EverydaySpy Podcast - Ex-CIA Operative: “Every Time You Speak, You’re in a Psychological War”

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260921 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you read people's behavior? There's a lot of different ways to do that. But so if you boil it down into its most basic form, uh, all relationships are transactions. And every time you are co-located with another person, you're in some kind of relationship, which means there will be some kind of transaction. Even if like, even if I'm a cute girl and you're a cute guy and we're at a coffee shop and we're not talking to each other, there's still transaction happening.

Interesting. Right? I look at you. You look at me. That's a transaction. That's an exchange. It's a, it's an exchange of what we call social capital, which is the currency of relationships. Right. That's why a lot of times flirtation starts when one person looks at another person. There's an exchange, right? That exchange is also known as a transaction. So I look at you, you look at me. We've just exchanged. We've had a transaction. The beginning of a relationship is there. Wow. So if you kind of advance that into any number of, whether there's a relationship, professional applications or personal applications or parenting applications, anywhere you go, you start to see that there's this constant transaction, this exchange of a currency that we call social capital that creates an environment of reciprocity where you want to return a favor or I want to return a favor. We want to return and exchange the value of the currency that we're exchanging. When you learn how that works, then you see it play out in both verbal communication and nonverbal communication.

So you start learning like which verbal words are higher level currency, which nonverbal behaviors are lower value currency. And if you want to build currency, build capital very quickly, you use high currency words,

high currency actions, and then all of a sudden the other person feels indebted to you subconsciously for reasons they don't even understand. Whoa. And you can essentially direct and control their behavior from there.

Can you tell when somebody's lying? Yes. You can, well, you can tell that through many, many tools before you ever have to worry about what's very popular, which is what people call micro expressions. So if you've ever heard the term micro expression or people talking about lie detection through micro expressions, like twitching of the eyes or the number of blinks or what happens on the face, those are very nuanced ways of determining if somebody is lying. Some of the easier things you can do is just listen and read body language and verbal language. against what you know to be the baseline that that person has. Interesting. So if there's like a change.

Correct. That's what you're looking for is you're looking for the delta, the difference between the baseline and their response to a certain question. And even then, you don't know, it's not like a smoking gun. That was a lie. It's more like a data point where you're like, I sensed, I assessed that there was mistruth somewhere. Wow.

So then you ask another relevant related question and see if you get the same indicator again. And then you do that four or five, seven times because there's a relationship in a transaction, right? Telling if somebody's lying to you is not an instantaneous thing. It's a thing that takes time. Whether it takes five minutes or five days, the power isn't in how quickly you do it. The power is in that you know how to do it.

But you still have to know where to look, right? Right. To be able to identify a change. Correct. So it's in the nonverbal behavior, the verbal languaging. Yep. I guess you could say.

Yep. So for example, right, nonverbal behavior, when you suspect that somebody is lying, You're looking for nonverbal behavior that demonstrates a threat response. People are going to be using against their spouses. And they're not using it. Sorry, not sorry. They're not using it against.

They're just using it during the transaction. Yeah. Right. But so an example of like a defensive nonverbal movement is when people cross. When they cross their arms, when they put their legs together, when they cross their feet like this. Like this? Yep. That is a, that is an indicator of threat based defensive behavior.

which suggests that there's something happening that's making you feel threatened. When we lie, the thing that makes us feel threatened is the lie itself, that the lie might be detected, that we might be called out, that we understand that we're creating a situation in which things could get worse, right? We're our own threat. So a crossing of the arms, a blocking of the arms, a touching of the face. This is one of the most vulnerable parts on the human body. The neck.

So when people reach up here and they pet and they stroke or they do anything like this, this is an indicator that they're feeling threatened. Damn. But it could be a false positive, right? Because I'm comfortable standing like this sometimes. So you're right. It could be a false positive. That's why it's so important to understand the baseline first.

Got it. This position is not a position you've taken at all during the entire history of this podcast. That's, yeah, that's fair to say. Yeah. So your baseline is this position. Yeah. So if I suddenly went like this while you were asking me a question, you would make an assessment note about it and understand that there was something about the topic that we just started covering

that you found defensive. That doesn't mean I offended you. Yeah. It could mean this topic is boring. It could mean that you just had a thought that crossed through your head about family or finances or whoever knows that made you triggered in a defensive way. Interesting. But it's just one data point. It's not a conclusion.

It's not an assumption. Yeah. It's a data point that we use for assessment. Wow. Damn, learning so much. That was the goal, dude. That was the goal. I mean, I feel like that's probably one of the more important phenomena is to be able to,

be able to identify, right? Lying like when you're a spy, like being able to tell when somebody's lying to you. It's less about being able to understand when somebody's lying to you and more about being able to interpret their threat response. Because the more threatened someone feels, the more likely they are that they will lie. The less threatened someone feels, the less likely they are to come up with fabrication. So a big part of what we do is we really just try to understand what's the level of threat that the other person is feeling. And how can we assess and or reduce any perceived threat that that person is experiencing right now. And like one of the ways that we can reflect and reduce the amount of stress or the amount of

tension is through a process we call mirroring. So when I first started this show with you, right, I was all like leaning forward, hands on the table. I was like, let's talk. I'm super excited to do this. But you were in this position. Yeah. You weren't adopting my position. So I was like, I am in a different energy space than Max.

Interesting. And if I want to make sure that Max is comfortable, I need to adopt Max's position. So I put my arms under the table and I sat myself back. And we can review the footage and you'll see how it works. But that mirroring process actually puts the subconscious mind at ease. It puts your subconscious mind at ease, but it also puts my subconscious mind at ease. And when my mind is at ease, I'm less likely to threaten you, which means you're less likely to feel threatened, which means that we're in a net positive relationship and the transaction.

are something that are going to be more predictable. Wow. So what's the takeaway for people listening that when engaging in a social transaction, do your best to mirror the person that you're transacting with? So there's like, let's break it into three kind of categories, right? The first basic, most important thing I want everyone to take away is that relationships are transactions. If that hurts your feelings, that's fine. You're wrong. Relationships are transactions accept and embrace that they're transactional. If you do that, then all they're assholes out there that don't believe that will be one step behind you. Hmm. Because you understand that it's a transaction. The second most important thing

I want people to understand is during that transaction, you build what's known as social capital. The words that you say, the behaviors that you use, create just like money, they create value that gets exchanged between people. When you pour value into somebody, they feel like they have to pour value back. If you give someone attention, it makes them feel like they have to give you attention. If you reject someone's please for attention, you will invite them to reject when you need attention. And that's how marriage has failed because people just, they don't see the currency that's being exchanged and nobody likes to invest in a losing account. CIA believes that all people are born with a spy secret superpower.

For some people, that means they can win deals for others. They can spot liars. Some can even seduce lovers. I built a free three-minute test to help reveal to you exactly. what your secret hidden superpower is. All you have to do is click on the link in the description below. Take the test and start using your spy superpower to stay ahead of 99% of people. So then they just stop investing. Right?

So first, understand relationships are transactional. Second, the transaction currency is called social capital. And then only after you've understood and demonstrated both of those things to yourself, then start learning how you can take advantage of the opportunity to create nonverbal currency through mirroring. Because the easiest way to build currency is through verbal communication, right?

As long as everybody speaks the same language, that's way easier and way less nuanced than physical nonverbal cues. Wow. Right? Just go up to somebody and say, you look really nice today. Right? Would you like a cup of coffee? I'm about to go grab myself a decap.

Would you like one too? Simple things like that, you're gonna see the currency right away. You'll see it right away. You'll see it when you come back with their cup of coffee and they're like, wow, this is really nice of you. I really appreciate it. It's been kind of a rough day. Hey, how's the family?

They're trying to reciprocate their gratitude for you going out of your way to bring them a cup of coffee. Wow. If you can start to see it for the transaction that it is, then you can determine when you want to invest, who you want to invest in,

and how much you want to invest. Wow. Is there an advantage to making the first investment, being like the first investor, so to speak? Yeah, absolutely. It's called first mover advantage. Wow. Right.

So the first mover advantage is that, you get to set the stage for everything. What direction the social capital is going? What level of exchange happens? How strong the reciprocation is, what the total value of the transaction is. If you're the one who's moving first, you set the stage for all of those things, right?

The equivalent of that in verbal communication is asking questions. In this conversation, you're the one asking questions. I'm the one answering questions. Who has control of the conversation? Me? Why? Why? Well, because I guess, yeah, I'm the, I'm the MC.

I'm going to go wherever you steer me. Yeah, fair. You're going to set the question. You could come up with a question that's completely out of nowhere. I'm going to follow suit. Yeah. Right? What am I going to do?

argue with the person who's asking questions? That's not what we do as human beings. So that's first mover advantage. Be entertaining for the listeners. So it's always in your best interest. I love it. To be the one that moves first. Is there any truth to that, like the Dale Carnegie stuff?

Like, you know, a person's favorite sound is the sound. of their own name. So that kind of stuff. There's absolutely truth in the Dale Carnegie stuff, but you have to understand that at the time that that was written, it wasn't written with an operational lens towards, you know, maximizing what was known of psychology and what was known of, you know, effective influence practices.

It was kind of one guy's ideas on how to build influence. That's completely different than what CIA does. CIA has 170 years worth of history cultivating and perfecting the influence process. right before CIA they were called OSS OSS taught CIA MI6 taught OSS right and MI6 has been around for a long time so you you have this history of professionalized

intelligence practices professionalized influence tactics that Dale Carnegie just didn't have damn so interesting man this is so crazy how do you get people to I mean I guess like you've kind of already went into how to get people to like you right like how to get how to how to build rapport and establish relationships.

And I feel like that probably bodes can probably be very useful for dating, for in the professional environment, winning friends and being able to like, closing business, man. Think about just pricing products. You have a book, right? You have a book. You speak. You do all sorts of things that drive your livelihood.

100%. Right? How do you choose the price for those things? How do I choose the price? man, that's a good question. It's a good question for a lot of people. It's like supply and demand. We get so many offers,

and we can't obviously appease all of the offers, right? And so we price it in accordance with how many offers we're getting. We kind of pit them one against one another. We use them as leverage against each other. So when you follow that process, what ends up happening is if the demand decreases, what happens to the price? Goes down.

You don't have control over it. that external locus of control. The CIA solution to something like that is to do something that we call demand generation, where you do something, you take action to increase the demand. So you're intentionally turning the dial up on demand. You can also simultaneously turn the dial down on supply. That's right. And control your own price, right?

Well, I feel like it's easier to turn the dial down on supply, but how do you engineer demand? And that's where it gets to be all about understanding relationships and transactions. So, for example, what you're doing right now with this podcast creates demand. I don't know if you've thought about that. It creates demand because everybody watching you, episode after episode, they begin to interpret that they have a relationship with you. Yeah. Not me. I'm here for one episode.

Then they forget about me, right? But they're with you every time. You're the voice in their ear. You're the picture on their screen. Right? That makes them want you. What happens when somebody wants something? It's demand. So the question becomes, are you being seen by the people who decide whether or not you get booked for their event? If you're not sure whether or not those are the people seeing you, then you start to adjust your strategy to make sure that you're the person that they see. That's how you demand. That's how you generate demand. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So cool. I'm going to do that. referrals are a great source of that, right? A great example of that. Because you know, your boy wants an Aston Martin. Go get it. It would be on brand. You need it. So do they give you like Tom Ford suits and Aston Martins when you join the CIA?

No, I always thought that they would. I thought that the beautiful women in the cars would be issued to us. And it's the opposite. Unfortunately, if you drive a nice car and have a hot girlfriend, everybody notices you. That's a good, that's a fair point. So you drive the busted old second generation Indian, you know, import. Damn. Yeah.

And you have a mangy dog at your side. A mangy dog. Are there any like super memorable international out in the field experiences that that you can share with us? Just like so we can for a moment live vicariously through you. So unfortunately, the details are still classified. Like our operational history becomes the thing that we are under a lifetime secrecy agreement not to divulge. Whoa. So it's tough.

Yeah. And my wife and I, my wife is also a former covert intelligence officer. Whoa. So we met and married at the agency, had our first child at the agency, and then left together. But we're in the process of trying to get CIA to clear a portion of our operational history so that we can answer questions like this in detail. Hmm. But what I will say is that one of my favorite parts about traveling the world was wherever we went for an op, we always had to take a route afterwards to cleanse ourselves. What do you mean by that?

So if you think about it, like when you go, I don't know. do ski? No. Tell me something that you do that requires travel. I, that's a good question. I'm a big indoor guy. You're a big indoor guy.

Let's just say, let's just say that you like to ski. And your favorite mountain was in Park City, Utah. Yes, yeah. How would you get to Park City, Utah? I would take a flight. Would you take a flight that intentionally has more than one stop? No.

We would. Interesting. Because we want to obfuscate both the starting points and the destination of where we're going. As much as you can. So I could take a direct flight from Miami to L.A. But if I do that, then anybody who sees my flight out of Miami knows I went to L.A. Yeah.

So instead, I'll take a multi-connecting flight that goes from Miami to Chicago, Chicago to San Antonio, San Antonio to Los Angeles or Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles. Wow. Now, anywhere along that route, if somebody finds me, they actually don't know where I was going to or where I was coming from. So what's nice about when you're working, any kind of covert up is that your cleansing routes become essentially your extended vacation. So you're like, I have to do this thing in Pakistan or I have to do this thing in

Georgia. Yeah. But I'm going to take a couple of days in Austria. I'll have a nice, you know, dinner in Italy and then I'll end up coming out through Frankfurt. That sounds nice. Yeah. That's the nice part about it. Yeah. And you're, I would imagine that you would have to have a very flexible mindset with regard to things like food, like foreign cuisines and things like that. You know, there's a lot of people that have what I call like the 12 year old boy diet. Like, they're just very inflexible. They hold on to their preferences, preferences very strongly. And I would imagine that as somebody who has to be as adaptable as you, that you really can't hold on to your preferences too strongly. Yeah, you're exactly right. You've heard of the phrase where

like there's some people who live to eat and other people who eat to live. We are mostly people who eat to live. So we break down our diet into core components, right? What's our carb? What's our fiber, what's our natural source of sugar, what's our protein? And you can get that anywhere, right? Does that mean that sometimes you're eating like dried, salted fish? Yes, but you're not eating to enjoy it. You're eating to survive. Yeah. So you can let that go. It's, it is difficult for foodies to do well at CIA. What's the weirdest thing you've ever had to eat? Snake. You've eaten snake. Yeah. What the hell is that like? It's like, it's like an overcooked version of scallop. Have you ever had like an overcooked scallop? It's like rubbery. Super rubbery. Yeah. So that's what like

all snake tastes like. It's like a rubbery stringy texture. Oh yeah. It's it doesn't have a bad flavor. The flavor is whatever it was cooked in. But the texture is pretty unique. Damn. Probably good source of protein. It's a great source of protein. I mean like I've had other weird stuff too, but but that was the one that always comes to mind like insects are weird but people have heard of other people eating insects, right? And insects are just kind of crunchy. They're like empty, crunchy things. Almost like eating seaweed. Yeah. But yeah, but there's like, and I also ate dog meat and dog meat is is actually excellent. Is it? Yes. It's quite quite good. Where were you? I was in Southeast Asia. Wow. Yeah. And dog is something they actually farm out there. They have farms where they raise dogs and the

purpose of the dogs is to be sources of meat. Oh, it's so fucked up. To the works, to the western mind. It's pretty messed up. Yeah. But it's a very sustainable meat source. But a dog is like literally, we've created dogs to be friendly. We've created them to be man's best friend. They're not. In the West.

In the West. In Europe, dogs were created to be essentially slave labor. Workers. Interesting. So in Southeast Asia, is it surprising that we created dogs to be food sources? I guess, I guess not. That's so wild, though. I don't even, I don't go near foie gras.

I don't go near veal. I just try to do my best. You know, I'm a passionate meat eater. but I tried to do my best with like the humane but yeah I mean I guess if I was in Southeast Asia and I had no other option. Yeah I mean they don't really worry themselves with humane options because a lot of their options

are just how do I eat? Survive survival. Wow.