Andrew Bustamante (@Andrew-Bustamante) spent years as a covert CIA intelligence officer. When Lex Fridman asked him to name the single most useful spy trick that anyone could apply to their everyday life, his answer wasn’t about surveillance, or reading body language, or disappearing off the grid. It was about how you see other people. The clip, from Episode 310 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, originally recorded in August 2022, has been recirculating widely since Bustamante published his memoir “Shadow Cell” with his wife and fellow CIA officer Jihi Bustamante in September 2025, which debuted at number eight on the New York Times bestseller list. His follow-up book, “Everyday Espionage: Winning the Workplace,” applies the same intelligence tradecraft directly to professional life. The perception versus perspective clip is one of the reasons people keep finding him. Here’s the distinction he draws, as he explained to Fridman and as YourTango reported in covering the exchange. Perception is how each of us interprets the world around us. It’s personal, it’s filtered, and it’s entirely our own. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the problem is that most people treat their perception as objective reality and then spend enormous energy trying to convince everyone else of it. “That’s why so many people find themselves arguing all the time,” Bustamante said, “trying to convince other people of their own perception.” Perspective is different. It’s not just feeling what someone else feels, which Bustamante distinguishes from empathy. It’s actively placing yourself in someone else’s position and asking what their life actually looks like. What did they wake up worried about? What are they afraid of? What pressures are they carrying that you can’t see? “Perspective is the act or the art of observing the world from outside of yourself,” he told Fridman. “You sit in the seat of the person opposite you and think to yourself, ‘What is their life like?'” The intelligence application is obvious. An officer who can only see a situation through their own cultural and personal lens is going to miss things. One who can genuinely inhabit another person’s point of view, their incentives, their fears, their constraints, is going to understand things that others don’t. But Bustamante’s point is that this skill doesn’t stay in the field. “If you do that to your boss, it’s gonna change your career,” he said. “If you do that to your spouse, it’s gonna change your marriage. If you do that to your kids, it’s gonna change your family legacy. Because nobody else out there is doing it.” That last line is the part that tends to land. Most interpersonal friction, whether in a marriage, a workplace, or a friendship, comes not from bad intentions but from two people each arguing from their own perception without pausing to genuinely inhabit the other’s. Bustamante is saying the CIA trains people to close that gap, and that closing it is available to anyone who practices it deliberately. The comment sections on the viral clips reflect how directly this lands for people. “He just put it into words for me,” one viewer wrote. Another added that taking on multiple perspectives is “a way to find useful truths and do skillful systems analysis.” The observation isn’t new, but something about hearing it framed as tradecraft, as a skill that professionals train for rather than a platitude, seems to give it traction. Bustamante runs his own platform, Everyday Spy, where he teaches intelligence-based skills for civilian use. His core argument, across the podcast appearances and the books, is that 95% of what CIA officers are trained to do applies directly to ordinary life. The perception versus perspective shift, he says, is where most people could start. This article originally appeared earlier this year. The post A former CIA officer was asked for the one spy trick everyone should know. His answer has nothing to do with espionage. appeared first on Upworthy.