Moment 207: CIA Spy Reveals How To Read Anyone Like A Book!

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0:40This conversation is designed to, for me, to be able to explain how spy skills have a very real value in breaking everyday barriers. 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've made it my mission in my company to break that barrier using a proven real world skill or technique from espionage. What sort of means is that to what end? If I'm the average Joe listening to this now, when you say break barriers, what are those barriers that I'm going to be able to break in my life?

1:20I 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.

1:53There 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 trade craft, but it's really to understand that any barrier that we as individual space, they can get us through. But we can also predict barriers other people will run into.

2:31And 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? Yes.

3:10And I'll be very frank here. I try to exercise something called radical transparency. 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 want to do.

3:49In 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, you know, the shister, bad guy business owners, right? The flip side, if you think of a coin, one side of that coin is manipulation. And that is a, 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.

4:31Is them 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, you know, DRM explosives. So it all depends on the caliber or the level of officer that you're kind of put into.

5:07So 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 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.

5:48You've probably talked to people who are bad liars. It's talked 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 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 more you run the risk of undermining your own lie.

6:32Bad 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 you 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 lie? Absolutely. I mean body language is a factor in everything, but body language is especially a factor in lying.

7:06Because 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, yeah. They sit bigger than life and all this other stuff, right? Their body shows confidence and openness, but then when they talk, they sound like idiots, right?

7:46They don't, 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 their body demonstrates. So you know that 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.

8:24So when you align 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? I see. So one of the first things to do when you're, when you're trying to lie to somebody, and again, we're now talking about how too lie to somebody. You shouldn't want to learn how too 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 to ask the real question, which is how do I know if I'm being lied to because that shows vulnerability.

8:55But if you want to learn how too 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? Yeah. So are mine. Are your feet crossed under your seat? Yeah. 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.

9:33If I was coming at you like, right away, you're going to be like, I don't know who this guy is, right? And similarly, if I was to be like, just for people that are on audio, he's just like doing different posture than body languages. So that are far away from my own, putting his hands on the table, etc. So okay, it makes sense. So we want to mirror first and you mirror because mirroring creates a foundation of trust, subconsciously 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?

10:10Is there anything else on the subjective 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?

10:50You just look to your left. It's natural to look to your left when you're from a Western country because chronologically time lines 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.

11:28They 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 going to hear that you can from Instagram influencers and Discord and everywhere on the internet, you're going to 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.

12:06Micro 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 deceit. The truth is you don't know if someone is lying to you until you have 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 camera's turned on. You are 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.

12:48But 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 was 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 variants 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.

13:23Was there any sort of consistent tell tell signs that someone was lying to you in an interaction? Like you know what I mean, certain nervous things that they do change, what are those variances that you might see that you go this person's not lying to me? Yeah, so with unskilled liars, it becomes much easier. Because a lot of times with skilled liars with people who are 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.

14:01There 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 12 year old tried a lot of them, they know what that looks like.

14:33They can't make eye contact. They do a lot of 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. Go 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.

15:17Those are the 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 road block. 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. 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.

15:52When 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 four basic motivations. Rice, RICE 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 and that's a reward. People do lots of crazy things for rewards. And these rewards change at a time.

16:34And based on person, 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. Right? So if you can assign, if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things. See 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 element of motivation, which is also known as manipulation, that falls under the sea or coercion.

17:15And then 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, right? 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.

18:06Of 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.

18:39You 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 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.

19:13When 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. How might you, so you said the ideology is the strongest of the core of the core motivations? How might you go about finding out someone's ideology in the context of business and life?

19:53A 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. 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?

20:26What 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. So people will volunteer it. Your customer base will volunteer to you what their ideologies are. They'll volunteer their politics. They'll volunteer 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 YouTube about, you know, how to make people believe in your brand because you use the right colors.

21:14But 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 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.

21:57It 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 is in present for your kids? That creates emotion in the right ideologically predisposed person. There's no woman out there who's going to be motivated by that. She might be motivated to tell her partner about that, but it's not going to resonate with her like it resonates with me as a father of young children.

22:36But 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 wasn't that's not present for your child? Man, that just like that pulls it 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. 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.

23:15The 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.

23:29It's to war with Iran over Yemen. 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 SB &R really is about getting people to let you into their secret lives. Correct. 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?

24:12When 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, you know, 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.

24:44It'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.