YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Bustamante

lines on the record: 255
first: 2022-08-08
most recent: 2022-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“True. I think that your point of view is accurate. I would also say that Complexities of what makes somebody make a decision. only really be properly calculated with a baseline. So because there is no baseline that you or I have on Peter Thiel, it's difficult to really ascertain why he does or doesn't accept invites or why he does or doesn't appear.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I would go a step further to say that the covert nature of intelligence operations. Is really attractive when it comes to the private sector because now they have all the same money with none of the oversight and all they have to do is deliver. So without the oversight, what's holding you back? And in a lot of, for anybody who's ever run a business, anybody who's ever started a startup or tried to make something succeed, we all know that there come those times where you have to skirt the boundaries of proprietary, of propriety or morality or commitments or promises to other people because at the end of the day, if your business fails, it's on you. So if you promise to deliver something to a client, you've got to deliver to the client, even if that means you stay up late or if you lie on your taxes, whatever it might be, there's a certain level of do or die.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do not believe that private intelligence and the laws of economics lend themselves to increased ethics or increased ethical behavior in the short term. Ends up happening is that in the long term, in order to scale economic benefits, you are forced to act within norms of your customer base. So as the norms of that customer base dictate certain requirements, the company has to adapt to those requirements in order to continue to scale. So if a company tries to ostracize LGBTQ, or if they try to ostracize men or ostracize women, they're limiting their ability to grow economically. They have to adapt to whatever is the prevailing ethical requirement of their customer base.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question of ethics is a great question. So let me start this whole thing out by saying CIA hires people. On a spectrum of our ability to be morally flexible, ethically flexible. All people at their heart are ethically flexible. I would never punch somebody in the face, right? Some people out there would say, I would never hurt another human being. But as soon as a human being posed a direct threat to their daughter or their son or their mother, now all of a sudden they're going to change their ethical stance. In self defense. But at the end of the day, it's still hurting another person. So what CIA looks for is people who are able to swing across that spectrum. For lesser offenses, right? More flexibility.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incentivize to stay there. Correct. I think that there was definitely, he understood incentives. I mean, Donald Trump understands incentives. So he was trying to incentivize them to stay. But I think he was also playing a safety card because he didn't want former CIA officials who were not listening to him to then move into private Intel organizations that he may be hiring only to then have them undermine him from both sides of the coin. So there was a little bit of offensive calculation in there as well.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He upset the apple cart with that. And unfortunately, the narrative that came out in many ways was a negative narrative against Trump, when in fact he was actually doing quite a service to the American people, trying to take away the incentive of senior officials leaving their service in order to just profiteer in the private intelligent world.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's when you also saw Trump start to go after, if you remember, there was a period where he was taking security clearances away from retiring officers. That became a big hot issue. That became something that people were very opposed to when they didn't realize that that process of taking security clearances away, that incentivized seasoned senior officers to stay in service. Because with private intelligence, paying a premium during the Trump administration, because Trump was paying a premium to the private intelligence world, when senior officers found that it was more profitable to retire early, keep their clearance, and go work for Raytheon, Trump saw that as bypassing service to the American people. You've made a career in CIA, you've made a career in NSA, you should stay there. If you leave, you lose your clearance because you no longer have a need to know.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is where private intelligence has both a strength and a weakness. The ultimate law overriding that's overseeing private intelligence is not government legislation. It's the law of economics. If they produce a superior product, then they will have a buyer. If they do not produce a superior product, they will not have a buyer. And that's a very simple business principle. Whereas in the current national security infrastructure, you can create a crap product, but the taxpayer dollars are always going to be spent. So it's really thrown things for a loop, especially during the Trump administration. And this is one of the things that I will always say I liked about the Trump administration. It put a big blazing bright light on all of the flaws within our system. One of those flaws being this executive power over the intelligence organizations and the lack of accountability for intelligence organizations to produce a superior product. When that light got shown down,”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that they're related but only circumstantially because remember Donald Trump wasn't really investing in CIA. So the last thing he wanted to do was spend his network WASTA. WASTA is a term that we call influence. It's an Arabic term for influence. Trump didn't want to use his Wasta putting teal into CIA only to lose Teal's contract as soon as Trump left office. So instead it was more valuable to put Peter Tiel's tool to use in private intelligence. And then, of course, I think he nominated Peter Teal to be his Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State. At some point in time, he tried to present, like presidentially appoint Peter Thiel into a position of government authority.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Palantir is one of those organizations that was trying to pitch their product to an intelligence community because they have, it's a fantastic product on paper. But the challenge was the proprietary services, the proprietary systems that we used in CIA prior to Palantir continued to outperform Palantir. So just like any other business decision, If you've got homegrown systems that outperform external systems and it's not worth it to share the internal information.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, in 2004, when they started significantly increasing their private presence of private intelligence officers, from then until now, it's become a budgetary thing. It's become a continuity of operations thing. And now the reason Northern Virginia has become one of the wealthiest zip codes in America is because of the incredible concentration of private intelligence that is supporting CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, and all the slew of IC partners.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the big recommendation coming out of the 9-11 Commission was that the intelligence organizations, the intelligence community significantly increase the presence of intelligence operators, overseas and in terms of analytical capacity here in the United States. When they made that decision, it completely destroyed. It totally was incongruent with the existing hiring process because the existing hiring process for CIA or NSA is a six to nine month process. The only way they could plus up their sizes fast enough was to bypass their own hiring and instead go direct to private organizations. So naturally the government contracted with the companies that they already had secure contracts with, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Khaki, you know, you name it. And then over time from 2001 to now, or that started.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. It's something that so few people know about. And it became a more mainstream topic with the Trump administration because Trump made it no secret that he was going to hire private intelligence organizations to run his intelligence operations and fund them. So that really brought it to the mainstream. But going all the way back to 9-11, going all the way back to 2001, when the 9-11 attacks happened, there was a commission that was formed to determine the reasons that 9-11 happened. And among the lists that they determined, of course, they found out that the intelligence community wasn't coordinating well with each other. There were fifdoms and there was infighting and there wasn't good intel sharing. But more than that, they identified that we were operating at Cold War levels, even though we were living in a time when terrorism was the new biggest threat to national security.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's, I mean, when I think of the fact that you could create a dossier on somebody in a matter of 24 or 48 hours, if you could wire them for two days, right? Internet of Things style, you put it in their underwear or whatever, right? Some chip that just reads everything. How heavy are they walking? How much time do they sleep? How many times do they open the refrigerator? When they log into their computer, how do they do it? Which hand do they use when they log in? What's their most common swipe? What's their most visited website? You could collect an enormous amount. of normative data in a short period of time where otherwise we're stuck the way that we do it now once or twice a week we go out for a coffee for two hours and two hours at a time over the course of six eight weeks 12 weeks you're coming up with a 50 assessment on how you think this person is going to behave just that time savings is immense”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And, you know, as fascinating as I think the challenge is building that model quickly. So technology is one of those tools that will be able in the future to very quickly create a model of behavior because technology can pull in multiple data points in a very short period of time that the human brain simply can't pull in at the same space, at the same speed.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most difficult thing in the world is consistency. It's the most difficult thing in the world. Some people say that discipline or self-discipline, what they're really talking about is consistency. When you have someone who performs consistently over long periods of time under various levels of stress, you have high, high confidence that that is the person that you can trust. You can trust, again, you can trust them to behave within a certain pattern. You can trust an asshole to be an asshole without trusting the asshole to take care of your kids, right? So I don't ever want to mix up the idea of personal trust versus trusting the outcome. You can always trust a person to operate within their pattern of behavior. It just takes time for you to get a consistent feedback as to what that baseline is for them.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a large element of experience and time that goes into that. She's also trained. And I think my wife and I also think. My wife and I also have the benefit of being recruited young and together where”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Female who is also not very attractive and also married, but then it turns out that that person is a sapiosexual and gets extremely turned on by intelligent conversation. That's exactly what you're there to do. Intelligent conversation with this person to find out if they have access to secrets. And by virtue of you carrying out your mission, they become extremely aroused and attracted to you. That is a very complicated situation.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, elements of sexuality that people underestimate, right? So physical sexuality, physical attraction is the most obvious one. It's the one that everybody talks about and thinks about. But then there's also sapio sexuality, which is being sexually attracted to thoughts, to intelligence. And then you got all the various varieties of personal preferences. Some people like people of a certain color skin or they like big noses. They like small noses. They like big butts. They like small butts. They like tall guys. They like bald guys, whatever it might be. You can't ever predict what someone's preference is. Sexual arousal preferences are going to be. So then you end up walking into a situation where then you discover, you know, and just imagine, imagine being an unattractive, overweight, married guy, and you're walking into an asset or a target meeting with like a middle-aged”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's used. It's absolutely used. It's called sexpionage. That's the term that we jokingly call it is sexionage. But yeah, the art of attraction, appeal, the manifestation of feelings through sexual manipulation, all of that is super powerful tool. The Chinese use it extremely well. The Russians use it extremely well. In the United States, we actively train our officers not to use it because in the end, it leads to complications in how you professionally run a case. So we train our officers not to use it. However, you can't control what other people think. So if you're an attractive male or an attractive female officer and you're trying to talk to an older general who just happens to be gay or happens to be straight and is attracted to you, of course they're going to be that much more willing to talk to an American who is also attractive.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just so you know, the US government, the military woke up to that exact same thing about two years ago. It's still very new. I mean, they were sourcing, take night vision goggles, for example, they were sourcing components and engineering and blueprints for night vision goggles from three, four, five different subcontractors all over the country, but they never asked themselves what the security status was of those subcontractors. you know, fast forward a few years and all of a sudden they start getting faulty components, they start having night vision goggles that don't work, they start having supply chain issues where they have to change their provider and the army doesn't know that the provider is changing. I mean, this is a strategy. The idea of going through third-party systems is identifying the vulnerability in the supply chain. That's a savvy, offensive practice for more than just”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the best thing that you can do, essentially, outside of trying to out hack the hackers. And then even in your intelligence and military worlds where the cyber warfare is active, the people who are aggressing are not trying to create aggression that beats security. They're trying to find aggressive techniques, offensive techniques that have no security built around them yet. Because it's too cost and time intensive to protect against what you know is coming. It's so much more efficient and cost effective to go after new vectors. So it just becomes like it becomes the most a silly game of your neighbor gets a guard dog. So you get a bigger guard dog and then your neighbor gets a fence. So you're just constantly outdoing each other. It's called the security paradigm. People just one-up each other because it's never worth it to just get to the same level.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Yeah. So, what I've seen as the norm, well, what I've seen is the cutting edge standard for corporations and the ultra-wealthy and even intelligence organizations is that we have tripwires. It's better if you can't prevent from being hacked, the next best thing is to know as soon as you get hacked, because then you can essentially terminate all the information. If you know it fast enough, you can just destroy the information. This is what the ultra-wealthy do. They have multiple phones. So as soon as one phone gets hacked, the Tripwire goes off, the operating system is totally deleted along with all data on the phone. And a second phone is turned on with a whole new separate set of metadata. And now for them, there's no break and service. It's just, oh, this phone went black. It's got a warning on it that says it was hacked. So trash it because they don't care about the price of the phone. Pick up the next phone. And we move on.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes to attacks, the leader always has the advantage because they have to create the attack before anybody else can create a way to protect against the attack. So the attack always comes first. And that means they always have the advantage. You are always stuck just leaning on, this is the best security that I know of. Meanwhile, there's always somebody who can create a way of attacking the best security out there. And once they win, they have a monopoly. They have all that time until a new defensive countermeasure is deployed.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then there's almost nothing you can do. Because once you become an intentional target, then your security apparatus, they will create a dedicated, customized way vector of attacking your specific security apparatus. And because security is always after, right? There's always the leading advantage and the trailing advantage.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're doing the right thing. What I always advocate is the low-hanging fruit is what keeps you from being a target of opportunity because you're half-assed hackers, you're lazy hackers, you're unskilled hackers, they're looking for low-hanging fruit. They're looking for the person who gets the Nigeria email about how you could be getting $5 million if you just give me your bank account. Exactly. That's what they're looking for. The thing that's scary is that if you're not a target of opportunity, if you become an intentional target.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. If someone had access to, if someone was able to clone your phone. Every time you cross a border, you go through some sort of security. If you've ever been pulled into secondary and separated from your bag, that's exactly when and how people clone computers. They clone phones. They make whatever, photocopies of your old school planner, whatever it might be. But for sure, you are an intelligence target. It just may be that you're not suitable to be a person who reports for an intelligence. We've got to understand that all people are potential sources of valuable information to the national security infrastructure of our host country and any country that we visit. Someone like you with your public footprint, with your notoriety, with your educational background, with your national identifications becomes a viable and valuable target of information.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not necessarily that you are interested to someone as a foreign asset or an intelligence collection source, but your network is extremely interesting.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you would not know if you were. For sure you've been on their radar. Absolutely, you've got a file. You've got a dossier somewhere”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we're taught that secrets and lies are similar in that they have a limited shelf life. If you treat them like food Secrets and lies have a very limited shelf life. So if you cash in on them while they're still fresh, you beat them before they spoil. You get to take them before they spoil. However, Trust has no limit to its shelf life. So it's almost like you're trading a short-term victory and losing a long-term victory. It's always better to keep the secret. It's always better to let the lie live because it will eventually come to light from somebody else, not from you, because it already has a limited shelf life. But what you win in exchange for not being the one that cashed in on the secret is immense trust.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the value of secrets has changed. And now there's almost a greater value on exposing secrets than there is on keeping secrets. That makes it difficult to keep secrets, especially when technology is going in the same direction.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's surprisingly difficult as technology changes. It's also surprisingly difficult as our culture becomes one where people want notoriety. People want to be the person who breaks the secret. 25 years ago, 40 years ago, that wasn't the case. There was a time in the United States where if someone gave you a secret, it was a point of personal honor not to share the secret. We're in a place where someone tells you a secret could turn into a Twitter post that gets you a bunch of thumbs up and a bunch of likes or whatever else.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“what we want to know. You get to know what the government tells you. You get to know what you need to know or what you've learned yourself, but you don't get to know secrets. People who do get to know secrets know them for a reason. That's why it's called a need to know.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Secrets give opportunity for security, they give opportunity for thinking, they give space. And space is an incredibly advantageous thing to have. If you know something somebody else doesn't know, even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes different, you can direct, you can change the course of fate. So I find secrets to be extremely valuable, extremely useful. at the place where secrets are being kept from a large mass. Part of what all Americans need to understand is that one of the trade-offs to building a system of government that allows us to be first world and wealthy and secure and successful, one of the trade-offs is that we have given up a great deal of personal freedom. And one of the personal freedoms that we give up is the freedom of knowing.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standard classification for all human intelligence operations is something called 25x2, 25 by 2, so 50 years, 25 years times two years, or times two rounds. So in essence, anything that I've seen has the first chance of becoming public domain declassified after 50 years unless there's some congressional requirement for it to be reviewed and assessed earlier. So by then, I'll be 80 something years old or potentially dead, which is either way. That's when it can come out according to its typical classification. The value of secrets I have seen is that secrets create space.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife is brilliant, and she still walks indoors. I mean, she'll walk in a doorway, she'll bang her knee on the same wall that's been there for the last 50 years.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's called Sensor. Yeah, because a sensor is someone who's able to interact with the world around them through their five senses very effectively. Like, if you talk to dancers, dancers can actually feel the grace in all of their muscles. They know what position their finger is in. I don't have any idea. I don't know what position my feet are in right now. I'd have to look to make sure I actually feel the floor right. Yeah, I definitely have.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't see it as sad because it's for me the faster you learn it, the faster you learn what your own sort of natural strengths and weaknesses are, the faster you get to stop wasting time. On things that you're never going to be good at, and you get to double down on the things that you're already naturally skilled or interested in. So there's always a silver lining to a cloud. But I know now that I will never be a ballerina. or ballerino. I know that I'll never be an artist. I'll never be a musician. I'll never be any of those things. And when I was 18, that might have made me sad. But now at 42, I'm like, well, shit, awesome. I can go be something else good instead of always being bad.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's a lot of good data in personalities writ large. Because there's not a lot of money to be made in personality testing. But I would say that with experience, with a good MBTI test, with a good paid test of 400, 500 question test, once you understand your own code and then you're taught how to assess the code of others with those two things kind of combined, because then you have experience in learning, it becomes very useful and you can have high confidence in the conclusions that you reach about people's professions, about people's relationships with family, about people's relationships professionally, people's capabilities to deal with stress, how people will perform when pushed outside of their comfort zones, really, really powerful, useful stuff in corporate world and in the espionage world.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My type index. I'm an ENTP. That's an extrovert, intuitor, perceiver, thinker, ENT, thinker, P perceiver. My wife is an ISFJ, which is the polar opposite of me, E, I'm extroverted, she's introverted, I'm an intuitor, she's a sensor, I'm a thinker, she's a feeler, I'm a perceiver, she's a judger.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it perfectly precise? And does everybody do it the same? I mean, those things to those are no, but is it operationally useful in a short period of time? That is a resoundingly powerful yes.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So essentially, your emergency mode, your dire conditions, that is your core personality. We can all act a little more extroverted. We can all be a little more empathetic when we have tons of time and money and patience. When you strip away all of that time, money, and patience, how empathetic are you? How much do you like being around other people? How much do you like being alone? Do you make judgments or do you analyze information? That's what's so powerful about MBTI is it's talking about what people are like when you strip away resources. And then because it's so consistent, it's also only for codes. It's super easy to be able to assess a human being through a dialogue, through a series of conversations, to be able to hone in with high accuracy what is there for code, for letter code. There's only 16 options and it becomes extremely valuable.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. And here's a few reasons why, right? So, first, MBTI makes the claim that your core personality doesn't change over time. And that's how it's calibrated. And one of the big arguments is that people say that your personality can change over time. In my experience, the MBTI is exactly correct. Your core personality does not change because your core personality is defined as your personality when all resources are removed.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, personality is extremely important for understanding human being. And I would say that there's a thousand different ways of looking at personality. The only one that I count with any significance is the MBTI. And the MBTI is what all the leading spy agencies around the world use as well.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it well. So, when people talk about beating a lie detector, it's not that they're telling an effective lie. That's not hard. It's not hard to tell a lie to an interviewer. And the interviewer doesn't care if you're being honest or not honest about a topic. What they're looking for is sensitivity. If they see no sensitivity, that's a big sign for them. That's a big sign that you're probably a pathological liar. If you show sensitivity to many things, then that's a sign that you're probably an anxious person. And they can still reset their baseline because they can tell how your anxiety is increasing, you know, in 15 minute increments. It's a unique skill. I mean, a really good polygrapher is immensely valuable. But yeah, it's the misnomers, the misconceptions about polygraphs are vast.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, from like a big, they've got multiple screens and they've got just, it's all information superiority. They have information superiority. You're the idiot looking away from them or looking sideways of them and trying not to move because you're afraid that if you like have gas or if you move a little bit, it's going to vary you from your baseline. And the whole time you're worried, your heart's racing and your blood pressure is increasing, which is a variance from baseline. So, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting art”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contractions or whatever. So you're sitting on this pad, you're plugged in, you're strapped in, you're tied up, and it takes so much time to get in there. And then they start asking you questions, baseline questions at first, and then other questions from there. And you're just answering the best you can, and you never know what they're seeing and you don't know what they're doing. And it's really hard not to get anxious about that anyways.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're essentially meant to identify sensitivities to certain types of questions. And then as they identify a sensitivity to a question, it gives the interviewer an additional piece of information to direct the next round of questions. So then from there, they can kind of see how sensitive you are to a certain level of questions. And your sensitivity could be a sign of dishonesty, but it could also be a sign of vulnerability. So the interrogator themselves, the interviewer themselves, they're the one that have to make the judgment call as to which one it is, which is why you might see multiple interviewers over the course of multiple polygraphs. But that's really what they're all about. So, I mean, outside of, they're extremely uncomfortable. Like they're mentally uncomfortable. But then there's also, you've got to sit on a pad because the pad is supposed to be able to tell your body movements, but also like your sphincter.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Polygraphs are really interesting. So, one of the things that people don't understand Like they're cold, a lie detector But they're not actually meant to detect a lie. They're built to detect variants from your physiological baseline.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just those kinds of things were so interesting because we were totally wrong about what CIA was looking for. Until you're in, you have no idea what they're looking for. And you're just shooting in the dark.”
2022-08-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #310 – Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source