{"id":6722,"date":"2026-03-21T05:31:41","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T05:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/?p=6722"},"modified":"2026-03-21T05:31:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T05:31:43","slug":"a-former-cia-officer-was-asked-for-the-one-spy-trick-everyone-should-know-his-answer-has-nothing-to-do-with-espionage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/?p=6722","title":{"rendered":"A former CIA officer was asked for the one spy trick everyone should know. His answer has nothing to do with espionage."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrew Bustamante spent years as a covert CIA officer reading people for a living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Bustamante<\/a> (@Andrew-Bustamante<\/a>) spent years as a covert CIA intelligence officer<\/a>. When Lex Fridman asked him to name the single most useful spy trick that anyone could apply to their everyday life, his answer wasn\u2019t about surveillance, or reading body language, or disappearing off the grid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was about how you see other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The clip, from Episode 310 of the Lex Fridman Podcast<\/a>, originally recorded in August 2022, has been recirculating widely since Bustamante published his memoir \u201cShadow Cell\u201d<\/a> with his wife and fellow CIA officer Jihi Bustamante<\/a> in September 2025, which debuted at number eight on the New York Times bestseller list<\/a>. His follow-up book, \u201cEveryday Espionage: Winning the Workplace,\u201d<\/a> applies the same intelligence tradecraft directly to professional life. The perception versus perspective clip is one of the reasons people keep finding him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the distinction he draws, as he explained to Fridman and as YourTango reported<\/a> in covering the exchange. Perception is how each of us interprets the world around us. It\u2019s personal, it\u2019s filtered, and it\u2019s entirely our own. There\u2019s nothing wrong with it, but the problem is that most people treat their perception as objective reality and then spend enormous energy trying to convince everyone else of it. \u201cThat\u2019s why so many people find themselves arguing all the time,\u201d Bustamante said, \u201ctrying to convince other people of their own perception.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perspective is different. It\u2019s not just feeling what someone else feels, which Bustamante distinguishes from empathy. It\u2019s actively placing yourself in someone else\u2019s position and asking what their life actually looks like. What did they wake up worried about? What are they afraid of? What pressures are they carrying that you can\u2019t see? \u201cPerspective is the act or the art of observing the world from outside of yourself,\u201d he told Fridman. \u201cYou sit in the seat of the person opposite you and think to yourself, \u2018What is their life like?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intelligence application is obvious. An officer who can only see a situation through their own cultural and personal lens is going to miss things. One who can genuinely inhabit another person\u2019s point of view, their incentives, their fears, their constraints, is going to understand things that others don\u2019t. But Bustamante\u2019s point is that this skill doesn\u2019t stay in the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you do that to your boss, it\u2019s gonna change your career,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you do that to your spouse, it\u2019s gonna change your marriage. If you do that to your kids, it\u2019s gonna change your family legacy. Because nobody else out there is doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That last line is the part that tends to land. Most interpersonal friction, whether in a marriage, a workplace, or a friendship, comes not from bad intentions but from two people each arguing from their own perception without pausing to genuinely inhabit the other\u2019s. Bustamante is saying the CIA trains people to close that gap, and that closing it is available to anyone who practices it deliberately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The comment sections on the viral clips reflect how directly this lands for people. \u201cHe just put it into words for me,\u201d one viewer wrote. Another added that taking on multiple perspectives is \u201ca way to find useful truths and do skillful systems analysis.\u201d The observation isn\u2019t new, but something about hearing it framed as tradecraft, as a skill that professionals train for rather than a platitude, seems to give it traction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bustamante runs his own platform, Everyday Spy<\/a>, where he teaches intelligence-based skills for civilian use. His core argument, across the podcast appearances and the books, is that 95% of what CIA officers are trained to do applies directly to ordinary life. The perception versus perspective shift, he says, is where most people could start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Bustamante spent years as a covert CIA officer reading people for a living. Andrew Bustamante (@Andrew-Bustamante) spent years as a covert CIA intelligence officer. When Lex<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/654960696_1405980924896228_807481422795658014_n.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6724,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6722\/revisions\/6724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humorsidehub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}