#151. The Secret Life of CIA Spy Explained - Andrew Bustamante | EveryDaySpy

How Dangerous Is A Spy? By Benoit Kim

What is the secret life of a CIA spy that the public does not know about? Having a public conversation with a spy from CIA is definitely one of them. Will I be on the CIA's watchlist after? Stay tuned.

Andrew Busamante is a former CIA covert intelligence officer, U. S. Air Force combat veteran, and the founder of his multimedia company, everyday spy. Expect to learn about the secret life of a CIA spy, how to self assess like a pro, and practical CIA techniques for everyday folks.

Truth-Seeking and Independent Thinking

Andrew Keen: Truth seeking and independent thinking go hand to hand, especially in the current era of misinformation. Keen: How has your CIA training upgraded your independent thinking and beliefs? What you perceive internally often manifests externally, Keen says.

How to Stress Test Your Ideas

To strengthen our firewall psychologically, you have to stress test your ideas and beliefs. The brain is the only part of your body that's both an organ and a muscle. If you want to constantly vet your own belief system, be willing to hear the belief system of other people.

In the Search for Truth: Objective Truth, Subjective Truth,

Andrew Keen: I always categorize truth into three categories. Objective truth, subjective truth, and practical truth. What is subjective is not often objective, and what is objective is not always practical. Keen: The truth has shades. If we start from practical, practical will lead us to objective.

Cognitive Bias and How to Defeat It

Andrew Keen: CIA tells us that you can't destroy the bias in your brain. Keen: The best you can do is understand that they're there and have red flags to identify them. If you try to fight it, there's an optimal point of resistance, and then it's a game of diminishing returns.

On Truth Seekers and Conformity

There's an optimal level of conformity you need to abide by, because society compresses people. CIA has a bad reputation because their mission is to manipulate people in order to extract secrets to protect american lives. Practically speaking, I have to side with this country.

Don't Want to Know the Truth

Sometimes beholder of information is burdened by the information that applies to you more than anyone. How do you navigate your internal and your world with this information that just ever more, like, cumulative? CIA taught me that people don't want to be told the truth.

Ex-CIA Spy on His Christian Faith

CIA calls ethical flexibility. The idea of moral or ethical flexibility is basically an idea that we're all coded with ethics and with morals. How does your flexible ethics conflict with your christian faith?

The Unknowable Power of Sex

There's a difference between desire and drive. What they desire in their public life is not the same thing as what they want in their private life. If you can accept and work inside that unknowable space, you could succeed or fail.

Have More Self-Analysts Made Relationships More Difficult?

The more self actualized a person actually is, the more difficult it is to manipulate them. The tool we use is understand the difference between assumption and assessment. The only way to counter that is to continuously assess people on an ongoing basis.

How to Stop Feeling Lost in Your Secret Life

Andrew Keen: When I feel lost, deeply lost, the first thing I do is implement a self reflection process. Keen: I'll check in on myself five times a day. You can start making actual practical changes to working your way through that dark feeling, that lost feeling.

In the Elevator With Steve Jobs

Andrew Keen: Having relationships is not the same thing as having meaningful relationships. Keen: Loneliness is the number one cause for depressions and mental health challenges. Those superficial relationships will never replace truly meaningful relationships, Keen says. That's what makes people so vulnerable to espionage, he says.

What Is Espionage?

Espionage is the process of stealing proprietary information. Sometimes you steal that information through a computer hack, right? Sometimes you're stealing secrets that are industrial in nature, having to do with business. Espionage is illegal in every country, everywhere.

How to Ensure You're Not Trapped in Your Echo Chamber

You will always be trapped in your echo chamber. The five people who surround you define the average of what you believe in. If you want to believe and learn more, you have to shed the exact same tribe. When you're not actively working toward problems, the problems will find you.

Podcaster: The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle is that 80% of the population will not remember what you say, 20% will. If you reject that principle, you are rejecting the opportunity to move beyond that divide. To talk about the future of our country, what is the division going to look like?

Sociopaths and their role in the CIA

Do you believe in the optimal level of antisocial tendencies or sociopathy? Why do some people go toward the light whereas many don't? The answer to that lies in the conversation we had about drive and desire.

Reality Break: The CIA Training

Josh: My bigger, more meaningful reality break happened somewhere in the first two weeks of my training at the farm with CIA. The farm is their covert training base, where they train their field officers. My mission with everything I do now is to keep all the blind people in my own country, comfortably safe.

How Do Extremists Get to Radicalize?

We're programmed and conditioned in all cultures to have an external locus of control. What extremism does is it first validates you being held back. It's also important in the world of human asset development, human intelligence. Without tribalism, there is no common enemy.

China Is the Common Enemy

The increasing tension between China and the United States is because China has been a student watching us grow since 1949. China understands that if they take a step too far, they're going to accidentally become the common enemy that unites the U.S. It's a dance that they're doing extremely well.

Cognitive dissonance

Andrew Keen: Do you have a list of mental models or thought exercises that you use to train your mind? Keen: The first big mental model is the idea of perception versus perspective. Keen: I try to always gain perspective by studying the podcast itself.

Cognitive dissonance 6

I used to think that community was like something that had to be large. Now I believe that my community can be as small as one other person. Even your religious leaders are just playing a show. I sense a theme of universal threats or universal truth.

What is a universal truth?

Human beings need connection with other human beings. It's a desire of every single human being. What you can do with that to be true is incredible. It highlights the vulnerability of people who say they're happy being alone.

How CIA Training Prepared My Wife for Marriage

The former CIA officer says his wife was also trained by CIA. He says nothing has shaped his understanding of humankind like being a father. Being a parent drove him to create a business, he says.

Daily Spy: Where Can People Connect With Me?

Every mistake I made with my wife and every mistake you've made with your fiance, it brings us closer together. Our imperfections are what give us fertile ground to connect. Where can people connect with you and just check you out?