography uh substance abuse uh submitting yourself to the authority of others right like there's a certain amount of trauma that's the right amount of trauma that turns you into this High achiever you always have to win something because you're trying to win favor when attention win rewards win Glory win something so you're always achieving you're always driving yourself towards something but it's not because you were born with drive it's because some part of your childhood those formative years taught you that by achieving you will be rewarded so that becomes the inherent thought by achieving I will be rewarded so now all of a sudden you project that onto a 40 year old a 50 year old a 25 year old they're going to have all the drive in the world because they believe they will be rewarded this is so fascinating so I love people that have kids even though I've chosen a different path how are you going to play this with your kids like are you up you turned 18 gotta go or something completely different yeah you know it's funny I I have to admit that I haven't got it figured out yet I don't I don't have to figure it out 20 years old already I know and the days just keep on rolling there are certain things that I've I've chosen to value and my wife and I have these these conversations pretty often Legacy is extremely important to me the whole reason really the whole reason I'm running fine Legacy please so for me Legacy is the legacy of how my family how my children and my children's children remember me and remember my contributions to the family okay I'm not I'm not worried about Building Wealth yeah it'd be great to build wealth but the truth is when I look back and this is very much how I was raised right I don't even know my father he was murdered oh God yeah he was killed in a violent crime but I was I was less than a year old still I know nothing about it yeah yeah yeah so my father was killed in a violent crime I never knew him my stepdad came into my life when I was four and became my stepdad when I was five so I never knew my father my stepdad was not a man that I had a close relationship with so when I look back on my family heritage it gets thin pretty fast I have a grandma my grandma was married and divorced I'm pretty sure more than once my mom has been married and divorced more than once my dad's mother and father I don't even really know like I think I've read about them I may have met I'm I met my father's mother once and that was all it took for me to be like I see why my father didn't stay with you kind of thing you know what I mean yeah so for me Legacy is all about what is the foundation that you're giving your children to continue to progress and achieve more than you did the big thing that was lacking from my childhood was love and support I was fighting for my mom's attention she was fighting for the survival of her family I don't I it's that's a pretty low bar so if I can just give my kids love and attention and give them an experience where we're not struggling to survive that's step one but I also know empirically they have to experience some level of trauma if they're going to be high achievers so do I intentionally create whatever that trauma is or do I try to be there to help guide them through it as it happens because maybe it happens somewhere else or do I accept that my children might just not be high achievers brother I'm holding my breath for the answer here like don't leave us hanging yeah so I I don't I don't have it figured out I know for a fact I want them to feel loved and I want them to feel supported I oftentimes question whether or not they should be high Achievers why do we value High Achievers I value High Achievers because I believe myself to be a high achiever I connect with other high Achievers life is more enjoyable because I'm always trying to achieve something but then I think about all the creatives out there the vast majority of the creative people in the world are not actually High achievers they're creators right the people who draw the comic books you and I love the people who make the music You and I love like somebody drives them somebody creates a schedule for them somebody creates a production schedule for them somebody forces them to go on tour somebody drives them and drives them and that's why we see so many amazing artists turn to coping mechanisms like drug alcohol and everything else to try to get through the stress of their life perhaps they're not Achievers on their own they're just deep creators and they're happy to sit in a dark room somewhere and if someone just brought them a sandwich every three hours or so they would create amazing things so I don't know I think I have the closest saying to a solution on this so one I totally agree on the trauma thing and this really is one of the reasons that my wife and I decided not to have kids because I knew they'd have to go through something hard and I didn't know if I could watch my kids go through something hard without stepping in and solving the problem for them so I thought I was going to be the ultimate what do they call them tiger moms like I thought that was going to be me I'm just going to be helicoptering in there solving every problem I just I wasn't sure so um the way that I approach this is through the lens of fulfillment so I really believe that we are biological creatures and there are subroutines running in your pink matter whether you want them to be or not and a lot of it has to do with just the 50 of you that's hardwired and it's become fashionable to act like we are blank slates we are not blank slates the brain works in a certain way and this is why humans are laughably predictable and because of that I think everyone is pushed violently by The Winds of evolution to pursue fulfillment which I have a formula for a recipe is probably the right way to think about it and the recipe is you have to work really hard I can go into why but you have to work really hard to attain a set of skills that allow you to serve not only yourself but other people in a way that you find exciting like that's it if you're doing that then you will feel centered in your life it doesn't mean that you won't go through grief it doesn't mean that life won't get brutal at times but it does mean you have an orienting mechanism in fact I think it was you that said in fact what what is life about what's the meaning of life yeah it's all about self-respect perfect okay so it definitely was you uh I've always told people the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself self-respect you have to do something that makes you think you are worthy of respect no one can give it to you you can't stare in the mirror and say I love you I love you I love you it won't work you have to do something that you believe is worthy of respect and part of that I think for people to respect themselves is they have to do something that they think is exciting but is also Honorable in that it helps not only themselves but other people and so if you do that then you'll have this core thing that will see you through the tumult of the ups and downs of Life lost love all that good stuff and the one trick in all of this is that you're gonna be super driven I think to to feel good about yourself you're gonna have to have dominion over your own life which means when you say you're going to do something you do it that takes an insane amount of discipline and drive so through all of that though you're going to have to make a decision around what am I going to Value myself for so that idea of self-respect you decide what you think is worthy of of respect in yourself and other people it is a decision and it would be different from culture to culture there's going to be a lot of similarities but they will vary right and in that if people make the mistake of saying I value myself for the achievement you're dead you're done your life is going to suck you're screwed because there are going to be times where you nail it and you're going to feel good but it will be so related to whether you got the outcome or not it won't even be fun and so you hear about all these gold medalists that are like okay first of all it was a nightmare trying to win the gold medal and then once I won it like my life was completely empty but if instead of making it about the outcome you make it about the pursuit all I value myself for and this is really me talking this is sincere this is how I think about myself all I value myself for is this sincere pursuit of my goals now my goals need to be exciting and honorable as explained previously but I may never achieve it so I'm trying to build the next Disney the odds of me succeeding are virtually zero but I show up every day I leave it all out on the field man and so if I fail look it will be a gut punch there's no doubt but I won't lose respect for myself based on whether I do it or don't do it because then it's like a thing that like is way off in the Disney I can't respect myself for the next 50 years while I try to do this like that doesn't make any sense to me so tying your self-esteem to the sincere pursuit of something feels like the only way out of a death trap that is an awesome that's an awesome formula it's an awesome formula because it takes the achievement factor out that's what makes it so awesome we are all conditioned at least in American culture Western culture we are if you're if if we're speaking English and you're listening to this in your native tongue you have been preconditioned to believe that achievement is the ultimate goal it's just how the Western mind works your formula makes it about working hard to achieve a set of skills that allows you to make a contribution that you find exciting achievement doesn't have to happen right and and won't quite frequently like you'll get wins hopefully along the way but because I work with so many people that are trying to build businesses I'm always telling him look the Success is Not Guaranteed but the struggle is this is going to be hard no matter what you're trying to do you're trying to be a piano teacher you're trying to be you're trying to build the next Microsoft doesn't matter it's all going to be hard now the question becomes will you love the struggle or not yeah because you may never achieve your goal and even if you do it's some amount down the road and so if you're not loving the difficulty you're gonna have a hard time yeah and I remember my business partners my former business partners and I we used to ask a question that I think it certainly caused me a lot of suffering I won't speak for them but the question was what would we do if we knew we couldn't fail and I remember that question was presented to me like it was the smartest thing in the world and I just thought um I don't think that's the right question because what I found was the success isn't guaranteed but the struggle is so I was like what is the right question and to me the right question is what would I do and love every day even if I were failing because that I can guarantee like there's going to be some ridiculously long stretch of time a year can feel like a long time when you're taking shots to the face oh yeah and in that year what would you love doing even if it wasn't working out and then do that thing right and so that has been an organizing principle of my life so unfortunately I chase money for a decade almost a decade and that was miserable and the irony of my life is I don't end up getting wealthy until I stopped chasing money and I start chasing purpose now business Acumen is a huge part of my success story so I don't want people to get delusional that like oh it's some Pollyanna story and once you just love other people everything works out no right but once you have another thing that's going to keep you pushing when things get hard now you've really got a shot um but yeah so many people Orient themselves around I imagine myself standing on the podium winning the award getting the Academy Award making millions of dollars and and I'm gonna feel at that moment the way I feel about the people that I look at when they win but it's a very different experience to win the award get the money than it is to look at the person winning the award and getting the money you know I love that idea of embracing the struggle because it the closest thing I have found to espionage the closest thing I found to spy work is business I knew you're gonna say that it's the closest thing all the sense in the world to me it's the closest thing out there you have to get in the head of your client just like you have to get in the head of your target the the constant experimentation the constant shots to the face the constant failure we have something called a probability curve that we use at the agency and the probability curve is basically telling you that the most probable outcome is failure eighty percent of the time you're going to fail 20 of the time you're going to succeed so you've got to be ready to fail eight times before your first success and that doesn't mean it's going to be an exponential success it's just not a failure right right it might take 30 40 50 swings before you actually hit that home run so what what's going to keep you swinging what's going to keep you swinging because you're not going to get excited when you hit a base hit after eight swings you're just not gonna get excited about that right what's going to keep you coming back day after day after day and in business it's the same way I've gotten to use all of the Spy skills in business I've gotten to meet amazing people in business I've gotten to go to amazing places in business and that's exactly what Espionage is like and I'm just in a in a blessed position now where our business continues to succeed and continues to thrive and we just double down on what we know Works keep holding it keep treating it like it's a spy operation and keep teaching people that business is the closest thing to spying because it works we don't know I can't say that I know why it works I can only tell you what I know about Espionage and why Espionage works and I'm seeing that the correlation exists in business as well I have to imagine that it's because it's psychology business is entirely psychology when you're writing a sales letter email Twitter post whatever it is you trying to understand what will be heard not just what is said yeah and whether I'm interviewing somebody whether I'm working with one of my employees it really is a game of psychology and so I more or less teach people how to be CEOs inside of what we call impact Theory University and uh I did this High ticket thing for a while we'll probably bring it back at some point but the problem is the reason that I'll say maybe at some point even though it's incredibly lucrative for us it what people actually need meaning what business really is is not what they think it is yeah and so the the marketing gap on that I have not figured out how to get people to understand what if you want to be a successful entrepreneur what you have to know how to do is make good decisions and what people think they need is a great marketing funnel and you do need that yeah but that's like down the road right and you do need good copywriting skills and you do need good sales skills uh you need to make a good product for sure for sure but at the end of the day you have to be able to solve novel problems that's being an entrepreneur and if you can't solve novel problems well you're screwed and there really is a way to think through these problems that follows a rubric that you really can teach people and so I've now been in three different Industries the first important for me to know the first industry I started which was in software I started as an employee but worked my way up to being a co-owner of the company but then the next two were companies I started from [ __ ] scratch and so three companies in a row and three wildly Divergent Industries have built multi-million dollar companies one we sold for a billion dollars so it's like hey this is teachable it's repeatable and it's all psychology you have to understand your own psychology you have to understand where you break down you have to understand when you become little Tom little Andy little whatever like you've got to understand that you've got to understand how what is the problem that people are trying to solve how do you show that you have the solution to that problem and it better be real like the thing you created better actually work because if it doesn't now you're going to be in trouble so that means you have to be able to see your own perspective you have to be able to break it down so you're not lying to yourself so that you recognize what's working and not working the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description alright my friend back to today's episode I don't I don't claim to have the answer here but we have a similar problem in human intelligence operations and and this is this is where I believe the the public disdain for CIA comes from CIA recruits us another one of the lessons they tell us is that they recruit us for something known as moral flexibility that just sounds horrible it just sounds horrible it sounds like the book you recommended right uh a billion a billion wickets that book is so good buy for anybody that has a strong stomach when you hear moral flexibility you have the same reaction right oh that sounds horrible but it sounds so good so moral flexibility is essentially the idea that you can move you can shift your ethics and your morals around some other objective right if you don't have that if you have strict morals and strict ethics you're not going to do well in clandestine operations you're just not you have to have flexibility to say Here Comes Your guidepost is it protecting Americans yes it becomes honestly as as again this is where people don't like CIA cia's mission is American Primacy um that's it right that's the goal it goes all over the 80s I love American premises I love it the most I know that's so out of fashion right now it is out of fashion I think it's crazy everybody should want Primacy for their own country they absolutely should and if you're an American the fact that we have the freest country in the world do we have problems yes are our problems anywhere like other countries problems no spoken by somebody who's been in other countries it's nuts man it's incredible how people lose perspective they never gain perspective they're trapped in their own perception about how bad America is America's messed up I'm not saying it's not we're like we're an adolescent country in the developmental stages of a country where just over 250 years old I think we're just under 250 years old we're freaking adolescents we're teenagers of course we're all [ __ ] up right what teenager do you know that has it all figured out we've got we've got growing to do but let's not negate the progress that we've made just because we're not where we want to be yet right but either way moral flexibility is this idea that you can change your personal ethics to fit a larger goal ours is American Primacy CIA believes and the the government of the United States believes that as long as America is the strongest country in the world the world is a safer place to Americans if you don't like the way that sounds then you don't want to work in the government right we're not worried about the security of Nigerians we're not worried about the security of Australians we're not worried about the freedom of human rights in you know Sri Lanka that's not our first goal it might be somewhere like goal 75 goal number one keep Americans safe give Americans every opportunity to succeed in a world that's dominated by the United States to be dominated by something it's going to be dominated by somebody exactly right so this idea of moral flexibility is a big part of what CIA recruits us to do they recruit us because we have moral flexibility to make that American Primacy Mission happen and then they also teach us that when you are engaging with somebody a Target and that Target has potential value to the mission sometimes you have to Veer from your own ethics about dealing with people to meet them where they are so that you can get into their private and secret life and guide them to where you need them to be did that mess with your head or do you find that easy I found it thrilling I wouldn't say I found it easy it's a there's a learning curve there but it was absolutely thrilling it's like you said something you enjoy doing right something that brings you excitement learning how to manage people like manage them on I say manage we learned how to manipulate people that's what CIA taught us how to do we weren't making friends with these folks right you're finding this the most powerful most uh vulnerable people in the world who have access to secrets that keep Americans safe that's not a big population there's really only a small population that has that level of access that level of secret access right you had to find them you had to befriend them you had to get into their secret life you had to get them to commit their their site the safety of themselves and their family to you and then eventually your real goal is to institutionalize them so that you can basically leave and a junior officer can step in to maintain that relationship do you reveal who you are at some point sometimes sometimes you reveal who you are sometimes it's better to leave what we call a fig Leaf where they think they know who you are but they're never really sure because if they were sure they might self-destruct right right that's another thing another predictable human thing human beings like to self-destruct we feel like we like to self-destruct what yeah we all carry this self-destruct button on our chest that's what we say right a big red self-destruct button so when we start to get ourselves into trouble you start to lie and then you tell compounding lies because you're trying to get yourself out of the situation that you got yourself into inevitably you're going to land on a point where you're like I just need to come clean wow that's something that we do right and then you've got the people out there who refuse to lie because they're so afraid of that moment that they only tell the truth yeah well when you only tell the truth guess what you do whoa I'm evaluating myself internally like crazy right now so uh keep going so so where why do we like to self-destruct we like to self-destruct because we in our in our brains we create this low probability outcome where all will be forgiven and we'll be able to reset what we don't like people can reinvent you can always reinvent you can never reset there is no this isn't freaking Nintendo right there's no hitting select or start and starting all over again you just don't get to do that you got to finish the game and then you can restart you can reinvent you can recreate but you can't go backwards you can't reset so true we keep thinking and we keep thinking that we can reset we keep thinking that we can go back to the blank slate that you already said never actually existed we can't we have to keep playing the game you have to you can Retreat or you can advance but you can't restart the war you're in it you're in it and you've only got one chance you've only got one ride on this rock that circles in One Direction Right Time only goes one way until we find out how to do it otherwise this is just where we are you've got to accept that reality you can't perceive something different you have to accept the reality that you're going where you're going two things happen when you accept that reality the first thing is that you learn that everything that's happened that you would is that that you would think that your instincts tells you to just reset and start over reset and start over just whitewash it all reformat the disk and let's start over again so we like to self-destruct because we are misinterpreting the moment right because we are telling ourselves a lie in our head right we're telling ourselves that it's better to start over than to start Where We Are wow it's never better to start over you are this you are a fantastic example because you accept it you are the sum total of all of your experiences good and bad you are zero to seven seven to thirteen thirteen to whatever age you are now you are all of that sum of all of that experience and all of your learning you you use the Mantra don't forget who you are or remember who you are is that what you say remember who I am what you're really remembering is everything that brought you to where you are you can't pick and choose you can't reset it that is what it is and it's a [ __ ] superpower but it's a superpower for everybody it's a superpower for everybody I'm nowhere near the financial success that you are I'm nowhere near the achievement that you've achieved I'm nowhere near the notoriety that you have nowhere near it but you still invited me to come here there's something I offer of value that made this conversation interesting and relevant to you we all have that kind of power what we call wasta wasp is the Arabic word for influence right we all have that kind of wasta we just have to learn to lean into the wasta that we have and leverage it to achieve what we're trying to achieve to build what we're trying to build we can't just reset it and start over we and we spend so much time people spend so much time bemoaning their background instead of leveraging it into something amazing turning it into something productive right and and what ends up happening is the reason Espionage works the reason business works is because human beings laughably predictable human beings are always unhappy Edgar Allan Poe said people are never truly happy until they're unhappy because you're unhappy as soon as something makes you happy you start to worry about when that happiness is going to be taken away by something that makes you unhappy so you can never actually reach happiness you're you're your average person is happy as long as they're unhappy because that's when they're content they believe well everything's everything's miserable it can't really get worse than this that's so weird so when in Espionage you're looking for those people you're you're always looking for the person who has access to Secrets because once you find the few people who have access to Secrets there's a high probability they're miserable because everybody's [ __ ] miserable so then all you have to do is use the skills to get into this miserable person's secret life and make them think that you're doing it because you care about them as a person when in fact you just care about their access because what you really are after is American Primacy and then once you get that person to trust you because they bring you into your secret life you just drain their secrets feed it back to American legislators and you prepare this person to be turned over to a new person that they never even led into their secret life in the first place but now you vouch what we call Advocate you advocate for this new person who's coming in which means your trust and your credibility and their secret life is automatically carried on to the person that you introduce them to they are now what we call institutionalized assets they don't even realize that their loyalty is not to Tom and Andy their loyalty is to CIA and they don't even realize it all while keeping their hand off the self-destruct button and because you're keeping their hand off the self-destruct button because you know remember how I was telling you sometimes we leave them a fig Leaf I'm sorry I'm just rolling here man if I'm cutting you off interrupt me anytime no no that's amazing when a spy realizes oh [ __ ] I'm giving away Secrets what they think to themselves is I need to go self-report I need to go tell my boss I need to go tell the police I need to go tell something because if I'm caught especially in the countries that we steal secrets from if I'm caught they're going to kill me they're going to kill my wife they're going to kill my kids they're going to kill my parents they're going to make us all a public spectacle to make sure that nobody ever does this again so they're stuck between a true rock and a hard place because they think to themselves if I self admit what I'm doing I might get killed if I keep doing if I if I get caught doing what I'm doing I might get killed so the self-destruct button they have is to pull away from you to like go into hiding and then potentially to leak it at some point in the future so then you lose access to them immediately two years down the road they still self-destruct they still tell somebody man this one time I was talking to an American and I accidentally gave him like the codes to our nukes and I realized that maybe I shouldn't trust him and then somebody reports them anyways and families get killed we have to protect them from their own Natural Instinct so a big part of what why we continue to meet with our assets is so that we can constantly cultivate and train them to resist that urge right there's no resetting how do you get them to resist that urge what you're doing is good yes I care about you positive reinforcement what you're doing nobody spies nobody spies for the reason they think they spy just like you were saying people don't want to know about business the people don't want to learn what they need to learn they want to learn what they want to learn I'm totally massacre at Massacre but people don't spy for the reasons they think they spy people spy for what's known as a core motivation right we call it a core motivation and there's only four core motivations and they fall into a a uh acronym that we call Rice r-i-c-e rewards is a core motivator ideology is a core motivator coercion is a core motivator and ego is a core motivator there we go those are it that's all you got wow every human being is driven in every decision by those four things dude I love these rubrics These are fantastic so when you when you recruit somebody when you when you create a spy it's all based in one of those four areas you just have to know which of those four areas is most relevant to that person and you'll know which of those four areas based on what you know about their three stages of life so this person is ideologically driven this person is ego driven this person is reward driven this person won't do something unless you hold a gun to their face you just know it right and then you test it over time so when you when you are managing and handling a human asset they're a human being they think that they're giving you Secrets because you're their friend they think that they're in some kind of trusting relationship now maybe you're their friend who also pays them maybe you're their friend who in who encourages them to believe in the power of democracy and they're in a communist country who knows right so you're feeding them whatever their core motivation is but you're also inside their secret life so you've got the Loyalty piece covered the human response to loyalty right the human response to being in someone's secret life is that loyalty that that fealty you've got that but you're also feeding them on an incentive basis by hitting their core motivation so those that's the magic one-two punch so that's how you keep someone resourced and charged so that they don't ever press the button that's waiting for them that self-destruct button is always there just takes one bad day one bad decision one moment of weakness to press it that's all you got to do is prevent people from doing that do they believe if they press that button that they'll get more lenient treatment yes you believe that too man you've had that conversation in your own head where you're like if I just come clean if I just admit the truth if I just share whatever right then it'll be less bad than if I don't there must be something tru-ish about that do people actually like I'm I'm trying to put this on the scale of like they're gonna kill my family everyone I know and love like that's so heavy man and humans can be gnarly in the extreme do they actually get letter treatment or is this like a Fool's errand it's a Fool's errand it's a full when you're in a place where that's the risk you've got it like you have to look at everything through a lens of of cultural norms right in a country where it's a norm to make a public statement through the mass execution of a family line which is that's a country where family name carries a lot of weight Asian families family names in Asia carry an incredible amount of weight Japan we were just talking what is Japan all about honoring what ancestors everything so to bring dishonor to the family name is such a heavy thing that the self-destruct button those people might press is execution is just suicide you know what happens if your asset kills themselves they stay secure but you lose a source of information so you can't let that happen right there's lots of different versions of a self-destruct button the trick is the the mission is to make sure that they never think that self-destruct is the best option it's always an option they always remember that it's an option right I certainly went through a phase in my life where I was thinking dark Suicidal Thoughts really many people do uh in in Seattle in that in that 13 to 25 year old pubescent Andy okay there was absolutely like dark nail polish like my I don't like my stepdad my mom doesn't pay attention my sisters are the favorites you know I was running into racial issues at school like there's all sorts of stuff there and you certainly have those thoughts where you're like what's the [ __ ] point like is this really work no one's even gonna miss me right like the the amount of people who have had those thoughts is is surprisingly large it doesn't mean we take action on it right it's an option right it's not really a reset it's not you're not starting all over again you're just ending what you have when people are thinking about smashing the self-destruct button do is it normally to confess or is it do people kill themselves it's normally to confess confession is confession is again this makes me sound like a just an incredibly horrible person confession is the worst of the two options from the point of view of an intelligence officer because if someone confesses then they're no longer providing access to information but they're also potentially admitting that you were the one handling them so now that brings a whole world of pain on you plus if someone starts to investigate you then how long before they start to take apart the network that supported you in that country or in the field right now all of a sudden there's like secondary and tertiary levels of of risk exposure so confession is our worst case scenario we would rather an asset self-destruct or just go dark go dark meaning they just shut themselves off from the world and I mean it's still scary if they shut themselves off in the world because you don't know who they're telling what to but we can control suicide we the blowback from suicide we can't really control the blowback from somebody who confesses do agents and I don't know if this is something that you can talk about but when that happens like the person goes dark do agents like get me out of here like is it extraction time usually it's extraction time is what we would call a non-emergency extraction an emergency extraction is like no [ __ ] black airplanes are going into the sky with boxes that have oxygen tanks and you're like getting extracted right that's we think that that your threat to life or threat to survival is imminent so we need you out ASAP right we don't have time to tell borders and custom that you're going to be leaving we don't have time to tell anybody we're just getting you out that's an emergency uh x-fill exfiltration when we have a non-emergency evacuation or a non-emergency exfiltration then you can usually you can go through the established lines it's a race against the clock because the question becomes can you get across the border faster than the person who went dark can turn themselves in submit your name and the bureaucrat the bureaucracy of the local police force can get your name to the border crossing agents right and sometimes I mean if someone goes dark if if someone goes dark and you've in 12 hours or less you can get yourself across the border you're safe right sometimes it can be three days sometimes it can be two weeks and sometimes you're you're on a mission that's so sensitive that it's actually better to wait until you see signs that people are coming for you and then trigger the emergency Expo whoa right so how so let's say that moment happens um do you have like booby traps or something that you set on the door I mean this is like straight up movie stuff are you like paper in the door and if it falls out you know somebody's been in like what signs do you look for that somebody's coming after you yeah so um I'm gonna stick to the unclassified version of course um so generally speaking when you think that you're under scrutiny what we call scrutiny or Advanced scrutiny you are looking first for some sort of active surveillance because the dude who lingers too long outside your apartment if they're if what if they're what we would call a bumbling surveillance then yes a bumbling and bumbling surveillance exists right there's there's different levels of surveillance so let's reverse engineer you've got an asset the asset knows that you are getting their secrets asset turns you in well now the question for the local police force or the local intelligence service is do we wrap up the person that we know is collecting Secrets or do we observe the person who's collecting secrets to see who else are they collecting secrets from and who else are they meeting with to report their secrets to because now you have the opportunity to unfold an entire network it's a very similar problem to what the police have do you take out one drug dealer or do you follow the drug dealer to find you know the larger Kingpin so the first thing that we do when we suspect that we might be under scrutiny is amp up our situational awareness to observe whether or not we think we're being observed so yes bumbling surveillance would be a potential that you're being observed usually bumbling surveillance exists naturally like there are countries where you just being a tall wealthy white guy as soon as you walk into that country there's going to be some bumbling person who's always like 17 feet behind you with a newspaper walking around just keeping an eye on you right for anyone for any number of reasons we would expect to see more refined sophisticated surveillance so we would look for a team we're trained to see teams of surveillance foot surveillance vehicle surveillance we're trained to know when and how to look for closed closed television closer to TV and or aerial drones we know when we can spot them at the right time to confirm if they're after us right and if we see sophisticated surveillance then we can trigger The Next Step so that's one way that we would go about doing it the other thing we would look for is electronic signatures that were being electronically surveilled there are certain signatures there are certain behaviors that you can look for in your cell phone in your computer in your laptop in your smart TV you know on your smart devices there's certain things that you can keep an eye out for that that demonstrate that you might be tapped or you might be under any of those unclassified that you can tell me about um I'm pretty sure that it's unclassified to talk about um gaps like delays if you start to see performance delays in a device that is performing normally that's a good sign that it's being it's got an additional drag on its internal CPU or its internal memory you're gonna be so paranoid now so if your smart watch is always working and then all of a sudden your smartwatch has this delay It's not catching the right time it's not catching it's not connecting the Wi-Fi it's got some kind of Gap some sort of digital Gap right that's usually a sign that's something in the internal unit is draining it of its processing power when a hack happens when an information or a data hack happens they're not usually very clean and they're not efficient so they are very energy intensive so for your watch or for your phone or for your smart TV to be sending your signal out to another location all the time right is going to constantly fill up it's going to take all the demand on your RAM that's being carried in your smart device so when you see that it's an indicator does that mean you run and hide not necessarily it's just an indicator oftentimes we find indicators as very comfortable things because if there's an indicator that we're being surveilled then that means it's not an indicator that as soon as we step outside we're going to get wrapped up into a van now we have time we have time to get off the X as long as we don't [ __ ] melt down right right so and that's the big thing too when you see surveillance on your Smartwatch or surveillance on your smartphone your TV starts to your smart TV starts to [ __ ] and then you also see surveillance on the street guess what every fiber in your body wants you to do run run and hit that self-destruct button right just run I'm out of here as fast as I can maybe if I get on a tuk-tuk and it takes me to a local airport and I pay some local pilot 300 US Dollars she'll just fly me to Cambodia Maybe no it's not going to work that way you're going to get intercepted 15 minutes after you start the Run like the the way the human brain can rationalize through a dangerous situation and come to the wrong conclusion it's incredible what tools do you use to keep control of your mind I can't fathom being a spy and having to manage my anxiety like that'd be nuts no way I would not excel at this so I mean anxiety is a challenge anxiety is a challenge but I will also tell you that CIA recruits heavily for people that have anxiety for people that have examples that have what so what what are some of the superpowers about having anxiety you're paranoid all the time yeah huge Advantage dude damn I worry that I would give myself away so here's what's what the other nice thing about people with anxiety is that they have a very real idea of where their true limits are because their true limits are tied oftentimes to their level of comfort so you're like I would never do these things you can fathom Espionage because we've been talking this whole time and you clearly have a very strong line of sight into how it works right it's just psychology you said it yourself so absolutely you can fathom it so it's really just a question of whether or not you have the competency and the skills to execute it today you might not well guess what we spend three four five weeks together even doing just superficial training and all of a sudden you're going to be like I think I could do this like I've got anxiety but I think I could do this my wife is deployed all over the world she is general anxiety disorder what's it called when you're diagnosed and she has been medicated for her own anxiety disorders she's operated all over the world right because she learned the skills another lesson that I think is really important that the agency gives us yeah and I apologize if I'm stepping on your toes in any way step away people sell confidence right there's books out there about how to be confident there's [ __ ] TED talks about all you got to do is stand like this and you're going to be confident right confidence is a perception not a real thing confidence is how you perceive your own emotional reaction or your own emotional relationship with the environment around you confidence doesn't exist it can't be measured it can't be improved or or reduced confidence is a non-sequitur it's an empty word what we mean when we say confidence is competence we want competence in what we're doing because the more competent you are the more comfortable you are executing right the more comfortable you are executing the more comfortable you are taking risks which is when you take a risk it's called courage right so there's this relationship between confidence competence and courage that we just because of all the unethical business owners out there they just summarize it all as confidence and they try to sell you some course that tells it if you look in yourself look at yourself in the mirror and say you know you're worth it you're worth it you deserve to succeed somehow you're going to have more confidence or if you stand like this you're going to have more confidence confidence is tied directly to competence if you increase your knowledge in something you increase your competence you you are able to give your uh rational logic side of your brain the left side of your brain you're able to give it more accurate information from which it can use to process a probability Matrix of your successful outcome right it's all about making good decisions another another bill you quote right it's all about making good decisions you make good decisions when you have Superior information you have Superior information when you have Superior competence the more competent you are in a skill the more courageous you are to take risks revolving around that skill that's that's all there is to it so CIA can take anybody off the street anybody teach them the competence Mass increase their competence in the right skills and then deploy them to execute an operation they have to be able to do that because the diversity of the targets that you need to talk to are as diverse as the gene pool in the United States sometimes you need somebody who is on the Spectrum sometimes you need somebody who's on the a non-neurotypical person to go out there and execute an operation so you have to be able to teach them the competent skills to go do it sometimes you need somebody who's handicapped sometimes you need somebody who's obese sometimes you need somebody who's old sometimes you need somebody who's like surprisingly young you need all sorts of people because the the individual who executes the operation is tailored to fit the operation because they need to get through the public life and the private life into the Secret Life as quickly as possible do you know what stocks and that is yeah okay so give people a quick primer in in the context of that was the moment that I realized oh there's a whole world happening that I just didn't realize was real I thought it was only in movies but like this whole Espionage game is deep is deep yeah so and I would love to go more into that too but so stuxnet quick primer uh stuxnet was a was a piece of code that was developed specifically to interact with what we knew at the time to be the Software System running Iranian uranium enrichment um facilities yeah there was a very specific tool it was reactor um no uh oh it's going to come back to me here the the what is it when something the centrifuge word that's the word one whatever game we're playing so stuxnet was a piece of code that was designed specifically to interact with the centrifuge that was used to enrich uranium and Iranian facilities that's what it was designed to do it was deployed it was successful and then the Iranian facility connected those centrifuges with the larger internet and when that happened stuxnet carried out continued to propagate out of the Iranian facility and into the entire Digital Universe so depending on Whose story you read right now essentially every digital device that's been connected to the internet at any point since like 2007 is infected with stuxnet that's crazy but stuxnet was so well designed that it only has a negative effect on B centrifuge operating system that was used by the Iranian nuclear facility at the time so bananas okay so how deep does a rabbit hole goal like there's like a whole battle being fought Ray dalio talks about the five types of War one of them is technological um how deep is that war the Espionage War the technological War the Espionage War so let's let's start with the Espionage War because this is this is a point that I love making that not everybody understands right 2016. the the election where Trump became president it became mainstream news that the Russians were suspected to be interfering with the election and the World Went Crazy right the American people went bananas FBI Secret Service Facebook had to change their algorithms Twitter was on The Chopping Block for for contributing to Russian covert influence operations right you remember oh yes why the hell do we think 2016 was the first time that happened why would we think that because we caught them in 2016 I mean if we caught them in 2016 how many elections did they influence successfully before that where we never caught them and that's just one country what about China what about France what about Israel what about Germany what about Brazil what about India I mean this there's as many countries out there there's 160 what 64 I think countries right now every one of them has something to gain by influencing the outcome of the American election why would we think that nothing ever happened prior to 2016. why would we think that the president's we've elected even in just years in Mayan timeline why do we think Bush was chosen by the American people why do we think Obama was chosen by the American people why do we think these people came to power of their own independence uninfluenced no foreign activity hard work it's probability wise it's extremely unprobable like it's it's improbable that these people came to power and there wasn't also some country engaging in covert influence that was contributing to the outcome of the election Jesus that's how deep it goes it's silly for us to think that just because we see it that means that it started then it's like seeing a roach in your apartment right if you see a roach in your apartment that's not the only Roach the walls are disgusting with roaches right we saw it in 2016. that means it's been there for a long long time our why do we think George Washington became the first president of the United States because he earned it and the American people voted for him France was the reason we won the American Revolution you don't think that had something to do with you don't think France had a say in who became the leader of the new United States now I'm not saying that all of our presidents have been given to us by foreign powers that's not what I'm saying but what I am part of the equation it's a part of the equation and you can't ignore that part of the equation right so now we have our entire political system is constantly in some embroiled in some sort of battle with Espionage and that's just our political system our DOD I don't know how much you keep up with Espionage news um Russia has penetrated the Army's medical Corps two army officers were arrested just three months ago whoa recruited spies recruited by the Russians yeah we've had nuclear nuclear Naval Engineers recruited by the Chinese who have also been arrested in the last three to four months I heard about that one like we are heavily penetrated heavily targeted heavily penetrated by all the services in the world and there there's a famous quote out there in the world of foreign policy that says there are no permanent friends or enemies just permanent interests whoa that's good so why do we think anybody is a friend why do we think an ally is a friend if you recall there was a major issue I think it was two thousand 10 maybe 2011 where the German Chancellor was notified that the American NSA was spying on the Germans wow we have had people go to jail from our Navy who were recruited and working as spies for the Israelis what like this history tells you the story it's just that nobody really spends time researching Espionage history so we have to understand how laughably predictable are human beings we are so laughably predictable that we you and I can predict that people aren't even aware that arrests are happening every few months of spies in the United States in the military in politics right in the Department of State in the Department of Commerce in the White House like it's not surprising unless you let yourself be surprised which again it's a predictable human thing to just if we don't know about it then it must not exist and then it's also predictably human to assume that a friend is a friend there are no permanent friends right that's there are people from my life 13 to 25 that are not my friend anymore because our interests diverged and that's normal and that's natural and it's also normal and natural to feel pain when it comes when you outgrow somebody or when you have to leave somebody behind because your interests have diverged and the saddest thing to me is the people who when they feel that pain when they feel that dissonance of leaving behind something from the past they instead choose to give up on the ambition and double down on the anchor yeah getting trapped by these are my friends I don't want to leave them behind that's crazy I don't want to um get off this topic though this is uh never in a million years did I think that this kind of thing would interest me but also never in a million years that I think that we'd be living through a transitional moment where the US is a declining superpower against a rising superpower in China um that as of the recording of this the brics Nations Brazil Russia India China and South Africa are making moves to create their own currency to stop trading in the US dollar so the dollar hegemony is it's been under attack for a very very long time so I don't want to make this a headline that people panic about but it certainly does feel like there's there's a lot happening right now um that is super unnerving and if it's got my attention um which this is really something that I'm slow to react to but if it's got my attention I think that it's reaching a certain level now it could just be social media makes things like this visible to even me um but everybody I talk to Ray dalio who I pay very very close attention to for people that don't know him he's runs ran he just recently sort of retired the largest hedge fund in the world so nobody's made more money off of being right about what's happening in geopolitics than this guy uh and he he's like yeah we're we're at the four types there's five types of war that I mentioned earlier we're in four of them with China already the only one we're not in is an actual Hot War where people are shooting guns what's your take on the global stability right now oh so unfortunately I would say that the the world the globe is fairly stable the question is what's the foundation of that stability the foundation for the stability of the world for a long time has been the United States we are seeing that transition just like you said right it's uh it's that place where you where you slide the pizza off the pizza pan and onto the cutting board right who we've been the pizza pan for a long time and now it's sliding to someone else the pizza's still very stable but what's the platform what's the foundation I am always optimistic that the United States will recover it will change its ways we'll find a way to reunify the incredible by like the incredible polarity that we're in right now and get focused on the one true goal American Primacy do you think that's possible in a world where I know you know just saying American Primacy it like puts you at risk of being canceled like people just there there is a contingent I won't even say how big it is but they're [ __ ] loud there's a contingent of people and it could be large that just that's offensive I understand it I I do I understand it and that's that's okay I I hope that doesn't happen on your show right but it's some of it to be sure no I'm not worried about it happening to me I just hope nobody cancels your show um but uh but the truth is um um American survival is not being threatened we don't have an existential threat to the United States existential threats are the threats that make people move we talk about existential threats more likely other countries talk about existential threats and then exit what is an existential threat a true existential threat is a threat that challenges your very existence the existence of the United States is is contingent upon the existence of the United States government not Americans like we sometimes think that Americans make the United States the United States is a is a representative republic government that has never existed before that now exists so if that government Falls or if that government cracks or breaks all the people will still be here right but America will be gone so the existential threat to the United States is the one that would trigger Americans to react now we've come close to those moments 9 11 is one of those times when all America felt awesome for a hot minute it felt so good the unity like yeah yeah all of a sudden all of our differences melted away right the same thing happened to Pearl Harbor all of our differences melted away because we had a common enemy and we could individually see the existential threat posed to our country yeah and our livelihood since 9 11 we have not had that kind of a threat countries around us have woken up to the fact just like Emperor uh Hirohito in World War II said I fear we have woke a sleeping dragon our enemies have learned that Americans are slow to react but when they react they react in full force there's no way a Savvy intelligent super power competitor GPC Global power competitor is going to trigger an existential threat to the United States because they know that as long as they basically let us uh segment ourselves separately as long as we insulate ourselves separately we're going to eat ourselves to death with our own stupid little bitter squabbles about American Primacy yeah right or about woke culture or about representation or about who knows what we're gonna we're gonna just waste our time bickering in our little room and we're not going to wake up to what's happening in the entire building that's the strategy of the future that's is the keep us divided it's not it's a an influence campaign is always cheaper easier and more success and has a higher probability of success than a military campaign so an influence campaign is basically like hey don't forget that you have race issues hey don't forget that there's a socioeconomic divide hey don't forget that the South you tried to secede from the union one like like just they're just picking they're just poking and throwing salt on a wound and then we are fighting over it right and we fill our days worrying about this garbage blind to what's happening on the larger scale blind the fact that the Fantastic example is the global war on terrorism the United States led the global war on terrorism following 911 right and it felt good for a hot minute like you said we were all on the same page and we were all in this fight then that fight lasted 10 years and then that fight lasted 20 years also it became so dodgy like what we were like if we had just been Relentless about Osama Bin Laden that's like when I heard how we caught him in like the size of a shadow I don't know if that's true but like it sounded dope and I was just like dude we're ninjas this is amazing yeah but that was after like a lot of and look I'm I'm not super engaged in this stuff so I'm definitely popping off ignorantly but it did not feel good as a casual Observer where we ended up going and how we ended up fighting and all that and it just seemed like wait what are we doing right so that felt like a squandered opportunity well during those 20 years while we were mastering the art of hunting terrorism and hunting terrorists in mountains in Pakistan and Afghanistan what were our Global power competitors doing was Russia engaged in the global war on terror was China involved in the global war on terror so all the hundreds of billions of dollars that we spent in that war we spent in a war that was a giant distraction for us that gave our closest near-pier competitors 20 years to invest their money and grow to become a larger threat than we were even aware they were becoming right and then China all of a sudden China has multiple aircraft carriers and they're launching aircraft from aircraft carriers and they can project power into the South Asian Seas that's insane right all of a sudden like the the Russian Federation is in close relationships with the Chinese and the syrians and the North Koreans and the Iranians how do we just wake up to this and that's that's what happens it happens because we are still an adolescent country so we get very myopic and we become very focused on the thing that we're playing with right now and we lose the larger site the larger vision the the world has watched us do this for too long and they don't make the same mistake twice especially not authoritarian countries because authoritarian countries have the benefit of authoritarian rulers that sit in an office or sit in a place in a chair for 15 20 30 years right they don't deal with the kind of tumult and transition that we have in the United States I believe our constant change of leadership is part of what makes us strong but we haven't yet learned how to have a change in leadership without a change in focus that's what we haven't quite learned to do yet so we're giving our authoritarian enemies an opportunity to have Focus for a long period of time against us while we don't have that against them okay so why why were we able to be so strong and now we're not before you even answer that question let me frame it for people and if I go wrong on any of this let me know but this this to me is goes back to what I did not expect to be the theme of this conversation but how hilariously predictable humans are so Ray dalio takes a very economic view of the world and he's like oh hey by the way what he calls the big cycle is so predictable that he broke it down into six phases and every Empire has gone through these six phases they last for roughly like 100 to 150 years America is basically at the end of The 100 year cycle um and phase six is total collapse War basically and the old world order falls apart there is usually a violent war and then a new world order is established and we're like clockwork on the cycle from a money perspective from a division perspective like everything just lines up so you have to have an internal populace that is divided uh you need to get yourself over your skis from a debt perspective which we've done you have to start printing money like crazy and there has to be a new superpower on the rise like it's the the stage is set and the stage was set in World War II which is how we became the dominant power to your point about waking a sleeping dragon sleeping Dragon woke up but now uh we're in trouble so that's my overly simplistic view of why this worked it was sort of a fluke uh not a fluke but it was we we hit the cycle at just the right moment when the British Empire collapsed at the end of World War II um because of our geography we weren't destroyed by bombs so we come out of the war pretty much unscathed so we ramp up all of our production capabilities we absolutely crush it we help win we create the nuclear bomb like just a lot of things come together and so then we're established as a world Reserve currency um because it's not like we weren't divided before then but we got to really enjoy uh a hot minute of prosperity does that seem like the right breakdown of why we could overcome our differences previously and now we can't like how do you yeah I don't think it's wrong I don't think it's wrong at all I think that it's interesting to me because it sounds like Ray dalio one of the reasons you respect him so much is because his analysis is based in economics and he he's put his money where his mouth is economics and economists have long been viewed as the true predictors of future Prosperity CIA we lean heavily into economic studies economic experts economic analysis the law of Economics because the law of Economics is that of the law of scarcity one of the first and most underrated economists out there was actually a Soviet Economist a guy named kondratiev have created what's known as the chandrati of wave the quadratic chondrothy of cycle that cycle essentially puts us it explains the pattern of Interstate conflict or intra State conflict where where countries compete actually go to war with each other and and it puts it on about a 25-year cycle 25 years to a peak in Conflict 25 years to A Drop In conflict and then as the wave continues like most waves the actual uh peak of the Waves expands so it goes from being 25 years to 25 years to then 32 years to 32 years and you start to see this longer slower wave right but it's still a wave it's still a waveform the next peak of conflict according to chondroziev's wave against the United States's point of view happens in about 2024-2025. oh great so we now have multiple economists basically saying that there's a peak coming a peak of conflict coming and that Conflict for the chondrozia wave is a peak of popular conflict and unpopular conflicts so we're coming off of an unpopular conflict right Afghanistan and Iraq largely turned into an unpopular Conflict at the end right and the wave between when that started and when the next wave is coming is right in that 25-year Mark right so according to congrats you have we are very we are not only coming up on a period of conflict but it will be popular inside the United States so people will rally behind that conflict that doesn't mean we're going to win that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be in our best interest but it does mean to your point earlier that we might see that moment where everybody kind of comes together again I think part of the reason that we were able to be successful was because of the same rules of Economics that you laid out from World War II our country hugely unpopular western expansion was hugely unpopular at the time the Civil War nobody wants to see the Civil War again most people would say the Civil War was a traumatic and horrible you know loss of life at the time there was no other option Abraham Lincoln had no option except to pursue Civil War because he knew that the presidents before him had been working to create a single solitary nation that had National Security from coast to coast we can say it was a fight for states rights we can say it was a fight for slavery we can say it was a fight for lots of things and those are also true but they may not be the number one reason why the why the Civil War was so important the Civil War was so important because we needed to remain one unified country from coast to coast to have American Primacy in the long run American Primacy is a concept that was created by Alexander Hamilton really American privacy is not new there's an entire Society out there called the Alexander Hamilton Society that's focused on preserving the ideals of Alexander Hamilton and the founding fathers who all believed that a strong United States meant a strong world because they saw and lived through the oppression of living under a monarchy right if you look at the top five wealthiest countries in the world right now the top five wealthiest countries in the world two of them are democracies the other three are monarchies right so the idea that democracy is the solution to all wealth and success hasn't really been proven yet we're still outnumbered by monarchies right so what does the future hold the future will be will be conflict is coming multiple economists have pointed to it you can see the writing on the wall what my wife and I call the writing on the wall conflict is coming what will that conflict look like is the bigger question you talked earlier about how you know you and I might be of the same ilk when it comes to are we already engaged in World War III is world war three coming up what will that world war look like there is conflict coming there is no reason for us to think it will look like it looked in World War II if anything conflict has proven to us that it evolves and changes just like technology and just like human thinking right but it's still predictable because it takes human beings to wage war I don't think I'm answering your question very well here but these are all this is where my brain goes so my question is do you see this uh as a a conflict with China does it become open Warfare is this going to be over Taiwan like or the Russia Ukraine thing spills over into something how do you see this playing out so my honest my honest anticipation what I expect will happen is that China will make a legal move on Taiwan what China did in Hong Kong was legal first they changed the laws in Hong Kong they changed the laws in China which then changed laws in Hong Kong which made it legal for them to go in and this and take Hong Kong by force in 2019 right before covet hit the whole world watched and it happened and the whole world complained and threw a fit and leveraged sanctions and said it was unfair and unjust and everything else and then the Chinese did it anyways and now here it is 2023 and most people don't even remember what happened in Hong Kong just four years ago now they're watching what's happening in Ukraine now in Ukraine some people say that what happened in Ukraine is that the world rallied behind Ukraine by giving them weapons and giving them training and giving them resources the most limited resource in Ukraine is Ukrainian soldiers it's not tanks or guns or howitzers the thing that will run out first is Ukrainian Fighters that's like it's been it's a shame to me to watch what's happening because the Ukrainian fighting force is putting up such a valiant fight they're doing everything they possibly can to equip every Warfighter to be worth 10 20 30 50 Russian Fighters right but that's their most limited resource they're not going to be able to create more Russian fighters in the next three to five years you just can't you can't turn a five-year-old into an 18 year old so that's the resource that's the the clock that zielinski knows he's fighting against he's racing against is not a clock of fighter jets or or missile defense systems it's how am I going to find enough Fighters and NATO and the West know that they don't want to put their boots in Ukraine fighting the Russians because that's all it would take for the Russians to basically say hey NATO allies are killing Russians so now Russia can kill NATO allies and because Russia is a nuclear power they essentially have the same Pawn like the same trump card that we had in World War II so nobody in NATO wants to mess with that trump card because when you have an animal cornered yeah it does amazing things right so what I see happening is China will make a legal move on Taiwan what legal play do they have with Taiwan though they have a number of legal plays first of all do you know what the American official American stance is on Taiwan something like um we're we're not going to do anything but don't like touch them it's so like bizarrely vague yeah it's called The One China two systems policy essentially in the eyes of American policy Taiwan already belongs to China interesting so then China also has acknowledged with Taiwan you have your own system but you're still part of the mother country this is Hong Kong 2.0 Hong Kong 2.0 and over the stretch of like what is it 80 miles from coast to coast between between Southeastern China and Taiwan so it's it's sticky man if if China makes a legislative move that basically forces the Taiwanese system to then say you are now communist right they could have the Legal Foundation to do that and then a legal attack is very similar to what they did in Hong Kong that goes to court systems that doesn't go to bullets right and then when the legal system starts to go in their best interest or in their favor now China has legal grounds to basically have Chinese police officers enforce Chinese law inside Taiwan this whole process what the hell is the United States going to do there's no missiles there's no guns you can drive through the Straits all you want it's a legal issue it's not a military issue so I anticipate China making a legal move on Taiwan that will be supported by key members in the U.N why because how many of the bricks are in the the leading countries in the U.N all of them right if you look at the Ukrainian conflict now the news media oversimplifies everything so media says that the UN passes resolutions that condemn Russia that's true and the U and the U.N passes resolutions with a large majority 140 countries you know condemn Russia that is also true what they're not telling you is that the countries who are not condemning Russia are the largest wealthiest countries in the U.N China is not condemning Russia South Africa is not condemning Russia India is not condemning Russia right even inside NATO you have Belgium and Hungary who are not condemning Russia really so even NATO is not unified on this whoa right China's seeing all of this and China's seeing it for what it really is not for what American Media is telling the American people it is the American Media isn't they're not trying to you know they're not trying to lead us astray they're just trying to run a business they're trying to get people to read their newspaper click their links see their ads so that they can have they can pay their employees the next pay cycle it's all the media is trying to do it's not they're not trying to lead us throwing them down the wrong path so once there's an administrative Takeover in Taiwan China has all the rules that it like all the cover it needs to basically just shipping to start shipping National Guard troops uh police officers even military units over to Taiwan and now Taiwan belongs to China in a bloodless War very similar to the bloodless coups that we've seen multiple times in places like Thailand or all over southeast Asia right that's how I see it happening and I see it largely happening in the lead up to the 2024 election because China is going to benefit from a very confused American base division during Peak Division and an electoral cycle wow that's so distressing because that feels very plausible uh uh okay so we have a lot of business interests there so what will our reaction be because my first thought was our reaction will be oh maybe that's the best way for this to happen we can be like ah we don't have to go and commit our American lives to it uh they did it just like Taiwan or sorry just like Hong Kong where we'll you know rant and Rave and say this is a problem and how dare you and sanctions But ultimately be glad that we're not sending people to die but do we have enough business interests there that especially in in you know sensitive areas like chip manufacturing where we can't let it go our business interests with China are significantly bigger than our business interests with Taiwan wow Taiwan has the market cornered on semiconductors but that's not just for the United States they have the mark they have like 98 of the market share in semiconductor manufacturing who designs the semiconductors we do we have all the IP they just have the plants that's why one of the big initiatives in Biden's chip Act is to actually bring tsmc tmsc forget the name of the country or after the name of the company the main manufacturer in Taiwan to actually bring them to the United States so they're trying to build manufacturing plants for the Taiwanese company here in the flyover states in the United States so that we can just bring that tool God this is going to be a fascinating Stateside 10 to 20 year period absolutely you just nailed it right there it is going to be a fascinating decade to two decades in the future so that's what I want to focus on that's what I encourage my clients to focus on it's not about what happens now or in the next two years it's about what are you going to do so that your family your business your financial Legacy your individual Legacy is safeguarded for what the world could look like 10 to 20 years from now the world could look like the United States is still the economic and Military superpower it could look like that so you may not have to change much but according to economists by 2033 China will be the economic superpower that's not far away if we print money like crazy then we could not go to zero but like every other superpower before us you you really get knocked for six it is not a minor thing that happens right and then you lose your ability to print your way out of things which then you go into austerity now you look like England post World War II which hey England's amazing but they definitely had some rough years and they're certainly not the global superpower that we are now but I've sort of always imagined us falling into the number two position where we still maintain some real might that we have massive influence in other parts of the world that there will almost certainly be Parts like Europe and look they're an economic mess but Parts like Europe that are going to be far more aligned most likely certainly culturally with America than they would be with China and so you get sort of a more like cold worry Vibe where America's Russia was a huge player for anybody that's too young to remember Russia was a beast when I was a kid now we didn't know that it was a bit of a paper Tiger but like they really uh they mattered on the global stage and I imagine will still matter I think you're asking yourself the right questions right what knowing that humans are laughably predictable if China becomes the next Global superpower what is the laughably predictable thing that would happen next right the most predictable outcome is that China would take the number one spot we would fall as the number two spot who's always everyone's Target the guy in the lead so right now the world is Unified that the United States is Enemy Number One even if there are allies we're still Enemy Number One you think NATO likes the United States no France and Germany have both come out to say that they don't want the United States in NATO anymore what absolutely the chancellor of Germany has said he wants Germany to have the largest army in Europe specifically so that they can't be bossed around anymore by the United States because everybody's over dependent on the United States military huh right the president of France early in the invasion with Ukraine shut Biden down and said you are actually you are exacerbating this conflict with the rhetoric that you're spitting in Poland in the United States when you don't even have the United States isn't even within the firing range of Russia right right so France and Germany have had something to say Biden has been so successful with his policy in in Poland because Poland has long had history uh against Russia so it's a natural like it's a natural way in Poland already hates Russia and Poland will take any help it can get from anybody in NATO and so the United States comes in and says hey we'll help you Poland we'll back you up and pull in back to the United States up but Canada and France and Russia and Germany and the UK they have a very different story there well we have to talk about France so I was scandalized in my research to hear you say that when you think about like the most hardcore uh intelligence agencies that France of all places is like brutal the d-s-g-e-d-g-s-e-s dgse yep uh what's their stick why France so there's a couple reasons why France um so one of the biggest reasons why France is because in the late 90s the United States CIA was caught spying on the French government just like in the early 2010s we were caught we were caught spying on the German government right unlike Germany France holds a grudge so is France not spying on us of course they are yeah yeah of course they are so but it's like we got caught and so now they get to be mad no it's more like something changed prior to the 90s prior to the late 90s France wasn't so interested in the United States they were interested in more direct threats to France well now in the late 90s there's this giant flap inside France and now France is like [ __ ] the Americans right so they start to dedicate resources to building up in intelligence service and a skill set that makes sure that they will never be penetrated by the Americans again right the dgse becomes one of the and Still Remains one of the best funded most technically capable intelligence services in the world why does French why does France have enough money to put all of their resources into their intelligence operations because guess what they don't have to worry about military industrial complex because they're part of NATO and the United States wants to keep sending weapons and troops into the European countries so the United States has basically bought its influence in NATO by forcing Europe to prioritize or giving Europe the opportunity to prioritize their economic growth in other avenues besides military Industrial Development that's why most of the militaries in Europe are very weak and very small now there are some that are modernized which is why everybody's so excited about Sweden and Finland coming into NATO but most other countries are outdated and underfunded they don't need to be funded because if something happens in Poland Article 5 of the NATO alliance means that the United States military is going to come save the day so they're okay with that and of course the United States is okay with that too because it means there's never going to be a military competitor in Northern in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a result what does get to happen is those countries can take all the money that they would spend on military defense and channel it into intelligence operations now when they Channel it into intelligence operations against China North Korea Iran terrorism they share that information back and forth with the United States selectively and they build that Alliance but they also spend those resources spying against the United States that's so funny and because France specifically is so well funded and holds a grudge and is so Adept specifically at targeting Americans they have made a huge impact in the space of Economic and Industrial Espionage against the United States there there are if you talk to an intelligence professional like I'm sure you have friends in your network and you're like hey is France really that big a deal you will hear the same thing over and over again [ __ ] France wow you will hear those two words from every intelligence professional out there because we have all been bested at some point in time by the dgse they either stumbled into one of our cases they false flagged and pretended to be CIA and recruited NASA from underneath us or who knows what right but they know how how to Target Americans whoa and nobody knows they even exist it's the perfect kind of clandestine operation nobody even knows the threat is there the way that information Warfare works leveraging the human animal against itself I am waking up to a reality that I've been so focused in my life on my businesses and my loves and passions and my wife oh my God that I just I've totally I'm totally blind all this and that I have an outdated Vision like I think of France from the 80s and 90s when I was a kid and like real made fun of them exactly they don't even fight back a hundred percent and so my vision I'm sure on a lot of these countries is really skewed in terms of what they actually think about us because I remember there was a lot of that grumbling when the World Trade Center first not not 911 but in the 90s yeah when they first bombed it where it was like uh there are people in the world that hate Americans I was like say what like I had completely you know my own sort of insulated vision of America and just we export culture and America's so great and who wouldn't love democracy yeah that was the first time I was like whoa wait a second like people don't actually want this and that is so in recent years I've been reading a lot about um totalitarian States uh communism and like what that really looks like in practice and it gets real scary real fast and so looking at Mao's China which is like the anybody that wants to have their brain absolutely melted there are three books that I recommend that you read where you can see just how terrifying humans can be and that is Mao the unknown story The Untold Story I can never remember the exact but that the gulag archipelago about the gulag system in Russia and then the red famine which is about the Ukrainian famine uh those three books will show you that the depths of human evil like I don't know how like it that's really really unbelievable like what went down and then when I was thinking about China and it's like But ultimately like that is born of the people like that that is the the natural outcropping now look at me come and go and maybe it's just born of the people right now in this moment and maybe that you know won't last but who like it it is the system that they don't overthrow that would be the right way to say it because they could yeah at any moment like if the people really don't want it they could overthrow it and they don't and so that was the eye-opening where I was like oh wow like the rest of the world does not think of democracy just to keep it simple the way that I do yeah and honestly now I'm beginning to wonder if even kids growing up now think of democracy the way that I do and if um demographics are Destiny I get a little unnerved because I'm man I don't I I am in the process of formulating my opinion about this so a lot of what I have is emotion so going back to your early things that we are emotional creatures in the way that we feel determines what we see um a lot of the emotion that I have that I have not solidified into an updated world view is I'm very unnerved by the amount of division in the country and I don't see knowing what I know about humans I don't see how we get back on to coming together without massive suffering now with enough suffering we will but I don't see how we'll come back together without just a tremendous amount of suffering I I wish I could disagree with you but I I agree with you I Not only would it take a tremendous amount of suffering for us to reunite but our biggest threats right now are also aware that as long as we don't suffer we're not really going to unite so they can just execute as long as they can execute cleanly on a consistent vision they will because you know what we cannot do we cannot execute cleanly on a consistent vision and we [Music] I believe in the American experiment and I believe that the world is safer with the United States being the global superpower but I also think that the world has the world hasn't come to that conclusion on its own so maybe what we need is a different Global superpower for a while before the world is like you know what maybe we don't like this right maybe we want to return to another system God I hope it doesn't come to that I hope it doesn't come to that either because I won't you and I won't be here for that my kids will be um right my grandkids will be the ones going through that transition and that's not going to be a pretty transition and who knows it's the the thing is that again knowing how people work we are hardwired human beings are wired to survive we are not wired to thrive we are wired to survive ouch yeah the human brain the whole the processing that goes between the amygdala and the sensory codecs and all the different parts of your left and right brain that help you reach conclusions they were all built and they have all evolved around the idea of individual survival so whatever happens human beings Will Survive will adapt and Will Survive we might suffer along the way but Buddhism says suffering is part of the experience right so to avoid suffering is almost contrary to the in to the faith-based dominant faith-based uh religions in the world right Islam Christianity Buddhism Hinduism they all agree suffering is unavoidable but human beings still find a way to persevere I would love to not have that happen but if I was in charge of any country that didn't want the United States to be the new Global superpower I would just let the United States continue to pick at its toenails like it does right now right we're the fat dude in the corner picking at our hangnail while the rest of the world is working out exercising getting smart and getting ready to go to go to war right on that uplifting note Andrew this was amazing and if we weren't out of time I would keep going and going and going I have thoroughly enjoyed this where can people keep up with you I've had a blast here Tom too you can find me anytime at my website everydayspy.com if you go there it'll have links to everything else I love it the most everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to learn how the future of our economy will shape up in the next 12 to 18 months check out this interview with Ray dalio talk to me about the three forces that you see that are influencing this moment we've got Banks collapsing US Dollars on

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,775,407

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Andrew Bustamante, Everyday Spy, tombilyeu, Conversations with Tom, Health Theory, mindset, podcasts, how to be successful, entrepreneur, CIA, spy, World War 3, China, myers-briggs personality, mbti, how to read people, cia spy, former cia, cia agent

Id: 14eG8uoQ6cQ

Length: 147min 15sec (8835 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 25 2023