ANDREW BUSTAMANTE: My name is Andrew Bustamante, and I'm a former covert CIA intelligence officer and the founder of everydayspy.com.

- [Narrator] How to Think like a Spy with Andrew Bustamante. Part one, Becoming a Spy. What do people get wrong about being a spy?

- The public really doesn't realize that they are much closer to CIA spies than they think they are. One of the things that movies get wrong is that they make CIA spies look like they're some kind of superhuman or superhero right from the day they were born, when, in fact, spies are built, they're not born. One of the most famous spy series of all time actually gets it wrong, and that's the "James Bond" series. Here you see this beautiful man, and he's always attractive, he's always well-spoken, he's always an amazing driver, an amazing fighter, an amazing shot, he's great with the women, and somehow he's able to operate all over the world by calling himself by his true name, James Bond. This is not what espionage is like. Real espionage is about people who blend in, people who aren't attractive, people who don't get a second look, people who are terrible with women, people who never drive a fancy car, people who never have to pull out their gun, because they're so good at keeping a secret, they can get in and get out without ever even being noticed in the first place.

- [Narrator] What are the qualities of a potential spy?

- International espionage requires a wide range of different types of look and appearance. You can't necessarily say that one person would always be good at espionage and one person would always be bad. Instead, there's really a place for people who look all different types. There's a place for the very young and the very old. There's a place for the very fit and the very unfit. There's a place for tall people, short people. There's even room for people who have different religious beliefs that require them to wear different types of physical dress. But when it comes to the one type of person that has the most operational utility, you're looking for somebody who is brown, but not too dark, somebody who is thin, but not too thin, somebody who is middle-aged because that's exactly the kind of person that disappears, no matter where they go, whether they're in Asia or Latin America, whether they're in Canada or Australia, they're overlooked, they're not worth paying attention to, they're not the kind of person you remember bumping into when you're standing in line at a local coffee shop. And that's exactly the kind of gray man that CIA, MI6, and Mossad really look for when they develop a new high-performance field operative. A good covert operator is born with a certain series of skills. They are very good at thinking on their feet, they're creative, they're adaptable, they're resilient and resourceful, they're also able to blend in and disappear. These are not people who want to be the center of attention. These are people who want to be in the background. They want to be forgotten. They want to be ignored. They're the wallflowers at your school prom. They're the kids who sit in the second to last row, because if they sat in the last row of the school bus, they would be noticed. The people who turn into very good spies are the people who enjoy the comfort of anonymity, it's the exact opposite of what you see in so much of media. Now, when an intelligence service gets a hold of this person who values anonymity, then they have this rich, fertile soil to teach them a whole slew of skills, from hacking skills to tradecraft skills to alias, disguise, to foreign language, and they can put and invest these skills into somebody, knowing that that person will never show off or brag about their skills. Instead, they're gonna use those advanced skills to make themselves even more invisible in front of everybody else. One of the most interesting questions I get from people is, "What is the one most important character trait to be a good spy?" And I find this question to be really interesting because it's a shocking answer, in my opinion. The most important thing CIA or Mossad or MI6 looks for when they make a possible new spy is somebody who seeks validation from a external source. They're looking for somebody who is so loyal and so dependent on external validation that they will lie, steal, cheat, commit crimes, cross borders, change their name, do anything they have to do in order to get validation and approval from that one focused external source. And when CIA finds a person like that, they can train that person to become dependent on CIA. And then the loyalty of that individual becomes so focused on the institution that they don't need any other attention from anywhere else, as long as they serve the one organization that validates and appreciates their work.

- [Narrator] What is the process for becoming a CIA operative?

- When you think about the process for applying and interviewing to CIA, you have to take every application you've ever made, from the military to a job, and throw it out the window, because the average application and interview process for CIA takes about 18 months. In fact, if you're a very qualified, high-performing candidate, the best you can do is about nine months. My own application process took about 11 months. And over the course of that time, you are exposed to more and more intrusive, personal, and high-stakes interview styles. Sometimes you're doing role plays, sometimes you're taking psychological batteries that take multiple hours, sometimes you're doing group or panelist interviews, where you're being peppered by a panel of people that you've never talked to before, and that's not counting all the things they're doing behind the scenes, pulling your digital footprint, looking at your police background, looking at your personal finances, looking and reviewing your health history and your family history. There's an incredible amount of activity that goes into identifying the right kind of people that can be trusted to carry out a secret mission somewhere else in the world on behalf of the U.S. Federal government. The reason CIA uses this escalation of intrusive interview styles is for two reasons. One, they're looking to identify the specific soft skills that exist in the right candidate, the person who can think on their feet, the person who's resilient, the person who is creative, but then, simultaneously, they're also looking for the person who's unwilling to share certain secrets about themselves. Where's the person that's too private to share secrets about the affair they had with their spouse, or where's the person that's keeping so many secrets, they're afraid to talk about the fact that they're broke or even in debt in their credit cards? Where's the person who's not willing to talk about their child abuse? Where's the person who's unwilling to share a secret about cheating on an exam in college? Because if somebody's willing to keep one secret during the interview process, you know you can't really trust that person to become loyal to the organization when they have to collect secrets of different types that relate to national security and national security policy. I often joke that I was the accidental recruit to CIA because I was not a great college student, I was not a great high school student. I came from the military, but I was not a good soldier. I really don't understand, even now, to this day, why it was that CIA took such an interest in me when they did. But my process was one of the most fun processes I've had in my entire life. As an Air Force officer, I was in command of nuclear missiles, which meant I was one of the people sitting underground, pointing missiles all over the world, knowing that if I turned my key, I would end human life in some place. So when the time came for me to leave the Air Force, I wanted to do something that was the polar opposite of nuclear missiles. So I found myself applying to the U.S. Peace Corps, and it was during that application process to the Peace Corps that my resume was actually flagged online for national security. And in the middle of my application to Peace Corps, I actually had a screen pop up on my computer that said based on my answers to date in my application, I might qualify for other jobs in the national security sector. Would I be willing to put my application on pause? And like any other 27-year-old, when I heard that there might be an opportunity for me to do something else, I hit Yes, and I said, "Yes, I am willing to put my application on hold for 72 hours to see what comes of this." And that's when I got a phone call one day later from a woman who didn't tell me her last name and came from an unlisted phone number with a 703 area code, which is Langley, Virginia, and she invited me to Washington, DC, to go through an application process that would vet me for a possible role in national security. I didn't know at the time that I was being vetted for CIA. I got a set of plane tickets in the mail. I had a rental car sent to me in the mail. I was only given enough information to make it another day, where my next hotel would be, where my next appointment would be. And that's kind of how I was carried along for the better part of 10 months as I went through test after test and interview after interview, where I was applying for and escalating through the process of becoming a CIA operative.

- [Narrator] What did you learn while becoming a CIA operative?

- When I actually started training with CIA, I started to have a series of self-discoveries. First, I started to discover that many of the things that I suspected my whole life, many of the things that caused me frustration and disappointment with society, were actually very viable things that CIA taught me to understand later on. It taught me to understand that there really isn't a sense of fairness or transparency or honesty that human beings carry from place to place, it doesn't exist in church, it doesn't exist in the professional workplace, it doesn't exist in the military, even though everyone tries to say that there are standards of behavior, and there are codes of conduct, and there are social norms, in reality, all of those things are flexible. So for me, growing up, it was always very challenging whenever I saw hypocrisy or whenever I saw people go against their word, or people not fulfill their promises, I never understood how it was acceptable, how is it that President Clinton could get on a stand and swear to tell the truth, and then lie on the stand, and yet somehow still become a popular president? It never made sense to me how people accepted deceit and lies and trickery and abuse, but CIA taught me how the human brain worked and how it is that the human brain can accept those offenses and move forward with its own narrative, its own dialogue. Learning that during my process at CIA taught me not only how to understand other people, but also how to understand my own life, my own childhood trauma, my own relationship with my parents and my teachers and my professors and my peers. And understanding how I viewed the world and how the world viewed me gave me an incredible advantage that the CIA knew I needed in order to operate as a solo operator in the field.

- [Narrator] How does becoming a CIA agent impact your personal life?

- One area that's very personal to me that CIA really helped me understand was the area of personal relationships. When I was a child, growing up in a house where my father had died early and my mom remarried multiple times, it was very difficult for me to maintain and really invest myself into personal relationships. I didn't have a lot of friends. I didn't really trust my teachers. I didn't even really trust my parents. And I learned later on that when I became part of CIA, one of the things CIA asks all officers to do is sever previous relationships, so just cut them off, break them off, stop investing in them because when you drag the past into your future, you leave yourself open to vulnerability. Where I anticipated that my peers at CIA would have a hard time, turning off all those old relationships, canceling old college friends, getting away from their cousins, getting away from their parents. What actually happened is that we welcomed that invitation, and I was one of those people who absolutely welcomed an excuse to terminate all of my old military friends, to jump off of social media, to stop answering email, to change my phone number, to change my address, and not even tell my parents where I was moving to. It was this welcomed opportunity to reset life and have a plausible explainable reason for yourself that's justifiable because you're going to go invest your life into keeping Americans safe. What better justification, what better rationalization is there for saying, "I am done with my old life, and I am starting a whole new life that nobody can know is real." Any rational person would have to ask the question whether or not CIA's behavior is in line with the behavior of a cult. And the answer is yes, absolutely, because the loyalty that you have to have to the Central Intelligence Agency has to come above your loyalty to anything else, higher than your loyalty to your parents, higher than your loyalty to your spouse, higher than the loyalty you have to your own children, because when you sacrifice everything at the behest of a mission to keep people safe by stealing secrets, you can't let anything else come before that. What we say to ourselves at CIA is, "Mission first, family always," which is still mission first, and that is absolutely in line with the way that cults cultivate their own followers. They make people absolutely dependent on the cult, the organization, the foundation, the principle first. So you have to consider the fact that based on objective reality, yes, there are many behaviors at CIA that are in line with the behaviors of a religious cult.

- [Narrator] What is CIA training like?

- CIA trains with a very specific model that really doesn't exist anywhere else. They call it a three-step model, first, you educate, then you exercise, and then you experience. What that means is, it's not like college, where everything is education-based, but it's also not like on-the-job training, where everything is experience-based. Instead, there's a very systematic formula to how CIA trains officers in their new tradecraft skills. They start with classroom education, and it really is that, it's just like being in a college setting. You have an instructor or two at the front of the classroom, and you have a room of anywhere from 30 to 100 new recruits who learn a skill or a concept. That class might be 45 minutes to two hours long. Immediately after that class is over, you take a short break, and then you come back for a series of exercises or role plays, maybe you role-play with another student, maybe you role-play with an instructor, maybe a few students are called to the front of the room, where they exercise in real-time, with all of the other students observing them. What's happening is the education portion of what happened in the morning is now being demonstrated through the exercise that's happening in the classroom. Immediately following that exercise, everyone is kicked out into the real world to go actually exercise the skill that they learned and the skill that was demonstrated in the field. And what happens is, you will either fail or you will succeed during the process of applying that skill in the real world. And what's really powerful is, because you operate alone, you are the only one who knows if you succeeded or failed with that skill. So then when you come back to the classroom the next day, you're carrying this knowledge in your own head, and it's up to you whether or not you seek additional help from a peer or from a teacher, whether you admit to your failure, or whether you celebrate your success, it's all on your own shoulders, which is part of the psychological game that must happen in order for you to develop both a loyalty to the organization, but also a sense of confidence that you can operate single-handedly in the field. It's important to understand that there's a difference between training and therapy. Training is something that you do in advance of an activity so that you have the resilience and skills and capability to persevere through the activity that you have to carry out. Therapy is something that you do after the fact. Therapy comes after some event has occurred that may have adversely affected your psychology, your self-confidence, your anxiety, your actual brain chemistry. CIA invests a great deal in your training, specifically because they do not want to invest in your therapy. They look for people who are capable of doing both wonderful and terrible things and still be able to sleep at night because they know that if, for some reason, you're overwhelmed, if, for some reason, you crack under pressure, if, for some reason, you break during an operation, there is much more at stake than just your life.

- [Narrator] What did the CIA teach you about ethics and morals?

- One of the foundational lessons at CIA is helping us to understand the difference between ethics and morals, and that's something that the average person doesn't really think about or understand. Ethics are actually something that's defined by your profession, it's something that comes from outside, an external source. If you're an attorney, there's a code of ethics for attorneys. If you're a doctor, there's a code of ethics for doctors. If you're a teacher, there's a code of ethics for teachers. It's defined outside of you. Where morals are actually something that's defined internal to you, it's something that you believe to be true, something that you believe to be important, maybe that's something that was taught to you as a child or something that you developed on your own. But ethics and morals are not the same thing. So when you join CIA, they teach you that they, CIA, have their own code of ethics, and that code of ethics is really quite short because we are what's known as an organization of last resort, meaning if CIA gets a mission, it's because nobody in the American government can do it. But morally, what it means is that you have to be flexible with your own personal morals. And a big part of what makes a CIA officer successful is what's known as moral flexibility, or the ability to believe one thing today as moral and something else tomorrow as equally just as moral, because sometimes you have to hurt a bad guy to save a good guy, sometimes you have to steal from a criminal in order to get what you need to protect someone else. So morals are not as black and white as they are in everyday life. Sometimes you have to do something terrible in order to accomplish something wonderful, and you have to be able to sleep with yourself at night, no matter what you do. The idea of moral flexibility seems like something that you might have to train into people, but the truth is that most of us are already born with that, we already accept that, we already understand on a fundamental level that if push came to shove, we would absolutely hurt others to protect ourselves, we would hurt others to protect our family, we would watch someone else fail rather than fail ourselves. And for the few people in the population who do not agree with that, they would never make good CIA operatives because there are many, many people, there's a very large talent pool of people out there who have the basic moral flexibility in order to carry out clandestine operations. They just haven't been trained to the place where they know how to carry out those skills to achieve specific outcomes.

- [Narrator] How do I know if I have what it takes to be a CIA operative?

- Use yourself as a test case here. If you're still listening to me talk right now, if you've heard me explain what it's like to go through the recruitment process, you've heard me talk about what it's like to be a spy, you've heard me talk about what the realities of spy life are like versus the movies, and you are still watching, that's a good sign that you actually have what it takes to consider being an actual undercover operative because thousands of other people have already stopped watching this video, thousands of people saw the headline and never even clicked on the video. But the fact that you are not only still watching, but excited to hear what comes next, goes to show that you already have some of that psychological foundation, that moral flexibility, that resilience, that courage, that independence, that willingness to cut off all of your old life in order to pursue a new life. You have that risk tolerance already inside you, whether you've ever known it or not, it's there. And that's what's so powerful about CIA. It doesn't care about the majority of people, it's there to preserve national security. And if you have that level of pragmatic thought, if you're willing to accept that there's a difference between people and institutions, then that shows that you are the kind of person that could potentially fit into the category of covert operative.

- [Narrator] Part two, The Psychology of Spycraft. Is there a difference between manipulation and motivation?

- It's a difficult truth to accept that human nature is inherently selfish. We have a survival instinct that puts ourselves above all other creatures. It's why, when you're on an airplane, you're instructed to put your own mask on before you put the mask on the child sitting next to you. And it's also why you accept that instruction from the airline every time you hear it because we know we have a level of required self-preservation that has to come first. And when people think about CIA, and they think about foreign missions, and they think about secret operations, they always think about the word manipulation. What CIA taught me is that manipulation is one side of a coin, and on the other side of the coin is the word motivation, but they are still the same coin, they're made out of the same material, they carry the same weight, they carry the same value, but somehow we think people who manipulate us are bad guys, but people who motivate us are heroes. The truth is that the skills that go into both motivation and manipulation are almost the same skills, the same level of persuasion, the same level of influence, the same level of charisma and dynamic creative thinking drives us to both be manipulated and be motivated. So CIA understands that sometimes you need to lean more into motivating someone to take a certain action. Other times, you have to manipulate them to take a certain action, but the thing that you cannot compromise on is that you are pursuing a very specific outcome. Whether you have to motivate or manipulate to achieve that outcome, your loyalty first has to be to that outcome. And if something about your ideology or your religious beliefs or your personal convictions make you feel like you don't deserve that outcome, there's nothing that CIA or any other skill can help you with because you have to be willing to accept the truth of survival instinct and the imperative of individual success as it exists in us as human beings.

- [Narrator] How can you take control of a conversation?

- One of the first things that new recruits are taught how to do is actually talk less and listen more, because we're taught that there's an element of conversation that's often missed in society, and that element is understanding how to control a conversation. Oftentimes, we think that you control a conversation by being the person who talks the most, when, in fact, you control a conversation by being the person who asks the questions, because questions direct the topic of conversation, questions prime the other person to answer whatever it is that you have proposed, questions are an opportunity for you to collect much more information than just the question that you're asking. And when it comes to being able to quickly assess what someone believes, what they feel, what they think, how they will behave in the future, questions are an incredible tool because you get insight into what is happening behind a person's external demeanor because you get a chance to see what people will say and how they will behave when they're distracted, processing an answer to your question, that is a more accurate representation of who that person is than when that person is talking on their own, making up their own topics, possibly even repeating something they've repeated a thousand times.

- [Narrator] What is the RICE method?

- One of the most powerful tools for assessment that CIA teaches us early on in our training is a method that we know as the RICE method, and RICE, R-I-C-E, is actually an acronym that stands for four other words, reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. The RICE method will show you what actually motivates or drives a person to take the actions that they take. Someone who's driven by reward is somebody who will take action based on the reward that they're given, maybe that reward is money, maybe that reward is an opportunity, maybe that reward is nothing more than a pat on the back or a high five. Ideology means people take actions because of what they believe in, maybe it's what they were taught as a child, maybe it's what they believe in their religion, maybe it's what they believe is right of humanity, but they make decisions based off of an ideology that was taught to them at some point in their life. C stands for coercion. Coercion is all the negative things in your life, this is when you make a decision because you're ashamed or when you make a decision because you're scared, or when you make a decision because you're afraid, or you make a decision because you're embarrassed. All of these tie back to a core motivation that has to do with coercion, especially if somebody else is making you feel guilty, making you feel scared, or making you feel humiliated. E, the fourth motivator, is ego. And ego is the most often mistaken of the four motivators because people mistake the word ego with egotistical. Egotistical means that you believe you are the most important thing in the world, where ego is simply the way you choose to look for the rest of the world. Everybody has an ego, even Mother Theresa had an ego. She wanted to appear sacrificing, she wanted to appear humble, she wanted to appear noble, those are all elements of ego. Ego is not good or bad, even though egotistical is a vulnerability. When you understand the RICE method and you understand that all people break down into these four different types of motivators when you assess them and talk to them using open-ended questions, close-ended questions, normal dialogue, even if you just sit back and listen to them while they talk to another group of people, you will quickly start to see the indicators of whether they are reward-motivated, ideology-motivated, ego-motivated, or if they can be motivated through coercion.

- [Narrator] What is sensemaking?

- One of the fundamental tools that CIA gives us when we go through our training for assessing human behavior is a tool called sensemaking. And sensemaking is actually something that goes all the way back to the Vietnam War, because during the early years of the Vietnam War, soldiers were discovering that they could capture Vietnamese or Vietcong soldiers, but they could never get those soldiers to disclose secrets. They were so dedicated, so loyal to the cause, that they would rather die than share any intelligence at all. So the U.S. Army turned to a team of psychologists to try to understand what was happening in the brains of these enemy combatants that was making them so loyal to their cause. And as a result of that research, the idea of sensemaking was born. Sensemaking is essentially the way that all human beings process through making sense of some situation, or more specifically, making sense of meeting a new person. And sensemaking has three different phases, phase one is called avoidance, phase two is called competition, and phase three is called compliance. So if you imagine a cup in front of you or a bottle in front of you, as you pour energy and effort into that bottle, it starts to fill up from the bottom to the top, that's exactly how sensemaking works. You have to invest through a period of avoidance, through a period of competition before you get to a place where you have compliance from your target. Avoidance really is exactly what it sounds like, it means that anytime you meet a new person or I meet a new person, our default instinct is to avoid them. When you meet somebody new in an elevator, when you talk to somebody new on the street, when somebody knocks on your door, sometimes it's even when it's somebody you know, when you see that your mother-in-law is calling on the phone, your instinct is to avoid, that is a completely natural human instinct. It's part of our survival instinct that's protecting us from some sort of discomfort. If you have the wherewithal to push through the avoidance phase, the next phase is called competition. When I talk about competition, I don't want you to think about two competing teams, two football teams, two soccer teams, two hockey teams, where one person has to win and one person has to lose. Instead, think of competition more like you think of a scrimmage, when the A team plays the B team, but you both belong to the same team, when the varsity team plays the junior varsity team, but you both play for the same team. Competition is actually an investment into the relationship that you were previously trying to avoid. So competition doesn't have to look like somebody wins and somebody loses. Instead, it looks like two people are exchanging ideas, exchanging conversation, exchanging or even debating on certain topics. But the activity of having those hard conversations is, in and of itself, a demonstration of the investment in the relationship, it's why anybody has ever had makeup sex, that's why the makeup sex happened, because you argued, and you debated, and you've invested so much into the relationship that the only natural next step was to celebrate the relationship. The final step in sensemaking is called compliance. Compliance happens only after avoidance is overcome and competition is demonstrated. Then you reach a point where you can literally ask someone to take a certain action, and they will, whether you're asking them for a secret, whether you're asking them for a dollar, whether you're asking them to marry you, you have a certain expectation of compliance because you have worked through all the previous phases of sensemaking. Even as I explain this to you now, you can see sensemaking in every aspect of your life, you can see it with your children, you can see it with your friends, you can see it in the workplace, you can see it with your clients. The people who understand sensemaking have an opportunity to shortcut the process, to get to compliance faster. Where all the people out there who don't understand sensemaking are going to be stuck, missing opportunities. Maybe they miss opportunities because during that avoidance phase, they just give up, or during the competition phase, they don't realize it's an investment in the relationship. Either way, they never get a chance to capitalize on the compliance that comes only after the other two steps are achieved. One thing that people often ask about is whether or not rapport is an important tool for sensemaking. And my answer is both yes and no because it ties back to the fact that most people don't understand what rapport really is. Many people think rapport is just having somebody who thinks well of you, or having a good positive relationship, or even having friendly banter. The truth is, rapport is a very practical tool. In fact, we, at CIA, call it social capital, because rapport is not really about having a positive relationship, it's about having a currency that denotes leverage in a relationship, that's much more like capital than it is like good faith or goodwill. You're being nice today so that you can get what you want tomorrow. You're being assertive today because you wanna set a tone for when you call in a favor later on. Rapport is important, yes, but rapport doesn't mean that it's all goodwill. Rapport actually means that you're building a sense of leverage, you're building an actual measurable currency, a social capital, that you can use to call in leverage in the future to get what you want. We previously talked about how we are all still creatures based on our core wiring of survival instinct. What people don't realize is that survival instinct isn't actually an instinct that makes us put more efforts into something, it's actually an instinct that makes us conserve our effort. In a way of speaking, we are actually very lazy creatures, we wanna find a way to survive with the least amount of effort. So understanding that we are actually always trying to keep energy in reserve, we start to understand why the path of least resistance is so attractive, why so many people quit early, why it is that avoidance and sensemaking is where so many people bow out and stop trying, it also helps you understand why the people of success are so successful, because even though they know they could have saved energy, even though they know they could have played it safe, they pushed harder anyways, they pushed through that survival instinct that tried to convince them to quit early, when the avoidance was easy, when the competition got difficult, they pushed through that to achieve a place where they have the power and the authority and the compliance of the people around them.

- [Narrator] How should we use these psychological tools?

- Everything we've just talked about is really just a series of psychological tools and tools that you can use to achieve very specific, deliberate outcomes that benefit you. But it's important to understand, just like the tools that exist in your garage or in your basement or in your closet, tools are ambivalent to the outcome, they're just a tool along the way. So whether you're screwing in a screw with a screwdriver or hammering a nail with a hammer, the truth is that the screwdriver and the hammer are just tools, they can equally be used to do terrible things to people, just like they can be used to do helpful things for people. RICE and sensemaking are exactly the same thing, you can use them as tools to achieve very positive outcomes that benefit you and benefit the world around you, or you can abuse them and use them to hurt people. But the important thing to understand is that whether you use the tool for good or for evil, there are other people in the world who know and have the same tool, and they can use that tool on you. And oftentimes, the best way to identify someone who you can trust is by understanding whether or not they're showing behaviors that are trustworthy, or if they're using good tools for bad reasons.

- [Narrator] Part three, The Economy of Secrets. What is the economy of secrets?

- There's a concept we have at CIA that helps us to frame the entire world around us, whether it's personal relationships or geopolitics, or even strategic intent, and that's by understanding that we are all governed by what we call an economy of secrets. If you think back to Economics 101 from whether you were in high school or college, you understand that economics is all about understanding that there is a limited supply, and there is always demand. The economy of secrets is the exact same way. There are always going to be secrets, and those secrets will be in limited supply, but everybody wants access to secrets. So there is an infinite demand for the secrets that are out there, personal secrets, trade secrets, geopolitical secrets, economic secrets, financial secrets. There's always a demand for secrets, and whether we want to admit it or not, we understand that some secrets, we want to keep until they're useful to us, and other secrets are so valuable, we will never share them, ever. But somehow, simultaneously, we expect other people to share their secrets with us, and we want access to the secrets that other people know that we don't know, sometimes just for curiosity, sometimes because we want to use it for a competitive advantage, sometimes because we just feel like we are entitled to understanding or knowing someone else's secrets. All of that is an example of the economy of secrets and the very real pressure that exists on the supply and demand side of that economy of secrets.

- [Narrator] Do all secrets hold equal value?

- Recognizing the value of secrets isn't something that's difficult for the average person. We all understand secrets that we don't wanna share and secrets that we do wanna know, and the value related to those secrets. There are many different types of secrets, there's secrets that people have that they don't wanna share because they did something wrong. There are secrets that people have, and they don't wanna share because they're respecting someone else's privacy. There's secrets that happen because you tricked someone into saying or doing something. There's secrets that occur because it was passed to you by someone else, and you're not sure what to do with it. There's a whole litany of different types of secrets, and every secret has value to gain leverage in some way, shape, or form. But understanding that there are different types of secrets is not a way of saying that all secrets are the same or have the same value. Some secrets get you a great deal of leverage, other secrets get you very little leverage. In fact, even the terminology that CIA uses to measure secrets isn't the same. CIA classifies their secrets according to different terminology, there's confidential secrets, there are secret-level secrets, and then there are top-secret secrets. And the way that they define each of these different levels actually has to do with the impact that would occur if the secret became public knowledge. So a confidential secret is a secret that could potentially do damage to national security. A secret-level classification is something that would cause damage to national security. And top-secret level secrets are secrets that would cause grave damage to national security. So even if you just apply this simple three-step rubric to your own personal secrets or your own career secrets, or your business secrets, you can see that not all secrets are the same. The secrets that have more damaging outcomes are the secrets you want to keep and the secrets you wanna gain. And the secrets that have very limited impact are the secrets that you don't bother yourself with and that you're okay sharing or trading with someone else.

- [Narrator] Why is it beneficial to know that everyone keeps secrets?

- When you accept that other people have secrets, and they will always have secrets, you are preparing yourself for a much more predictable, much more successful future because that is a reality. You can live in a world that is not true and believe that people are honest, or you can live in a world that is factual and objective and recognize that all people are keeping secrets from you. Once you accept that reality, you can start applying behaviors, practices into your personal life, into your business life that make it so that you gain more secrets than you share. And gaining secrets in an economy of secrets is the same thing as gaining wealth or gaining power, or gaining leverage. It sets you up to have more success with the outcomes you're trying to achieve, whether those are revenue goals, or whether those are personal goals. But if you choose to believe that secrets are not valuable, or that secrets are not being kept from you, then you're setting yourself up to always be exploitable by the people who recognize that secrets can be achieved through simple, repeatable processes, like the processes we've talked about today. You open yourself up to being motivated to share your secrets, manipulated into sharing your secrets, tricked into sharing your secrets, you even run the risk of sharing your secrets with the masses because you believe that it's fair to do so. In fact, what you're doing is you're letting go of the very value, the very currency that you need in order to achieve the success, the ambition, and the outcomes you care about. I remember being a kid, and my stepdad used to always look at me and tell me that, "The world isn't fair." He would say, "Life isn't fair," and I never understood that because all day at school, all people told me was that I had to act in a way that was fair to other people. I had to wait my turn in line, I had to share the chocolate milk, you had to take turns playing kickball. Everybody was trying to police this idea of fairness. But then I would come home at night, and I would receive these lectures about how the world isn't fair, and it never made sense to me. It still didn't make sense to me all through college and even through my military career, until I joined CIA, and CIA was able to explain to me that fairness is a construct that helps to create predictability in human behavior. When people believe there is some sort of level of fairness, when people believe that there is some sort of egalitarian level that keeps us all on equal footing, then you can actually predict and control a society in the long term. Whereas what we were trained to do as CIA officers was infiltrate those societies and abuse or exploit the areas that were kept secret from the masses. We were charged with stealing secrets from terrorist groups. We were charged with stealing secrets from foreign militaries. We were charged with stealing secrets from scientists of foreign countries that were trying to create nuclear capabilities or new weapons. We had to go into this organization that believed that some semblance of fairness to find the few that were willing to compromise on secrets they were trusted with because they inherently doubted that everything was, in fact, fair. We don't live in a world that is fair. We live in a world that is constantly jockeying and vying for more power, more information, more influence, more leverage, but we call it fair in order to reduce the number of competitors who are trying to get that edge. When the majority of people are willing to accept that there is some level of fairness, they stop trying to gain an edge, which means that it's only a limited few that are truly competing for the top slot. When you look at that through a lens of survival instinct, that means, if you are trying to survive, you have a better chance of surviving when you let go of the idea that there is fairness, and you lean into accept the fact that there are predictable behaviors, predictable tools, leverage, manipulation tactics, motivational tactics that can create high-probability outcomes that benefit you.

- [Narrator] How do we identify the most valuable secrets?

- We've already discussed how secrets have value, and value is really only something that you achieve when you trade the object of value. So that leads us to wonder, what is a good secret to trade, and when is the good time to trade it? With this question, we have to remember that not all secrets are equal. Some secrets cause damage to your outcome. Some secrets cause significant damage to what your ambitions and your goals are. There's never a time that you wanna trade or share a secret that does grave damage to what you're trying to achieve. The ideal kind of secret to share are secrets that we call have a shelf life, meaning that over time, the secret becomes less important or less valuable, because there's a very real current time element to many secrets. What happens today is only secret until it makes it into the headlines tomorrow. What happens today in the marketplace is a secret that's only really worth keeping while nobody else knows that the market is making that movement. So you always have to be considering the relevancy of a secret when you determine what its value is. So the best secrets to trade are the secrets that have value right now, but that value has a half-life that decreases every day you move forward, because you're gaining reciprocity by sharing that secret with someone else. So when you trade a secret with a fast half-life for someone else trading a secret with a slow half-life, you end up having a more valuable secret that you receive relative to the secret that you give away. That's the economy of secrets, that's the trading of secrets, the horse jockeying of secrets, that makes it so that you can stay ahead of your competition over time, because you're not trading damaging secrets, you're trading secrets that are already destined to become known to the light of day.

- [Narrator] Are there any tricks to keeping a secret?

- When you want to keep a secret, it's actually much easier than you might expect. The first trick to keeping a secret is really just to limit how much you talk. And if you do talk, talk in questions, don't speak in terms of answers or dialogue or conversation, because even by the way that you answer a question, you actually start to expose some of your secrets, the words that you use, the pace that you speak, the level of excitement that you share when you talk, these are all ways that you can share with other people interpersonal secrets about you, your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, how much you care about your kids, how much you care about your job or your family. So it's actually very easy to start to protect yourself, simply by speaking less or by being the person who speaks in questions rather than the person who carries on a conversation. Another way that you can keep your secrets is by understanding that when you have a conclusion that you reach in your mind, when you have a suspicion, when you have a curiosity, when you wonder if somebody is trustworthy, when you wonder if somebody is lying, when you think somebody might be stealing from the boss, instead of sharing that information with somebody else, you just keep it for yourself, and you allow time to continue to pass by to give yourself more information, more time to assess more observational information, to reach a conclusion that's actually meaningful. Because if you do catch someone lying, if you do catch someone embezzling, it's much more valuable to you to share that information when you have a preponderance of evidence that can actually confirm your suspicion. Where what many of us do is, we feel the need to share our suspicions immediately, we share our thoughts, our concerns, our issues right away, because we think that there's value to be gained by having other people give us their opinion, when, in fact, the most valuable thing you can do is keep your secret to yourself and collect more information about it. CIA is an information-gathering service. We call it intelligence, but all intelligence really is, is having what we call information superiority, meaning the best and highest quantity of information compared to our competitors. When you have information superiority, you are deemed to have intelligence. It's the same thing we say when we talk about an intelligent person. Intelligent people have a preponderance of information that is believable and useful to them. It's just the same as having information superiority for CIA.

- [Narrator] How can we extract secrets from others?

- Sometimes you wanna access somebody's secrets, but you wanna do it in a way where they don't realize you are prying or searching for secrets. We use a term called elicitation for this activity, when you are trying to elicit specific information without demonstrating that you're interested in that specific information. If you think about the average movie, where you see a guy walk up to a girl in a bar, he's having a conversation to try to see whether or not she's interested or whether or not she has a boyfriend. What he's doing is, he's eliciting. He's talking about the weather, he's talking about the band, he's talking about mundane things. But what he's really doing is gaining assessment information from his target to see is she smiling at him, is she interested in him, is she wearing a wedding ring or an engagement ring. The same thing is true when you are trying to collect secrets from other people. You wanna elicit that information. One of the most powerful tools that you can use to elicit is really just to engage a person in a meaningful conversation with what we call open questions. Open questions are questions that cannot be answered in a single word or a short phrase. So, for example, a yes or no question is not an open question, asking somebody whether or not they like their meal, or if they're happy, or if they've had a good day, none of those are open-ended questions. Open-ended questions start with words like how or why, or to what extent, or tell me about. When you ask an open-ended question, the person who's hearing your question has to interpret it through their own psychology, their own perception, their own lens of beliefs and biases. And because they have to interpret your question, they oftentimes share much more information than they intended to share. So when you ask somebody, "What are your thoughts about the current events in the Middle East," you will get much more information than what you ever thought you would expect because they will share their opinions, their beliefs, their background, you'll see their emotions, you'll see how much they focus, you may even see whether or not they're knowledgeable about what's happening in the Middle East at any given time. When you ask somebody how they feel about the passing of a loved one, or how they feel about getting a new puppy, you will actually get much more information than what you're seeking. And that is how you get deeper into understanding the biases, beliefs, and opinions of other people. When you understand their biases and their opinions and their core beliefs, it gives you more information to craft your next question. These concepts of open-ended questions that open doors and open windows allow you to dig deeper and deeper into the secrets that people are trying to keep without them ever realizing they're sharing their secrets with you, their secret opinions, their secret thoughts, their secret biases, their secret feelings. They're sharing them verbally, they're sharing them non-verbally, they're sharing them with their face, they're sharing them with their mouth, they're sharing them with their body.

- [Narrator] Part four, How to Multitask Like a Spy. What is task saturation?

- Current research shows that the average person has to make more than 1600 decisions a day. They have to decide when to pick up the kids, what to feed them for dinner, what to say to their spouse, when to call their mom. They're keeping track of when the next time is to put out the trash, and they're keeping track of when the next time is to mow the lawn. There are an overwhelming amount of tasks that you have to carry out every single day, and the same thing happens to us when we are operating in the foreign field, it's something that we call task saturation. When there's more tasks that need to be done, then you feel comfortable carrying out with any sort of effective capacity. And task saturation is a very dangerous thing 'cause it can result in decreased cognitive ability, increased stress, increased anxiety, and an overall sense of unproductive success. When you find yourself in a position where you are experiencing task saturation, you have to understand that the most valuable resource that you have is time. CIA teaches us that there's only three resources that matter in life, there's energy, time, and money. And the reason time becomes such a valuable resource is because you can always create more energy, and you can always create more money, but you cannot create more time. So you are literally always working against a clock, a clock that is ticking, a clock that is counting down, a clock that is rolling forward, and you can't slow it down, and you can't stop it. So when you become task-saturated, you really start to feel the pressure of time. And instead, what you need to understand is, the very same time that's making you anxious is actually your most valuable asset.

- [Narrator] How can I manage my task saturation?

- You can learn to identify and manage your own threshold for tasks so that you never enter a position of task saturation. We have a very simple rule of thumb at CIA that says that however many tasks you think you can confidently carry out simultaneously, subtract two. So if you think you can do seven tasks simultaneously, just do five. If you think you can only do three tasks simultaneously, cut down by two, so you just do one. What happens when you take this simple rule of thumb, and you reduce the number of tasks that you're trying to accomplish by two, you are essentially increasing your resources for fewer tasks, which increases your productivity with each of those tasks. And as you become more productive, you gain momentum with the other tasks, you actually start making progress that you didn't think you would make. And above all, you have this very positive mindset and this very positive attitude that allows you to continue being productive. In contrast, when you allow yourself to reach a place of task saturation, the opposite effect happens, you start to feel like you're not being productive, you start to feel like you're overwhelmed, and you develop a negative mindset that actually starts to create more problems that keep you from being productive. Once you are task-saturated, you have to start working to resolve or reverse your level of task saturation. The first step is one where you have to accept that you are actively in a position of task saturation, which means you will not accomplish all of the tasks that you're trying to carry out. Once you accept that you will not be able to do all the tasks you're trying to do, the next step is to prioritize the remaining tasks that you have. At CIA, we call this operational prioritization, which means that to continue the operation and to achieve success, we must prioritize in a very specific way. When you are in a position of task saturation, it means that you can no longer trust your rational brain because your emotions have taken over, you feel nervous, you feel scared, you feel overwhelmed. The very fact that you are feeling that way shows that your rational decision-making process can't be trusted. This is where time becomes your most valuable asset and your best friend, because time is something that you can't argue with, time is something that you can't debate. So when the time comes that you need to operationally prioritize your tasks, you want to use time to help you put those tasks in order. So you ask yourself the question, "What is the next task that I can carry out in the shortest amount of time?" Yes, I know it sounds simple, and it sounds basic, and it may even sound silly or stupid to you, but it's the very fact that that question is so elementary in nature that makes it so reliable when your whole body is working against you, because you can't deny the simple truth that some tasks can be done faster than others. And as you start to complete tasks in that lens of operational prioritization, you start to gain momentum, you start to reduce your total number of tasks, and you start to gain back confidence as you get back to the place where you are able to manage the remaining tasks that you have. To give an example of how CIA trains us to deal with task saturation and really trust this process of doing the next fastest thing to overcome the sense of task saturation, imagine that you and I are meeting with a terrorist asset in the foreign field, maybe that's somewhere in the Middle East, maybe that's somewhere in Southeast Asia, and we don't know that we can trust this person, maybe they are carrying a bomb strapped to their chest, maybe they're carrying a gun, maybe they have a group of people that are waiting just outside the door to attack us as soon as we sit down. But the secrets that this person has are so valuable that it's worth the risk of trying to have the conversation. We are gonna go into that meeting, and right away, we will be task-saturated. But you have to focus on the next simplest task, which really is just saying, "Hello," to this terrorist target. That is a simple, stupid, basic thing, but it is something that only takes a few seconds before you start making progress. Now, imagine in this situation, when we sit down to meet with this terrorist asset, that the worst really does happen, and that this terrorist stands up and pulls guns out of his pockets, and points these guns at you and me, and we have to immediately flip ourselves into some kind of defensive or survival mode. Again, you realize that we will be in an immediate position of task saturation. What do we do next? Here's a person in the room with us, actively trying to do us harm. Do we help each other? Do we help ourselves? Do we scream for help? Do we make a phone call? Do we try to radio in the military to save us? The answer is, you have to do the next fastest thing. We are trained in that situation that the first thing you have to do is protect yourself. So you take cover, you hide behind a piece of furniture, or you fall on the floor, and you hide behind a large chair or a desk or a table. You try to do something to keep yourself safe, it's fast, it does not take a lot of time, but it gives you the space and the momentum that you need to make the next decision. So from your position of cover, now you know you have one less task, you are now physically protected from the person with a gun. But what do you do next? The answer is, you have to assess the room to decide what your next step will be. So you use your ears, you use your eyes, you use your mouth to speak out and find out whether or not the other person that you're in the room with is safe, whether they're protected, whether or not you know where the shooter is, whether or not you're counting how many times they fired their gun. You're making all of these decisions in real-time, choosing the next fastest decision, because that's what will keep you alive. You're not trying to do the next most complicated decision. You're not trying to solve all the problems at one time. You're not trying to play a hero. You are literally just trying to make the next fastest decision that you need so that you can have one less decision to make so that you can be one step closer to survival. We don't often deal with life-and-death situations in the real world. We don't have to worry about whether or not someone's strapping a bomb to their chest, or whether they're coming in to try to hurt us. But we do have to deal with surprises and unexpected events all the time, surprises from our children at school, surprises from our bosses at work, surprises from our spouse at bedtime. We never know when the next surprise will happen, but no matter when you find that surprise present itself, no matter when you find yourself in that moment of task saturation, your path to survival is literally as simple as doing the next fastest thing, because as you accomplish those tasks, you will build momentum, you will build confidence, you will build a sense of productive activity that gets you back to the place where you feel confident with the level of tasks that you have left, and you will overcome that feeling of task saturation.

- [Narrator] How do emotions get in our way?

- One of the biggest challenges we face when we find ourselves in a moment of task saturation is that, emotionally, we start to say negative things to ourselves in our own head, because we have given up on rational thought, so now our brain has all this extra capacity to start using emotional thoughts. So instead of trying to focus on a productive outcome, our brain starts to self-criticize. We actually start telling ourselves, "Oh, I should have never done this thing in the past," or, "I'll never do that thing again." You start to have all these negative thoughts that pile on with the brain's additional capacity by letting go of rational thought. This is something we call head trash. It's all the junk that comes into your mind where you start to self-criticize and self-demean and self-ridicule because your brain has this additional capacity that it's not using on rational thoughts. Head trash and negative thinking can become a real problem because it actually convinces you to stop trying, it convinces you to give up, it convinces you that you are not capable of things that you actually are capable of doing, because as soon as you start to think you can't do something that you actually have the capacity to accomplish, you end up right back in that very same place of sensemaking, where you try to avoid and escape instead of face a problem head-on, and accomplish what you know you can accomplish when you have rational thought. We are literally wired to doubt everything around us because that's how we survive. But we live in a world where we're trying to thrive and lean into, and sometimes even trust the world around us. But we have not evolved biologically to the place where we can do that yet. Overcoming task saturation through the simple process of being able to do the next fastest task kept us alive when we were living in caves and running from predators. It will also keep us alive and help us to thrive in today's modern world because, at the end of the day, we still view the world around us as something that is either a threat or not a threat. Sometimes your children coming home and throwing a fit is a threat, it's a threat to your sleep, it's a threat to your stress. Sometimes the boss calling you at eight o'clock at night is a threat, it's a threat to your worry, it's a threat to your career, it's a threat to your job prospects. Sometimes when you get a bill in the mail, it's a threat, and we constantly find ourselves living in a world surrounded by threats that make us feel overwhelmed, just like we did when we were living in a cave, and we were threatened by all the predators that surrounded us. We have to understand that the simplest solution is oftentimes the best solution, and that has proven true for us countless times, and that will prove true for you with operational prioritization. So here's my challenge to you. You will feel overwhelmed tomorrow and the day after and multiple times this week. Task saturation is virtually guaranteed if you're in any kind of professional workplace environment because the demands are always going to outweigh your confidence in carrying out certain tasks. So when you identify that moment where you are carrying more tasks than you have confidence that you can execute, try to do the next simplest thing, maybe that means you have to stop to make yourself lunch, maybe that means you have to stop to pour a new cup of coffee, maybe that means you just need to sit and take a few deep breaths for yourself, but you will find that if you accomplish that simplest task first, you will find motivation, energy, momentum, and positive thinking that allows you to continue moving forward. When you practice operational prioritization just one time, you will immediately feel the benefits, but that won't make it a habit, that won't make it a reliable tool in your tool belt, you have to drill this, you have to practice it over and over again, you have to practice it at home, you have to practice it at work, you have to make it part of your routine, that every time you reach that point of task saturation, you will literally stop and do the next simplest thing. And when you see the benefits of that over and over and over again, you will be behaving like a trained operator, like the best in the world, who can travel anywhere to accomplish the impossible.