Deception Expert: How to Build Trust With Strangers And Spot Liars Instantly!

0:00 Today's guest is a former CIA spy, an expert in psychological warfare. I would say the most powerful weapon in CIA, it's the perception of connection. When you can find out what relationship is missing from a person's connection web and you can fill that, you gain incredible power. For years, he operated in the shadows, traveling the world, recruiting foreign assets and gathering intelligence that shaped US national security. I would argue that America is one of the easiest countries to spy on for exactly that reason. Our rights as American citizens make us very vulnerable. Today, he's revealing his secrets, teaching ordinary people how to think like a spy to succeed in real life scenarios. That's a question nobody really ever asks. You see that they have a business. Maybe you see that they're growing a business, but you don't ask

0:47 yourself why. You have to dig into the why before you can understand the what. In this episode, we'll dive into his most perception shifting moments in the CIA, unveil his tactics to uncover priceless information, and explore why he's desperate to leave America by 2027. 2027 is my priority goal. If I can make that happen, then great. What it boils down to is that Andrew Bamonte, welcome to the Jack Neil podcast. I'm stoked to be here, dude. You have got like a sexy ass voice. Holy [ __ ] I appreciate it, man. When you turn that thing on, it's like Barry Manalo like like it's it's pretty it's singong, man. Thank you, man. And now that I've met your girlfriend, I understand why she likes you. It's the only reason, honestly. It actually actually was a key reason with her. She's like, "Just turn off the

1:33 lights and talk to me. Just just here's my good night story. Just read it to me." Maybe that's why she asked me to do that. That's funny. Um, but yeah, man. Good place to start here. Uh, fairly general, but to give people an idea of your worldview and how you perceive things. What did the CIA teach you about humans? The CIA taught me a lot about humans, right? People, human beings, there's good and there's bad, which is really not a fair statement. There's there's constructive and destructive elements to people. There's no such thing as good and bad. That's one of the things that the agency taught me. There's no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. There's just consequences, right? Some things, some consequences are productive, meaning they actually create more. Some

2:19 consequences are destructive. They take something that exists and they break it into smaller chunks so they reduce it, right? That's really what it all breaks down to. That's why, you know, Iran feels like we're the bad guys and we feel like Iran are the bad guys. We call Iran terrorists. They call us terrorists. Who's the actual terrorist? What is a terrorist tactic? What is a terrorist tool? It's all up in the air for for definition. So, one of the big things that the agency focuses on is just trying to understand whether the behaviors of a person are productive and beneficial to you or whether they are destructive and a hindrance to you and to look at things through that objective lens rather than a subjective lens. I guess you personally, do you view most humans you interact with as evil or do

3:06 you try to segment it as selfish or self-interested? I I very much focus on self-interest. Does this person benefit me? Does this person drain resources from me? Or is this person netneutral? That's how I look at almost all relationships. It was an important lesson that the agency taught us early on to to look at relationships not as obligations, not as commitments, but as transactions. Every relationship at its core is transactional. Even though we don't want to admit it, even though people feel slimy about it, it's the truth. If if we will let go of all of our preconceptions, we'll start to realize that relationships are transactional. Nobody enjoys a relationship where the transaction costs them more. Right?

3:53 Every secret secret shocking news. Every mother out there doesn't like being a mom for like the first 5 years. They don't. Mom, I know it's true, right? All the other moms watching telling that I don't know what I'm talking about. You know it's true, too. All the dads watching are nodding their heads right now because they know that shit's true because a little baby's just a [ __ ] succubus. It sucks money. It sucks time. It sucks sleep. It sucks milk. It just takes everything. So, in that transaction, what's the mom getting out of the deal? She's not getting anything, right? In many cases, the dad's not getting anything either. So those first few years with children are super hard because there's no positive counterpoint to all that resource drain. They get a giggle every now and then. They get a decent night's sleep every now and then,

4:38 but that's not truly a transaction. The same thing is true in university when you go to school. Why you like some friends and don't like other friends, why you like some sisters and not other sisters, why you get along with some cousins and not other cousins. It's because what you value, if it's not returned to you, then you don't actually see a positive transaction in the relationship. So then subconsciously it starts by you realizing that you don't want to be around that person as much as you want to be around other people. And eventually it moves from the subconscious into the the prefrontal cortex and then you actually start intentionally making decisions to stay away from some people and engage with other people. You've been Christian for a few years now. Um, would you say that your relationship with Jesus and your

5:23 study of the Bible as well as having children has impacted these views in any way or is it just more reaffirmed it? I would say that my experience with Christianity, I was saved in 2004. So, I've been I've been I've been born again for a long time. But since 2004, my journey in my own faith has been an interesting journey. It was a journey that started very kind of black and white because I was a I was a military thinker and then I went and I took my faith into the agency with me and I started to see the scripture through a different lens because when you get outside of the United States when you start living and working and traveling and and operating in the world, you really start to see how [ __ ] shitty

6:10 human beings are. And now when I read the Bible, what I read in the Bible is that human beings are shitty. I used to read in the Bible like, "Oh, there's people, people, people, people people, people people, and then there's like special people here and special people there." Now when I read in the Bible, it's like everybody's shitty. There's just a few people who try harder to work against their natural instinct to be dickwads, right? And that's the real journey. The real journey is not to try to redeem ourselves. We can't redeem ourselves. That's why Jesus died on the cross. He's our redemption. We're [ __ ] We can't do it ourselves, right? The best that we can do is work every day to suck less. That's that's how I read the Bible now. That's how I see my

6:58 faith now. And there's a a a level of that that's liberating because it's like, "Oh, I'm always going to suck." I it takes off all the pressure of having to overachieve. I'm always going to suck at everything. I'm always going to sin. I'm always going to be selfish. I'm always going to make people feel bad. Like this way it's going to be forever. What I need to do is challenge myself to perpetually try to honor the father who granted me my propitiation. That's my job is to try. But the funny thing is even if I don't try, Jesus Christ is still the redeemer. Beautifully said. Um, I want to touch more on your spirituality later in our conversation. Um, but I want to zoom back to I think it was 2011. You did a

7:44 Reddit post. It was like, I worked for the CIA, ask me anything. And one of the top threads was something along the lines of not trusting people who didn't speak much. So, why don't you trust quiet people? That's a great call out to that Reddit AMA. That was a transformative moment for me because that was the first time I had any kind of viral moment. Um, and landing on the front page of Reddit for even just a few hours was kind of like mindboggling. But in that question, what I was highlighting is that we live in a in a society where we're kind of taught that we have to speak a lot. We have to gain people's attention. We have to earn validation. We have to earn recognition. We have to earn respect. Earn, earn, earn, earn, earn. And the way that you earn those things is by talking. What

8:31 CIA taught us is that the person who's talking is always dulging information. And they're not only dulging the information that's coming out of their mouth, they're also dulging nonverbal information. What's their face look like as they say the topic they're talking about? What are their hand gestures? How much do they swallow? How much do they spit? How loud are they? How fast do they talk? Do they talk with confidence? they talked with with some other like you know uh deliberate effort that you can see. So there's tons of information coming out of the person who's talking but the person who's quiet reserves all of their information and absorbs all of the talk all of the speaker information. So it's not just that the person who's quiet is not disclosing personal details. it's that they're doubling the

9:17 amount of information they get because they're protecting their own information and gaining not just one speaker's information but all the speakers information. When you naturally are quiet sometimes socially you feel awkward because there's a social pressure to talk. But at some point you realize that being a quiet person has its benefits too. The wall flower can sneak in, sneak out. Nobody really worries about them. They can say no to appointments that that social people have social pressure to say yes to. Like you start to learn, introverts learn over time that there's kind of some benefits to being introverted. As much as it isn't socially acceptable sometimes, there are some benefits. The natural introvert isn't my concern.

10:04 The trained individual who learns to keep their mouth shut, that's the person I don't trust. the person who's got like you right now solid eye contact, very active listening, really engaged uh in terms of nonverbal communication. Like that's a skilled person and that's a person who is picking up everything you're putting down and you're getting nothing from them. Yeah, I had that experience. The only other CIA affiliated guest we've had on was Chase Hughes. Good dude. Um good dude. And when I sat down with him, I was just like, it was almost terrifying to speak because how much I saw he was listening and observing everything I was saying. And all the comments were about that. It was like like this guy Jack is like very intimidated. I'm like that's exactly what was going through my head. I'm like you can see everything like through my

10:50 eyes. Um but have you improved that skill over the years of sitting and observing with people or does it kind of like max out at a certain point? It's always growing but the growth curve gets smaller. Yeah. It also the nuance and the mastery comes with time, not initially, right? And Chase would say the same thing. When you're first taught how to do this stuff in school, it's very, very technical. It's it's academic. It's practice-based. It's like learning how to write letters or write numbers, right? It's technique. And then you put a lot of effort into having bad technique. And then you practice and your technique gets better and it gets better and it gets better. But at some point that return on investment, the growth curve starts to get shallow.

11:35 You're still improving, but now instead of improving 10% every two months, you're improving 1% every two months and then some sometimes 1% over the course of a year. I think what's changed for me is that since leaving CIA, I'm no longer dealing with bad guys. Something that people often misunderstand is CIA spends all of their time pairing up its trained officers against the world's worst characters, right? Weapons smugglers, drug runners, you know, nuclear weapons engineers, military generals for foreign hostile countries, like actual villains, if you want to use good and evil, right? Those folks all have been trained, either trained in school or trained through the school of hard knocks. They've all been trained to be suspicious of people like

12:22 us. That's what the world looks like when you're a CIA operator. When you get out of the CIA and you start to work in everyday life and now you're doing, you know, working with clients, working with businesses, working with sales teams, working with your own team, th those aren't bad people. They're just normal people. And what you find is normal people haven't had the counter inelligence training to be able to work against you. So, they're that much more responsive to your techniques. They're that much more communicative with their verbal and non-verbal cues because they've never tried to not they've never tried to hold them back, right? And then there's elements inside society that makes people feel emboldened to like be themselves and show show their attitude and hey, this is just the way I am.

13:09 Like, okay, you be you because that's just more information for me to pick up, right? So what I found is that the the mastery continues but it changes because the target set is completely different. It's it's almost like spending two years operating against the Colombians and then two years operating against the French. There's a massive cultural shift between the Colombians and the French. The skills are still the same and they're still people, but the culture, you can literally see the culture when you operate against those two different countries. It's the same thing when you see people who are counterintelligenced versus people who are not. It's a huge culture change. It's interesting because Chase, we actually didn't go into too much of his time with the CIA. I think a lot of it is still classified, I would guess. Um,

13:54 but how would you classify like the different set of skills he might have versus you? I don't know if you've spent a ton of time with him. Yeah, Chase is a good friend. Um, and Chase is a an absolute professional. So the major difference is understanding that Chase operated in what's known as a controlled environment. He was in an interrogation. In an interrogation, the interrogator controls all elements of the environment. The interrogator controls the temperature of the room, the size of the room, the seat that you're sitting in, the they control when you walk out the door. They control when you've eaten, how much you've had the drink. They control when the interrogation starts, when the interrogation ends. So the person who's the target in the interrogation room has no control at all. And as they sit in that chair, they

14:42 know they have no control. In my world, there is no room. We're not carrying out interrogations. We're carrying out human intelligence operations. So we have to find a target in the in the native environment, in the open world. They can walk away from us any time. They can leave any time. They can lie to us anytime. We have no control that they don't voluntarily give us. So the skills are very different in terms of how they're applied, but conceptually they're very similar. Just as an example, Chase has made, you know, phenomenal references that talk about micro expressions. Micro expressions only work in an interrogation setting because in an interrogation setting, you have the time, the space, and the command to get a baseline for your target and watch the change in that

15:28 baseline as the interrogation continues. Um, like consider blink rate in this setting with this lighting where you're sitting and I'm sitting the angle of the lights like you're going to have a certain blink rate. That's going to be your baseline. As I stress you out during the interrogation, your blink rate will start to change and that's how I'll see that the stress is kicking in, that the cognitive load is increasing, that you're trying to fabricate, I'm going to see that change in your blink rate. Well, if I [ __ ] take you outside right now into the LA sunshine, guess what's going to increase? Your blink rate. Just because we're outside, there's a breeze and the sun's high in the sky. So is it would be false to say that by taking you outside and seeing you increase your blink rate, that must mean that you're stressed. No, I have to take the environment into consideration. So that's just one example of the difference between the interrogation

16:14 world and the field intelligence collection world. So essentially, you're used to having less control over a lot of the variables. Um, so I I guess it'd be good to ask you to get a difference uh in his perspective on this, but what can you tell about a person just by looking at their face in in field operations? You can't tell a lot. You can't tell a lot because you've got the environment to consider. You've got the fact that the people that you are meeting, you only get to observe them while they are aware that you are observing them. Right? In interrogation rooms, they sit in a chair. You've got cameras. You've got two-way mirrors. You've got somebody who's watching them for hours before the interrogator ever walks in. Out in the field, you might be sitting at a cafe for hours waiting for the target to show up to get their cup of coffee. So, you don't actually get to

17:00 see their face until you're actually engaging them. And then from that moment, you have to understand that you have now interrupted their baseline just by introducing yourself to them. Right? Anybody who's ever gone on a first date or anybody's ever approached a woman or had a woman approach them out like when they were single knows exactly what this feels like, right? You are interrupting whatever it is that they were in the middle of. So, um we I I have this uh example that I go through in my training courses where you know there are men who approach women and they have a a perfectly good line, a perfectly good opening line. They are good-looking guys. The girl is interested in them. But when she sees them and she's interrupted by them, when they tap her on the shoulder or they say something to

17:45 her in the middle of like the shampoo aisle at the grocery store, whatever, when they say something, her face looks like this. Well, when the guy sees a girl's face look confused, he immediately thinks it's me. She doesn't like me. They're not thinking we just interrupted her mental flow. Now, imagine that girl is an introvert. Or imagine that girl is highly analytical, very very smart. Sometimes people who have a high intelligence quotient have a low processing speed, right? And that low processing speed allows their prefrontal cortex to absorb more information before it makes a conclusion. So now the smart pretty girl is going to give you that face for a longer period of time because

18:32 she's processing what's happening right now. where the dumb girl who's really shallow is going to get past it really fast and be like, "Oh, hi." Right? So, it's the inverse of what we're actually looking for. Granted, there are sometimes you want to look for a dumb girl, but generally speaking, the smarter the person, the slower the processing speed, the longer you have to sit in what we call sitting in the discomfort. You have to sit in that discomfort and give their brain a chance to actually work. If it's that hard during dating, imagine how hard it is during treason, right? The same thing happens in business negotiations. You make an offer and then they give you a face and you're like, "Oh, I just pissed them off." No, you just interrupt. They've had a number in their mind the whole time. You just presented a

19:19 different number. You got to give time for that cognitive dissonance to work itself out, that grinding of the of the mental gears. So you said that people with higher IQs have slower processing speeds. Often times oftentimes people with higher cognitive capabilities, not the same thing as IQ, right? Intelligence quotient basically means um the level to which you are capable of having complex thoughts, but people who have high cognitive capability, they may not have a very high IQ, but they still have a high level of cognitive capability. They can still learn a lot. They can still measure a lot. Uh, so IQ is one quotient, EQ is another quotient, and then you have technical capabilities. I don't know if you've ever met somebody who is borderline like

20:05 borderline mentally uh not neurotypical. What what in the non-politically correct worlds we call a [ __ ] You might meet somebody who's borderline [ __ ] but amazing at small engines or amazing at computer programming. Right? that person has a great deal of cognitive capability, but they may not have a very high IQ and they would have a slower processing speed theoretically theoretically for for things not related to what they're good at because they're hyperfocused on the one thing. So it takes a lot to because it's that cognitive dissonance and there's also this building process, right? Because your your brain connects your neurotransmitters connect faster on things that they see more frequently. So musicians who have played the guitar for decades can learn a new piece of music

20:51 faster than guitarists who have not been playing the guitar for decades. That has nothing to do with their IQ or their cognitive capability. It's just a matter of how fast those neural networks have been built. What we call muscle memory. Something I want to talk about, I correct me if I'm wrong, but this was on the farm where there was like an exercise where you had to get a free cup of coffee. So how do spies get a free cup of coffee? It's such a fun exercise when you first go through it. And you're exactly right. During our essentially what what you could classify as basic training for CIA, everybody goes through the farm, what's known as the field tradecraftraft course, FTC. And we go through the course and just like I was explaining uh in one of your previous questions, it's very academic at first and then it becomes very

21:36 experiential by the end because you have to learn the skills and suck at the skills and practice them and get better at them so that you can try to reach some level of of performance before you actually graduate. One of the skills that they want us to learn is how to add instant value. That's the skill. Adding the perception of instant value to someone. The way that they exercise that is with this free cup of coffee exercise. So the mission, the challenge is you have to get a free cup of coffee from an absolute stranger within a certain window of time that they assign you. And there's certain rules. You can't ask for the cup of coffee. You can't trade them a cup of coffee. Uh it can't be any kind of uh like favor,

22:25 right? So they have to voluntarily uh come up with the idea themselves that you incept into their mind to buy you a cup of coffee that is more than $3. It can't be an inexpensive cup of it can't be a 50- cent cup of coffee at like a cafe or in a 7-Eleven, right? So those are the rules. And then you go out and you have to execute. And most of us fail over and over and over again until we until it clicks that it's not a challenge for coffee. It's not a challenge for sch smoozing. It's not a challenge for being a great conversationalist. It's a simple challenge to create the perception of value that exceeds the tangible cost of a $3 cup of coffee. So what can my

23:11 target what can I give my target in terms of social equity right social capital the term that we use what can I give them in terms of social capital that exceeds the $3.50 50 cents or $7 depending on what city you're in, the value of cup of coffee they're buying for you, right? Sometimes it I mean it's very specific to the target. A little old lady in like rural Alabama, all she might need is for you to sit there and ask her questions about her grandkids and her pets and she might be like, "Oh, you're such a sweet boy. Let let me get that cup of coffee for you." Right? In some places like Busy New York, it might be something different. And it might be having to have a conversation with somebody that's a deep dive into Andy Warhol paintings, right? But there's always something that people have that

23:58 they value greatly that they don't get enough of. And if you can give them the thing that they value, they perceive that value as exceptional compared to a $4 cup of coffee. And have you exercised this in the real world? Absolutely. I get I I will get a free cup of coffee probably a dozen times a year just from just I'm not even I'm not even trying anymore now. I just I stand in a line somewhere or I stand like it happened just a few days ago at the airport. Somebody recognized me from a podcast. I sat I stood there in line. I was polite to them. They asked me a couple of questions about what's this guy like and what's that person like and do you get do you get tired? And as soon as I got to the checkout lane, they just were like I'm going to get his coffee. I didn't ask for it, but they perceived enough value from me answering their questions and being polite to them or

24:44 whatever else that they wanted to buy me a cup of coffee. They wanted to reciprocate that value. So, the free cup of coffee, it's not necessarily from the coffee shop. It's could be from someone else in line. Correct. Honestly, you're going to have an easier time getting it from somebody else in line than getting it from the coffee shop. But, we all make that mistake, too. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We also all make the mistake of of trying to like cajul someone into it by getting to the getting to the cash register and then being like, "Where's my wallet? Someone I don't have my wallet." And you think someone's going to buy you a cup of coffee and instead the barista just keeps your coffee on her side and the person behind you gives you a dirty look. So it doesn't it doesn't work. So do you have a framework for the different types of value you can provide in a situation to get the thing that you want? There is a framework that's related to that. Right. And and the

25:33 framework is called Rice. It's a um it's a four step a four-part framework that we use to identify the core motivations that inspire a person. We're all motivated, but we're all motivated by different things. And even while we change in our age and we change in our uh lifestyles, our four core motivations don't change. And our core, our deepest motivator also doesn't change over time. Right? So rice r i is the acronym we use for these four different motivational levers. R stands for reward. I stands for ideology. C stands for coercion. E stands for ego. Every human being no matter what language comes out of their mouth or what they carry between their legs falls under these four motivations.

26:20 Reward means what are you going to give me to motivate me to take action? Whether it's money or attention or kisses or a free cruise, right? What am I going to get? There are lots of people who are heavily motivated by what they will get. I is ideology. Ideology is all about what you believe to be subjectively true, false, right, wrong, good, evil, right? This is your co your high school alma mater. This is your college mascot. This is your faith. This is your hometown heroes, right? Like all that's ideology. This is your nationalism. Why is it that as soon as this the the national anthem plays, we all stand up and take off our hats? [ __ ] ideology, man. Right? That's what that is. We're motivated because we are hurah American. C stands for

27:05 coercion. Coercion is all the negative stuff. Shame, embarrassment, humiliation, that shit's motivating. Fear, right? When you hold a gun to someone's head, they are motivated. When you threaten to fire someone, they are motivated. But there's an obvious downside to that because once you use coercion, you don't really get a second chance to coersse them again because they they avoid you, right? You don't get to use that a second time. And the fourth one is ego. And ego is the one that's the most complicated only because people misunderstand ego and egotism. Egotism is when you feel like you are the most important person in the room all the time. Ego is not being egotistical. Ego means how you view yourself and how you want to be viewed.

27:51 We all have an ego. We all have a way we want to be viewed. We all have a way we want to be perceived. Whether that's Mother Teresa or or Gandhi or Donald Trump, we all have an ego. If you can align the person's ego with the behaviors that you show towards them, you can literally show them a version of themselves that they want to see, which then delivers value that they want to reciprocate. So with those four different motivators, you can create the perception of value artificially or genuinely for your target. And which of those would you say is most valuable? The strongest by far is ideology. When you understand someone's ideology and you echo it back at them, you can move mountains, right? That's how you end up

28:36 having monks that light themselves on fire during the Vietnam War. That's how you end up having [ __ ] people strap bombs to their chest and then blow themselves up in public squares or people hijack airplanes and crash into buildings while they're still in the pilot seat. That's all ideology. That's some powerful [ __ ] man. Right. That stuff is so powerful that there are thousands of people every year who vow celibacy and fight the urge that is so natural to have sex their entire life. Right? That's how strong ideology is. when dealing in uh like high stakes business scenarios and with top level entrepreneurs, would you say that it tends to lean more toward ego or would you say it's still the ideology portion? Um, that's a great question. It actually

29:23 it's it's a pretty solid split between ego and ideology in the business world. The hardest thing to do is understand why they're in business. That's a question nobody really ever asks. You you see that they have a business. Maybe you see that they're growing a business. But you don't ask yourself why. Why do they have this business? Why not some other business? Why not some other job? Why are they making 5 million a year or 10 million a year or 100 million a year? Is it because they wanted to or because they have to or because they did it accidentally or is it because they have some you like secondary partner who's feeding them opportunities? You have to dig into the why before you can understand the what of in business. So

30:08 it's very easy. I mean one of the things that that drives me uh up a wall with American culture is that people like to accuse wealthy successful business owners of being greedy. That's all that's just a narrative that's been grown over time by more [ __ ] stupid poor people. And there's no reason to think that rich people, successful people are greedy by default. They are not. I've met plenty of wealthy people who could care less about money, but they want to win. And the only way they can measure victory is with a dollar sign. Some people measure victory with people that they hire. Well, in order to hire people, those people make you money and those people cost money. So somebody could be exclusively focused

30:55 on growing the largest company based off of headcount or based off of customers or based off of market share, but they're going to be accused of being money motivated and being greedy. And that may not be the case at all. Right? So you really have to understand why the person's in business. There's a lot of people who are in business because they had to adopt the family business. They don't even like it, but they're doing it because they have to. And the thing is such a welloiled machine that when dad and granddad gave it down the chain now that it's with you, you could literally sit on your thumb and the thing's still going to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year and you're bored and you feel trapped if you feel anything at all. Right? You if you don't know why they're doing it, then it's going to be very hard for you to gain leverage in the negotiation. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Do you have any advice for

31:42 people dealing with maybe working for or doing business with figures like Kanye, Trump, like these notorious high egos um that are a bit tough to handle like conversations or communication with? It goes back to what we were talking earlier about consequences, right? Um productive outcomes and destructive outcomes. Let's take the Elon Musk Donald Trump disaster that's happening right now. These two were buddy buddy during the election cycle, right? And then during the first hundred days, oh, you couldn't separate the two of them, right? Like they were licking off the same ice cream cone. Now they're throwing like missiles at each other on Twitter and everybody's talking about Trump hates Elon, Elon hates Trump. The the miscalculation here to me is fairly

32:32 clear. Elon, who is clearly on the autistic spectrum, who leans heavily in the Asberger's direction, high uh IQ, high cognitive capability, low social, low emotional intelligence quotient or emotional quotient, right? Elon was thinking if I help Trump, Trump will help me. Like that's a logical one 010 kind of decision, right? Trump was thinking, I'm the [ __ ] president. And once I'm the president, I don't have to help anybody I don't want to help, but everybody wants to help me, right? So for him, the d the the scale didn't tip. Elon helped him and Trump was like,

33:17 "Of course he helps me. I'm the president." If you've seen the musical Hamilton, it's such a good musical for so many different reasons, but there's this incredible point where Thomas Jefferson in the musical decides to change the rules about who becomes vice president. Prior to Thomas Jefferson becoming president, the vice president was always the runner up in the election. Right? So here in this case, the runner up went to Thomas Jefferson, was like, "Hey, I'm excited to be your vice president." And Jefferson looked at me, he was like, "You're not going to be my vice president. I'm changing that rule." How? Because I'm the president, right? That there's leverage there. Trump knew he had leverage. Uh Elon thought he was winning leverage from Trump and he wasn't. So, you have

34:03 to understand who you're dealing with. I say that because your original question was, "How do you deal with these people who have large egos?" First, I wouldn't assume that it's ego that they have. It could be something else. could be ideology. Trump could have a winning a winning ideology or a authoritative ideology or you know he's kind of a tough nut to crack because we only see what we see on TV, right? It's not like we get to have drinks with him in Mara Largo very often. But uh when you understand why they are the way they are, then you can understand what they're actually what what's driving them. So if you think that you got someone who's being driven by ego, then you have to ask yourself, what leverage do I actually have? And if you don't have leverage, how productive is the consequence going to be or how destructive could the

34:49 consequence be? And then is that how you want to spend your resources? Yeah, it's a fascinating one because from what I've noticed, there are two types of entrepreneurs like you're describing, the ones that are all about value exchange and equal value and like they feel bad if it's not fair. Then the the other ones are like you work for me, you're part of my team, you're part of my vision. Um, and the only way I found to go around those people is just lean into it. But I guess how do you extract the value from situations like that? I actually really like working with the person who you're on my team, you're you're part of my vision because they're completely sold out to their vision. So all you have to do is show them how working with you aligns with their vision. Even better, how working with you gets them to their vision faster and cheaper than working with somebody else.

35:35 Right? And if you don't want to compete on price, then don't make it cheaper, just faster and with higher confidence, right? That's if you can make someone believe that your product gets them to their end point faster and more successfully, then you have a premium product. I will also say entrepreneurs are very similar to CA like CIA case officers. Case officers are your your field intelligence officers that you see in the movies. Those are almost always case officers. very very similar mindset, risk tolerance, um, relational dynamics between a case officer and an entrepreneur. They want to take risks. They don't like the routine of doing the same thing a million times. They like having big vision. They like thinking 10 years down the road, not 10 days down the road, and for sure not 10 minutes down the road, right? And they for damn

36:21 sure don't like thinking 10 minutes in the past. So there's all these things that are very similar between case officers and entrepreneurs, which is another reason why I like working with entrepreneurs. I like being around entrepreneurs because it feels very much like being in CIA. So if you are part of an entrepreneur mastermind, you're actually much closer to what it's like to sit in a CIA bullpen with a handful of other CIA officers who are working different cases. Everybody has a different personality, but by and large, they're all trying to achieve something where the probabilities of success are against them. and their vision is what drives them. What are some skills then that you see CIA field officers use that entrepreneurs often neglect or lack. So there's a few of them. One of the biggest is the whole idea of keeping

37:07 your mouth shut of listening instead of talking. Right? Entrepreneurs like to talk. They feel like they have to pitch all the time. They have to pitch. They have to defend. They have to justify. Right? Every minute they're not talking is a minute they're not making money. You can make huge evolutions if you don't talk. If you listen, listen to your client, listen to the market, listen to your peers, listen to your your customers, listen to your uh your uh employees. If you listen to them and you give your brain the space to find trends, find emerging threats, find patterns, which an entrepreneur's mind is good at. If you do that, then you'll be able to make fewer changes that have a higher impact where if you're constantly just pushing and pushing and

37:52 pushing, you're going to roll right over those. You're going to grow one step at a time instead of ever taking a giant leap. Right? Another thing that that entrepreneurs do a bad job of is asking questions. when they talk, they're making statements instead of using those rare moments that they speak to ask questions to get more pointed information. Right? The the person who's in control of any conversation isn't the person who speaks the most. It's the person who asks the questions because the person who asks the questions is like the interrogator. They decide what the next topic of conversation is. They decide how long you're allowed to speak. They decide when and if they're going to share any information in the conversation other than asking the question itself. Right? So you take

38:38 control of a conversation when you ask questions. So if entrepreneurs asked more questions, they would collect more intelligence and they need that intelligence to make informed decisions to achieve their vision. The information is often out there, but people just aren't sharing it with you. Every entrepreneur has had that experience where they've been with a client or they've been with a a [ __ ] employee and there's some piece of information that the entrepreneur is desperate to get, but they just assume nobody has the information because nobody has shared it with them. They've shouted it from the rooftops. Hey, if anybody has an idea for how to reduce costs and XYZ, just tell me. And nobody tells them, right? Because some people literally need to be asked a question. They have the answer, but they need to hear you say to them,

39:25 "Do you have any ideas on how I can do this thing?" And until you ask them directly, they will not volunteer it because they're wired to keep their ideas themselves cuz maybe they're afraid that their idea is a bad idea and they're afraid of embarrassing themselves. And they would rather sit there and have an idea that's a good idea that that's theirs rather than risk it being a bad idea when they say it out loud. On the Rice acronym, uh, you mentioned coercion. Do you usually try to avoid business with anyone who tries to use coercion tactics? And how can you tell if someone is trying to manipulate you? It's a great question and this is something that uh I think a lot of us have had experience with being manipulated. If not in business and if not in professional life, then for sure in our personal life, parents, friends, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends, who knows

40:11 what? Current wives, right? Future husbands, who knows? But uh I'm going to break your question into two, right? Do you do business with people who coersse you? That's one question one. And then how do you know if someone's trying to manipulate you? That's question number two. I avoid business where I see coercive behavior. Because when someone is trying to coersse you, often times what that means is that they are immature in some other element of social interaction. So if they're that means that if they're going to coersse you once, they will coersse you again. And it's very likely that their other business relationships are also coercive and their leadership style is also coercive. So now you've got what we call in the agency a house

40:58 of cards. It's a big beautiful house, but if any one thing falls apart, the whole thing is going to come crumbling down because this person has built a universe that's all shame, guilt, and fear-based. Shame, guilt, and fear are all negative feelings that are very resource draining. So all the individuals that are currently being controlled through those tools, once they're given an opportunity, once they're given an alternative to not have to feel that anymore, they're going to punch. Whether that's an investor or whether that's a vice president or whether that's a low-level customer service rep. And once that one person punches, then work is going to fall onto other people who aren't going to be motivated to do a good job because they're just trying to survive. And then they're going to punch and then the whole thing falls apart, right? So, I

41:45 stay away from people who I see exercising coercive activities, coercive practices, not necessarily because I feel like it's unfair to me, but because it's a level of immaturity that shows me that they're desperate. If they can't find a way to use the other three productive motivators, they can't find a way to motivate with reward, ideology, or ego. The only thing they can use right now is guilt, shame, fear, embarrassment. It's not worth it. It's the risk exposure to me and my objectives are too great. How do you know if someone's manipulating you? The short answer is when someone is trying to manipulate you, the big the biggest indicator is usually how you feel. You have very strong feelings when someone is trying

42:31 to manipulate because manipulation is emotionally based in nature. They have to pull on emotions whether those are coercive emotions or positive emotions. Oh, you're so beautiful. Your hair is so nice. You're so smart. Those are all things that make you feel good, but they're very indicative of you're getting ready to be manipulated, like mutated, moved in a certain direction because they're priming you for emotional compliance, right? Whereas, when somebody comes to you and they don't use emotional words, right? They use logic based words. It's it's wise. It's in your best interest. you should consider those things are much less uh powerful to you because they're not emotional, right? So, as soon as you start to feel anything in a conversation, that should be your first

43:18 trigger to say, "Am I being manipulated?" It doesn't mean you are because manipulation is based on intent, right? They may not be intending to manipulate you, but your indicator is still the same. So, that's how you know if someone's manipulating you. Um, how can you tell if you're being spied on? So, there's a lot of elements that go into the term being spied on, right? There's being physically observed, which is when you have someone who's got eyes on you, essentially when you are a target or when you are a rabbit. That's physical surveillance or physical observation. There's also digital observation. Digital observation can be split between um imagery collection and data collection. So now whether there's a drone on you or a camera on you,

44:05 that's all digital collection. Um but it's but it's imagery. Whereas if someone's tracking your cell phone or someone's monitoring your web traffic, that's digital like cookie traffic, right? That's a different types of observation. Then you also have uh kind of like secondary or second ring observation, which is when they're spying on you by talking to the people who are around you. They're not directly collecting from you. They're collecting indirectly from the people around you. So they might be following your mom or your dad or listening to the family phone calls or listening to your wife's phone calls to try to track what you're doing. That's all a secondary type of collection. Is that one more common? Um often times secondary collection is the way that we start because to collect on an individual you run the risk of them det discovering that they're being collected upon. And once they've been

44:51 queued in or once they've been clued in that they are being collected upon, they can change their behavior and then you lose everything. Whereas if you follow the spouse, you get everything you need to about the person, but the spouse isn't ever what we call CI savvy, counter intelligence savvy. So they're not thinking about how to protect themselves, and they're for sure not thinking about protecting you by protecting their, you know, Facebook accounts or whatever else it might be. So it's the short answer is very difficult to know if you're being spied on. And I would also say if you become the target of intelligence collection, you can't really get away from it because they have all the benefits. They have the benefit of time, the benefit of space, the benefit of cost, the benefit of technology, and all you have is your own resources. So if you think that

45:39 you're being spied on and it's true, you're kind of it's game over. You're they're going to collect. You can take certain steps to reduce what they collect, but they will adapt and they will collect a new way. How many people would you say are being spied on right now? It's a great question. Do you want to talk worldwide or in the United States? I guess US. Yeah, I would say in the United States there are probably I would guess somewhere between 250 to 500,000 targets of in of active intelligence collection inside the United States. Is that one officer assigned to them or a group? No, no, no, no. I I'm talking about all collection from all countries and all adversaries, right? I'm not I'm not even talking about Americans collecting on Americans. Like I'm not talking about FBI following a drug

46:25 dealer, right? That's also a type of spying, right? I'm just talking about foreign nations targeting American citizens for some sort of intelligence purpose. I would guess it's between a quarter of a million and a half a million people because often times one officer will cover multiple targets. So if you think about it, let's just say we we know that we can estimate there's about 10,000 undercover American CIA officers around the world, right? So that's our unclassified demarcation line. Each of those 10,000 officers can easily cover and spy on 25 to 40 people a year, right? So each of those 10 to 25 or 45 people. Now you got

47:12 45,000 uh is that right? 400 10 somebody help me with public m 10,50 people 500k 500,000 right? So over the course of a year just 10,000 officers can cover that. Right. And that's that's over the course of a year. At any given moment, if you have all the officers around the world, and we have a very large intelligence service, it's not like the Panameanians don't have 10,000 undercover officers. They might have 70, but they're going to be operating here in the US. They're going to be operating all over the world. And then CIA, um, is the only country we don't operate in, North Korea. The I'm going to reframe your question.

47:58 What you're what you're asking is are there countries around the world where CIA doesn't have access? What we call those um denied areas. Denied areas is the term that we use for any country where policy or border security or some other element keeps Americans out. Now CIA of course has ways to make officers go in who do not appear to be American, right? There are some countries where a Brit can go or a Canadian can go that an American can't go. So all you need to do is have a UK passport or a Canadian passport and you can get in. Sometimes you do that with a false flag operation where you pretend to be someone else but you don't have their permission. Sometimes you do it with a joint operation where you actually work with the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service CSIS to get a Canadian passport for an American citizen. There's all sorts of

48:44 ways that you can kind of slice the cat or skin the cat. Um but there are in general I think we have three denied areas right now. North Korea is a denied area. Bellarus is a denied area. And I'm pretty sure Russia, no, Iran is a denied area. So those are three denied areas where you cannot get in as an American by policy, security, or some other purpose. You can still get into China, you can still get into Russia. Is that just because of tourism? Like they just want to keep the money for tourism there? Um, oftentimes denied areas make their immigration policies very hostile because they know that if someone gets in, it's going to be very hard for them

49:30 to track that person. So, it's just safer to keep them out. The tourist dollars aren't worth the intelligence risk if you put it to put it a different way, right? But that is the case for China and Russia. Right. China and Russia, like they have the they know they have the capabilities inside their country that if an American spy goes into China, China's got more resources. If an American spy goes into Russia, Russia's got more resources. An American spy goes into North Korea, North Korea may not have the resources to actually track that person down. This is a bit off topic, but uh why can't Putin launch a nuclear bomb? There's a number of reasons why Putin can't launch a nuclear weapon. Why? And let me clarify that he always has the ability to just call a command and

50:15 launch a missile, right? But the disaster, the blowback would be too significant geopolitically. There's many other ways that he can deploy a nuclear weapon to get the same effect without having to risk the geopolitical blowback. So the short answer why can't he launch a missile is because if he were to launch a missile the blowback against him from his allies from his uh from people who are collaborating with him etc would be too great. He would lose much of the position and momentum that he currently has right and being the country that that triggers a nuclear weapon you run the risk of other people triggering nuclear weapons and you don't know if they're going to do the right thing or the wrong thing with their nuclear weapons. Russia's still at risk of a nuclear disaster if they launch and say France launches on them, right? Or the

51:00 US and France launch on them and Israel sends something that we don't even know they have. There's all sorts of like reasons why they wouldn't want to do it. But the the primary reasons because if Putin wants to deploy a nuclear weapon in Kiev, he's got at least three other vectors where he can do it and have plausible deniability that it ever came from Russia, right? He can have some Iranian proxy group go into Kiev with a suitcase nuke and and blow it up there. He can have some uh Hamas or or you know Iraqi rebel group that they can launch from from some controlled zone that they have and it doesn't even come from Russia and it can be on like a little hypersonic missile that they have. He can have something smuggled through Bellarus and then brought just down

51:46 south a little bit and it's already in Kiev and it could be triggered by Bellarus instead of by Russia. And then what's the world gonna say, right? The trick with nuclear war since I mean we learned it immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When you use a nuclear weapon, you have to have a reason in the deployment that causes um a moment of pause for your enemies. There has to be a reason that they wait because if they wait then tempers will will cool and alternate responses will be discovered. If you don't give them a chance to cool, if you don't give cooler heads a chance to prevail, then the responses the list of responses is much shorter. And at the top of the response list is well let's

52:33 just throw a nuke at them. So what Putin knows and what all of us know now, all of the nuclear capable countries, is that if you're going to deploy a nuke, you have to deploy it in what's called the fog of war, you have to you have to deploy it in a way that's confusing because when you launch uh that capability and it's confusing, everybody's confused first. So then they just start thinking about alternatives and trying to understand what's happening and by the time anybody gets to a response, it's significantly reduced, right? It's it's a it's a built-in deescalation technique. But in the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did uh other countries have nuclear capabilities or was just the US? It it was a race, right? Okay. So that was the reason for the pause there. So is there any do you see any possibility that a

53:19 nuclear weapon is launched in our lifetime? Now that we're So again, I'm going to be specific because you're you're you're asking about launching, right? Launching. When you launch a nuclear weapon, whether it's from a submarine, whether you launch it from a a cruise missile, whether you launch it from a land-based silo or a mobile silo, we live in a world now where anything that's launched is going to have early warning detection. And that early warning detection is going to essentially negate the value of the launch. So, you lose the element of surprise depending on the technology that people have claimed to have or may not have or technology that could work or couldn't work like Golden Dome or or laser intercepts. there's no guarantee that the that the missile you launch is even going to actually deliver. It could be could be intercepted and destroyed.

54:05 Right? So I think we are finding ourselves in a time when launching a nuclear missile is very very improbable. It could happen. Desperate things could happen. Uh you could have a volley of nuclear missiles like you see when uh when Iran or Hezbollah does a missile attack against Israel. They just launch a volley because they trying to overwhelm the missile defense systems. So you could see a volley from some place like North Korea. You could see a volley from some place like Russia, right, or Iran. So all that to say, I think a launch is something that we'll probably never see. I think a launch is something that we'll never have to worry about ever. But a a smuggled nuke or a dirty nuke, a suitcase nuke, a truckbased nuke, a boat based nuke, um those are what caused me

54:51 bigger concerns. I mean, we've got we've got nuclear technology, warheads that are highly tactical that fit on the end of a Stinger missile. I mean, that's the kind of thing where I mean, it's not it's not too much of an overstatement to say you could unscrew it off the Stinger missile, drop it in your backpack, and ride your bike to wherever you want to detonate the thing. Do you know what I mean? It's technically more complicated than that, but I mean, you're literally talking about a warhead that's the size of a football. I was not aware of that. There's like 2,000 nuclear bombs, right? Or is it much higher? There's So, it's much higher. There's approximately 2,000 ballistic warheads on ICBMs. And ICBMs are interconnected intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, those are the

55:37 missiles that launch from the ground, go up into space, and then deploy. You've got cruise missiles on bombers. You've got you uh missiles that sit on subs. And every missile has multiple warheads, multiple independently targetable uh warheads. If you had to rank them in order of like powerful intelligence agencies uh per country, like who who has the most powerful intelligence agency in the world? When you think about intelligence and intelligence capability, you have to think about how they use that capability. It's not just about um apples to apples, right? It's like apples to bananas to oranges to strawberries. So the United States has the the best funded and the most capable

56:22 broad spectrum intelligence skill set, right? We have paramilitary. We have um physical assets like drones and airplanes. We have field-based intelligence officers that are in a constant pipeline. So they're always being deployed. We have incredible capabilities for offensive and defensive cyber communication. a broad spectrum, highly funded, very capable. So I would call the United States, I would say CIA is the most powerful intelligence agency holistically that's out there. But when you compare CIA against say MSAD, MSAD is much smaller, has less funding, has less broadspectctrum capability, but the capabilities that they have are far more

57:08 lethal and they have much less um hesitance in using those capabilities. It takes a lot of work for CIA to decide to send in a tactical team to kill somebody. I mean, that's a [ __ ] ton of paperwork, approval process, delay, planning, ex like it's it's a lift. That's the kind of thing that MSAD could turn around in 14 days or less. And they have a tolerance to do it and they're willing to do it and they see the necessity to do it. So, in that way, MSAD is more dangerous, but not as powerful. They're more powerful in one narrow way, right? Consider China's military or I'm Ministry of State Security, their MSS. China has a gigantic population. I think

57:53 it's 1.4 billion people. And ideologically, Chinese believe that they're Chinese first, right? Even if you are a Chinese immigrant, you are still Chinese first. You're not an American Chinese, you're a Chinese American, right? You're not a British Chinese, you're a Chinese Brit. You're always Chinese first. That's just part of how they're raised. That makes for a massive informal intelligence network. Everywhere there's Chinese diaspora, there's the potential to collect intelligence for the motherland, right? It doesn't mean every Chinese person's a spy. But it definitely means every Chinese person has to ask themselves the question of would I give information to the federal government of China, right? Would I give

58:40 it to the pullet bureau or would I not? Here in the [ __ ] United States, FBI comes and knocks on your door and is like, "Hey, I need intel on your neighbor." You'd be like, "No." Like we have, we feel no com conviction to help our government. But it's not like that in China. Like people who are native Chinese born, they always have that compulsive desire or need for one way or for one reason or the other. Maybe it's because they want to help. Maybe it's because they're afraid not to help. Who knows? But they will give information. So that informal network means their reach is unbelievable, right? Every Chinese shop everywhere in the world could potentially send $5 to the main to the mainland and like completely transform their budget, right? So it's a very different um way of doing things. An intelligence service

59:26 that very few people ever talk about is uh is the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. Pakistan's intelligence service actively deploys terrorist techniques, actual suicide bombers, uh, politically motivated acts of public violence. Like, as a professional intelligence service, they will use terrorist tactics. That's something that we don't use. That's something that the Chinese don't use. That's something the Russians don't use. Like, that's some scary [ __ ] But they will use it. And that makes them very powerful in that way. Now the reason nobody talks about it is because Pakistani ISI is almost completely and totally focused on India and India's research and analysis ring R A is almost exclusively focused on Pakistan. So you

1:00:13 got these two foes who have high levels of capability and and high levels of power that are only focused on basically killing each other. So India has a fairly capable CIA equivalent intelligence service that nobody talks about. Yep. the research and analysis wing ra are they fairly country first similar to China? Um it's a good question. I would I would say that um the nationalistic

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