CIA Spy: How To STOP Narcissists, SPOT LIARS in 30 Seconds, & Protect Against Being Controlled!

CIA Tactics to SPOT Liars, Narcissists, Manipulators, & Learn to Control Your Emotions to Get AHEAD! Andrew Bustamante (Ex-covert CIA spy, decorated military combat veteran, & founder of Everyday Spy) details his path into the world of espionage! You’re either controlling or being controlled. Learn the difference. This episode has practical tips and tools to protect yourself and get what you want in life. From learning to CONNECT WITH ANYONE, why YOU SHOULD TALK LESS, to the shocking impact of a new world order on global politics & detect when someone is LYING. Andrew Bustamante also breaks down: - Who makes the BEST CIA agents? - Dark truth behind high rates of drug & alcohol abuse, divorce, & adultery among spies - Why sexpionage is a real thing (and how much PAPERWORK is involved) - STRESS of being a spy & how Andrew dealt with it - How he predicted the U. S. Presidential election before it even began - Why he believes America faces a decade of discomfort - How we’re all being manipulated & controlled by hidden forces - Tiny weapons & surveillance tools used in spy life - What it’s like being married to ANOTHER spy - How CIA & military agencies are pushing for better mental & physical health in agents (& why it matters for you too) This episode gives SURPRISING ways you can break free, get ahead, & navigate uncertain times. If you’ve ever been curious about the secret world of spies, politics, and survival tactics, you can’t afford to miss this episode of MBB! Want to learn more from Andy? Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/MayimBialiksBreakdown Follow Andy on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@Andrew-Bustamante Explore Spy School: https://everydayspy.com/ Join the podcast: https://youtube.com/@EverydaySpyPodcast BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  There's a rule of thumb that CIA teaches us. You are either in control, or you are under control. There is no other option. Every day, you have to choose whether to take control, or whether not to take control. And understand that if you choose not to take control, you're giving control to someone else. If you want to be persuasive, first, you need to understand that people don't care about your point of view. But people care very much that other people understand their own opinions. CIA taught me that there's a very simple process to rapidly build trust and influence in other people, asking two questions, and then making one validating statement. You repeat the same cycle again.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  The process, subconsciously, makes the other person think that you are like them. And it makes them feel like they are interesting, important, and they are relevant. They have a dopamine rush that makes them feel good being around you. The fundamental need for human beings that so often goes missed is the need for connection. Feeling seen, feeling heard, and feeling present in a moment with another human being. And it's a very, very powerful concoction when you can artificially create that sense of connection for somebody else.

• 1:39Mayim Bialik?

  Hey, I just found out something astounding. Approximately 63% of those of you listening to or watching My MB Alex Breakdown are not subscribed. We know you're listening, and we know you're watching because of all of the awesome comments you leave telling us how My MB Alex Breakdown is helping you lead a happier and healthier life. We love that. But the best way to support our show is to subscribe. It's also the only way to get latest updates and to know when new episodes drop. So, anywhere that you listen to podcasts and on YouTube, please subscribe. Hit the bell icon so that you know when a new episode drops. Thank you so much, and on to the episode. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 2:14Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 2:15Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. This is the place where we break things down, so you don't have to.

• 2:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Today, we're getting secretive.

• 2:20Mayim Bialik?

  We're getting very secretive. I'm gonna put on my secretive uniform.

• 2:24Jonathan Cohen?

  She's costuming up.

• 2:26Mayim Bialik?

  I'm putting, I'm donning my costume, which is sunglasses and a baseball hat pulled low.

• 2:34Jonathan Cohen?

  I can barely tell it's you. You blend right in.

• 2:36Mayim Bialik?

  Well, today, we're gonna speak to former CIA intelligence officer, Andrew Bustamante. He and his wife were actually both undercover agents all over the world. They ended up leaving the CIA, and they have a website, EverydaySpy.com, and a podcast, Everyday Espionage Podcast. It's an unbelievable story. And you might think, what does my life have to do with spying? Well, have you ever wondered if you should be able to tell if someone's lying to you?

• 3:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Have you ever wondered if you're being influenced negatively, or how you can persuade someone and have positive influence?

• 3:16Mayim Bialik?

  Have you ever wondered if there are basic things about the government that will give you a better understanding of why your kids go to school, what we eat, and how our social structure is organized? Are there things about this past election that we can understand better in the framework of the kind of intelligence that our guest was trained to have?

• 3:42Jonathan Cohen?

  What he explains is that the CIA collects research from leading universities on health optimization, on mental optimization, and they trained their operatives how to be the best versions of themselves. So he has taken that wisdom and shares it with us. He also breaks down...

• 4:04Jonathan Cohen?

  The arc of the US on the world stage. What's going to happen in the next, I think he said, between eight and 10 years? What is life in the US going to be like? And he gives us a description that I haven't heard anywhere else.

• 4:19Mayim Bialik?

  We're also going to talk about underlying forces that influence the decisions that we make in politics, in voting, and even in dating. We're going to do a super fun exercise where I get to figure out if Jonathan is lying or not. This is a really fun episode, and Andrew Bustamante is a super awesome, hilarious, incredibly knowledgeable person.

• 4:42Jonathan Cohen?

  He's also going to seduce Mayim and persuade her to like him even more than she already does.

• 4:47Mayim Bialik?

  Let's welcome Andrew Bustamante to The Breakdown. Break it down. Hello.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Hello.

• 4:56Mayim Bialik?

  I'm wearing my spy uniform today for this interview.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  It looks perfect.

• 5:01Jonathan Cohen?

  This is the first time she's dressed up.

• 5:04Mayim Bialik?

  It's the first time I've decided to wear a costume, as it were, but I will put on my regular glasses.

• 5:10Mayim Bialik?

  Andrew, welcome to The Breakdown. It's really nice to talk to you.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I love that you called it a costume. That is the actual professional espionage term for it.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Legit, legit, I'm not joking.

• 5:22Mayim Bialik?

  It's called a costume when you wear your spy clothing?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, whenever you try to go undercover, in disguise, what the TV shows call disguise, the professionals call costume.

• 5:34Mayim Bialik?

  Like, are you wearing your costume? Or do you say spy costume?

• 5:40Speaker 00

  That is an awesome question. We are not witty enough to actually think through that process. It's a costume department. We don the costume.

• 5:49Mayim Bialik?

  Oh.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Do you have your costume articles?

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the term, that's the inside lingo.

• 5:57Mayim Bialik?

  Can you tell people a little bit specifically about what everyday spy is? Because I would like to think I'd be a great everyday spy, but I took the test from the website, and I don't think it's really my strength. Tell us a little bit about sort of what you have expanded your life to include since leaving being a secret operative.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely. You know, the most dangerous part about being a CIA officer, a CIA spy, isn't the mission. It isn't being undercover in a foreign country. And that's what the movies make it out to be. It's actually very easy to do that job because you've put a lot of planning and training and practice and you've prepared yourself for the op. The most dangerous part of a spy's life is everyday living. And for that reason, CIA puts a great deal of emphasis into training us to optimize every day, to improve our sleep, to improve our memory, to improve our fitness, to improve our relationships, to think outside the box, to challenge norms, to see our own cognitive

• 6:56Speaker 00

  biases, our own cognitive limitations, and then to reprogram or rewire the way that we cognitively look at the world. So it's much more dangerous for a spy to accidentally sign the receipt with their true name than it is for them to have to worry about being shot on a high-speed boat as they shoot through, you know, Venice. So Everyday Spy is my way, my mission, of trying to share with the world how spy education and spy skills can be used to break barriers that hold you back every day. Barriers in your relationships, barriers in your finances, barriers in your job and your career, and overcome them using proven spy methodologies that were given to us when I went through CIA.

• 7:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Before we get to that, I think Mayim has a few questions just on the life of a spy that I don't think she can hold on to.

• 7:49Mayim Bialik?

  Can you explain to people who Andrew Bustamante is?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  That's a complicated question because who Andrew Bustamante thinks of himself to be is very different than what the world thinks of Andrew Bustamante. So I will say that, in a nutshell, the internet will tell you that Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA intelligence officer, the founder of a company called EverydaySpy.com, and a content creator for YouTube and for digital courses that reach around the world. But if you ask my kids or my wife who Andrew Bustamante is, he's a super geek, he loves his family, he really hates to do anything that makes his hair look nice, and he would really feel much happier just eating ramen noodles and watching serial television shows.

• 8:36Mayim Bialik?

  There's so many aspects to your life. I mean, your young life is very interesting. Can you, though, tell us, how does someone become a CIA spy? Like, what is the path?

• 8:51Speaker 00

  It's a great question, because there are many different paths. But there's not an infinite number of paths. There's really only three primary paths. You are either recruited, meaning somebody finds you and invites you in. And that happens either through, you know, college campuses recruiting you because you studied a certain science or you studied a certain language. The military will recruit you in because they find you in some military place and you have a specific skill or a specific utility that the CIA needs at any given time. So you can be invited or recruited in. Then the second primary way is that you volunteer. You apply online or you submit a job application at a job fair, because CIA is at job fairs.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  And then that application goes through a normal process of being reviewed and being determined. And then the third way is you actually try to do something that's adjacent to intelligence. And then during that parallel process, you're kind of directed or guided to go into the intelligence world. And that third process was how I was pulled into CIA. I was actually trying to go into the Peace Corps. I was trying to travel the world and help innocent, you know, starving children and teach microfinance in Africa. That's what I was trying to do. And that's just adjacent to stealing secrets and committing sabotage.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  So I was pulled into this incredible young life, which makes me a little bit nervous for when we start talking about my old life.

• 10:25Mayim Bialik?

  So when you were recruited, had you had any desire to do this? Or was it like completely out of the blue? I actually thought of joining the Peace Corps when I was in college. And I was a science student and they really needed scientists. So I actually learned a bit about it at the time. But, you know, were there things about you that you felt, oh, I actually would be suited to keep secrets and kill people? I don't know.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  It's, yes, I love that. I've never had this question posed before. It's actually a really exciting question. I, I was one of those kids, like, younger than 13 is what I'm talking about, kid. I was one of those kids that like, wanted to be everything. Astronaut, police officer, doctor, CIA spy, fireman, all of it, right? And I thought that the sky was the limit. I could do it all. Well, then I went into the military and I was categorically disqualified from being an Air Force intelligence officer. And, and it was because, it was because the Air Force didn't need intelligence officers. There was an attitude in 1999 that intelligence wasn't that important, that it was much more important to have pilots and much more important

• 11:43Speaker 00

  to have, you know, people who flew airplanes or did navigation. That was, that was the predominant need, until 9/11. And 9/11 happened when I was still in uniform and it kind of changed the attitude about intelligence. So when CIA picked me out of the, the pool of what could have been a world healer with the Peace Corps, when 2007 came along and I was recruited, I had never even considered being part of CIA. I thought that if I couldn't do a military intelligence, for sure I couldn't do CIA intelligence. So I was more excited and giddy that, like, somebody was interested in me. It was kind of like dating, right? I was like, "Oh, somebody thinks I'm cute." And that's essentially what made me say yes to go the

• 12:27Speaker 00

  next step in the next step in the process.

• 12:29Mayim Bialik?

  So, before we continue on this trajectory, was it a good thing that the government wanted to date you?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  They were an abusive partner, but it, it did turn out well for me.

• 12:42Mayim Bialik?

  How long were you in the CIA in this capacity?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  I served with the National clandestine service for seven years, and then I left in 2014. And in 2014, I left service, but I still had a commitment to remain legally

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Adherent to what the CIA said my cover job was. So it took another two years before I could actually be out.

• 13:09Mayim Bialik?

  And you and your wife were, you were like a Mr. And Mrs. Smith?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  My wife and I were both from CIA. We were both in the National clandestine service. That's correct. It's not nearly as cool as the movies make it out to be.

• 13:22Mayim Bialik?

  You're lying. It sounds really cool.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  It had cool parts. It had cool parts.

• 13:28Mayim Bialik?

  It's like sexy.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Nothing is sexy after you have your first child, but everything before that was pretty cool.

• 13:34Mayim Bialik?

  Wouldn't you think?

• 13:35Jonathan Cohen?

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• 13:38Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:22Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:49Jonathan Cohen?

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• 14:54Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:40Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:24Mayim Bialik?

  reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Myambea Alex Breakdown sent you. Think of your average college student who wants to, like, join the Peace Corps. I wouldn't think that's a natural transition to then be an undercover CIA agent. Did you, like, know a lot of things and have an interest in that world? Or, once you were recruited into that world,

• 17:07Mayim Bialik?

  did you then start acquiring all of this knowledge that you need to have to do that? Because, like... I like, I lie like a dog. Like, you can tell when I'm lying. Like, I'm not good at secrets. It makes me uncomfortable. I find it, you know, morally challenging to keep secrets. You know, like, I, I don't, are those skills that, like I said, you were already like, "Oh, I could be a, a secret person." Or did you become that once you were recruited?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  So it's, it's a mix, actually. And you hit on a number of really important parts in your question. So CIA, people come to CIA from all different walks of life. Like I said, some are recruited, some volunteer, some are on parallel paths and then cross over. But just because they're invited to come to CIA doesn't mean they qualify to stay at CIA.

• 17:58Mayim Bialik?

  It's like Men in Black?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  Sort of, yes. I mean, I know it's, I shouldn't be surprised that we keep coming back to TV or movie references.

• 18:05Mayim Bialik?

  It's all I got, bro. I know nothing about the CIA, except what television and movies have taught me.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  So if you recall, during Men in Black, they put him through some, they put Will Smith through a series of tests to see how he would respond. And one of the most famous tests is when, like, an alien pops out, or a little girl pops out with a gun, and he doesn't shoot the little girls, like, cut out.

• 18:28Mayim Bialik?

  And he knew all the things, so he clocked all the things that, like, only he could catch.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Correct. Now, if you recall, part of that was because the Will Smith character talked about his childhood and growing up, and how he learned on the street, you know, how to see things differently. That is very real for the real CIA. CIA is looking for people who are just enough messed up in the head that they can skip ahead in a lot of the training. One of the terms that we use is called moral flexibility, which is exactly why you have a hard time lying, Em.

• 19:02Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, moral flexibility? That just means you can lie.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  It means a lot more than that. It means if, would you, it means if you sat across from a person,

• 19:13Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  you wouldn't want to hurt that person. But if that person threatened to hurt someone in your family, you would have no issue immediately hurting that person before they could hurt someone you love.

• 19:26Mayim Bialik?

  You don't know what kind of bleeding heart liberal I am, but okay.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Well, now you're learning what kind of liberal, like, bleeding heart I am not. And not only that, but you also have to be able to sleep at night. So you have to be able to lie to the face of a terrorist or a child prostitute pimp, right? You have to be able to lie to their face to get them into a situation where they might get hurt or captured or killed in pursuit of some larger cause to protect Americans. And then you know you got them in that situation. You go home, you kiss your daughter on the forehead, you eat a pork chop, you go to sleep, you wake up the next day and you do it again.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  That's moral flexibility. It's not just, I'm gonna lie on my tax return, right? It's, I'm gonna lie knowing that it's gonna get somebody else hurt.

• 20:14Jonathan Cohen?

  How do they test for that?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  There's a very, there's a multi-tiered psychological aptitude battery that we go through. And it's different types of psychological exams. Some of them are panel interviews. Some of them are one-on-one role plays where you have a people who sit behind an invisible wall who watch and assess. There's of course, an actual empirical rubric test that we take. It's many, many hours and interrupted throughout the day. So it's a lot like your, like standardized testing in elementary school and middle school, amped up. And then each of those tests happen with a time-space in between. So there's a time delimeter. You'll start on day one and then you'll come back and take the second part of the test on day, you know, 70.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  And then you'll come back and take the final part of the test on day 120. And you're constantly assessed through multiple different venues and multiple different people along the way.

• 21:09Mayim Bialik?

  When you think about people who lie, you know, there's a lot of talk on the interwebs about like, I was dating a narcissist, right? And one of the things that, you know, is a hallmark of narcissism is often, I don't know, moral flexibility or, you know, an ease with being dishonest and kind of perpetuating lies. Where does that fall in terms, I'm not saying those people need to be spies, but I'm curious, from what you know about moral flexibility, how does that apply to kind of normal, everyday people who encounter people who lie to them?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  It's a great, it's a great point, and you know, it's hard to talk about it in generalities, so I'm gonna get a little bit, a little bit geeky, right? Narcissism is just one version of something that's called antisocial personality disorder. And underneath the umbrella of antisocial personality disorder is narcissism and socialism, or psychopathy and sociopathy, right? Or sociopathy. So you've got these different categories that we use to describe people who are essentially just antisocial to a level that is considered to be a disorder. Well, here's the truth of it. We're all fucking antisocial. Nobody likes people. We like some people. We like the people who like us, and we like the people who think like us,

• 22:36Speaker 00

  and like our music, and like our food, but nobody likes a stranger. Until the stranger proves that they have something in common with the person, right? It's against our very core survival instinct. We don't trust new people, we don't like new people. So what happens is, some of us are kind of grown in our formative years in an environment where we learn to trust secrets and lies more than we learn to trust the people around us. Well, now, if you, like, if you advance that life into their early twenties and early thirties, some people are able to remain protective, self-preservational, without creating a disorder that puts them at the center of their world.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  They still have loyalties and obligations and personal values. A narcissist goes too far. A narcissist has been damaged psychologically to the point where they truly believe they are the center of their universe, and they cannot identify their own shortfalls. Whereas somebody who's, somebody who just doesn't fit into society...

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Right, a sociopath still has loyalties and values and they value their church possibly, they value their family, they value their education, they value something more than themselves, but they still break the rules of society. All of that psychological battery that CIA puts us through, it's not to find the smartest person, it's to find the few people who are already wired with just the right cocktail of fucked up in this and loyalty, obligation, and yet still seeking validation from outside. Because once you find that person, boom, they will do anything for $25,000 bonus every year.

• 24:23Mayim Bialik?

  That's very helpful. My question is, are all CIA operatives of this category similar in that sense? Like, can you say, oh, this one might come from a, you know, white, upper-class family in Connecticut, and this person might come from the streets of, you know, Echo Park or whatever, but is this generally what the profile is? And is that the best way to get the job done? Or is it the best way for the government to be able to control such people?

• 24:57Speaker 00

  It's a great two-part question. So the first, I'll answer the first question first, and then the second part, second, right? Yes, it is a profile that is predictable among CIA field officers. Now, CIA has field officers, analysts, linguists, logisticians, it's got lots of different operators. But when you're talking about what we call a core collector, a core collector is a person who goes out there and their job is to collect information direct from human sources. A core collector who's, has to be skilled at lying, has to be skilled at manipulation, has to be able to keep multiple lying and manipulating relationships in order simultaneously, right?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  That person absolutely fits the profile that we just laid out, Em, right? That whether they grew up in a white, privileged neighborhood, or an inner-city African-American neighborhood, it's not about their socioeconomic status, it's about the psychological imprint that happened to them when they were young. Did they feel like daddy loved them? Or was daddy always gone? Getting on a coke high because he ran a hedge fund? Or daddy was never there because he was gang banging? Who knows, right? We don't know why daddy wasn't there, but the kid certainly feels like he didn't earn dad's love. And now he has to try extra hard to earn that external validation. So that's the answer to your first question. The second part is, is that the best way?

• 26:24Speaker 00

  I would say that we, the government doesn't try to think about what the best way is. They try to think about what is the most pragmatic way. So when it comes to having to constantly recruit new officers, new operatives, and bring them up to a basic level of capability before you deploy them all over the world, where some will get killed, some will get captured, some will be spectacular at their job, right? The government doesn't want to spend five years creating super soldiers. But the government also doesn't want to spend three weeks putting somebody through basic police training, right? So they find this natural balance where in about nine months, they can take a person off the street

• 27:07Speaker 00

  and train them to a basic capability for intelligence core collection. But that nine-month window only happens if they pull from the profile that you and I just talked about. If they went to a different profile, it might take 13 months or 18 months. If they pulled from a more violent profile, it might take six months or four months. But they found this balance over time.

• 27:28Mayim Bialik?

  I've seen those movies too. Here's a question. Does the government know that you're telling people all of the things that you're telling us?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Yes, the government knows, and they have a, they have a mixed reaction to it. Sometimes I get pats on the back. Sometimes I get hate mail. Sometimes I get these reminders in my, in my inbox that say, "Just, just a reminder from CIA's friendly office of personnel that you have a lifetime secrecy agreement, and you will be prosecuted under the full confines of the law if we find that you violate your secrecy agreement." So that's why I don't tell secrets.

• 28:03Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, but I want some. Can we talk around secrets?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm comfortable with lying. I'll just tell you something's a secret if you like.

• 28:11Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, for Pete's sake. How am I supposed to talk to you at all? You could be lying about everything.

• 28:17Jonathan Cohen?

  But instead of facts, what you share a lot is strategies and the techniques that were instilled. And I'm actually surprised that they're even open to allowing you to share these training mechanisms, the ways in which that you succeeded in your spy work, because it does have, number one, it kind of pulls the veil back on how they're training operatives and what the skill set is. And two, it does have some huge implications to people who are not spies, which maybe they don't want them to have those skills.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great point, Jonathan. And, you know, what happened to me, it was my personal experience leaving CIA that put the dots together for me on this. CIA doesn't create top secret training methods. It doesn't create top secret life improvement hacks. What it does is it goes out into leading research universities and it pulls cutting edge research and then it implements that research into its training rubric. So that the ways that we're trained and the ways that we're taught and the tools and techniques that we get for fighting anxiety, for reducing stress, for increasing our memory, those are not top secret CIA methods. Those were things that came from Harvard or Princeton or, you

• 29:35Speaker 00

  know, Cambridge and they came to us by way of our training program, but they're not classified. And because of the government bureaucracy.

• 29:43Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know what you're talking about. What bureaucracy?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Classification has a very specific definition and I'm able to skirt that definition. So I'm adhered to my secrecy agreement, but I'm still able to pull back the veil, like you said, Jonathan. And that's a very powerful veil.

• 30:01Mayim Bialik?

  I have questions. These are going to be silly questions, but I'm going to ask them anyway.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Go for it.

• 30:06Mayim Bialik?

  Did you have your hair like this when you were a CIA operative?

• 30:10Speaker 00

  No, this is my Peace Corps hair. I'm trying to, it's my healing process, Em.

• 30:15Mayim Bialik?

  So you, you had to just look like a, a normal, clean-cut human being?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It, I had to look like the environment that I was trying to disappear into.

• 30:24Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so you sometimes had to wear disguises that made you look like you were from different places?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Correct, so, so I don't know if you can see my giant five-head or my very ample nose. And I always looked like somebody who wasn't important.

• 30:43Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so, um, for people who aren't watching, well, this is a great episode to watch. Just, I mean, your hair is something to behold. I can't imagine people are listening to this instead of watching it. But, um, this would be a place where being sort of ethnically ambiguous or being able to blend into different, like, like I have a friend and you can't tell if she's, she could be Italian, she could be Greek, she could be Eastern European, she could be Russian, right? Like, that would be an advantage, because you could, like, blend in different places. Can you give us two very different examples of places you've had to blend in?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely, so a lot of my operations were actually in East Asia. And the reason I was so effective in East Asia is because they are incredibly racist against anybody with brown skin in East Asia. So if you have brown skin, you're like less than, you're less than the bottom of the social hierarchy. So the last thing they would expect of a brown person-

• 31:39Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Is that they were smart, trained, or trying to steal secrets. They're too busy looking for all the tall, six-foot-tall, like, six-foot-five Captain America, white, American-looking people. That's your spy, James Bond, right? So I operated a lot in East Asia, where nobody knew that I was anything important. And I operated quite a lot in Latin America, where I looked just like every other brown guy in Latin America, right? Even though I don't speak Spanish, uh, well, or-

• 32:09Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, your name is Bustamante, it's like a fantastic last name.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  It is, but it's an Italian, Spanish Bustamante that I borrowed from my wife.

• 32:18Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, another silly question. Did you have to have different facial hair? For disguises?

• 32:25Speaker 00

  I did, I did, and usually it wasn't very well groomed. It was more like as nappy and homeless as you can make it look. So one of the things that I'm still getting used to being on YouTube is actually trying to make myself look like I care about my face.

• 32:38Mayim Bialik?

  Did you have to use prosthetic beards and things? Or it was just your natural beard? You would grow it out?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  So, we do use prosthetics. This is, again, I'm gonna geek out with you for a second here, Em. The way that we use disguise, we call it costume, like we talked about, but the way that we use disguise in the field, there's three different levels. The most advanced level is also the most dangerous level because it's the least predictable level, and that's when we use prosthetics. So, I mean, nobody thinks about this, but if you don't use the right kind of adhesive, in the cold, it'll fall off. In the heat, it'll curl, right? If you don't use the right kind of matching skin prosthetic.

• 33:22Mayim Bialik?

  It'll look fake. You'll blow your cover.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Right away, exactly. Your nose will be like half falling off of your face. So what we try to do as much as possible is not change ourselves with prosthetics. And then if we have to use prosthetics, then we use prosthetics at great distance from the people who are trying to observe us. So for me, they would rather dye my beard, or shape my beard, or even like, let me grow a beard, you know, on vacation for six months, and then bring it back and get it all nasty and dirty, and then let me go out in the field. That's easier than shaving me and trying to put me in a straight-haired beard.

• 34:00Mayim Bialik?

  Have you ever had to be costumed as a woman?

• 34:04Speaker 00

  No, not something I had to do operationally, but I have 100% worn female costumes to see if I could push the skills, my own skills, in costume design.

• 34:15Mayim Bialik?

  And you could not?

• 34:17Speaker 00

  No, it's hard to pull off looking like a girl when you're this ugly.

• 34:21Mayim Bialik?

  Hey. You think you're ugly? No, but I was curious, because in some places you can cover your face as a woman. Like, I've seen that in the movies. Who hasn't seen that in the movies? Or a cartoon?

• 34:32Speaker 00

  It's true, it's true. And that's, you know, when you're talking about a full cover, like when people wear a burka or some sort of hijab. When you're talking about that, that is a different level of disguise. We don't consider that prosthetics.

• 34:45Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  We consider that still level-one disguise, a very basic disguise, because it's just fabric.

• 34:49Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, anybody could do that.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Correct. Well, the eyes, the eyes are the giveaway. And if anybody's ever seen...

• 34:55Mayim Bialik?

  Eyes are the window to the soul.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  If anybody's ever seen an Arab woman in full garb, like, she puts a great deal of effort into her eyes, usually.

• 35:04Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah, when I was in Egypt, it was astounding. Like, it was the most stunning display of makeup, when that was all you can see was eyes. Obviously, there are burkas where you do not even see their eyes, because it's a screen. But, okay, here's another question, which is not as silly. And you don't have to answer, but I'm gonna ask.

• 35:23Mayim Bialik?

  Have you killed people?

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Not intimately.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  And, yes, we have different levels of killing. I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that, Em. We have intimate killing and we have non-intimate killing. Intimate killing is when you deliver the death blow with your hand. Non-intimate killing is when you participate in the demise of a target, the neutralizing of a target, by executing your portion of the job.

• 35:50Mayim Bialik?

  So the government sends you to kill people?

• 35:53Speaker 00

  The government sends all of us, in a way, to kill people. We just have different... It's like an assembly line. Nobody does it all. We just, some people put on the bolt and some people put on the tire.

• 36:03Mayim Bialik?

  And I didn't mean to make this a personal attack on you. I'm saying that, like, when we think about... When I think about, let's say, the army, you know, and I have great respect for people who, you know, who serve our country. And it is a method of our government sending, often, you know, poor kids, who they've promised a college education, you know, sending... People to do the dirty work of a government that also isn't always transparent about why they're sending us places. Do you see your role as kind of an extension of that bureaucratic killing machine?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Dishonesty. Yes, absolutely. And, no, you don't have, I love this conversation right now because that is a very real element that we have to come to terms with after our first or second field tour. After you've been in the field for about two years, you start to see through the smokescreen and you start to see what's really happening, right? And what's really happening is you were promised an opportunity and then you were brought into this very bureaucratic organization where you signed a lot of promises that are legally binding and now, all of the sudden, you have to go, you know, fight for a cause that you don't believe in.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  You have to go participate in a cover-up that you know is not being disclosed to the American people because you've been told that to disclose it to the American people would also mean disclosing it to your adversaries, so we're going to keep it a secret from everybody, right? It's a very difficult world to live in, but again, we are psychologically predisposed to understanding that there are secrets that need to be kept and there are secrets that need to be shared. So it's not an easy lifestyle. That's why many people who have made it 15, 20 years in the agency, they come out psychologically flawed for the rest of their life. They can't recover, right?

• 38:08Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, you would, we now have a larger understanding of what happens to soldiers and I think that this is true even if you feel that it is a just cause. You know, I want to set aside the notion of like, you know, participating in Murder, assassination, what'd you call it? Non-intimate killing? You know, that's gonna do something. Seeing the destruction of war, that's gonna do something to you and it's gonna change you and it causes trauma. But I, I think like, kind of setting those things aside for the moment and kind of talking the way we're talking right now, it's very interesting because, you know, what is the

• 38:47Mayim Bialik?

  framework for your, or anyone's, personal comfort in being hired by a government to do things that you may not agree with? Where is that line?

• 38:59Speaker 00

  And what's amazing is you, you don't ever think of that. When you are a good fit for the job, you don't think about that line on day one. You stumble into that line later on and then you realize, oh shit, like, maybe I bit off more than I can chew. And to CIA's credit, they're familiar with this buyer's remorse. So there's, there's a very, a very strong mental health component at CIA. They've got staff psychologists, they've got, you know, staff therapists, they've got staff PT, personal trainers and exercise scientists, who are all there to help you develop healthy coping mechanisms to deal with what you do every day.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And when the time comes that you can no longer cope in a healthy way, they just take you off the line and then they put you in administrative jobs where you can't do any damage and then they treat you with, you know, whatever they can treat you with and whatever you choose to treat yourself with, which is why we see such a high rate of drug use and alcoholism, adultery, divorce, because lives just fall apart when, when people stay in service that long.

• 40:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Are those mental health providers not incentivized to keep you going and to sort of push the limits of your coping mechanisms?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  That's exactly what they're incentivized to do. And that's how they climb up their professional ladder, by finding new treatments, new combinations, new practices that take a field officer from six years of field utility to eight years of field utility. They take them from one or two war zone tours to three or five war zone tours, right? If you can prolong the utility of an, of a, a field operator, you've essentially increased the productivity of the entire workforce. And it's very, it's very clinical, very bureaucratic and very mechanical in that way.

• 40:48Jonathan Cohen?

  And I don't want to comment on, at all, on- The role of this organization or the people in it. But in a way, you're putting someone into a pressure cooker that you know eventually they're going to crack. And it's like, how do I keep them there as long as possible, functioning to do the job as well as I can, knowing that I'm just waiting, monitoring them to say, this eventually is going to be too much. They're going to not be capable of doing it anymore. And I'm just waiting for that. That's kind of, that's an intense.

• 41:18Mayim Bialik?

  You just described a lot of people's relationship with God. Right? That God sets us up like, I know this is not going to go well on this planet. Right? But let's just kind of like, see what happens. I mean, this is sort of a microcosm, if you can call it that. It's a macrocosmic microcosm of kind of our existence. Meaning like, I've seen that Twilight Zone episode, right? Where it's like, you're, you wake up and no one else is there. And it's just like, you're in this planet of no one-ness. It's like, what am I doing here? What's my purpose? What am I supposed to do? Like, guess what? That's your lot in life. I mean, I don't mean to get all existential, but it's kind of interesting.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Well, it's also, it's to a, you're, you're right, Jonathan. And I think what's important is going back to the macrocosmic microcosm that M just talked about. What you see at CIA, what you just laid out at CIA, is exactly what happens in the military. Why are there VA benefits? Why is there a veteran status? Right? Why are we seeing constant support for homeless veterans and suicidal veterans, et cetera? Because the military has learned over hundreds of years, and they learned it from the British before them, right? That you're putting people into a pressure cooker, maximizing their utility, hoping they don't die in combat before they have an ROI on their training costs.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  And then, at the same time, you need a certain, a number of people to quit instead of retire, because only the people who retire are going to get continuing benefits for the rest of their life. It's a strange, one of the things that CIA taught me that I that I make a mantra right, you know, every day is that, you know, the United States runs like a business. Everything runs like a business. It's a cost benefit analysis. It's a return on investment versus diminishing returns. That's how the world really, really works and CIA doesn't work any different than that.

• 43:12Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to get into the pulling back the curtain because through your time at CIA, you've seen how the US operates, how the world operates from your unique vantage point, and I want to get into that. Just wrapping up what we were talking about in terms of your fieldwork, how much of fieldwork is neutralizing targets versus collecting information?

• 43:38Mayim Bialik?

  Versus just hanging out, not looking like yourself and seeing what happens?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  And when you're hanging out, not looking like yourself, usually you're collecting information. So it's it's about, I would say honestly, it's like 98% collecting, 2% neutralizing. Because once you neutralize a target, they're no longer a viable source of information. So you need to string that target along as long as possible, maximize everything you can get from them, and only when the calculation becomes that they are more of a risk than a return, would you consider neutralizing them.

• 44:11Mayim Bialik?

  Do you have to have sex with them?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  You can have sex with them. It's an option, but there's a lot of paperwork involved and and

• 44:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Is that the main deterrent is the paperwork?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  That is the main deterrent, to be honest. That is the main deterrent.

• 44:23Mayim Bialik?

  Just like dating me.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Second to that, in the United States, we're really funny about sex. Sex in the United States oftentimes means connection, relationship, obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everywhere else in the world, sex is just sex. So if you go to bed with a Russian, chances are they're going to be way more in a position of power over you than you are over them the next morning.

• 44:44Mayim Bialik?

  Wait, wait, sorry, just Russians?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I mean, it goes on. It's Russians are just the the primary villain in all the movies, right?

• 44:53Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, got it. Like, like, I'm thinking James Bond, right? Like,

• 44:56Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 44:57Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. But you could make a spy baby. What do you do? You don't want to get somebody pregnant? You can't make a spy baby?

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Well, you know, they have things now in modern times that can keep you from making a baby the first time.

• 45:08Mayim Bialik?

  Nothing is 100% except abstaining.

• 45:12Mayim Bialik?

  That's what I tell my children.

• 45:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's talk a little bit, I mean, we could go down the spy sex route. And I think that would take the entire podcast.

• 45:21Mayim Bialik?

  It's all I'm gonna think about for the rest of the podcast while I listen to you guys.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  I have that effect on women sometimes, I'm not gonna say.

• 45:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, the difference between spies is fascinating, but I don't think we have enough time with you to cover all of these topics.

• 45:36Jonathan Cohen?

  I would love to talk a bit about the United States. You were very clear that you believe Trump was gonna win.

• 45:46Jonathan Cohen?

  We're recording this fairly soon after the election. You were right.

• 45:51Mayim Bialik?

  I knew he was gonna win too. I'm not even a spy.

• 45:54Jonathan Cohen?

  But you didn't make any videos going on major podcasts claiming.

• 45:58Mayim Bialik?

  I could have made all the videos. I could have told everybody how this was gonna shake down. But go ahead.

• 46:03Jonathan Cohen?

  You also said that there was only one person in the Democratic Party that could have beaten Trump.

• 46:11Jonathan Cohen?

  If people haven't heard that, which I think, you know, much of our audience might not have, can you just briefly explain who that person is and why you think they could have beaten him?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Michelle Obama is the only Democrat in the country that had a chance of beating Donald Trump. And I think that she knew that. I am certain Barack knew that. And the entire Democratic National Convention must have had a sit-down fireside chat over bourbons and cigars, recognizing that they only had one person who was a viable match for Donald Trump. And it's because what we just saw in our election cycle is that it's not about policies. It's not about power. It's not about, you know, democracy and freedoms. It's a popularity contest tied in with political credibility.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  And Michelle Obama has incredible amounts of both political credibility and popularity, just like Donald Trump has, right? And even though it's easy for us to criticize Donald Trump's political credibility, he was a former president, he has his name on hotels all over the world. That, in the eyes of the average American, that is a high level of credibility.

• 47:30Mayim Bialik?

  Talk to us about the average American.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  The average American is much more disappointing than any of us want to admit to.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  And that's just the truth of it, right? The average American, I mean, whether you're, everything you look at, whether you're looking at salary or education level, or whether you look at hours spent behind a screen versus hours spent reading a book. On average, when you talk about the bell curve, right? A true average, the average American is not very well-informed, not very well-educated, not very physically fit, not very health-conscious, not, does not make a very good salary, and does not spend a great deal of time engaging in personal enrichment activities. So, that is the, that is the primary bell curve of America. And, just like we were talking about earlier, Em, it's because that is a very good cog in a large machine.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  The, out the extremes of the bell curve, that's where you find the people who are the most vocal, the people who are the most accomplished, the people who are the least accomplished, and also, the most vocal, right? So, what we really see, day to day, are the two outliers, active on TV, active on the internet, active on YouTube, active everywhere, right? The people producing are the outliers, for the most part. The, the silent center is the piece that everybody forgets, is the real decision-maker for the future of our country.

• 48:57Mayim Bialik?

  Let's talk a little bit about the female aspect here, though. Because many people, um, you know, I live in Los Angeles, so it's kind of like, with all due respect to my city, the streets are littered with traumatized humans right now, who like, cannot even lift their heads up. Like, it's like a, it's like a wasteland here. And what a lot of people are saying is, the whole country prefers a rapist over a woman. And I feel that's too broad of a brush to be using when we try and accurately assess this situation. And also, I do believe that certain regions of the country, my region of the country included, tend to be a bit dramatic.

• 49:41Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning, that's like a really like, "Oh my god, oh, it's catastrophic," and it's, you know, all these things. But if we're to take a more, kind of, measured view... Can you explain, because a lot of people would say, "I don't think a woman is gonna cut it for most Americans." "I think they want dad." "No matter what, like dad's always done this job." "Why would mom plunge the toilet when dad always plunges the toilet?" "And every time he plunges it, like at some point, we get to poop again, right?" "So, talk a little bit about the female aspect of it." "Because I think so many people wanna just be like, 'People hate women.'"

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, gender is a very real thing. "And the bias towards paternity in the United States is also a very real thing." "But, race and racial injustice is also a very real thing in the United States." "And so are racial biases." "And yet, we still saw Barack Obama take the office for two consecutive terms" "And have a very successful presidency."

• 50:41Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I don't, I think certain people never recovered" "From the fact that we had a man of color as our president." "Like the birth, like the birth, like they're good." "People went crazy, they didn't give him a moment's rest." "Literally, because they were picking on him." "Like he's a secret Muslim operative." "Like, it was crazy, like that's nuts."

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Remember, we're talking about the bell curve. "What you're referencing right now is an outlier." "The person who can't sleep at night because there was an African-American" "Or there was a black president." "That person exists, but they're not the silent center."

• 51:14Mayim Bialik?

  Alright, so we had a black president, so that was good.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Correct, and I think, honestly, I think that the center, "I think the majority of Americans would welcome a female president." "I think they would be excited for a female president."

• 51:27Mayim Bialik?

  They just didn't want this one.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  That's exactly it. "The problem is that the Democratic National Convention" "Has put forth two females to the ticket for president." "Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, right?" "Neither of them, frankly speaking, was a woman" "That the majority of Americans wanted to see be the first."

• 51:51Speaker 00

  They didn't want that. They want, like, think about what Barack Obama was. Barack Obama was a man of color who worked his ass off to come from nothing to be the leader of the free world. That's what we want to see in a first.

• 52:04Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of the criticisms, though, that people did have of Hillary Clinton and a lot of the criticisms people have of Kamala, and honestly, I think a lot of the criticisms people would have about Michelle, is things that only women get criticized for. And I'm not looking to, like, bring down the patriarchy so we can have a woman president. But I also think, like, you have to understand the system that you're in. And the fact is, a woman is going to be judged differently. And we have to figure out how you deliver a package that people are going to want, even if we think they shouldn't feel the things they do about a woman. About her voice, about her suit, about her fucking hair. Like, I don't care, but a lot of people do.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  I get you. And I don't disagree with you. I just, what, I think that the measurable pieces of impact here are that when, when you stand, when you are a minority of any variety, and I would include women as a minority, if you're a minority of any variety, and your platform promotes your minority, you are immediately ostracizing everybody who is not part of your minority.

• 53:12Mayim Bialik?

  And men are very, very sensitive to being left out. They are.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Well, not only that, but it creates a weird sort of hypocrisy. It creates a weird sort of hypocrisy in a party that says that gender shouldn't matter, and then promotes femininity, right? It's difficult when you say that age shouldn't matter, but then you highlight youth. It's difficult when you say that wealth shouldn't matter, but then you highlight, you know, poverty. It's just, it, that, it's not about, you know, individual, it's not about people and their beliefs or value systems. It really is about the core way the brain processes information. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that people don't know how to process. And when people don't know how to process, they take the easier way out. Donald Trump is a very simple thing to process.

• 54:00Mayim Bialik?

  Really?

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Oh, he's a very simple thing to process. Most people don't like Donald Trump. They just chose him because they didn't want the alternative.

• 54:09Mayim Bialik?

  Right. And they were, and at some point...

• 54:13Mayim Bialik?

  Most of our country is comfortable with all of the things that he says about all the people that he hates and all the people he wants to step on. And the violence that he speaks of when he speaks of women.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  I appreciate your point of view, being a person in LA.

• 54:32Mayim Bialik?

  It's not about, hold on one second, whoa, whoa, whoa. This isn't about a point of view. I'm talking about the things that Donald Trump says that he stands for is what people are choosing. It's not about a point of view.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  I think if you believe that people are choosing what Donald Trump stands for, that is your point of view.

• 54:49Mayim Bialik?

  Got it.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  I think there are plenty of people out there who are choosing Donald Trump for all sorts of reasons other than what he stands for.

• 54:56Mayim Bialik?

  I agree. I agree. I also, I do want to just bring one thing. You mentioned femininity. That actually does not really have a place for me in this conversation. Maybe you meant femaleness, you know, that like you're presenting like, oh, men and women should be equal, but like, I'm a woman, right? Like, that's not necessarily femininity. Like femininity would imply like, you know, is like, they said that Kamala was Donald's worst enemy because he couldn't pick on how ugly she was, which was, you know, his favorite thing to do about Hillary Clinton.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  No, that's totally fair. And I did not know that femaleness is a word, but I know that now.

• 55:29Mayim Bialik?

  Well, femininity implies something different, but I think you meant, I think you meant if you're gonna act like, oh, we're all equal, she should just be a neutered, a neutered female. Maybe we shouldn't use any pronouns, but that's also offensive to people.

• 55:44Jonathan Cohen?

  Andrew, the world is a complicated place from an international diplomacy standpoint. Currently active wars, you know, there's almost two different roles for the president, one internationally and one nationally. You know, what does it mean to have Trump on the international stage now? And where are we in terms of the arc of American dominance? Are you concerned that we're at the end of that arc?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say that I'm, I don't think we're at the end of the arc. I don't think the evidence suggests we're at the end. I do think that it's not a smooth arc. There might be, you know, some fits and bursts, some peaks and some valleys. And we're somewhere in those peaks and valleys right now. What I will say is that Donald Trump represents a very, what we consider to be a traditional dominant, forceful, bullish, American idea. He's not a diplomat. He doesn't believe in alliances. He doesn't believe in, you know, equality. He believes in superiority.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  And within the government, it's important to understand, inside the government national security arena, that is how everyone thinks. American primacy is the term that we use to define the imperative of the future of the United States. So whether you're talking to the Army, or whether you're talking to CIA, or whether you're talking to the FBI, you will hear the term "American primacy." It means America must be the prime, the number one, the only superpower. Not necessarily because we are the best ever, but because if someone else rises to our level, it means that our national security interests will be threatened.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Equality means that whoever was number one is no longer number one. It means that there's less control. It means that there's more risk. It means that there's less opportunity. Not no opportunity, just less opportunity. And that is the way the national security sector works. So anybody who has, who, you know, was raised in a family that believes that American primacy is important, anybody who was cultivated professionally or educationally to believe that American primacy is important, they are going to lean towards that message much more than some of the other conflicting messages that we've seen from the Biden administration or the Harris administration, especially when the truth, Jonathan, the truth of what

• 58:20Speaker 00

  we see play out in the headlines, is that we don't always tell the truth about why we make the decisions that we make policy-wise, why we support Ukraine but don't support, you know, Israel, why we, why we label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists, but Iran labels the US military as terrorists.

• 58:42Mayim Bialik?

  That was pretty clear to me, but I could just be speaking for myself.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  There's all these different pieces that because of the advent of technology and the spread of social media and the availability of information, we're now seeing that people have more access to create that cognitive dissonance than ever before.

• 58:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Which countries benefited or had a vested interest in one candidate over the other becoming the US president?

• 59:06Speaker 00

  You know, this was a, this was an amazing year for intelligence sharing and intelligence communication in advance of the election. 2016 was really the first time that Americans realized that there's election meddling. There's always been election meddling. It's just that 2016 was the first time that it became mainstream media. And then in 2020, it became a topic again. But from 16 to 24, you really got to see the intelligence community, what we call the IC, create a strategy for how to collect and combat actively foreign meddling and foreign intervention.

• 59:46Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, can you explain for, for people who may not understand? Do you mean that other countries might try to change the number of votes so that a particular person will win?

• 59:58Speaker 00

  No, no, no. We're not talking about anything that has to do with the actual manipulation after the vote. It's all about the influence campaigns in, in the lead up to the vote.

• 1:00:08Mayim Bialik?

  Got it.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's when the meddling happens so that people can send false information, misinformation, disinformation to sway that big chunk of middle voters. Because those middle voters might, they might choose somebody based on a whim because they watched a movie or-

• 1:00:23Mayim Bialik?

  They might not know if Puerto Rico is referred to as trash, and then they might say Puerto Rico's trash, let's vote for that guy.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have no idea with the, so that's what the foreign governments are very good at meddling with disinformation and misinformation. But the intelligence assessments were, were really, really clear and really consistent.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Russia wanted a Trump victory. And it's because empirically, it's because, or at least what's known in open source, it's because Trump has made it very clear he wants to end the war in Ukraine. He wants to call a ceasefire and he wants to move on. That's exactly what Vladimir Putin wants too. Because that's in Putin's vernacular, that is a victory.

• 1:01:08Mayim Bialik?

  It's what the Ukrainians would want, except not by being handed over to the Russians, which is presumably what's going to happen.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  I mean, it depends on if you're talking about what the Ukrainian people want. I don't think the American population has a very clear idea what the Ukrainian people want. What Zelensky has made clear is he wants the full return of all original pre-Krymea invasion Ukraine, returned to Ukraine. And that was the promise that he made. That definition of victory is a very difficult definition to achieve, which is why anything less than that is a Putin victory. So Putin and Russia wanted a Donald Trump presidency because of that primary issue. However, Iran, who is a close ally of Russia, did not want a Trump victory. They wanted a Harris victory. Because Iran is very, very familiar with how to skirt the sanctions and get around

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  the diplomatic pressures and the economic sanctions when there's a democratic president because democratic policy is usually open to more abuse than Republican policy. There's less sable rattling, there's less violence, there's less, you know, intense military action. There's more soft power action. And Iran hates Donald Trump because Donald Trump was the commander in chief when IRGC General Soleimani was killed. So they very much wanted a Harris victory instead of a Trump victory.

• 1:02:31Mayim Bialik?

  So I wonder if you can talk a little about good guys versus bad guys. You know, nothing is as simple as that. And, you know, many of us were raised, you know, with an understanding, for example, that Russia is a country that does not have a free press. Russia is a country where I happen to know many people who fled Russia and Ukraine. They were not allowed to practice, even practice their religion. They weren't allowed to have rights as Jews, for example. And there was a huge campaign to evacuate, you know, the Jews of Russia and the former, you know, USSR. And...

• 1:03:08Mayim Bialik?

  You know, for many of us, we were raised with this sort of notion of like Russia is that's, I mean, if I had to say good guy or bad guy, like a lot of people would say like, that's a bad guy, right? Or, you know, Kim Jong-un, like North Korea, like, oh, that's, and I understand this is a lot more complicated and who's to say, but, you know, for, for some of us, you know, October 8th of last year brought about a real turnaround in, you know, individual groups that are terrorist organizations that were now being called freedom fighters and, you know, are being celebrated in many fringe aspects of this country. But what happened to good guy and bad guy? And do you understand that for some

• 1:03:52Mayim Bialik?

  people, Trump making nice-nice with a lot of people that many of us believe are bad guys feels problematic?

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. It makes, it's the, the notion of a dichotomy between good and bad is an oversimplification of life. And what happens is when we're young and someone, and our parents and our community are trying to teach us the basic survival mechanisms to move forward, it's very easy to create dichotomies. Good, bad. Rich, poor. Expensive, cheap. Right? Hot, cold. It's very easy to teach a dichotomy. But the thing is, as you grow and mature, you realize that the world we live in is much more nuanced than that. So to your point, Em, about Russia being a bad guy, do you know why we won World War II?

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Because of Russia. Russia was our closest ally. And Russia's strategy in World War II that defeated Nazism was the same strategy they used when they invaded Ukraine in 2022. So it's the same Russia in many ways, even though it's gone from being the Soviet Union to being just Mother Russia. So Russia used to be good, now they're bad.

• 1:05:09Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, if you're a Jewish person, Russia was never good. Like, it got worse when Russia came in after liberation.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  The notion of good and bad, the notion of good and evil, it's transient. People had different opinion about Germany, and people had a different opinion about Spain, and people had a different opinion about Argentina. Like, our opinions about countries change and shift as they relate to this question of American priorities and American interests. And that's why we have very famous statesmen who have quoted, right? There are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.

• 1:05:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think that the world can exist without NATO? Without the alliances that currently exist? I think one of the main concerns about Trump as a destabilizing force and putting America first and, you know, creating much more of a nationalism is that, you know, the world orders that have existed since the second, end of the Second World War have created some stability. Yes, there have been wars, of course, but there hasn't been a next world war. And, you know, people are concerned that the undercutting of these alliances could leave a lot of chaos.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that, I think that what's happening is we're seeing a blending of two ideas. And people don't realize there's two distinct ideas that are blending into one. The idea that we need a new world order, I would say that is an accurate idea. The world order that was established after World War II, for anybody who doesn't recognize it, that world order was defined by American primacy. NATO was built, in large part, so that the United States could remain in control of Europe, right? The United States rebuilt Germany, rebuilt France, rebuilt the United Kingdom on the back of loans and weapons and the, and the proliferation of technology that was American technology.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  NATO understands that, right? You've seen Germany and Spain and France take more of an independent streak in the last eight years because they realize they're kind of under the thumb of the United States, and that is the old world order. What we need for a more democratic world is we need more powerful democratic alliances. The actual current NATO alliance is not democratic. It's very dictatorial, based on American power and American primacy. Donald Trump, in one case Donald Trump is saying, "We need to separate ourselves from NATO." That's kind of accurate. It's just that he doesn't understand that separating ourselves from NATO by making us less free than Europe is not a good idea.

• 1:07:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Are you hopeful or concerned about the next, even four, six years? Not even to make it about Trump, but about, you know, the changes that you see happening on the world stage?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  I'm pessimistic about the next 10 to 12 years. Because I categorize this as saying, "The United States, don't forget that we're less than 300 years old. We're going into middle school right now. We're coming into puberty." Whereas Russia, China, I mean, ethnic groups that run their own countries are thousands of years old. We're only a few hundred years old. We haven't figured this whole thing out yet. We don't realize that, you know, the pants that fit us really well back in 1970 don't fit us so well in 2024.

• 1:08:33Jonathan Cohen?

  We've gained a lot of weight.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  So I'm pessimistic because it's gonna be uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to learn, I mean, I make all the boy jokes about middle school. It's uncomfortable to learn that you can't wear sweatpants anymore, and you can't wear silk boxers anymore. And, you know, it's uncomfortable to deal with zits and acne and body odor, and that stuff's uncomfortable. You gotta figure out how to live with those realities before you can evolve to the next level. The United States has a decade or so of discomfort before we learn how to move forward and evolve in a positive way.

• 1:09:07Jonathan Cohen?

  What do you think that looks like for the middle of the bell curve that we talked about? Everyday people, Americans, living life, what does that discomfort look like practically?

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the good news is that to the everyday person, to the average bell curve person, it's small changes. It's more expensive beef. It's more expensive milk. It's more products that are coming in from countries that you don't know about, and less imports from countries that you like. It's more expensive plastic because we're not gonna take it from China anymore. It's More mandatory recycling, right? It's things like that that the average person is going to work through. They're going to feel the pain, but they're going to feel it in small amounts. It's really the bigger corporations, the bigger American governments, entrepreneurs who are making, you know, seven figures.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  That's where they're going to feel the biggest shifts. Because some years they're going to get taxed at 38%, and some years they're going to get taxed at 24%. And they're never going to know what taxes is going to look like. They're never going to know when their investment on waterfront property in, you know, Fort Lauderdale is going to be good or bad. They're never going to know when the legal system changes, right? And the Supreme Court justices change. It's going to be big changes for the, for a small amount of people and small changes for the rest of us.

• 1:10:29Mayim Bialik?

  How about the people who want to get abortions? I mean, I think that's what a lot of people worry about, you know? Like, the things that the Supreme Court actually does get to rule on.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  I, that, I for sure agree. That the people, having the Supreme Court determine what rights we do and don't have, that's a difficult thing. Because one person can change

• 1:10:49Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  that entire policy. And we will continue to see, especially as we, I don't think the, the end of partisan politics is anywhere nearby. So we're going to continue to see this jockeying, not just of Supreme Court justices, but of all the people who are politically appointed. The head of CIA is a political appointee. The head of FBI is a political appointee. And that's not before we start talking about Health and Human Services, IRS, you know, the Education Department, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to continue to see these machinations and feel the discomfort as we figure out how to create a consistent improvement strategy, rather than the constant chaos of adolescents.

• 1:11:27Mayim Bialik?

  Do you think there should be a third party? Like, I've heard people talking about this kind of left and right, but like, is this a thing?

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  I would love for there to be more than two parties. The bicameral system that we have is not effective. It's definitely not effective for where we're trying to go in the future. You can't have coalitions like you have in Europe. You can't have independent candidates because they don't meet the bureaucratic requirements to even be promoted, right? And then, even if you look at how our system currently works now, it's not the American voter who gets to choose the candidates that get to move forward. It's some group of people that we don't even vote on. So there has to be a change to that process if we want to believe that we will have leadership in the future that truly represents the people. Right now, what we have is a popularity contest between two candidates that we may

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  or may not have really chosen in the first place.

• 1:12:21Mayim Bialik?

  Well, in a country that's extremely large, has way too many people to even have us like... It's like we're not in 8th grade and we're choosing a class president. That's kind of what it feels like, you know?

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  You're right, you're right. It's like we're choosing our class president before we even realize...

• 1:12:36Mayim Bialik?

  Right, this is like literally the president of this entire nation. And I don't know, I'm thinking of other democratic countries in the world that have this many people, like it's not a thing.

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's true. It's a weird place where the United States has found itself. And that's a part of our strength, but it's also a part of our vulnerability. And it's what our enemies try to exploit, is our own development process. They try to call us flawed and broken and corrupt, when we recognize that we're just figuring it out every day.

• 1:13:08Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I mean, look, in the global stage, like, the notion of like, "we're just trying to figure it out," doesn't really fly. I mean, I'd like to ask one question about this kind of divisiveness, and I'm not trying to be a threat monger here, but, you know, one of the things that Sinwar said, you know, that he learned when he was in a prison in Israel, was that when there is infighting in Israel will be the best time to seize upon the vulnerability of the country. And October 7th happened after years of protests and civil unrest among the Israeli population.

• 1:13:46Mayim Bialik?

  I don't, I would obviously don't want anything horrible to happen to us. And I wonder if we're in this particularly vulnerable place because we're so fiercely in opposition here about kind of core values, or at least that's what it seems like. Does that put us in a vulnerable place, like for, I don't want to say our enemies, but for adversaries in the world?

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  I think Americans understand there's a divisiveness that we need to get past if we are going to increase our level of security. Does that mean that our enemies are going to be able to unravel what we've built because of our divisiveness? That's the real question. I think right now, the answer is no. There's no level of sophistication that Russia, or China, or Iran, or North Korea has.

• 1:14:33Mayim Bialik?

  That to be like, hey, everybody get off the floor. We're gonna have a big old kumbaya with Russia so that we can defeat Trump. That's not gonna happen. My yoga studio is not gonna be taken over by Iranian operatives.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. So I'm not worried about that, but I do believe, you are totally right, that there is a vulnerability that's inherent in our bipartisan nature right now. What I think is also important to understand, at least from my experience, is that our core values, I don't think our core values are as opposite as sometimes politicians make them out to be. Right? I think there are plenty of people out there who are actually independents, but they're forced to identify with one of two camps.

• 1:15:16Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe we need a parliament. I've been saying this for quite some time. Maybe we need a parliament.

• 1:15:21Jonathan Cohen?

  So what my dad says all the time is that all the US problems are, I'm Canadian, so he says that all the US problems are because we don't have a parliament. Do we think that this is the US's major Achilles heel or vulnerability right now? Or is there another blind spot that we should be aware of?

• 1:15:39Speaker 00

  I think there's two blind spots that we need to be keeping an eye on, right? The first is, we are an inherently conflict-oriented country, right? Like, we love conflict. We glorify war. We glorify debate. We glorify arguments.

• 1:15:58Mayim Bialik?

  And we lie about it and we call it Thanksgiving.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  That too. But we love conflict. And as long as we celebrate conflict, then what we're doing is we're preventing ourselves from ever understanding the real value, the genuine value, of collaboration, of cooperation, of alliance and working together, right? It's very, very difficult. It's very, very difficult for people to develop more skill for collaboration and cooperation when we are celebrating in media and celebrating in school and celebrating in salary competition. So that is one Achilles' heel. The second Achilles' heel we have, I think, is when we don't recognize that we are a giant bully. That is what the United States is. We're a gigantic bully.

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  And the people who are our closest allies are our closest allies because they want to be friends with the fucking bully. They're not our friends because they think that we're the best democracy. They're not our friends because they believe in our ideals. They believe they're our friends because we are pragmatically a good friend to have right now. And you've seen those alliances break down and change over time as people have seen other bullies rise. And now, what we're seeing is that the countries that are succeeding around the world, they're taking a page out of our book and they're essentially becoming little fiefdom bullies on their own. That's how China has gained success in the last 20 years, right? That's what has made Russia successful in its small sphere of influence. That is what we continue to see happen in Mexico and what we see even happen in Europe.

• 1:17:28Mayim Bialik?

  I do agree what, I mean, I can't help it. When I look at what just happened in this country, you know, yeah, people chose the bully. People chose the person who teases special needs people and who mocks people who choose to change their sexual or gender identity. Like, we, that, that's who this country just elected. And the fact is, like, I get it, like, people want him to get the job done. And like, even with Israel, like, I, there's some complexity there for people. But, yeah, it makes me kind of uncomfortable that I, you know, I'm a, a peace-loving person who wants to, like, kumbaya it, you know, globally. And also, I understand that you can't just lay down and be mowed over by people who are burning American flags all over the world.

• 1:18:13Mayim Bialik?

  So, you know, to me, though, it makes me sad, sad, I'm having feelings. It makes me sad and it makes me worried for my kids, for your kids, for all of this next generation that, you know, is, in this case, living in a country with someone who really ran on a campaign of, I don't make friends, I'm not friends with people. And you're not gonna feel friendly with the people that I'm gonna denigrate as you step over them on the way to the, you know, the ballots. Like, it's hard.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  I don't necessarily see it as hopeful that the bully won the election. But I do see it as hopeful that almost half of the country wanted to take a different approach.

• 1:19:01Mayim Bialik?

  Well, wait, hold on one second. It's not, it's not that half the country wanted, half of the, I mean, a third of the country was gonna vote Democrat and probably a third of the country was gonna vote Republican. Somewhere in the middle is where this teeter point came, where people are, where these states flipped. It's not like half the country used to vote for her and went for him, we're, we're divided.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Well, what I'm saying is, I'm, I'm looking at the popular vote numbers, really, is what I'm talking about, when it comes to the votes that were actually cast, not the Electoral College, because Electoral College is a, a machine of all of its own, right? But when you just look at, you know, I, you know, I voted for this person, I voted for that person, and you compare that apples to apples.

• 1:19:38Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, yeah, what I was saying is, to say that people wanted something different, that would imply that half the country used to vote for Biden and was like, I want something different, I want Trump. You're saying that the majority of people have decided that they don't want to continue the administration, essentially, that we have had.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say yes, because I think that's, I think we're getting at the same thing, right? But that there, it's not like, it's not like 80% of our country decided that we want to be bullies. Right? It was it was a empirical process, a mathematical process that landed on the current president through electoral votes. But there was a huge component of our country that said, I don't think I want to do this. I don't think I want to go down this path. There's got to be a different path. Right? And that's so that tells me that we're not sold out to the bully cause. We're still deciding what our future is going to look like.

• 1:20:29Mayim Bialik?

  That makes me feel better. Thank you.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  That's why I was hoping like that's how I see it too.

• 1:20:34Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Jonathan Cohen?

  There's so much in your work that in Everyday Spy that relates to people in their everyday life with amazing tools and skills that they can learn, which I want to get to. But before that, I think it's, you know, one of the things we do on this podcast is, you know, pull back the curtain a little bit to explain how things are operating in ways that people might not realize. You know, we talk about that, oh, you're making decisions in your health and you're having this outcome that you might not realize is because you have these other behaviors that you don't realize are causing this this effect. Can you describe or give us some examples of things that happen in American life that

• 1:21:15Jonathan Cohen?

  people don't realize are being influenced by factors behind the curtain? Like, we recently did an episode on UFOs and now the conversation on UFOs is like, oh, wait a second. Yeah, there is all this evidence that they exist and there are aircraft and biological.

• 1:21:33Mayim Bialik?

  And the government knew.

• 1:21:34Jonathan Cohen?

  And the government knew and the government just hadn't, you know, felt comfortable telling people. You know, I'm curious about your take on that and your experience if you saw inside the CIA anything that, you know, maybe you're not allowed to speak about. But what else are people not realizing that like shit isn't as it appears?

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  Um, you know, this is, it might be a boring example, certainly not as sexy as UFOs. But but the calculus that I learned at CIA is an economic calculus.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  The United States was built to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution. So the reason that our children go to preschool and stand in line isn't because it's efficient. It isn't because it's good for our kids. It's because, at a certain level, the preschool wants to be able to minimize the number of staff and maximize the number of students, and that's easier when you make the kids stand in line. But it's also part of the overall programming so that a five-year-old standing in line now will become a law-abiding, tax-paying, non-argumentative subordinate when they're 35, right?

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  And that process is ingrained from everything, from our driver's license applications to schools to, you know, waiting in line to cast your vote, right? But what's really fascinating is that when you look at the numbers, economic analysis numbers, you see that most people, 80% of people, are going to reach and lose their highest income before the age of 55, even though we retire at 67. Because there's an incentive in both government and corporations that once somebody starts to push 50, 52, 54, it's cheaper to get younger talent and to let go of the older

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  person who costs more money. So the end result is that in retirement, most people are retiring on less than what they ever made at their peak impact, their peak financial impact. That economic engine that drives the United States is what has made us a superpower. It's what makes us have the ability to afford the world's most advanced and sophisticated military. It's what gives us the ability to have the most advanced intelligence collection capability out there. It's what gives us worldwide reach. But at the same time, it's essentially guaranteeing that not everybody will get an opportunity to reach their fullest potential. It's only the outliers who either get opportunities given to them, which is why you see the Kennedy

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  family, you see the Bush family, you see these families that somehow perpetually have opportunities. So it creates this opportunity or creates this system where few people will be given opportunities and then the other half that essentially buck the system and create their own opportunities are also equally celebrated. So it ends, it creates this kind of dearth of hope for everybody else in the middle. And as we get older and we face reality, we give up on that hope more and more. And then we just kind of fall back on crossing our fingers and wishing and hoping that we just somehow don't get ground down by the system.

• 1:24:59Jonathan Cohen?

  It makes me think that if you're not questioning why you are required to do almost everything, then you're just becoming another cog in the wheel and, you know, but that, there's a risk in that, right? You're called antisocial if you start questioning the norms of society. But if you don't question the norms of society, they don't have your best interest at heart. They're not looking out for you.

• 1:25:22Speaker 00

  It's important to understand that the American government is not there to support the American people. The American government is there to perpetuate the survival of the American government, right? That's what it's there for. American primacy is not there for Jim and Jill and Jason, right? It's there so that there's another generation of American primacy. And that was a very hard lesson for me to learn. I joined the military, I joined the CIA with a very clear image in my head of me doing things to protect my sisters and me doing things to protect my mom and me doing things to make, to make my life better for my future children.

• 1:26:03Speaker 00

  And then when I was actually inside the machine, I started realizing, I'm just doing this because there's a senator in Kansas who's trying to get reelection and he made a campaign promise about high fructose corn syrup and now they need intelligence about Cuba and Cuba's sugar crop. And I'm like, this is, this is not what I signed up for. But I'm inside the machine and I can't do anything about it. And it's a, it's a twisted world. If you choose to see it that way. It's a harsh, ruthless, pragmatic world. If you choose to look at it with a lens that's absent of emotion.

• 1:26:39Jonathan Cohen?

  So you need to be somewhat antisocial in order to break out of the system.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  I would say you need to be, you need to explore non-conformation, right? Non-conformist behavior. You don't have, if you're standing in line or if you see your kids standing in line at preschool, you don't have to be the parent that goes in there and throws a fit. You go in there and you say, why do you have a line before they wash hands? And then the teacher's going to give you an answer. And if you're, if you're a conformist, you will say, oh, thank you for the answer. But if you're willing to practice non-conformist behavior, you'll say, is that the only reason? Are there more reasons? Is this really the best process? Could we let them wash their hands on their own?

• 1:27:23Mayim Bialik?

  Well, look, what happens is you have an elite population that can afford to remove their children from the military system of standardized school. We did Waldorf. We're a Waldorf family where the teacher would ring a little gentle bell when it was time for the kids to come in. And if they didn't come in, she didn't yell at them. She would just do an activity inside and they would eventually follow her. Like the Pied Piper thing, right? But I ended up not, I mean, I couldn't afford to send my kids to that kind of schooling. We did like, you know, an inexpensive parent and me class, learn some of the principles. And then we homeschooled because we also were like, I don't know that you need to sit in a box and have a bell ring every 50 minutes, which is how I was raised. And like, I turned out okay, right? Like, that's what everyone's going to say. Like, we turned out okay.

• 1:28:08Jonathan Cohen?

  But that's what people say is, oh, this is just the way it is. And, oh, you turned out fine. Why are you complaining? Stop, like, they don't want to think. And therefore, they don't ever build a better solution. And they refuse to acknowledge the ingrained behavior that is then required. And actually, Mime, I would say that you have a really hard time challenging rules. It's only through this podcast that you've started to be like, wait a second, there are things that are happening here that we're not being told about.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  And that that could have a huge impact on our lives. So I would say that the school system didn't do that well for you.

• 1:28:43Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I think not to answer for Andrew, but you know, people who are afraid are easy to control and people who are weak are easy to control. And so the fact is, and I don't mean to like go into this, but like, you know, I always say this, why was, why were mushrooms and pot made illegal? Because stoned people will not go into a country they have no business being in and slaughter innocents. That's why. And when people are in touch with something greater than themselves, they don't want to massacre people on behalf of a government who's making money and making deals behind their back. So like, that's the structure. I mean, I've seen X-Men movies. I know what happens when people are different. They group them all together.

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  There's, I would add to your list of, you know, poor people are easy to control and stupid people are easy to control and, you know, ignorant people are both easy to control and easy to make. And that's the North Korean model. They build an ignorant population.

• 1:29:44Mayim Bialik?

  And that doesn't mean that North Korean people are stupid. What you're saying is ignorant, meaning not aware of the options, not aware. And it's, I mean, I've seen those movies too. The one person who's like, we don't have to live like this and they lead a revolution, right? But like, that's also, that's Harriet Tubman. That's like all these great, it's Martin Luther King Jr. It's all the people who said like the, we will not live like this that break out of that.

• 1:30:06Speaker 00

  There is another way, right? And, and until somebody is able to say there is another way, many, many people don't ever think that there is another way. They think that they're faced with the options in front of them, right? Are you going to order chicken or salmon at the wedding? And people look at the two options and if they don't like either option, they choose the option they like the least.

• 1:30:27Mayim Bialik?

  And I'm like, I'm vegan and I hate mushrooms, so don't give me a portobello.

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  Nobody thinks I don't have to eat at all at the wedding. Nobody thinks I'll just drink beer, right? That they don't ever think that there's another way.

• 1:30:40Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan and I talk a lot about what we think is a, it's not even a conspiracy, what we think is an overt, you know, plan by the government to make us sick and then sell us pills to make us better. Can you talk a little bit, you know, our favorite example is the ultra-processed food study that came out. And like, lo and behold, what Europe has known for decades, America was finally like, "Hey, it seems like something weird's going on with ultra-processed food and your health." And then very quickly after that, the government was like, "That study was incorrect. They did the analysis wrong. The algorithm was incorrect. And ultra-processed food is really good for you." That's like cuckoo pants crazy to me and Jonathan.

• 1:31:21Mayim Bialik?

  Is there anything you can speak to about sort of the, the food complex that is this country? And like, we're like, you know, Food, Inc. people. We're like, you know, those kinds of hippies. So, anything you say is safe here, but I'd love to know your take on sort of what's going on with the industrial food, you know, complex in this country.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  You know, this didn't really come to my awareness until after I left CIA. Because you can imagine, when you're at CIA, you live in a, in a, in a vacuum. And you don't realize how many resources are at your disposal when you're at CIA. So, working at CIA also means you're working with Navy SEALs, you're working with Army Delta operators, MAR-SOC, you're, you're working with all the most elite services out there. To your exact point, M., our institution does not feed elite operators processed food. They don't. And they train us, they train us to find whole food sources.

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  They train us to sustain ourselves in the field on whole food sources. And they constantly build us back without prescription drugs as much as possible. And when they turn to using prescription solutions for elite operators, that's when they take those operators off the line. So they understand.

• 1:32:40Mayim Bialik?

  Wait. This is mind blowing.

• 1:32:43Speaker 00

  At an institutional level, they understand that optimized optimized effort comes with whole food and non pharmaceutical solutions. And they give us all the resources, the tools, the training, the methodologies, the staff, the support that we need to optimize ourselves because they need us to be optimized. And when the day comes that we can no longer be optimized without some sort of processed or pharmaceutical solution, that's when they replace us with somebody else. And that's that. When I was in the middle of it, I just felt like I was king of the world. I was getting all this great, you know, great meat sources and great vegetables and great fruits and, you know, I was, I was, I was getting hours dedicated in

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  my day for meditation and mindfulness. I was like, this is like, this is easy living. It wasn't until I left that I was like, oh, I see what was happening here. I see why you paid somebody $250,000 a year to be my exercise scientist, to calculate exactly what my caloric intake should be, my exercise output should be, to measure my muscles and my VO2 max. I see why you did that. And I also see why the rest of us are stuck paying $115 a month or an hour to some trainer down the street at Planet Fitness.

• 1:33:59Mayim Bialik?

  And being sold toys with our food.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  And yeah, exactly. And, and that becomes the most available food source is a processed food source.

• 1:34:07Jonathan Cohen?

  One of the things that you speak about is influence on people and people also influencing us, knowing when we're being influenced and how to increase our influence. Both of those, one is I'm not going to be able to assert myself, get promoted, maybe make a relationship I need to. My finances might struggle, my, my overall health might struggle if I'm not able to have the control over my own life. And the other is, um, how do I, if I have an idea and I want to put it out in the world, I want to influence Andrew to like what I'm talking about. Like, can you describe some of the tools and strategies that you've learned to both understand when someone is controlling you and how to influence other people?

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  There's a rule of thumb that CIA teaches us that's scary, but simple. Right? And, and that rule of thumb is that. You are either in control, or you are under control. There is no other option, right? And it's one of those simple binary dichotomies that, you know, we all use to teach people a simple truth. There's, in reality, there are lots of other gradations between the two. But when you take that at face value, it's really about understanding that every day, you have to choose whether to take control, or whether not to take control. And understand that if you choose not to take control, you're giving control to someone else. And when you talk about influence, Jonathan,

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  it's a perfect example because you hear people talk about influence all the time. And there's books about influence, and there's gurus who teach you how to build influence, and business coaches who teach you how to build influence. And you also hear the word persuasion. And there's YouTube videos about persuasion, and there's TikTok videos about persuasion. Persuasion and influence, oftentimes, people misunderstand them as the same thing, when they're two very different things, right? Persuasion requires that you put active energy into someone, in person, right? And that you were using emotional ploys to persuade their way of thinking.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Influence happens when you are not with somebody, but they are still recalling your knowledge, or your belief, or your ideas.

• 1:36:29Mayim Bialik?

  Or your lies.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  Or your lies, exactly. So persuasion comes before influence. And you have to invest in mastering persuasion if you ever want to be a person of influence. Because the influence is the roof on the house, but all the other structure of the house is built on persuasion.

• 1:36:51Jonathan Cohen?

  How do I become a better persuader?

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  First, you need to understand that people don't care about your point of view. But people care very much that other people understand their own opinions.

• 1:37:04Speaker 00

  So if you want to build persuasion, if you want to be persuasive, you have to learn how to understand and identify what other people value, and then demonstrate back to them their own values. If they care about freedom, then you need to highlight freedom. If they care about environmentalism, then you need to talk about environmentalism. If they care about the future of their children, then you need to talk about the future of their children. But if you sit there and talk about, you know, the incredibly high tax rate that you have to pay, when they're worried about how they're going to put food on the table, you're not going to persuade them, right? So if you can learn to-

• 1:37:42Mayim Bialik?

  Meet people where they're at.

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Correct. It's something that we call perspective. If you can gain perspective and let go of your own perceptions, then you have a real opportunity to build persuasive appeal, which will turn into long-term influence.

• 1:37:58Mayim Bialik?

  What I love about you, Andrew, is that you could have any number of jobs. Like, if I were talking to you right now, I'd be like, "This is the best social media influencer manager I've ever met in my life." And then when you're talking about politics, I'm like, "This is the best politician I've ever heard explain Israel to me." Like, when you talk about, you know, costume, I'm like, "This is the best prosthetic makeup artist I've ever met." You're like that guy. You've got this, like, enormous amount of knowledge about all these different things, but they all go together because of your training.

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Right. And that's what I find to be so exciting about owning and operating my own company. And my company is an education company, right? I'm essentially a giant international school. And I love that because I get to offer people the opportunity to learn something new without forcing them, or grading them, or objectifying them to some arbitrary set of rules, right? It's an invitation to learn, instead of a mandate to learn.

• 1:38:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Are there specific strategies to use to try and uncover what someone values quickly? Is it just listening to them?

• 1:39:06Speaker 00

  Let me give you a really, a really great tool that blew my mind when I went to CIA. So I was 27 years old when CIA recruited me. I thought that I was a good conversationalist. I thought I was pretty good with the women. I thought I was like, at least, a better-than-average social talent. And then I realized very quickly that I was a dumbass, right? And a big part of my dumbassery was that I spent most of my time talking about me. Talking about my history, my experience, my qualifications, my ideas, right? CIA taught me that there's a very simple process to rapidly build trust and influence in other people.

• 1:39:48Speaker 00

  And that process involves asking two questions and then making one validating statement. And then after that validating statement, you repeat the same cycle again. And that the process of asking questions and validating other people's ideas, subconsciously makes the other person think that you are like them. And it makes them feel like they are interesting and they are important and they are relevant. And then they have a dopamine rush that makes them feel good being around you.

• 1:40:23Mayim Bialik?

  Now you're a dating expert.

• 1:40:25Jonathan Cohen?

  What's a good intro? Like role-playing? You're gonna ask M. You're gonna persuade M. You're gonna get influence over her. I mean persuasion first. What's like, obviously it's situation-dependent, but are there like, is there a bank that you start with? Like your go-tos?

• 1:40:44Mayim Bialik?

  Also, I'm an actor, so it's a little, I mean, I'm sure you are also an actor. I mean, that's kind of what you had to do as a spy. But let's do, can we do it?

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Let's do it. So, so M, I'm gonna ask you not to act. I'm gonna ask you to try to be genuine.

• 1:40:57Mayim Bialik?

  I don't even know who I am, so this'll be fun.

• 1:40:59Speaker 00

  That's all right. So, so from what you've shared today, I already know you're a mom and I already know that you're, and I've watched your channel enough to know that you've been through a divorce, right? So, let me start with this, M. I will start with, what did you do first thing this morning with your kids? What was the first thing you did with your kids today?

• 1:41:18Mayim Bialik?

  My kids didn't stay over last night and my other one's in college.

• 1:41:22Mayim Bialik?

  But do you want me to, do you want me to take an example of when my kid was at my house?

• 1:41:26Speaker 00

  No, I want, I want to start right where you were.

• 1:41:28Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, of course you do. I can see what you're doing. Okay, go ahead.

• 1:41:31Speaker 00

  I need to meet you where you are, right?

• 1:41:33Mayim Bialik?

  My older son's in college and my younger son is at his dad's, so I woke up alone today.

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  What's it like to wake up in an empty house when you know you're a parent?

• 1:41:44Mayim Bialik?

  It's, it's two things. It's kind of a sadness, kind of a pull. My son describes it as there's an invisible string, you know, that's, that's very, very long because wherever he is, I'm attached to him. And then there's also an element of kind of like, I don't have to wake up, make a lunch and get the kid on the bus by seven in the morning. So a little bit of relief as well.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  I swear that you just described what I wonder about my own future. Like when my children leave, I feel like I'm gonna be sad, but I also feel like I'm gonna be happy.

• 1:42:16Mayim Bialik?

  Should I write you a check for a million dollars? Is that what happens?

• 1:42:21Speaker 00

  So what does that mean for your, what does that mean for your work productivity? Does that make it very easy to work? Or does that make it kind of distracting to work?

• 1:42:28Mayim Bialik?

  No, I think I'm, I'm pretty practiced at it. I've been divorced for 12 years, so I, I have a rhythm that I've fallen into when I'm alone.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  What does the rhythm for work look like?

• 1:42:38Mayim Bialik?

  Well, it means that I can take my time, you know, making my protein smoothie or whatever I'm gonna do for breakfast. And then I get to sit down, do some emails, you know, look at my phone, check the news just once. Don't want to get obsessed about it.

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  I, I actually also start my day with a protein smoothie. I use a protein called True Greens. Have you ever heard of them? They're pretty amazing.

• 1:42:59Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  So what's the protein that you use?

• 1:43:02Mayim Bialik?

  I use, well, they, they used to sponsor our podcast. I use Purie, which is, it's a vegan protein powder.

• 1:43:09Speaker 00

  I also use vegan proteins because, first of all, I just find that they are easier to digest. But also, I find that vegan proteins are a more viable solution for long-term muscle growth when I'm older.

• 1:43:22Jonathan Cohen?

  That was a cycle of three. That was a cycle of three. The sec, the last cycle had one question and a follow-up. But I could feel the rapport building. It was happening.

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  How did it feel to you, though? And, and you know what was happening to you. So how did it feel to you?

• 1:43:39Mayim Bialik?

  It felt like I was at a bar and a guy was trying to get me into bed. But that's just because that's my fear about people like trying to connect with, you know, me.

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  Also, she doesn't like to talk about herself in, in, when asked questions specifically. So like you're putting her in a very awkward position.

• 1:43:57Mayim Bialik?

  I, I definitely, I felt like, oh, you're relating to things. You're finding the similarities, not the differences. So, yeah, I would imagine that, um, that it does. It feels like a connection. It feels like you get me. It feels like I want to share more with, it feels like I'd go on a date with you if you gave me your number.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  So, so here's the twisted side of this very effective dating technique.

• 1:44:20Mayim Bialik?

  I don't want to make a spy baby yet, though. We need to have three dates first.

• 1:44:23Jonathan Cohen?

  He doesn't have protein in the morning. He never has imagined his children leaving the house. All of that was fake.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  No, actually, the twisted part here is I now know a great deal about you, Em. But you still don't know anything new about me from that process, really.

• 1:44:40Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:44:41Speaker 00

  I know that you start your day in the morning. I know that you like to move slow. I know that you have a child in college and a child that's at your husband's house. I know that you used to have a protein sponsor for this podcast.

• 1:44:54Mayim Bialik?

  Did I not ask enough questions about you? Is that why we're not going on a date?

• 1:44:58Speaker 00

  I grew up on Blossom, Em. If you want a date, I will fly to LA and take you to dinner. I will just tell my wife I have to do this.

• 1:45:05Mayim Bialik?

  But, but what you're saying is that what you were able to do was establish rapport, establish trust and this kind of connection without you actually having to reveal anything about yourself. So that if that's the relationship you need to establish out in the field, you haven't really given up anything of yourself.

• 1:45:23Speaker 00

  Correct. It's a tool that we call informational superiority. Now, you feel good being around me, hopefully. But you don't know anything about me. So when you meet your friend and you say, "I met this guy." She's like, "Tell me about him." You're like, "I actually don't know anything about him."

• 1:45:38Mayim Bialik?

  But he's very interested in me, and that's what's most important.

• 1:45:43Speaker 00

  But we've all had that moment. We've all had that moment where we realize, "I actually don't know anything about that person."

• 1:45:48Mayim Bialik?

  That's me and Jonathan. It's like, why are we here?

• 1:45:51Speaker 00

  That is now, essentially, Jonathan, what we are able to do now is, we just created a systematic process to make that happen all the time. With clients, with customers, with possible future dates, with in-laws, with business partners. It's predictable, because the human brain is predictable in any language and any age.

• 1:46:13Jonathan Cohen?

  So what you've created is a way to get information, but more importantly, for someone to feel comfortable with you that you have shown interest. And because what most people actually want is for someone to be interested in them and to have space held for them and reflected back and finding similarities. There's nothing people love more than, "Oh, my gosh, that person understands me and has little sparks of similarity."

• 1:46:41Speaker 00

  You're exactly right. And you know, the way that we talk about it at CIA is that the core need, the fundamental need for human beings that so often goes missed is the need for connection. And that connection is nothing more than feeling seen, feeling heard, and feeling present in a moment with another human being. And it's a very, very powerful concoction when you can artificially create that sense of connection for somebody else. Because it means that there will never be a lack of people who want to connect with you, even though they don't realize they're not connecting with you on a personal level.

• 1:47:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I mean, this is also a dangerous tool to use too much. Because if you don't know that you're doing it, the user of the tool can, you know, if you're not a spy, can cut themselves off and actually, you know, not form that reciprocal relationship. These are, you know, to be used carefully.

• 1:47:41Speaker 00

  Correct. And that's what you're getting at there is really the difference between what we call a trained person and an untrained person. Em talked about narcissists earlier. Narcissists are untrained. They go to the school of on-the-job training. They learn through the school of hard knocks. They don't learn how to genuinely connect with another human being. A trained person learns how to use these skills to gain practical advantages for operational goals, whether that is a goal in your everyday life, or a goal in your career, or a goal in your personal life. But also, a trained person understands that they have to accept genuine connection in order to be optimized as an individual.

• 1:48:26Speaker 00

  You have to trust somebody. You have to connect with somebody. Otherwise, you will never be optimized. You will lose that basic core need of human connection.

• 1:48:35Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, I'm fascinated about that because the movie version of the spy is someone who is isolated. You know, you have to give up everything in order to join this world.

• 1:48:45Mayim Bialik?

  I've seen Liam Neeson do that many times.

• 1:48:48Jonathan Cohen?

  You can't have the relationship. You have to be willing to leave at a moment's notice. And everyone in your... And of course, the hero of whatever movie this is finds the one person they don't want to walk away from, and they end up changing their life. But what you're saying is actually, you know, fundamental to optimization is that there has to be a break in the character. You can't be the spy 24/7, or you won't function.

• 1:49:11Speaker 00

  Correct. You have to have... It's a matter of energy transference. And I don't mean woo-woo hippie L.A. energy. I mean, actual, like, national lab scientific energy. Human beings are energetic sources, and we transfer energy to and from each other. There has to be a time when you recharge your energy because so much of your day is spent shedding energy. You put energy into your children. You put energy into your spouse. You put energy into your employees. You put energy into strangers. You put energy into the Uber driver, who's making you nauseous, but you don't want to yell at him. Like, you put energy out into the world all the time.

• 1:49:53Speaker 00

  You must have a way of recreating or generating energy. And one of the best ways to do that is by being around another energy source, where you're in receive mode, and they're pouring their energy into you.

• 1:50:06Jonathan Cohen?

  How do you tell if someone is lying to you?

• 1:50:08Mayim Bialik?

  Because their lips are moving, Jonathan. Their lips are moving.

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  There's a number of ways to do this. Most of the stuff that you see on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram is not right. It's not about looking for small facial movements. It's actually about things that are much bigger than that. One of the best things you can do to find out if somebody's lying to you is you can ask them a question about how they feel, right? Ask them a question that we call a feelings question, right? For example, you must have been so happy when you saw the birth of your first child. What happens is you're asking a question that will absolutely create an emotional response.

• 1:50:46Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, there's a lot going on down there if you don't take drugs, but sure.

• 1:50:50Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, I was a little terrified, but.

• 1:50:51Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, you were talking to him. I was like, I was the one doing it. I wasn't really watching, but yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  But what ends up happening is you can see the challenge. You can see the effort on their face if they're trying to lie. Lying takes effort, even for the most experienced liar. Lying takes a lot of effort. So when somebody shows very little effort in their face and their body movements and their intonation, there's a good chance they're telling the truth.

• 1:51:19Mayim Bialik?

  Or they're a sociopath.

• 1:51:21Speaker 00

  But when somebody puts a great deal of effort into their lie, you can actually see it. You can hear the pause. You can see the confusion on their face. You can hear them blubber through their words. So that's just one actual tool that we use. It's not a bulletproof tool, but it's one proven tool to actually see if someone's lying to you.

• 1:51:39Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm curious about the pause. Well, I'm curious about two things. The first is, what does effort look like? You talked about pause. You talked about like a facial reaction. So I'm curious to hear a little bit more specifically about that. And then also, how does that differ than when you asked me that question and you proposed an emotion to me, which would be a natural emotion? I felt like I paused for a minute because I was unsure the emotion you presented to me wasn't really authentic to my experience. And so I was almost auditing and trying to say, what would my experience be? So I felt like I kind of looked up and I had my head tilted for a second.

• 1:52:21Jonathan Cohen?

  And I was like, oh, actually, when he was born, it was a difficult birth and I was kind of terrified and I was a new dad and we did a home birth. And I was like, holy shit, there's a human being now. Like, it wasn't, you know, like the looking at your son in the movie and being like, holy, you know, just happiness. It was like a bit of terror too.

• 1:52:41Speaker 00

  And that's a very honest answer. And I think your example is one of the reasons why it's not a bulletproof solution. But let's do a real quick field experiment right here, right? Do me a favor. Jonathan, push your glasses up a little higher on your nose, just so that we can see your eyes. Perfect. Now, M, can you see Jonathan?

• 1:52:59Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:53:00Speaker 00

  Okay. Your job is to watch his face and make observations that you can describe physically. Don't tell me about observations about what you feel. Only tell me objective observations about what you see, okay?

• 1:53:16Mayim Bialik?

  Turning off my feelings.

• 1:53:17Speaker 00

  Perfect. Perfect. Jonathan, I need you to relax, because you're already preparing yourself for an exercise.

• 1:53:23Jonathan Cohen?

  I was like leaning forward a lot. Okay, I'm sitting back. Go ahead.

• 1:53:26Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm gonna ask you, the first question I ask you, I just want you to answer honestly.

• 1:53:30Mayim Bialik?

  I'm really good at this also. I just want to give you a heads up, because I grew up in a very emotionally volatile home. And I grew, no, but I'm saying, I grew up tracking. I grew up like super hypervigilant. I can pick up off, like, if someone's uncomfortable about something that like they don't want to talk about, I know it from like 50 yards away. So I think I'm gonna be very good at this game.

• 1:53:51Speaker 00

  Perfect. Perfect. Okay, so your job is to watch Jonathan. Jonathan's job is to be Jonathan, relax. I'm gonna ask you a question. It's gonna be an emotional question, and your job is just to tell the truth. All right? What was it like when you met your wife for the first time?

• 1:54:09Jonathan Cohen?

  I have to think about when...

• 1:54:14Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm really thinking.

• 1:54:17Speaker 00

  Stop right there. I don't need any more. We've got everything we need.

• 1:54:20Jonathan Cohen?

  So what happened? Yeah, I'm so curious.

• 1:54:22Speaker 00

  Tell me what you saw, M.

• 1:54:24Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so what I saw is I saw a miniature like record scratch in his eyes. I saw his eyes kind of like, they didn't freeze, but it was like everything stopped. And I could see like the cog, like the wheels start turning.

• 1:54:42Speaker 00

  That's your emotions. That's your emotions. Which, what did his eyes do? Tell me what they did.

• 1:54:47Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, it looked like they tracked a little bit down and then they stopped.

• 1:54:54Speaker 00

  So you may not be as good at this as you think you are. But luckily, we have a replay. So, production team, play the replay. What you actually see is Jonathan's eyes move up and to his left. Now Jonathan's Canadian, primary language is English, correct Jonathan?

• 1:55:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:13Speaker 00

  So that means that he reads from left to right. So what you just saw him do is he referenced chronology in his memory, trying to find what, when did I even meet my wife? Trying to find the memory. And then, you could also see, his forehead remained flat. He didn't furrow his eyebrows with confusion or effort. He just looked up to try to find the memory, and then he couldn't resist smiling. He couldn't resist it. And he was talking about how he had to think hard, and he was talking about how he was trying. And normally, you might think that somebody who's stalling is lying, but you could see in his face, he was recalling the joy of his wife.

• 1:55:53Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, they're not married anymore, but yes.

• 1:55:56Speaker 00

  When they first met, for the first time, though, that's positive stuff, right? So you could see all of this unhindered emotion. So whatever you were going to say, Jonathan, had a high likelihood of being truthful.

• 1:56:08Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, this is the most fascinating little exercise, I think, we've maybe ever done on this podcast. And I've watched a lot of your content. I don't know if you've done this before, I haven't seen it. I'm fascinated also by tracking of eye movements. The notion of looking up and to the left as a way to find a memory is fascinating. There's a lot of neurological and neuromuscular research that actually you can use eye movement to reset body patterns. And so to think about tracking that as it relates to how people are thinking is really interesting to me.

• 1:56:48Speaker 00

  And again, it's not bulletproof, because if you're talking to somebody who maybe is dyslexic, or if you talk to somebody who their primary language is Arabic, they're gonna learn, they're gonna reference their chronology differently, right? So, now the second exercise. Jonathan, you have to relax, but your job is to lie. Your job is to lie, right? And M, your job is to observe the observables, always knowing that we have the replay in case, in case you don't see something exactly right, okay? All right, Jonathan, another feeling question, but this time I need you to lie, okay?

• 1:57:24Jonathan Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:57:25Speaker 00

  Were you afraid that you would be lonely for the rest of your life when you got a divorce?

• 1:57:30Jonathan Cohen?

  No.

• 1:57:32Speaker 00

  What did you see, Em?

• 1:57:34Mayim Bialik?

  His eyes didn't move.

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  Nothing moved. Did you see how rigid the whole thing was?

• 1:57:40Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:41Speaker 00

  This is another great replay. It's another great replay because you could see the pause that I was telling you about, Jonathan. Remember how I told you, look for a pause? If you were telling the truth, you would have answered right away. I'm guessing that I asked that question and the first thing that went through your head was, yes. And the next thing that went through your head was, I have to lie. No.

• 1:58:02Jonathan Cohen?

  It's interesting that I actually had to ask myself, I wasn't sure if I was or not. I mean, the biggest thing when I got divorced was actually not, the idea of not living with my child was the biggest thing. That's the first thing that hit me. And there was a moment, actually, when I first left the house. When, it was actually one of the hardest parts, was I came back and I was visiting the house at the time and I hadn't been gone very long. And my son was maybe five, maybe six at the time. And he had climbed into the washing machine and was standing in the washing machine because he was too small to like reach in and get the clothes and he liked to do his own clothes.

• 1:58:47Jonathan Cohen?

  And he was in his underwear and nothing else and he was standing in the washing machine and like really proud of himself as he was pulling the wet clothes out and throwing them into the dryer. And I thought to myself, you only get that moment when you live with your kid. You don't get that in a visit. You don't get that any other time than when there's just unstructured moments. And I remember like that, that's what was sort of the forefront, like my notion of like what's going to happen to me in relationships was like so far out of my consciousness that like when you asked me that question, I had to sort of travel back, but also I knew I was supposed to lie, so I wanted to answer quickly. So that was, it was a tough question. It was a really tough question.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  It was just an emotional question. And I think your story, which is a gorgeously beautiful story, by the way, the story that you just told, really shows the pause that Em and I saw was only probably

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  Three quarters of a second. And all of that happened in your brain during that pause.

• 1:59:48Jonathan Cohen?

  So fast.

• 1:59:49Speaker 00

  And that's what makes it so, so viable, such a valuable tool. Because when people lie, they still feel the emotion. And then they have to put effort into not showing the emotion. Your eyes didn't move at all. You didn't reference a chronology at all. Right? You just stayed locked in on me with a tight jaw until you said, no.

• 2:00:11Jonathan Cohen?

  It was almost not human. It was like, there was an absence of, of real human emotion in it.

• 2:00:17Speaker 00

  And when you told the truth right before that, your face told the story for you. The smiles and the, and the, and the grin and the teeth and the, and the eye movement and the head movement, like you'll see it in their, in your own replay. How very much effort is obvious to see.

• 2:00:31Mayim Bialik?

  I have two more questions. What's your favorite movie about a spy?

• 2:00:36Speaker 00

  My favorite movie about spies is the very first Spy Kids. And it's because all spy movies are not real. They're all bad. But I love Antonio Banderas and I watched Spy Kids with my kids. And they loved it. So it's just this very fond memory of, of a, of a spy movie. Because most other spy movies I watch, especially the very serious ones, and all I see is just how many things they get wrong and how little of it is true.

• 2:01:06Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, my other question. In a lot of spy movies, they show like teeny tiny weapons. Like teeny, teeny, like, like in The Kingsman, like teeny, teeny, tiny weapons. Is that a real thing? Are there weapons that we don't know about that are like so tiny and you can hide them in a button? Like, is that a real thing?

• 2:01:25Speaker 00

  Yes, there are weapons that are tiny that you would never believe exist. And, and they deliver a lethal action in a number of different ways. Some of them deliver a lethal dose of poison. Some of them deliver some sort of lethal impulse that throws off your heart and puts you in cardiac arrest. And then there's a whole slew of other things that, you know, do everything from confuse you or, or blind you or whatever else. And oftentimes-

• 2:01:53Mayim Bialik?

  It's like Dungeons and Dragons. You're like throwing a spell at someone.

• 2:01:57Speaker 00

  Lightning bolt, lightning bolt, right? But I will also say that more than weapons, because we're about collecting intelligence. So the really impressive stuff is how small the tools are that we use to collect secrets. How small our thumb drives can be, how small microchips can be, how small cameras can be, how small audio bugs can be, right? Like how, we even have ways of creating audio recording devices that have no battery power.

• 2:02:26Mayim Bialik?

  Wow.

• 2:02:27Speaker 00

  Right? And that's just really cool stuff that is better than the movies, in my opinion.

• 2:02:32Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 2:02:33Jonathan Cohen?

  I have two very short questions. One is, what is your best tool technique, most universal, that you would say people who are not spies should learn about?

• 2:02:43Speaker 00

  If it's, if it's something that I want just the average person to do without paying me a single dollar, I just want them to stop talking. Just, if you just talk 10% less, you're going to learn like 30% more than you learn right now. And it's a hard thing to do, but it's very, very simple and very memorable. Just talk less. When the moment comes where you feel like you should talk, pause. And just hold it and then say what you have to say. And you're going to be shocked by how much you learn. If it's something that people will learn from me, meaning they will come to Everyday Spy and they will take a course with me. The thing I want them to learn is a course I have called OP Think. That's a master course called Operational Thinking that I shortened to OP Think.

• 2:03:27Speaker 00

  It's the best thing we've ever created. It has transformed people across the world. We use it in all of our executive coaching. It includes many of the tips that we talked about today, Jonathan, from how to ask questions and how to tell lies and how to identify falseness and persuasion and influence. All of that in one program. So if people are going to pay money, that's what I would want them to learn. If they don't want to pay anything, they just want to have a great time on this podcast, literally just hold your tongue for 10% of the time that you, and see how much more you learn.

• 2:03:57Jonathan Cohen?

  Liam, I'm going to OP Think. I'm coming back a super spy. I mean, that sounds amazing. My sort of last question for you is something that you talked about sort of really at the beginning of this podcast. And I have a slight intro to it. The first is, I'm wondering if people from homes where you have to scan, where you're hyper-independent, where you don't have the type of social network or connection, end up making better spies. And I've heard about your story and know that you grew up in a situation that you had to fend for yourself at an early age. And I'm wondering if that makes someone more prone to be good at this work.

• 2:04:42Jonathan Cohen?

  But really, I wondered about the stress of that life and the constant scanning that has to happen and the persuasion and having to show up for other people and defend and control yourself. We know that having a high level of freedom in self-expression is wildly important for mental health and physical health. And not having that creates a level of stress and burden that you have to carry for such a long time. And I'm wondering, having been in the service that long, is it something that you're able to really unpack? Or is it layers where you're like, holy, I'm still... Are you still finding yourself to come home to yourself in that way?

• 2:05:28Speaker 00

  So, I was married. I got married at the CIA. I met my wife at CIA. We served around the world. We did some incredible things. We're still waiting for CIA to let us tell the whole story. But fast forward to 2014, when we leave CIA. Within just a few weeks of leaving CIA, we found ourselves hiring a marriage counselor because we were just starting to see the tip of the iceberg of exactly what you were talking about, Jonathan. We were wired through our childhood, through our unique childhood traumas and the training that we went through at CIA

• 2:06:09Speaker 00

  and all the resources that were given to us at CIA to keep us optimized. When we left, it was the first time that we started to see that the house of cards started to crumble.

• 2:06:21Speaker 00

  And we went to a marriage counselor. And the marriage counselor couldn't keep up with us. Like, we're telling, to use Em's words, we're telling Mr. and Mrs. Smith stories. And the counselor's like, um, uh, I don't know that I'm equipped for this, right? So after two or three different therapists, nobody was really comfortable working with us. But we needed an outlet. And, you know, this is the first time I've told this story, Jonathan. Everyday Spy started because my creative expression has always been writing. So I started to write about spy skills that I was using in everyday life. I started to write about the difficulties of transitioning from CIA to everyday life.

• 2:07:04Speaker 00

  I started to write about how embarrassing it was to be an elite operator, but a shitty husband. Like, I started to write and write and write. And that writing became a blog. And I learned a little bit about a website. And then people started reading it. And then it just kind of snowballed. And there came a time when I started writing courses and I started writing speeches and I started writing scripts. And then people said, "Stop writing, just talk." So I started talking on a stage. And then I started talking in front of a camera. And then people were like, "Come talk on my podcast." And, I mean, the, the rise of my company is not because I'm some good business person. It's really just my own therapy to do exactly what you said, Jonathan, to find and express myself creatively, to process the, the experiences that I can't talk about

• 2:07:49Speaker 00

  in a way that is hopefully productive for myself, for my family, for my future. That's a great question, man. Thanks for letting me talk about that.

• 2:07:56Mayim Bialik?

  Really, really fascinating. I mean, the whole thing, start to finish, is really fascinating. And we hope people will check out Everyday Spy. It's so incredible. And we're so glad that you are working through your stuff by sharing so much with, with us and with everybody.

• 2:08:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And this was a great conversation. This was a great, a great way to spend my afternoon.

• 2:08:20Mayim Bialik?

  We didn't even get to ask him about sex performance.

• 2:08:24Jonathan Cohen?

  What kind of paperwork do they have to have?

• 2:08:28Mayim Bialik?

  I don't know. I like that he was so cavalier about, you know, oh, there's ways not to get people pregnant. Okay, but I've seen that movie too, where the spy thinks that she's not going to get pregnant, but he gets her pregnant anyway.

• 2:08:41Jonathan Cohen?

  I love that that's the focus for you, is spy babies. Not, maybe this person is seducing me in order to kill me? Maybe they're trying to steal my secrets?

• 2:08:52Mayim Bialik?

  I want to talk to his wife. Maybe she'll come on and talk to us. Maybe she'll talk to us about these things. I'm very curious about his wife. They got kids.

• 2:08:58Jonathan Cohen?

  We should talk to his wife.

• 2:09:00Mayim Bialik?

  Please make sure to go to everydayspy.com. You can learn so many things. It's not just how to be a spy. It's how to use the techniques that the most elite, secretive, powerful, influential people in the world have to learn. And you can learn it. So please check it out and from our breakdown to the one we secretly hope you'll never have. We'll see you next time.