Passing The Torch

Ep 24: TOP SECRET!!! Helping People Take Control of Their Lives & Hack Success Like a Former CIA Super Spy with Andrew Bustamante

• Martin Foster • Season 1 • Episode 24

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ABOUT ANDREW:

Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, decorated military combat veteran, and successful Fortune 10 corporate advisor. After 20 years leading human and technical intelligence operations for corporate and government clients, Andrew founded EverydaySpy.com - the first-ever online platform designed to teach elite spy skills to everyday people. Featured in both US and International media, Andrew’s training content has been praised for its innovative, authentic, and life-changing impact. When he isn’t giving interviews, running spy exercises, or supporting private intelligence contracts around the world, Andrew lives with his wife (also an ex-CIA Officer) and two children in Florida.

In this episode, we discuss TOP SECRET: Mental optimization hacks reserved for the intellectual elite to control any situation.  Additionally, we cover DECLASSIFIED: ways to solve everyday problems like a spy would in life OR in a life or death situation. ELITE TRAINING: Unpacking the routines, exercise & nutrition necessary to shortcut daily peak performance.

Lastly, other topics discussed in the episode are the following-

  • After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 2003, the real genesis of his career
  • A childhood coping method Andrew unknowingly developed only to realize later that it wasn’t normal, but critical to adulthood success
  • How his training and background impacts the ability to build relationships with people, or first impressions
  • Breaking a cover story when someone is lying to you
  • easy and simple people skills the CIA gave Andrew to help unlock peak performance, reach mental optimization and achieve your best life ever
  • Spy movie that most resembles Andrew's life---THE ANSWER WILL SURPRISE YOU!



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WEBSITE - WWW. E V ERY D A Y S P Y . C O M
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MORE INFO ABOUT THE GUEST:
Hack Your Way To Success: Secrets From a CIA Operative

“You can unlock tools, tactics, and techniques once reserved for the world’

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Episode 52: Riley Tejcek – Mission of Empowerment and Endurance


Bio: Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, decorated military combat veteran, and successful Fortune 10 corporate advisor. After 20 years leading human and technical intelligence operations for corporate and government clients, Andrew founded EverydaySpy.com - the first-ever online platform designed to teach elite spy skills to everyday people. Featured in both US and International media, Andrew’s training content has been praised for its innovative, authentic, and life-changing impact. When he isn’t giving interviews, running spy exercises, or supporting private intelligence contracts around the world, Andrew lives with his wife (also an ex-CIA Officer) and two children in Florida.

Background: The name’s Bustamante. Andrew Bustamante.

Andrew is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, decorated military combat veteran, author, and successful Fortune 10 corporate advisor.  After 20 years of leading human and technical intelligence operations for corporate and government clients, Andrew founded EverydaySpy.com - the first-ever online platform designed to teach elite spy skills to help everyday people hack their way to the top. 

Featured in both US and International media, Andrew’s training content has been praised for its innovative, authentic, and life-changing impact. The training content is also explained in his book called  'Everyday Espionage: Winning the Workplace' which helps the ordinary civilian employee utilize spycraft to win in different aspects of the workplace. This training manual highlights hacking everyday things like increasing your energy, how to time block efficiently, nailing  job interviews to more serious, possibly lifesaving things like treating wounds while in the field and mastering pain tolerance.

Show Notes: 

Intro 00:00 – 01:56

After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 2003, what is really the genesis of what is now Andrew’s career
01:58 – 03:01

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, you know, it's a great question. The place where my career started was absolutely founded in probably the second week that I was at CIA's training camp The Farm. That's where it all kind of clicked for me. I mean, it was life-changing for me when CIA started teaching me how to view the world. And it's one of those things, for anybody who's ever had like a life changing moment, it's very clear to you when that moment happens. It's  just a moment. It's not like it happened over hours. It is usually just like a bolt of lightning. And that's what happened to me at the agency. It just being somebody said something, somebody showed me something, I don't know, but there was this moment of just total clarity where I was like, I'm never going to see the world again after this moment and that’s how I got to where I am now.

A childhood coping method Andrew Bustamante unknowingly developed only to realize later that it wasn’t normal, but critical to adulthood success
03:02 – 07:51

Andrew Bustamante: You got some really good questions. I see why you warned me that this one was heavy. Well as a kid, we are all, all of our jacked up everything, everything that's wrong with us started when we were kids. If you were to go a step further, everything that's wrong with us was imparted in us by our parents when we were kids. For me, what that looks like is I was raised by a stepdad. My father died before I could know him, before when I was still like an infant and I was raised by my mom and my grandmother until my mom remarried. I was raised in a mixed family. A 1990s, 1980s era mixed family, which was basically, you know, dad is dad, but you know, I'm his son by legal status, but he treats my half-sisters, he treats his own daughters differently than he treats me. Anybody who had a step-parent in that period of time, they get it. There's always that step-parent that's super into being a step-parent and he becomes the true parent and everybody loves that. That wasn't my step-dad. So for me, I always had to navigate this world of knowing that I wasn't my dad's favorite, but trying to get attention from my mom, but trying to do it in a way where nobody assumed that I was being tricky or malicious because everyone...both mom and dad constantly accused me of trying to play the one against the other. So when you're, I mean, that means that odds were stacked against me all the time. I had two adults always assuming the worst in me. So no matter what I did, even if I did something that was just genuinely, I was just genuinely interested in football, whatever it might be, there was always going to be the threat of someone thinking that it was me being malicious. The way that I learned to cope with that was by just being the observer, by just being quiet all the time. Then I learned to not ask questions and just do the things I wanted to do in a way that I wouldn't get caught. From that kind of coping mechanism as a kid, for well or for ill, that's how I got through the academy. When I got to the academy, the academy was the exact same way. At the Air Force Academy or any military academy, everybody assumes that you're the worst, especially your freshman year, right? You're dumb, you're lazy, whatever, right? You're trying to run a scam. They have to put it up on their wall, the principles of the place. We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. That's totally BS. You have, everybody lies. It's part of life to lie. Everybody cheats. You just may not cheat on your schoolwork, but you're cheating somewhere. You're cheating on your taxes. You're cheating to get a discount on like a, on a pair of shoes or something. Everybody lies. Everybody cheats and everybody steals in some way, shape, or form. It just doesn't have to be stealing from a store or stealing from like your fellow cadet. But people steal attention and they steal hearts, right? And they steal ideas and they steal imagination, they steal stuff all the time. So what ends up happening is the people who graduate from a military academy, it's not that they don't lie, steal, or cheat, it's that they don't get caught when they lie, steal, and cheat and that's just the perfect feeding ground for becoming a spy. Because a spy is just someone who has learned how to get away with breaking the rules. And once you know how to do that, CIA can come in and then sharpen your tool set. And now they can send you out offensively anywhere in the world so that you can lie, steal, cheat, collect intel, make spies, run sabotage operations without exposing the hand of the US government. So my childhood coping mechanism turned into...a very useful tool for national security later on. And that wasn't just me. I was surrounded by men and women who had the exact same experience learning how to be professional criminals in the amateur world before we were made professional spies.

How Andrew’s training and background has impacted the ability to build relationships with people and first impressions
08:00 – 10:45

Andrew Bustamante: The agency does an excellent job of teaching you how to think like the person you're sitting across the table from. That's the place where the military falls down flat. The military does not do a good job of teaching you to think like your commanding officer or think like your fellow soldier or think like your...Sergeant it doesn't teach you to think like anybody if anything the military tells you to stop thinking and just do what you're told and the idea is that if they if you can start there then they can fill you with whatever skills that they need you to have from there, right? They'll teach you leadership and they'll teach you proactive collaborative whatever right there was a term that's slipping my mind right now assertive followership I think was something I learned from the Air Force. In order to teach you anything, they first think they have to erase every bit of where you came from. The agency takes a very different approach. CIA is very human focused. CIA is human focused because CIA's mission is to collect human intelligence, something known as HUMINT. HUMINT is different than the other kinds of INTs, the other kinds of intelligence disciplines that are out there, whether it's MASINT or SIGINT or MILINT or whatever it might be their focus is on HUMINT. The only place that you can collect HUMINT is from human beings. You can't collect it from a data hardware server. You can't collect it from stealing clippings off the floor of some secret base somewhere. You have to collect it from human beings. The only way you get a human being to trust you enough to tell you something that they know is secret is by building a very strong personal relationship. Kind of like what most people build with a girlfriend or a boyfriend or what they build with a close friend. We learn how to simulate that relationship and make it artificial, but only artificial from our perspective. It seems very genuine from the spy's perspective and that are the assets perspective. And they teach us how to do it in a truncated timeframe. So it's all about human psychology and human nature and understanding how you can use that to get ahead in a relationship.

How to Break a Cover Story When Someone is Lying to You!
10:47 – 15:03

Andrew Bustamante: Yeah, so when people lie to you, what's sad, it's always kind of fun and refreshing when people lie to you and you're the spy. It’s like watching a little kid try to play a sport or play an instrument. You're like, oh, this is really cute. Look, they're lying. It's like, oh, this is nice. They're trying to manipulate me. Look at how cute this is, right? Because they have no idea who they're talking to when they do it. And the tricks that might work for your average person don't really work on a trained manipulator. They don't really work on a trained interrogator or a trained spy. When someone's trying to lie to you, the biggest giveaway isn't where they look. It's not a facial expression or a micro expression. You'll always have someone on Instagram trying to sell you a book or sell you a YouTube video course or something about how you can read micro expressions. Micro expressions are extremely difficult and they aren't reliable. What is reliable is just asking the logical follow-up questions because what happens is when people are lying, they often haven't thought the lie through. So there's a series of questions that you can ask, just two or three questions deep that will make a liar stumble almost every time. Asking questions that are logical follow-up questions about feelings, asking questions that are logical follow-up questions about order of operations, and then asking people logical follow-up questions where they just have to repeat something that they said earlier in the conversation. Those are three really powerful simple ways that you can trip a liar up without them even realizing it. Because when liars lie, they haven't built what's known as a legend for their lie. A legend is the foundation, the framework for the falsehood that you're telling. So essentially when a spy goes undercover, we build a legend, a very comprehensive, it doesn't have to be complicated, but a comprehensive foundation that holds the house that is our cover identity. When most people lie, they don't take the time to build a legend. They just tell a lie, and then they're backpedaling trying to defend that lie. And that's why they fall apart when you start asking questions. It's completely unprofessional when you have the upper hand, when you have the advantage over somebody, you don't toy with them. You don't mess with them. You have the advantage, man. Right. It's like if a football team is winning at the Super Bowl, if they're up by 14 points, they don't start dicking around and messing with the opponent. They just keep executing to the maximum capability using every advantage they have and using the fact that they have the lead. When you start messing around with somebody, you run the risk of screwing up because you don't train to mess around. You train to win. So it's a very amateur move. Whenever you see anybody just messing with somebody, that's why you see that kind of stuff on the bar scene and you see it in high school and you see it in early stages of college. When people are cocky and they start messing around, they always screw up. Professionals don't do that. So when we catch somebody in a lie, we do everything we can to make sure they feel very confident that they have not been caught because that gives us informational superiority. Right, you're in the Air Force, you understand, the Air Force's mission is air superiority. The thing that's killing Ukraine right now is that nobody will help them win air superiority. Right? with the exact same way in espionage, only the superiority we're pursuing is information superiority. 

Training on empathy versus sympathy
15:20 – 17:43

Andrew Bustamante: Empathy and sympathy are interesting things. Sympathy is not something you can control. Sympathy is something that you feel inherently. Empathy is something that you can control. Empathy is, it's a mix of emotion and logic. So when your dog dies, and I know that your dog has died, and I remember my dog dying, I feel sympathy for you. I'm like, oh man, that's sad. I feel your sadness. I feel sad for you and I can't really do anything about that and doesn't mean I have to tell you I feel sad. It doesn't mean I have to do anything about it because I feel it. Empathy, on the other hand, is when I can actually understand that you feel sad and why you feel sad. I might feel the same sadness, but it's more useful than that because now it's like, oh, your dog died. Maybe I never had a dog that died, and I'm like, oh, your dog died. You're sad. Well, if you're sad about your dog, let's talk about the guy that hurt your dog. Let's talk about your dad who bought you that dog. Let's talk about your favorite memory with that dog. So we're trained to use empathy as a tool to unlock conversation topics and unlock secrets that the person otherwise wouldn't have talked about. Every time you break up with a girlfriend, every time your kids get hurt, every time your boss treats you like trash, We have an opportunity to empathize in that moment with a target and unlock access to things that that target would not talk about otherwise. There's lots of things that you would never talk about with me over dinner or watching a ball game or throwing a football back and forth. There's some things that you would never talk about, but as soon as something bad happens, now there's a window. We call them windows and doors. There's a window for me to use empathy to unlock the subject that you otherwise would never talk about. So empathy is super useful to us. Sympathy is present, but it's less useful because sympathy is only useful if it helps us unlock empathy, but we're going to be distracted from our empathy if we're focused on our own sympathy. Hopefully that makes sense.

Using empathy and sympathy to influence outcomes to benefit those within spheres of influence?
17:52 – 24:58

Andrew Bustamante: Let’s take your whole big part of your focus in in this awesome show that you've built is on like passing wisdom forward and a lot of it the focus is on doing that through mentoring relationships. So if you look at any mentoring relationship, assumes that one person is the mentor and one person is the mentee and that the mentee is there to learn from the mentor. So if we just look at that relationship specifically, a mentee mentor relationship, it's human nature. We are misled into thinking that a mentor has to be selfless to give their wisdom and their time. We end up, if you follow LinkedIn or if you read any of the garbage books that are out there, there's lots of people who are like, oh, mentors are hard to find. Mentors are hard to find because mentors are these giving, gracious people who are super successful but also willing to spend extra time teaching you how they did it. Mentors are not hard to find. Mentors are everywhere. What you need to understand is that the lie isn't about mentors being hard to find. The lie is that mentors are people who are giving themselves freely. No mentor worth your time and effort is doing something for free. They're not giving you their time for free. They're not taking away from their business, taking away from their family, taking away from their own creative time. They're not taking away from that so they can sit with you for an hour and pour their wisdom into you. That's baloney. What a good mentor, there are people who will do that, but those people are not good mentors. A good mentor knows that a relationship is supposed to be transactional, that they will give you their time and knowledge, and they are expecting you to give them something back in return. What you give as a junior person, it's not going to be the same thing that they give as a mentor. You're not going to give them wisdom they don't have. You're not going to give them insights in a network that they don't already have. What you are going to give them is a different perspective fresh take on old ideas. You might even be able to give them actual skills that they don't know even are out there. If you talk to the average 50-year-old business success right now, he only knows three or four social media platforms. He doesn't even know that there's 15 or 18 that are out there. And that's the kind of stuff that young people know because young people have access to excess time. Older, successful people they're at a loss of time. So they don't have the time to learn what works, what doesn't work. They don't know what the newest trending stuff is. They don't know what has real potential long-term value and what's going to be a flash in the pan. Young people have the opportunity to answer those questions for older people, which is what makes having a mentee a very profitable thing if you are a mentor. If you sit down at coffee with your mentee and they just sit there like an open book waiting for you to scribble your thoughts down, that's exactly how mentee mentor relationships die because no mentor is going to waste their time on somebody who's just a one way vacuum of information. And I bring that up because your question was about empathy and sympathy. If you are a mentee, the place to target your empathy is on your mentor, because most mentees that I've met don't have, they don't spend any efforts sympathizing or empathizing with their mentor. Mentees seem to think that their mentor has it all figured out. Well, he's already a millionaire. He's already successful. He's already doing everything. Or she, she's already super, she's beautiful and she's fit and she's got four kids and a happy marriage. She's got it all. You are dead wrong if you look at a mentor and think that they have it all. If they had it all, they would see no benefit in sitting down with you. There is clearly something they're looking for and they are hopeful that by sitting with you, you can fulfill whatever that gap is, a gap in knowledge, a fresh perspective, even just like an entertaining conversation. There is something that that person is missing and by sitting with you, they hope that you will fulfill it. If you can have your empathy and sympathy radar up when they make that decision and they say yes to sitting with you, if you make a phone call on Monday and you invite them to coffee on Wednesday and they say yes, you've got from Monday until Wednesday to start thinking, what can I offer this person? What does this person have? Or more importantly, what is this person's pain point? What are they missing that makes it worth it to them to sit with me for coffee on? Maybe they're just doing it out of the kindness of their heart, but most likely they're doing it because there's something they think they might get out of it too. What is that thing? If you turn on your empathy and sympathy radar then, and you show up ready to rock, you show up like a professional at that meeting, at that coffee on Wednesday morning, you're going to learn quickly. You're going to see something, you're going to hear something, you're going to have researched something that you know will be useful to that person. We make a joke, it's not a joke, it's our mantra at the CIA, that the goal of every meeting is just to get another meeting. Every time you sit with somebody who's a potential asset, all you wanna do is just sit with that person again, and again and again until they prove to be useful or until they prove to be a waste of your time. If you could just make that a goal of every time you sit with a mentor, every time you sit with your boss, every time you sit with a coworker, the goal is just to bring something to the table that fulfills what they're looking for, that gives them some bit of knowledge or insight they didn't previously have. Because there's a reason they're sitting with you. If you can find that thing and give that to them and work towards meeting a man, then before you know it, you're gonna have tons of influence built in that relationship and you'll be able to use that for anything you want.

Easy and simple people skills the CIA gave Andrew to help unlock peak performance, reach mental optimization and achieve his best life ever
24:59 – 30:44

Andrew Bustamante: A super powerful tool is something I call the power of questions. Now, when most people have a conversation, they want to and they think about being a part of the conversation or they think about being in control of the conversation. When people think about that, they assume that the person who tells the most lively story or the person who is the most entertaining, or the person who is the most knowledgeable, that those are the people in control of the conversation. They're totally wrong. If you want to be in control of a conversation, you have to be the one asking the questions and there's two benefits to asking questions. The first big benefit to asking questions is that you determine what direction the conversation goes. Just look at this interview with you and me, Martin. Who's in control of this conversation? It's not me. It's you. You are, you are making, if you were to consider our conversation like a railroad, you're making hard left turns and right turns. You're choosing when we change topics and what we're changing the topic to. You're controlling that because you're the one asking questions. I'm just a talking mouth. I'm just a big talking face answering the questions that you're answering because that's what human nature drives us to do. We answer the questions that other people ask. Whenever you ask a question, the other person is fighting human instinct not to answer that question. They want to answer that question. Their cognitive brain is bringing them satisfaction by answering your question. It's one of the reasons why you can catch a liar, because a liar has to put an extra step in where they make up a lie about their answer, so it slows down their cognitive reasoning. So the first big advantage about asking questions is that when you ask a question, you control the direction of the conversation. The second big super-secret about questions is that when people talk and other people listen, that drops, releases dopamine in the human brain, which is a feel-good chemical. So every time you ask me a question, it makes me feel good. It makes me feel good about me because you think I'm interesting and you think what I'm saying is so interesting that you're not going to interrupt. That releases a chemical hormone in my brain that makes me feel like I can trust you. Oh, Martin understands that I'm an expert. Martin thinks that I'm interesting. Martin thinks that I'm handsome, whatever it might be, I like Martin. So when you're the one asking questions, you're doing both of these things at the same time. You are subconsciously getting someone to trust you because they believe that you think they're an expert. They believe that you think they are interesting, but then you're also controlling the conversation. You are telling them exactly what they're supposed to say to you and getting the information you need. It works like a charm in espionage when we're trying to collect secrets, but it can work in your dating relationships. It can work in your relationships with your kids. If you're married, how often are we assuming that the other person is disinterested in us? How often do we find ourselves in a situation where there's one piece of information that we want, but we don't want to have to ask for it? Right? It's just, it's ridiculous how often in relationships, the closer the relationship goes, like marriages or long-term friends, the more we assume and the less we just ask. If you just use the power of questions and you understand that every question you ask has dual benefits to you, then it completely transforms your everyday life. I think you got some good questions, man. I like that they're deep and I hope that you don't mind that I spend 15 minutes answering each one.

Mental optimization hacks reserved for the intellectual elite to control any situation
31:20 – 39:22

Andrew Bustamante: There are two that are super simple that I lean on every day and I've leaned on them since my days at the Academy. Actually the first one I actually learned at the Academy. I was a freshman and I was a varsity athlete at the Air Force Academy and a junior on the same team was watching me struggle one day through practice because I was super tired. And this was in the first semester of my freshman year. I was really, really new to the Air Force Academy. I was a varsity fencer. So the Air Force Academy had an international fencing team. So I was there and I was working through practice and this guy pulled me aside and he was like, you know, dude, what's going on? You're not focused. We come here to train. This is not elite. You stumbling around, yawning, tired, forgetting what the coach is saying is not elite. So what's going on? And I just told him, I was like, oh, I was up late last night studying. I'm trying to keep up with whatever the studies are because the academics are really intensive. And he looked me square in the face and he said, there is nothing more important for you to do while you're in this institution than sleep, just straight up. He was like, if you're not getting at least eight hours of sleep a night, you are setting yourself up to fail because it's impossible to keep up with all the academics. That's by design. But when you sleep and you're well rested, you will intrinsically retain more of the information that you're learning in class. Once you let yourself get tired, you will be diluting the amount of information you retain and you will be forcing yourself to have to go back and reread, relearn, revisit notes and textbooks and everything else. And then if that leads you to sleep less, then it's a negative progression. You sleep less, you intrinsically retain less, you have to study more, which means that you sleep less still, and you intrinsically retain less still. So you can see how it's kind of like a slow decay into chaos. He taught me that when I was 18 years old. Fast forward to me being 27 years old at the CIA, and I had the exact same conversation again with somebody there during my training, my training year, my training months at the farm, where the guy was like, look, if you want to understand an asset, all you have to do is sleep. Just sleep. Get all the sleep you can get. Get all the rest that you can get, because then your observations on time on target are maximized. When you're not sitting there thinking about how tired you are, when you're not trying to hide your yawn, and you're not stretching because you're tired or wondering where your next couple of copies come from, all that activity takes energy. When you can focus that energy into observing your target instead, then when you leave that one hour meeting or that two hour time on target, you're going to have gigabytes of information just on downloading your brain. So the first big hack that I always teach my folks is to start sleeping more. We are, as Americans, we are perpetually under slept. It's like 60 or 70% of high school students are not getting the minimum required sleep they need to make it through the day and it only gets worse from there. And most places, most people wear it as a badge of honor that they're insomniacs. They don't, they stay up late or I don't need to sleep. That's baloney. Like everybody needs to sleep. Your brain is wired to do its best to optimize its performance. We're talking about optimization. If you wanna optimize your freaking brain, you've gotta set your brain up for success. It is built to be optimized when you rest. It is not built to be optimized on stimulants, stimulants like caffeine or anything else. So get your sleep. Get your sleep, it's gonna take about 72 hours before sleep really starts to become like a light bulb difference, like a transformative difference, but if you can get three days where you get a solid night's rest, everything's different. When you wake up on that fourth day, guaranteed, you will see the world in a completely different set of point of view because everything just comes easier. You remember things faster. You only have to hear things once. You can predict the motions and activities and you can even predict what other people are going to say. Because guess what? All those are not sleeping enough. They move slower. It's like watching the world move in slow motion when you are well rested. It's easy to stay one step ahead of everybody because they're all perpetually tired, chasing the next energy drink, chasing the next cup of coffee, right? They're chasing the next chance they have to, you know, sit on the sofa and close their eyes for a 20 minute show with the kids. It's a super advantage when you just have enough rest. That's the first big mental hack. The second mental hack is kind of related. We're taught that in the afternoons, when you start feeling tired in the afternoon, it's not really a sign that you're physically tired because you haven't slept enough. For us, we know we have slept enough. So when that two o'clock to five o'clock timeframe comes and you feel that lull in energy, it's actually a depletion of glucose in your bloodstream. The food that you've eaten all morning, the calories that you consumed from the time that you woke up to the time that you ate lunch, those calories have been burned because most of your activity happens before 2 to 3 in the afternoon. Your heavy thinking, your heavy working, your heavy labor, it all happens usually before 2 to 5 o'clock in the afternoon. That's a huge depletion of resources inside your body in terms of calories, sugars, carbohydrates, proteins. So what we're taught is in that window of time, don't look to a stimulant. Don't turn to caffeine. Don't try to take a power nap. Instead, give your body what it's actually missing. What it's actually missing is something called glucose. Glucose is naturally occurring in all of your fruits and vegetables that are out there, specifically in fruits. There's high concentrations of glucose in oranges, apples, strawberries, cherries, grapes, watermelon. If you just have eight ounces of fruit, if you have your average apple, if you have your average orange, if you have a ripe banana, within 15 minutes of consuming that fruit, the glucose is going to hit your bloodstream, and you're going to just zap back to life. And the calories and the fiber inside that fruit make it so that the glucose levels are sustained for about another three or four hours, which gets you to dinner. So for all those people who are destroying their sleep habits because they're drinking coffee at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and then that caffeine keeps them up until 11 o'clock, one o'clock in the morning, if they can replace that afternoon coffee with an apple, or replace it with a dozen grapes, or replace it with a handful of cherries, when you do that, you get the same hit, the same energy that you would get from an artificial stimulant like caffeine, you get it from the natural glucose that your body is actually seeking, which just puts your whole bio rhythm back on track and allows you to go to sleep at eight or nine o'clock or 10 o'clock and get a full night's rest and be up and ready to rock at 6 a.m. the next day. So those are my two bio hacks man. Give your body what it wants and your body's gonna optimize its own performance. Give it sleep and give it glucose.

Spy movie that most resembles Andrew Bustamante’s life
45:14 – 46:42

Andrew Bustamante: All of the action spy movies are not at all realistic. So you're not going to hear me say that any of those are very good. If you want a spy movie that's closest to real life, you'd have to honestly look at something like Office Space, which isn't even a spy movie. They're not expecting is extremely close to what spy life is like and then there's these awesome Rowan Atkinson movies called Johnny English which are awesome. Those are very close to what it's like you got somebody who's trying super hard to be super cool and they constantly make blunders and everybody around them is a little bit and somehow the mission still makes it through at the end. So Johnny English if you haven't looked them up those are excellent spy movies.

Billboard message for everyone to see and read
46:44 – 47:12

Andrew Bustamante: One life, no compromises. I carry that to my grave, man. That's the tagline to my whole business. You only get one life, don't make any compromises.

Best place to find Andrew Bustamante
47:20

Andrew Bustamante: If folks want to find me, you'll find me honestly at the website anytime, everydayspy.com. So if you just go to any browser, everydayspy.com, you'll find me there. If you like podcasts, I have an iTunes Top 100 podcast called The Everyday Espionage and if you can join me there, I have a new, I've been running new episodes ever since 2017. Everyday Espionage podcast on any of your favorite platforms and I'll be there.

More info about the guest:

Books and People mentioned: 

  • Dr. Justin Marchegiani
  • Rowan Atkinson / Johnny English

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Slow down and take a breath with The Mindful Frogman: Navy Seal Commander turned mindfulness and meditation teacher Jon Macaskill: https://passingthetorch.buzzsprout.com/1946508/10142693-ep-18-slow-down-and-take-a-breath-with-the-mindful-frogman-jon-macaskill 

Quote: “When you find your way, you find a way to make it happen.”

- Eric Thomas

People on this episode

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Martin Foster

Host