Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante says the skills he learned inside the agency gave him what he calls an unfair advantage — and he argues those same skills can be taught to anyone.
Bustamante, who served as a CIA intelligence officer alongside his wife, is the founder of the platform Everyday Spy. He returned for a second conversation with host Michael Franzese to discuss his new book, "Outsmart Everyone: Spy Skills for Gaining an Unfair Advantage at Work and Life."
Franzese, who hosted Bustamante once before, said the earlier conversation drew strong feedback from viewers, many of whom compared the CIA to the Mafia. He noted that he rarely hosts a guest twice and that he seldom reads books, but he took extensive notes on this one.
The book's central phrase, "unfair advantage," drew particular attention. As Bustamante defines it, an unfair advantage is not an illegal advantage. It is simply unfair to those who do not have it.
"What is fair is what is available equally to all people," Bustamante said. "What makes something unfair is that it remains a secret. It is hidden. It is withheld."
He compared it to a job posting that anyone can apply for, while the hiring manager quietly favors a friend's son. The opportunity was open to all, but access and information were not shared equally.
Bustamante said the CIA gave him that kind of edge, and that it changed his life, his family's wealth, and the entire trajectory of his career. The book, he said, is an attempt to put those skills into a form people can carry with them.
A major theme of the conversation was the flood of information in modern life. Bustamante described what he calls information overload — a world that no longer lacks information but drowns in it.
He recalled a recent family trip to Japan, where he was struck by the sheer number of screens. Tokyo, he said, was one of the quietest big-city experiences he has had, with people using headphones and avoiding phone calls on trains and streets. Yet pharmacies and grocery stores blared digital advertisements, sometimes in multiple languages.
"It was Times Square everywhere in the city," he said. "It is overwhelming. It is overload."
Bustamante said the CIA taught him that knowledge, experience, and intelligence form a triangle that works like a flywheel. People start with knowledge, apply it to gain experience, and from that build wisdom, which then generates new knowledge. The problem, he said, is that many people stop at information alone — scrolling social media, watching television, and absorbing headlines while mistaking that for wisdom.
He said every skill needed to gain an unfair advantage is learnable and transferable, which is why he wrote the book.
On detecting deception, Bustamante said there are systematic processes for determining whether someone is lying. The key is establishing a baseline, and that baseline begins with trust.
"You do not trust anyone until they earn your trust," he said. "You do not trust anyone until they earn it."
From that baseline, changes in behavior become visible — shifts in how people speak, how they act, whether they arrive early or late, whether they behave strangely. Nonverbal signals, he said, are far harder to control than verbal ones.
Bustamante described a CIA principle he called the relevance principle: what have you done for me lately? Were you loyal, cooperative, service-oriented, honest, and trustworthy in the past seven days?
He said the CIA operated this way, and as a result built a vast network and achieved a level of success and power most people never realize. When officers leave and begin trusting people at the start, those people get many chances before trust is lost.
Franzese said he learned the same lesson on the street, where his baseline was distrust from the beginning. After leaving that life, he said, he flipped his approach and gave people a thousand percent trust, only to watch it erode. He now believes people should have to earn trust first.
Bustamante agreed, arguing that society teaches people to trust teachers, strangers, and politicians before losing that trust, and that life would be better if the model were reversed.
The conversation also covered negotiation. Franzese said many people do not realize they are negotiating all the time — with spouses, children, neighbors, and even at the grocery store. Bustamante said the CIA taught him early that all human relationships are based on mutual benefit.
He acknowledged that the idea makes people uncomfortable. People say they love their child simply because the child is theirs, or love their spouse without utility. But psychologically and cognitively, he argued, everything rests on utility: whether the output you receive is greater than the input you feel you are giving.
The foundation of solid negotiation, he said, is when both sides feel they are getting more than they give — a win-win, or positive net gain. Traditional media and education, he said, wrongly frame negotiation as a zero-sum game where someone must win and someone must lose.
"When you finish a negotiation and you feel, 'I got what I want,' and the other side feels satisfied too, that is a win-win," Franzese said. "That is what you are after."
Bustamante said people return to the negotiating table when they win. He described it as a mindset first, then a skill that can be developed.
Another chapter discussed separating signal from noise — noticing what others miss and remembering details others forget. Bustamante compared it to talking to a teenager. A teenager talks a great deal, but finding what truly matters requires looking past the words, the fake laughs, and the smiles.
The same applies in business, in intelligence, and on a battlefield in active conflict, he said. Finding the signal amid the noise takes real effort and skill, and it creates an unfair advantage in a world where everyone is drowning in noise rather than signal.
Bustamante said much of what the CIA teaches is not difficult. Conceptually, it is logical. Whether detecting surveillance, detecting lies, writing intelligence reports, briefing, manipulating, or living under a false identity, the process is simple. What the agency looks for, he said, is controllable people — people who can learn skills and apply them consistently and professionally in pursuit of the mission.
He said the same logic applies in organized crime, where what is learned on the street is meant for the family and the life, not to be taken elsewhere. He founded his company on the idea that anyone can learn these skills. The concepts are academically sound, he said, and in practice it all depends on application.
Bustamante said the skills themselves are neutral. They are not loyalty skills. They are cognitive, psychology-based, academically grounded skills. When applied, they become everything.
He described the CIA hiring process as a search for flexible people rather than highly independent ones. A person with ties to a father, with dependency, or with a need for external validation — if also intelligent — makes an ideal intelligence officer, he said. Franzese responded that it was frustrating to realize, after leaving, that he had been that person.
Franzese also raised the question of whether people who feel they have something to prove are at a disadvantage. Bustamante disagreed, saying the person with something to prove is hungry, driven, and motivated.
He said his own difficult childhood — including his relationship with his stepfather and his mother, who raised him alone for years after his father died — gave him the drive and competitive nature he has. He said he would not change it, and that while raising his own children in a stable, loving home, he looks for ways to add enough challenge so they do not grow up weak.
Franzese said Bustamante had learned to turn adversity into an advantage, and Bustamante agreed, adding that parents want to give their children everything without making them weak.
The discussion turned to the art of asking questions. Franzese said many journalists do not know how to ask a question, and he often has to lead interviews himself. When people do not know how to ask, they never get the answers they are looking for.
Bustamante recalled being a talkative young man in high school, college, and the military, always trying to be the center of attention. Early in his CIA training, an instructor asked the class how to control a conversation: do you talk more or less? Everyone said talk more. The instructor explained they were wrong.
"The person who talks less is the person who directs the conversation," Bustamante said. "The person who asks the questions is the person who directs the conversation."
When you combine the questioner with the person who talks less, he said, you control the pace, rhythm, and direction, while the other person learns nothing about you. He described sitting through 45-minute or two-hour conversations with skilled interlocutors and realizing afterward that he knew nothing about them.
Franzese said his father instilled the same lesson early: there are times you may be the smartest person in the room, but you do not want anyone to know it. Stay quiet, ask questions, and people will tell you everything you need to know while learning nothing about you.
Bustamante said a mentor at the agency taught him that people actually like being outsmarted. He admitted the idea bothered him at first. But he came to understand that when someone is outsmarted, they do not realize the other person is smarter. They are led to a conclusion, nudged into an action, or helped to make a choice without effort.
"When you catch someone trying to outsmart you, it means your brain has done a lot of work," he said. "No one likes to put themselves through a lot of work."
The human mind, he said, is designed to save energy, reduce friction, and skip steps. It is not designed to be precise. People like being led to conclusions, which is why they like salespeople, attractive people, and anyone who makes life easier.
Franzese brought up a chapter on cover identity, recalling friends in organized crime who succeeded because they were simply themselves. Bustamante said the CIA teaches that any cover story should be 95 percent true. Only the 5 percent you change truly alters the course of an operation.
He compared it to navigation by compass. The difference between 270 degrees and 275 degrees looks tiny, but after five miles the gap can be ten or fifteen miles. The same rule applies to a covert operation: be yourself 95 percent of the time and adopt only a 5 percent alternate persona.
Media and films, he said, make people think an intelligence officer must be completely different — fluent in another language, fully disguised, with a different name, birthplace, history, and education. In reality, it is the opposite. You want most things to stay the same so you do not have to remember a web of lies.
If you studied at a university in Texas, your cover should be that you studied at a university in Texas. If you studied art, your cover should be that you studied art. Perhaps instead of saying you studied Renaissance painters, you say you studied Romantic painters. That 5 percent difference makes it nearly impossible for foreign services to find you years later.
Bustamante said the book does not teach people to become someone else. It gives them skills to improve who they already are, so they can gain an unfair advantage in their personal and professional lives. Tactically, he said, the greatest advantage is being radically honest with yourself.
Everyone else on the street, he said, is trying to pretend to be someone else — more comfortable, braver, richer, or higher-status than they really are. He used the image of 100 one-dollar bills: how many do you spend pretending to be someone else, and how many are left for real purchases? Saving even 10 percent of that spending gives you 10 percent more resources to invest in what you are trying to achieve.
Franzese asked whether Bustamante's worldview comes from his time as an intelligence officer or from his earlier personality. Bustamante said he underwent a massive change during CIA training. He had been idealistic, believing in the goodness of people, in a better way to live, and in art as the solution to everything. He believed people could understand one another and that the world would be better if things were equal and fair.
Part of the reason he was hired, he believes, was that ideological base. But it shattered quickly when the agency helped him realize a deeper truth he had struggled to accept: that some people receive special treatment, and that the world is not fair. He had clung to the hope that it was fair and could be equal.
The CIA taught him that what he had always suspected was true — that there is a system behind the system, a structure and hierarchy that makes things run, and that not every worker is supported by their government. Governments, he argued, do not pass laws to keep us safe but to create a stable society so productivity can be maximized and the tax base expanded.
In an uncivilized, unsafe country, he said, workers must focus part of their attention on staying safe, which reduces productivity and shrinks the tax base. He called it disgusting but logical. When he learned it, his ideology collapsed because it had been built on a weak foundation, and his pragmatic worldview took hold.
He said he sometimes wishes he were more ideological and envies people who still believe in liberal policy promises, progressive ideas, and spirituality. But his worldview is no longer that. Empirically, he said, his success, wealth, and influence increased significantly once he shed those ideologies.
Franzese asked about the "Five Whys," a process Bustamante describes in the book for finding the root of an issue, a core motive, or a fundamental driver of personality. The technique involves asking five questions, all beginning with "why," with each answer building on the previous one.
Bustamante compared a person to an onion: each new "why" peels away another layer and brings you closer to the core. He gave an example of being upset with someone named Gus. Why are you upset with Gus? Because Gus did not tell you the truth. Why does that upset you? Because you trusted Gus. Why did you trust Gus? Because he went to the same school you did. Why do you trust someone just because of where they studied? Because you were taught to trust people who went to the same school.
What you discover, he said, is that you are not angry with Gus at all. You are angry that you believed you could trust someone based only on the institution they attended, because your university convinced you of that at eighteen.
The process works for everything, he said, including figuring out what business is right for you. Entrepreneurs often say they want to be their own boss. Why? Following the Five Whys may reveal the real reason — perhaps not wealth at all, but a desire to spend more time with children, or to run an automated business that does not intrude on weekends.
Used with others, especially those unfamiliar with the technique, it is powerful. Bustamante said he uses it in discovery calls with lawyers, accountants, and potential hires. Why did you become a lawyer? The answer may be that they did not know what else to do, that they truly believe in the law, or that they were trying to build a future for their family they never had.
Franzese said he has long hated the word failure, treating it as a learning experience. Bustamante said the CIA taught that every problem is an opportunity, because everyone else sees only the problem. If you are one of fifty people who see only the challenge, you miss the chance to see what the problem itself has created.
When plans go wrong, when someone lets you down, when the market shifts, when technology fails, or when the power goes out at home, a problem creates an opportunity. He recalled a country song from his college days called "Rain for the Roses," about a farmer and his wife. The farmer works the fields while his wife watches from the window, longing for his attention. Then a storm comes, and he has to come home, park the tractor, and spend the day with her.
God sent rain for the roses, Bustamante said, because the husband had to come home. It is an example of what the agency taught him: every problem creates opportunity if you are willing to see it. The person who sits complaining about the problem, he said, undermines not only themselves but their own competitive advantage.
Franzese invoked Ronald Reagan's phrase "trust, but verify," calling it a lesson the CIA should teach first. Bustamante said he credits much of it to his military experience, where verification was an academic necessity for certification to handle nuclear weapons. He had to trust that someone did a good job, but verify with a checklist, verify with his own eyes, and pull on a locked door anyway.
On the street, he said, he learned it from mistakes — trusting people's word, failing to verify, and getting burned. Fortunately, the losses were only financial. He said he now follows the rule in his life, and that people with the same rule are never offended when he verifies. Less mature people get upset. His response: "No, this is how I trust you. Let me trust you and verify your work. This is how I build trust."
Franzese said he learned early that the worst debtors are always the best collectors. People who owe money and never pay become the fiercest collectors when someone owes them. The same applies to many things. People who never keep their promises are the ones who demand you keep yours. People who never repay debts chase you relentlessly when it is their turn to collect, because they instinctively assume everyone is like them.
Bustamante said his personal mission — something he never had in the agency or the Air Force, where he followed the organization's mission — is shaping the future by shaping the few who will build it. He said the vast majority of people cannot be helped and do not even see their own hypocrisy.
The strongest person, he argued, is not the opposite of the debtor. It is the person who can see things as they are, who can see in their own heart that they are both a good payer and a bad payer, a good collector and a bad collector, and who can see it transparently, accurately, and objectively to shape the future for others.
He said the country has moved in its current direction because the masses allowed a minority to shape the future. Whatever you believe — whether you see it as good or bad, liberal or conservative — the reality is that the masses follow a path made by a minority. If you want to change the world, he said, you do not need to focus on the masses. You only need to help shape the minority.
Franzese raised the criticism he receives for supporting Trump's policies, saying he has no personal relationship with Trump and would support the same policies under any name. He said he tells critics he will acknowledge Trump's faults if they will be honest about what happened before Trump. If they cannot see both sides, they have no credibility with him.
Bustamante said the terms for this are assessment versus assumption, which the book covers. Assessment means taking every new piece of information through your knowledge, experience, and wisdom, and updating your view each time. It allows you to like someone's approach without liking the person, or like approach A while disliking approach B.
When you do not build your views on objective assessment, you rely on assumption, which is vulnerable to cognitive biases, mental shortcuts, and inherited beliefs you never chose. Someone raised in a particular religion did not choose it, yet it may influence every decision. The easiest example, he said, is college sports rivalries: people hate one university and love another with no idea what each offers or its history, simply because they grew up in a household that cheered one team and despised the other.
If you do not actively reprogram your mind as an adult, he said, you remain trapped in the same assumptions. Most adults believe there is something wrong with seeking an unfair advantage, so they never do it. They hold to beliefs because they learned at some point that "unfair" equals "bad."
Bustamante said that is not the person he is trying to help. The person he can help succeed more than ever is the one who looks at the idea of an unfair advantage and wants it, who is drawn to it. Everyone who thinks there is something wrong with an unfair advantage will not buy his book. But everyone who thinks there is something unfair out there that could be used to do something good is exactly who he wrote it for.
Franzese said he had never before sat on his platform and analyzed a book in the five years he had been hosting, despite many people bringing him their books. He said he simply had not seen value in them, and he was not trying to diminish anyone. He called Bustamante's book a valuable resource.
Bustamante said building relationships was a major benefit in his own life — knowing how to talk to people, how to deal with them, and how to make people like him and want to be in the same room. Franzese said he is often not the smartest person in the room and does not know how to do certain things in business, but if the person who does know wants to be in the room with him, they can reach a solution together.
Bustamante recalled being the talkative one when he was younger. At the Air Force Academy, where cadets got only one weekend a month off campus and needed permission to leave, there was enormous pressure to go out, find a girl, impress her, and make her willing to wait a month. He said he always found someone, took her to dinner or ice cream, then returned to brag to his friends about how charming he was. She never called again.
He blamed the competition from other schools in the area, never realizing his own flaw. In the CIA, he learned the concept: when you are always the one talking and controlling attention, no one wants to be around you, because you do not make them feel interesting, special, or important. When they try to get a little attention or share an idea, they feel they are failing because you keep talking about yourself — your favorite ideas, movies, and foods.
He said he is now so sensitive to it that when someone changes the subject to themselves, it is like a bright nuclear explosion in front of his face. He recalled a recent weekend at a friend's house, talking with the friend's wife about her favorite music, when her visiting sister interrupted before the wife could answer and began talking about her own favorite music. The group seemed to find it normal, and even the wife went along with it. He called it the perfect way to alienate people.
If you want to build a network effectively, he said, make everyone around you feel they are more interesting than you. They will want you around all the time, because that is what sets you apart. Everyone else sits there saying how good they are at their job, how excellent they are in their field, handing out business cards and YouTube channels and talking about how much money they make. It is all "me, me, me."
When your role is to ask someone what they do for a living, why they do it, how they enjoy it, what their favorite band is, or what their favorite movie is, you make them feel so interesting that they want nothing more than to have you around.
Franzese described a company wine dinner for about thirty people who had flown in from around the country. After dinner, during the Q&A, one or two or three people would ask questions entirely about their own lives, never getting to the point. He said he tells people to let them talk, because it makes them happy and they will stay with the company for life. One man talked so long Franzese could not even hear him, but he kept going, unaware. Franzese saw it as the man's moment — he had the stage, and there were twenty-five other people there. Give them the stage for a while.
He said people stayed after dinner that night because they were made to feel good and important. That, he said, is the magic recipe: make someone else feel important, and you will have done something no one else in their life does. Everyone is married to someone who does not make them feel important. Everyone has children who see them as the most boring parents in the world. Everyone has employees who do not care much and managers who care even less.
Then you meet the person who genuinely makes you feel like the center of attention — not for hours, just for a few moments. Your favorite waiter, your favorite bartender, your favorite clients. You find yourself devoting time to them and wondering why. Why do I spend all this time talking to this waiter? Why do I always ask for Susan when I come to the restaurant? Susan is not even that pretty. But she always remembers your drink, asks about your children, and keeps your water glass full. She knows how to make you feel important. It is not hard. Sometimes it is a few simple words or a handshake: "Hey, you did a great job tonight, my friend. I really appreciate the way you worked here." It leaves a big impression, and many people simply do not realize it.
Franzese said he could sit for five or six hours discussing the book but would not, because people are busy and Bustamante had other places to go. He noted he had never before hosted another author and sat with them to break down a book on his platform.
One chapter that stood out was Chapter Three, on the only three resources that really matter. Bustamante said that without clear guidance, everyone feels scattered about what deserves their time, energy, and attention. At the CIA, he was told there are only three resources that matter: time, money, and energy. Every other resource either feeds into one of these three or is a complete distraction.
Time is relatively easy to understand as a limited resource. We do not know how much we have, and everyone knows time cannot be created. Money is familiar, and everyone understands it can be limited. Knowing how to make money, especially from nothing, is a valuable talent.
It was the third resource that shocked Bustamante and everyone else in his training class, and still shocks people today. The CIA teaches that energy is the third resource — not metaphysical or fantasy energy like chakra energy, but literally thermal energy, the energy you need to get through your day, to stay focused, to walk a hundred miles, to take the next step, to lift a heavy box.
All three resources are limited. You have only so much money, so much time, and so much energy. When one runs out, your ability to carry out any operation is significantly impaired — an intelligence operation, a military operation, or an ordinary person's attempt to go on a date, close a business deal, or build a house.
The CIA taught that the three resources are also interconnected. You cannot create more time, but you can create more energy. When you create more energy, you accomplish more in less time, which saves time later. With that free time, you have the opportunity to create greater productivity, which generates more money.
When the CIA teaches officers how to plan an operation or a cover identity — what is called a cover legend — it is not just about recognizing the three resources but optimizing them. Create more energy with a little extra sleep, a cup of coffee, or some extra exercise. Create more energy to accomplish more and save more time. With surplus energy and time, you have the chance for greater productivity, which in the intelligence world leads to more government funding. Produce more intelligence reports on a place like Iran, and the government gives you more money to gather more information.
In business, he said, if you have two extra hours — not just of time but of focused energy — how much more money can you make? A little extra money, time, or energy creates wealth exponentially, and then you amplify it over time. If you can do less important things with your time and more important things with your time, how much more money will you make, and how will you use that money to invest and make money generate money over time?
Bustamante said it was revolutionary for him at the CIA, and embarrassingly, it took him another year or a year and a half after leaving the agency to realize he could apply the same concept to his daily life and his business. He applied it at a Fortune 10 company and made them a huge amount of money before realizing he could do it for himself.
Franzese asked whether the book explains how to achieve this fully. Bustamante said it is difficult to master and inherently individual, because biological variation allows you to master it. Energy depends on your biology. Certain foods give you energy, and the same food may drain someone else. He is lactose intolerant; dairy may be easy for someone else to digest. If they ate the same bowl of ice cream, it would energize one person and drain him.
In the book, he said, he literally explains how to increase your energy, how to apply your energy to your money and available time to improve them, and how to use your improved resources to create more improved resources and keep building in an upward spiral.
He teaches the concept because it is easy to understand and applicable. He believes you can apply it because you have already seen its benefits. But many people can be taught and can read it, yet if they lack the discipline, confidence, and courage to try, they will never realize it.
He gave a simple example: Franzese makes a living selling premium non-alcoholic wine. Reducing alcohol intake is one of the fastest ways to increase energy immediately. Drinking non-alcoholic wine instead of alcoholic wine literally gives people more energy within hours. Imagine doing that three nights in a row. All that new energy could be used for something productive, creating wealth, creating opportunities, and saving time.
That is just one example of removing something from your diet. When you start adding things — meditation, fruit, changing your fiber intake — these are simple biological factors with profound effects on your available energy and what you have to deploy in productive efforts.
Franzese said he has been dedicated to giving viewers good information about their health and talks often about longevity. He said he does not promote products for everyone, but he believes in this book and in Bustamante and appreciates his willingness to share.
Franzese noted that after Bustamante's last appearance, some people said he still works for the CIA. He said he does not know for certain, but Bustamante says he is not, so he takes him at his word. Even if he were, Franzese said, what is the problem? He is providing skills and information.
Bustamante said the book will be released on September 8 and is available for preorder. Anyone who preorders and emails his team at [email protected] will receive a 155-page companion booklet with more skills, practices, and exercises to maximize the skills. He said the instructions will be in the description.
He called it a real advantage: not just something to read about, but a practical book and workshop for learning how to apply the skills.
Franzese said he might be one of the first customers. He said you can never be too old to learn something new, and that he has many young people around him. On TikTok, he said, people now call him "Uncle Mike" because so many Gen Z and young people enjoy the information he shares. He said he would use the book and share some of its information with others.
Bustamante encouraged people to use the unfair advantage now. "Remember this well," he said. "The unfair advantage is only unfair to the people who do not have it. It is completely fair unless you do not have it."
Franzese closed by thanking Bustamante and telling viewers he hoped they learned something. He called the information valuable and Bustamante very intelligent, adding that he does not say that about everyone. He encouraged viewers to buy "Outsmart Everyone," saying he took notes and that if he wants to learn, he knows where he came from on the street, but he believes he can learn a little from the CIA — and certainly has.