For someone that's just clicked on this podcast now, who's trying to understand the value that they're going to get from you by understanding the work that you do at Everyday Spy, what are they going to get from this conversation?
This conversation is designed for me to be able to explain how spy skills have a very real value in breaking everyday barriers.
And that's the mission of my company at Everyday Spy.
We use spy education to break barriers, social barriers, financial barriers, educational barriers, cultural barriers, language barriers, if there is a barrier in life, I made it my mission in my company to break that barrier using a proven real -world skill or technique from espionage.
And what sort of means is that to what end?
So if I'm, you know, the average Joe listening to this now, when you say break barriers, what are those barriers that I that I'm going to be able to break in my life?
So I intentionally use the term breaking barriers because we all have different barriers.
What? The reality of life is that we all come into barriers that are similar, but we come into those barriers at different times.
For some people there's a barrier in income that they're born into.
For other people the barrier that they're born into is that they don't have a father.
For other people they come into a financial barrier when they're 18, and they have to leave home.
Some people don't ever know financial barriers, but they do know educational barriers because they suffer from dyslexia or they suffer from ADHD.
There are people who have barriers that are due to anxiety.
The reality is there's really 12 or so barriers that we will all experience in our life but we will experience them at different times.
For some of us, it won't happen until we become parents.
For others, it happens as soon as we hit adulthood.
The idea is that CIA is extremely familiar with barriers and what they teach us as officers going through their training programs is not just the details of tradecraft, but it's really to understand that any barrier that we as individuals face, they can get us through, but we can also predict barriers other people will run into.
And if you know somebody else's barrier and you understand their barrier better than they do, when you help them through that barrier, they will tell you secrets.
They will tell me secrets.
As part of your training to become a CIA officer, you must have learned how to manipulate people.
That seems to me, from what I know of spies, pretty foundational to what it is to be a successful spy and to get information from someone else.
In this conversation today, are we going to learn how, through your training, you were taught to get information from people and make them do what you wanted them to do?
If you want to manipulate people, you will learn that from this conversation.
If you want to manipulate people, I will teach you how to manipulate people in just a simple conversation, you can learn those skills.
But the thing to understand that's the most important is that whether you want to manipulate or not, others are manipulating you just because you don't know what they're doing, right?
The problem with being an intelligence operator is that to achieve the things you have to achieve, you sometimes have to do things that you don't wanna do.
In being a business owner, what I've discovered is that many business owners struggle because they feel like they have to do things they don't want to do.
They feel like they have to be sleazy.
They feel like they have to be tricky.
They feel like they have to mimic, shyster bad guy business owners, right?
The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation.
And that coin has value, manipulation has value.
But the other side of the same coin is motivation.
If you can get people to do what they want to do, then you have motivated them.
And that is worth just as much as getting people to do what you want them to do, which is manipulating them.
Is learning how to kill people involved in the curriculum?
No, that is not involved in the curriculum.
Not at the basic training level.
Do they teach you that?
They teach some people that, but they don't teach everybody that.
It depends on the discipline that you're part of.
If you're a paramilitary officer, you need to learn how to kill.
And you need to learn how to kill in different ways.
Kill quickly, kill quietly, kill with blunt weapons, clear with bladed weapons or kill with bladed weapons, kill with projectile weapons.
So kill with explosives, de -arm explosives.
So it all depends on the caliber, the level of officer that you're put into.
So paramilitary, they must learn that.
But your standard human intelligence field collector, they need to learn how to live and work without being caught.
So if you kill somebody, it's a big deal.
You might get caught.
So it's much easier to teach that person how to manipulate, how to collect secrets, how to live and operate without ever being detected, whereas a paramilitary officer doesn't need to learn all that.
They taught you how to lie.
They teach you how to lie.
How do they teach someone how to lie?
It starts with a foundation of making sure that you recruit people who are already liars and then once you, when you're sitting across from a liar you can start to understand if they're a good liar or not very quickly.
You've probably talked to people who are bad liars.
Let's talk to everything.
So you know when someone's a bad liar so from that you can identify people who are good liars and then when you do find a good liar you start to teach them what they already naturally do that makes them a good liar and then you start to teach them how to refine that skill and you start to teach them how bad liars operate and how you can detect a bad liar and how you gain advantages you know with lies and how to handle lies as an example because I promised you skills.
Bad liars talk a lot.
Good liars talk a little because the more you talk the you run the risk of undermining your own lie.
Bad liars make a lot of statements.
Good liars ask a lot of questions because if you ask questions, you're not really disclosing anything about yourself.
So if you've ever had, if you think back and if you remember ever going to a party or ever having a date or ever being in a social environment where there was somebody there that made you feel so interesting but you didn't know anything about them, you were talking to a very good liar.
What about body language?
Is that a factor in lying?
Absolutely. I mean body language is a factor in everything, but body language is especially a factor in lying because, again, going back to the idea of a skilled liar versus an unskilled liar, a skilled liar knows how to appear like they are telling the truth with their words and with their body, whereas an unskilled liar often has a disconnect, and their body will say a different message than what their mouth is saying.
Consider your stereotypical jock your standard European footballer or your American jock a lot of times they'll be portrayed as like somebody you like yeah they sit bigger than life and all this other stuff right their their body shows confidence and openness but then when they talk they sound like idiots right though I don't know I'm sure like you know totally like dude that lady like whatever they are there's a disconnect their voice does not demonstrate the same confidence that body demonstrates.
So you know that person is lying, what they're lying about is not necessarily just the content of what they're saying, but they recognize they don't.
They can't cognitively accept the fact that they are in a position where they are telling an untruth, and that untruth at a minimum is.
That they are not super confident and super comfortable, they are actually uncomfortable and they are not feeling confident.
And that's why they're stammering over themselves.
So when you were lying to someone based on your training, would you think a lot about your body language?
Yes. And what would you do...what would you...what were the principles of making sure your body language wasn't letting the cat out of the bag?
So, one of the first things to do when you're, when you're trying to lie to somebody, and again we're, we're now talking about how to lie to somebody.
You shouldn't want to learn how to lie to somebody, you should want to learn how to know if somebody is lying to you, but we always start this way where we want to...we're afraid ask the real question.
Which is how do I know if I'm being lied to because that shows vulnerability.
But if you want to learn how to lie to somebody the first thing you do is you mimic the person.
Look at you and I right now we are mirrored.
Are your hands connected under the table?
So are mine. Are your feet crossed under your seat?
So are mine. We are mirrored right now.
Which means when you look at me subconsciously you see yourself.
I want you to see yourself in this exercise because if you see yourself, your initial instinctive response is going to be trust, because who do you trust in the whole world?
You trust yourself.
So the first step to being able to lie effectively is to be able to mirror the person you're lying to, if I was coming at you like, right away, you're gonna be like, I don't know who this guy is, right?
And similarly, if I was to be like...
He's just doing different postures and body languages.
So, far away from my own, putting his hands on the table et cetera.
So, okay, makes sense.
So, we want to mirror first and you mirror because mirroring creates a foundation of trust. Subconsciously it creates a foundation of trust. And then once you have that foundation of trust, you just start, kind of pushing the envelope more and more with the untruth or with the fabrication that you're creating, the lie, right.
Is there anything else on the subject of telling a lie to someone that's believable that we need to be aware of in terms of skills.
Yes, so first, the whole idea about...
There's two important ideas that get glorified in social media that are just inaccurate and the first is called eye movements.
You can't actually tell if somebody's lying to you based on where they place their eyes because while there are certain elements of eye movements that have biological relevancy, there's many many more things about eye movements that don't have biological relevancy, right?
So what I mean by that is, if I ask you what's your oldest memory?
You just look to your left. It's natural to look to your left when you're from a Western country because chronologically, timelines start on the left. So when you ask somebody a question about time and they look to the left up down or in the middle, generally speaking, that has biological relevancy.
So it's a low probability that they're lying, but they still could be lying.
When you ask somebody a question, they look to the upper right or the lower right or wherever they might look.
If there's not necessarily biological relevancy because they could be looking up into the right because down into the left, it's too bright and they could be looking in any number of directions because maybe they have a headache or maybe they have something else going on.
The ability to create some sense of probability about why they're making the eye movements they're making is too difficult.
So you can't assess someone's honesty or dishonesty based off of eye movements, even though you're gonna hear that you can from Instagram influencers and Discord and everywhere on the internet.
You're gonna hear that there's some connection that you can make, justifiably.
It's not true. The same thing is also true.
So it is also an untruth that you can rely on something known as micro expressions micro expressions being the number of times your eyes blink or the Twitch in your face or if you're sucking on your lips, these ideas that get glorified through social media as indicators of of deceit the truth is you don't know if someone is lying to you until you've had enough time with the person to establish what's known as a baseline a baseline means what's normal for you.
So I'll just use you as an example, 10 minutes before the cameras turned on, you were a totally different person.
Your energy is different.
You're so much more conversational.
Like you are just...
You're an awesome friendly guy when the cameras are not on, but you turn into an interviewer when the cameras turn on.
Totally rational, totally logical, makes total sense.
That doesn't mean that you're lying now and you were telling the truth then.
It means that the environment has changed and nobody would know that if there wasn't a baseline.
Most people that watch you don't ever know what you're like outside of this baseline.
So you have to get to know the person and then understand the variance that's unusual to understand if they're lying to you.
Exactly. We call it time on target.
You need time on target so that you can understand the Delta, the change between their baseline, and whatever pressure you're putting them under.
Was there any sort of consistent telltale signs that someone was lying to you in an interaction.
Like you know what I mean, what you know certain you know nervous things that they do change you know what are those variances that you might see that you go this person's now lying to me?
Yeah, so with unskilled liars it becomes much easier because a lot of times with skilled liars with people who have either learned how to lie through formal training or people who have learned how to lie through the school of hard knocks, when there's people who are skilled liars, it's difficult to find generic tells.
With people who are unskilled liars, it's much easier to find generic tells.
There are people who you've heard of being on the hot seat, it's a phrase we use in Western culture pretty often, like when someone is under pressure, we call them being in a hot seat.
When you've got an unskilled liar, they can't stop moving their body, like they're just, they're always uncomfortable and they just keep moving and they keep twitching and they keep fidgeting and it's like they're sitting in a hot seat that is one of the biggest tells of an unskilled liar and again anybody who's ever had like a six -year -old or an eight -year -old or a twelve -year -old try to lie to them they know what that looks like they can't make eye contact they do a lot of you know like verbal noises that aren't actual words they can't get comfortable they keep moving around they keep shifting
shifty those are all all those words came from real world examples of an unskilled liar trying to lie but you don't need micro expressions of the face or to know which way their eyes are tracking in order to pick up on that.
Going back to your training then what were some of the other most important transferable skills that you learned throughout that process?
The most interesting and useful things that we learned during training actually had to do with the psychological processes that people go through and being able to understand the process and then predict and identify when the process is happening.
Those are things that really make a huge difference yes it's cool to learn how to do a dead drop and yes it's cool to learn how to detect surveillance or how to drive a car through a roadblock right those are all very interesting things but the most useful things are the things that you can use all day every day through multiple types of interactions and there are a series of processes a number of processes that we learned that had to do with human psychology one of those processes is understanding the idea of core motivations.
Core motivations are, remember how we talked about manipulation, and motivation are two sides of the same coin.
When you understand all the different options of the currency that you're working with, you can work with it more effectively.
So people are generally despite age, race, creed, or religion, people have four basic motivations, and we call those for basic motivations.
RICE, R -I -C -E, stands for Reward, Ideology, Coercion and Ego.
Reward is anything that you want.
Money, free vacations, pat on the back, women, alcohol, if that's something that you want and me giving it to you gives you what you want, then that's a reward. People do lots of crazy things for rewards.
And these rewards change over time?
And by based on person.
Okay. Right? The second primary motivator is ideology.
Ideology is the things that you believe in.
People do crazy things for the things they believe in, whether it's their religion, whether it's their country, whether it's family, whether it's what they believe is morally correct.
If you can assign, if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things.
C is coercion. Coercion is all the negative things.
guilt, shame, blackmail, anything that you do to force someone to take certain action by leaning into the negative elements of motivation, which is also known as manipulation, that falls under the sea or coercion.
And then E ego, is everything that has to do with how the person views themselves.
So oftentimes ego gets oversimplified into thinking that it's just people who have a big ego, somebody like Donald Trump, who has a big ego, or you name the famous actor who has a big ego.
Ego is also people who don't have big egos.
Mother Teresa had an ego.
She wanted to sacrifice for other people.
She wanted other people to see her sacrificing for other people.
That is also ego. So with these four core motivations, you have a rubric, a process, to understand why other people do what they do.
If you understand why other people do what they do, all you have to do is connect what they care about with what you want them to do and you just increase the probability of them doing what you want them to do.
Of these four core motivations, is there an order of the strength that they have over people?
So if you were really trying to get someone to do something you'd focus on this core motivation over that one.
Yes, absolutely. Ideology is the strongest, ego is the second strongest, reward is the third strongest, and coercion is the weakest. This is one of the things that movies get wrong.
Movies try to make it look like you can blackmail somebody or hold a gun to their head and get them to do what you want them to do.
In the real world, once you hold a gun to someone's head, they never trust you again.
You can never get them to do something twice.
Whereas if you appeal to their ideology, doing this is good for your country.
Doing this is good for your family.
Doing this is good for your health.
If you can appeal to someone's ideology, they'll do what you tell them to do for a long time because they'll trust you.
Is this really the the essence of manipulation then?
That is the essence of motivation and manipulation, the same coin.
You'll hear me come back to this because one of the things that people really struggle with outside of intelligence, is they feel like they have to label things as good or bad.
When you have moral flexibility, you take away good and bad.
Everything just becomes a question of utility or productivity.
If you need someone to do something and you can motivate them, then you should.
But if you need someone to do something and you can't motivate them, that's a green light to manipulate them because you still need them to do what you need them to do.
If you feel bad about manipulating somebody, you are not going to do well in the intelligence world.
So you said the ideology is the strongest of the four, of the core motivations, how Or might you go about finding out someone's ideology in the context of business and life?
A lot of times people will volunteer to you.
There's two ways. If you're a keen observer, people will volunteer to you.
You've already volunteered that you are ideologically predisposed to fatherhood.
You've already talked about it.
The reason that you're worried about fucking up your kids that you don't even have yet is because you're thinking about fatherhood.
So clearly, you are ideologically predisposed to what it means to be a responsible father.
father. You want to be seen as a responsible father.
That plays into your ego as well.
So I'm sure when you're talking to your partner, if you guys are already looking at where would we go to school, where would we live, what kind of diapers should we use?
If you're even thinking about that, you're thinking about it through the lens of the ideology of being an engaged, present, helpful, loving father, right?
So people will volunteer.
Your customer Base will volunteer to you what their ideologies are they'll volunteer their politics they'll volunteer their their pain from their childhood they'll volunteer their pain from business if you listen if you listen the second way that you can get to understand the ideology of your customer base is through active marketing the right kind of marketing not mass marketing not the kind of garbage that you see on Instagram and and YouTube about you know how to make people believe in your brand because you use the right colors.
But actual marketing, where you present a message and that message was crafted with an emotion behind it, people who respond to that intentionally crafted message are showing what their motivations are because they were clearly motivated enough by the message to take action.
You've heard a lot of people talk about narrative, especially in politics, there's you know there's the there's the liberal narrative, and there's the Republican narrative, and there's the conservative narrative, and the church narrative, and people talk a lot about narrative.
Narrative is not the power in influence, the power in influence actually comes from messaging.
It takes two steps to get to a narrative.
It takes messaging first and then messaging builds a narrative.
If you think about messaging, messaging is supposed to be an emotional thing.
Just a statement, just a message, just like a text message, right?
Are you afraid of being the kind of father that isn't present for your kids?
That creates emotion in the right, ideologically, predisposed person.
There's no woman out there who's gonna be motivated by that.
She might be motivated to tell her partner about that, but it's not gonna resonate with her like it resonates with me, as a father of young children.
but that's just the message.
Then the narrative is not emotional in nature.
The narrative is logical in nature.
So you use an emotional message to communicate a logical narrative.
Are you afraid of being the kind of father that's not present for your child?
Oh, man, that pulls at my heartstrings.
Well then all you have to do is sign up for this app that reminds you every Sunday to read your kids a story, and you're like, oh, that makes total sense.
All I need is a reminder, and I'm going to be a good dad.
And that's messaging and narrative.
The same thing happens in politics.
The same thing happens in geopolitics.
The same thing happens the whole world over.
Because in the intelligence world, we understand messaging and narrative.
We know how to use messaging and narrative.
It's how you elect a president.
It's the reason that Saudi Arabia went to war with Iran over Yemen.
Like it's everybody understands at a national security level, the idea of creating a message or a narrative using emotional messaging.
But when it comes to business, people don't get it yet.
They haven't learned that lesson yet because they've all been taught through an MBA program or something else that you sell toothpaste by creating more toothpaste with brighter colors on more shelves.
I've heard you say that espionage really is about getting people to let you into their secret lives.
What is our secret life?
So you know if you go back to an earlier part in our conversation we were talking about how, when you trust people you'll tell them your secrets, right?
When you help people they'll tell you their secrets.
There are three lives that anybody lives.
We have a public life, a private life and a secret life.
The public life is the life that we're all very familiar with, right?
It's the life that you live for everybody else to see, not just the people who watch your podcast and the people who work for you and your company, but your public life also includes what you show your friends.
It includes what you show your church. It includes who you are when you walk down the street.
The clothes that you choose to wear are a perfect example of your public life.
It's what you want people to think of you.
Remember the E in Rice.
Mother Teresa wanted people to see her a certain way.
That is her public life.
When you're in espionage, the goal is to get away from the public life because if you want someone to give you secrets, you can't get secrets from somebody who's in their public life because they're protected in their public life.
So, you have to move them from public into secret.
And the middle step between public and secret is private life.
So, you have to move somebody from public life to private life.
Private life is a life that your partner knows.
Private life is the life that your closest friends know.
Your mom and your dad may know it.
It's the people who know that your feet secretly stink.
It's the people who know that you don't really like to eat oysters because whatever they give you gas.
That's all stuff that's private.
Your business partners don't know that.
Your customers don't know that.
The people who watch your podcast don't know that.
And it makes the people in your private life feel like they know you.
And it's what makes it so that for you in your public life, you feel like you have meaningful relationships because instead of 200 people who you kind of know, now you've got 15 people who are in your private life.
They know your home address, they know your birthday, they know your favorite ice cream, it makes you feel good.
Inside of someone's private life, they will share sensitivities, but they may still not share secrets because it's one thing to secretly tell somebody that you're worried about your business.
You're worried about the next revenue cycle.
You're worried about maybe your wife is having an affair.
Those things are uncomfortable, but you'll share them with people in your private life.
But you would never tell someone in your private life that you're having an affair.
You would never tell someone in your private life that you hit your child.
You would never tell someone in your private life that your parents sexually molested you, or whatever else.
those dark, deep secrets only live in your secret life.
The life that's so secretive that you don't even share it with the people in your private life.
What we're trained to do is to follow a process that allows us to meet somebody in their public life, get them to let us into their private life, and then get them to let us into their secret life.
because it's a very, like, simple psychological process to get into someone's secret life because secretly we all want somebody in our secret life.
We all want to have someone we can tell our secrets to.
We just don't trust anybody in our private life enough to get there.
So if you know how to leverage perception and perspective, use the four core motivations, when you know how to leverage sad rats to create trust, you can actually cut into someone's secret life and once you're in someone's secret life, they never stop trusting you.
They never let you leave because it was so rare and so hard to find you from their perspective, they don't ever want you to leave. So even if you break their heart, even if you lie to them, their trust in you is so great and so strong and so subconscious that you don't ever leave their secret life.
I'm very keen to know how you get into someone's secret life and how they might get into your own.
And we've talked about some of those principles earlier.
But I was wondering if one of the techniques you might use is by sharing your own fake secret life with them to create an element of comfort.
I think I've heard and I think I know from doing this podcast generally that vulnerability creates vulnerabilities to some extent, i .e. if you open up to someone that they're more likely to open up to you.
Correct. There's a, so you're getting into now a form of mirroring, much like we were talking about physical mirroring.
Now what you're talking about is emotional mirroring.
There's a nuance there because you have to know when to mirror appropriately because if you're mirroring somebody else and they know that you're mirroring them, then subconsciously they feel like they're in control.
Interesting. That's interesting.
So what you need to do is you need to mirror just enough to get to the place where you can get them to mirror you.
When they mirror you, sub -consciously, they know that you're in control.
So once you are in a position of power or control in a conversation, then you can use the ploy of feign vulnerability, which I wouldn't quite use it the same way you did.
I wouldn't make up something vulnerable.
Instead I would, we call it opening a window or opening a window that opens a door.
So we have these windows and doors in conversation.
So opening a door means completely changing a subject.
So if I were to just say right now, I don't really like French food, that's opening a door.
You as the interviewer can go through that door or you can close that door because it's not relevant.
But if I open a window about how I have certain digestive challenges that I don't like to talk about, that's a window.
You can always come back and push on that window and get me to go through a whole new door of conversation, right?
So when it comes to vulnerability and conversing with somebody about vulnerability, you want to present windows and not present doors.
So instead of saying something that's a fake vulnerability, you would say something that's a real vulnerability that may not be applicable to you.
Like, perhaps you say something like, you know, I, I have been having massive arguments with my wife recently and sometimes it makes me just want to leave home.
That's real. That's not saying I'm going to leave home.
It's not saying what I'm arguing about.
But if I believe that in your secret life, you are also fighting with your wife and you're living in a different room and you're not telling anybody about it.
I want to show some sort of bridge between us that gets you to admit that to me.
Because if you can admit that to me, maybe I can find out more about what you're doing to cope with the fact that your marriage is falling apart.
Maybe you have a girlfriend.
Maybe you're on Tinder.
Maybe you're doing something else, right?
Maybe you're drinking.
Maybe you're doing drugs.
I don't know. But I need you to let me into that secret life.
So I'm going to present a window and see if you go through that window.
So say that I was the asset and you were the CIA agent.
You have more experience in that role than I do.
and I was sat in a bar and I said to you yeah god this week's been really hard at home because my wife she's annoying me what and you were trying to get into my secret life how might you manoeuvre from that?
Right so there's a the basic principle here that we would use is called the two and one combination so two means two questions and one means one confirmation so when you present to me a topic that I want to explore further the most rudimentary of techniques out there is you present to me a topic I want to explore.
So I ask a follow -on question, you will answer my follow on question because you're predisposed to answer my question.
I will ask another follow on question.
You'll be predisposed to answer that as well.
And then I'll say something that confirms what you're saying, that way it doesn't feel like you're being interrogated.
Instead it feels like you're talking to somebody who gets you.
So I'll confirm what you say, like, oh yeah, I mean, I had a girlfriend once and her feet stank so bad.
And man, it just made me want to like, sleep with her feet outside of the covers.
And then you just stop there.
Because you've asked two follow -on questions and one confirming statement, the psychology of the other person is going to be to continue volunteering information.
And then you just repeat the cycle.
So they give you another piece of information, you follow, follow -up question, follow -up question, confirmation follow -up question follow -up question confirmation to you it feels formulaic listen ask a follow -up question listen ask a follow -up question to them it feels like they are talking to somebody who really really cares just put yourself in the shoes practice a little perspective here imagine if you really were talking about something that was frustrating you and the person sitting next to you at the bar literally didn't do anything other then ask you follow -up questions and agree with you
you're going to feel like you get me man why can't my wife get me like you get me like you know what i'm talking about i completely agree with you man tell me more oh dude and then and you can see how we'll just human beings just fall right into the groove
