Name: CIA psychology: Ask questions that make people reveal everything | Andrew Bustamante
Uploaded: 2025-06-30T15:58:25.000Z
Duration: 16 min 46 s
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When you accept that other people have secrets and they will always have secrets, you are preparing yourself for a much more predictable, much more successful future.

Because once you accept that reality, you can start applying behaviors, practices into your personal life, into your business life that make it so that you gain more secrets than you share.

And gaining secrets in an economy of secrets is the same thing as gaining wealth or gaining power or gaining leverage.

You can either live in a world that is not true and believe that people are honest, or you can live in a world that is factual and objective and recognize that all people are keeping secrets from you.

I remember being a kid and my stepdad used to always look at me and tell me that the world isn't fair.

And I never understood that because all day at school, all people told me was that I had to act in a way that was fair to other people.

Everybody was trying to police this idea of fairness, but then I would come home at night and I would receive these lectures about how the world isn't fair.

It still didn't make sense to me all through college and even through my military career until I joined CIA.

And CIA was able to explain to me that fairness is a construct that helps to create predictability in human behavior.

When people believe there is some sort of level of fairness, when people believe that there is some sort of egalitarian level that keeps us all on equal footing, then you can actually predict and control a society in the longterm.

Whereas what we were trained to do as CIA officers was infiltrate those societies and abuse or exploit the areas that were kept secret from the masses.

We were charged with stealing secrets from terrorist groups.

We were charged with stealing secrets from foreign militaries.

We were charged with stealing secrets from scientists of foreign countries that were trying to create nuclear capabilities or new weapons.

We had to go into this organization that believed in some semblance of fairness to find the few that were willing to compromise on secrets they were trusted with because they inherently doubted that everything was in fact fair.

We live in a world that is constantly jockeying and vying for more power, more information, more influence, more leverage.

But we call it fair in order to reduce the number of competitors who are trying to get that edge.

When the majority of people are willing to accept that there is some level of fairness, they stop trying to gain an edge, which means that it's only a limited few that are truly competing for the top slot.

When you look at that through a lens of survival instinct, that means if you are trying to survive, you have a better chance of surviving when you let go of the idea that there is fairness and you lean in to accept the fact that there are predictable behaviors, predictable tools, leverage, manipulation tactics, motivational tactics that can create high probability outcomes that benefit you.

There's a concept we have at CIA that helps us to frame the entire world around us, whether it's personal relationships or geopolitics or even strategic intent.

And that's by understanding that we are all governed by what we call an economy of secrets.

If you think back to Economics 101 from whether you were in high school or college, you understand that economics is all about understanding that there is a limited supply and there is always demand.

The economy of secrets is the exact same way.

There are always going to be secrets and those secrets will be in limited supply, but everybody wants access to secrets.

So there is an infinite demand for the secrets that are out there.

Personal secrets, trade secrets, geopolitical secrets, economic secrets, financial secrets.

There's always a demand for secrets and whether we want to admit it or not, we understand that some secrets we want to keep until they're useful to us and other secrets are so valuable, we will never share them ever.

But somehow, simultaneously, we expect other people to share their secrets with us and we want access to the secrets that other people know that we don't know, sometimes just for curiosity, sometimes because we want to use it for a competitive advantage, sometimes because we just feel like we are entitled to understanding or knowing someone else's secrets.

All of that is an example of the economy of secrets and the very real pressure that exists on the supply and demand side of that economy of secrets.

Recognizing the value of secrets isn't something that's difficult for the average person.

We all understand secrets that we don't want to share and secrets that we do want to know and the value related to those secrets.

There are many different types of secrets.

There's secrets that people have that they don't want to share because they did something wrong.

There are secrets that people have and they don't want to share because they're respecting someone else's privacy.

There's secrets that happen because you tricked someone into saying or doing something.

There's secrets that occur because it was passed to you by someone else and you're not sure what to do with it.

There's a whole litany of different types of secrets and every secret has value to gain leverage in some way, shape, or form.

But understanding that there are different types of secrets is not a way of saying that all secrets are the same or have the same value.

Some secrets get you a great deal of leverage.

Other secrets get you very little leverage.

In fact, even the terminology that CIA uses to measure secrets isn't the same.

CIA classifies their secrets according to different terminology.

There's confidential secrets, there are secret level secrets, and then there are top secret secrets.

And the way that they define each of these different levels actually has to do with the impact that would occur if the secret became public knowledge.

So a confidential secret is a secret that could potentially do damage to national security.

A secret level classification is something that would cause damage to national security.

And top secret level secrets are secrets that would cause grave damage to national security.

So even if you just apply this simple three-step rubric to your own personal secrets or your own career secrets or your business secrets, you can see that not all secrets are the same.

The secrets that have more damaging outcomes are the secrets you want to keep and the secrets you want to gain.

And the secrets that have very limited impact are the secrets that you don't bother yourself with and that you're okay sharing or trading with someone else.

When you want to keep a secret, it's actually much easier than you might expect.

The first trick to keeping a secret is really just to limit how much you talk.

Don't speak in terms of answers or dialogue or conversation.

Because even by the way that you answer a question, you actually start to expose some of your secrets.

The words that you use, the pace that you speak, the level of excitement that you share when you talk.

These are all ways that you can share with other people interpersonal secrets about you, your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, how much you care about your kids, how much you care about your job or your family.

So it's actually very easy to start to protect yourself simply by speaking less or by being the person who speaks in questions rather than the person who carries on a conversation.

Another way that you can keep your secrets is by understanding that when you have a conclusion that you reach in your mind, when you have a suspicion, when you have a curiosity, when you wonder if somebody is trustworthy, when you wonder if somebody is lying, when you think somebody might be stealing from the boss, instead of sharing that information with somebody else, you just keep it for yourself.

And you allow time to continue to pass by, to give yourself more information, more time to assess, more observational information to reach a conclusion that's actually meaningful.

Because if you do catch someone lying, if you do catch someone embezzling, it's much more valuable to you to share that information when you have a preponderance of evidence that can actually confirm your suspicion.

Where what many of us do is we feel the need to share our suspicions immediately.

We share our thoughts, our concerns, our issues right away because we think that there's value to be gained by having other people give us their opinion.

When in fact, the most valuable thing you can do is keep your secret to yourself and collect more information about it.

We call it intelligence, but all intelligence really is, is having what we call information superiority, meaning the best and highest quantity of information compared to our competitors.

When you have information superiority, you are deemed to have intelligence.

It's the same thing we say when we talk about an intelligent person.

Intelligent people have a preponderance of information that is believable and useful to them.

It's just the same as having information superiority for CIA.

Sometimes you wanna access somebody's secrets, but you wanna do it in a way where they don't realize you're prying or searching for secrets.

We use a term called elicitation for this activity.

When you are trying to elicit specific information without demonstrating that you're interested in that specific information.

If you think about the average movie where you see a guy walk up to a girl in a bar, he's having a conversation to try to see whether or not she's interested or whether or not she has a boyfriend.

He's talking about the weather, he's talking about the band, he's talking about mundane things, but what he's really doing is gaining assessment information from his target to see is she smiling at him?

Is she wearing a wedding ring or an engagement ring?

The same thing is true when you're trying to collect secrets from other people.

One of the most powerful tools that you can use to elicit is really just to engage a person in a meaningful conversation with what we call open questions.

Open questions are questions that cannot be answered in a single word or a short phrase.

So for example, a yes or no question is not an open question.

Asking somebody whether or not they like their meal or if they're happy or if they've had a good day, none of those are open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions start with words like how or why or to what extent or tell me about.

When you ask an open-ended question, the person who's hearing your question has to interpret it through their own psychology, their own perception, their own lens of beliefs and biases.

And because they have to interpret your question, they oftentimes share much more information than they intended to share.

So when you ask somebody what are your thoughts about the current events in the Middle East, you will get much more information than what you ever thought you would expect because they will share their opinions, their beliefs, their background.

You may even see whether or not they're knowledgeable about what's happening in the Middle East at any given time.

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CIA psychology: Ask questions that make people reveal everything | Andrew Bustamante

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