EverydaySpy Podcast - The CIA Framework You Can Use To Read Anyone in 4 Minutes

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260822 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca. You are most likely in a relationship with an extrovert. And then I would also venture to assess that you don't come from a lot of advanced education

that you kind of built yourself from scratch. How did you figure that out? Because those are all, maybe the humble, I don't know, but the rest of them, because the rest of them are true, right? Especially I am married to an extrovert. I do come from very humble beginnings and just a high school education. I went to college for one day. But how did you figure that out just in a few minutes of chatting with me?

So there's a couple of things. One, the way that you're dressed. The way that you're dressed does not denote a person who comes from wealth, but it also does not denote a person who is focused on what other people think of them. Right. So you've developed companies and you've sold companies. You're self-funding your own media position. So there's obviously disposable income there, but you're not wearing that disposable income.

You have a nice pair of shoes on, relatively kind of specialized pair of shoes, but your shirt and your pants are just standard, right? You put care and attention into your beard shape and into your hair, but not so much care and attention that it's obvious. You're also naturally very kind of reserved and you mentioned being married. So if you're a reserved person and you're married and you're functioning to the place where you can run companies, it's most likely that your spouse is opposite wiring than you. She has to absorb and lift you up in those places where you're feeling. down. So if you are an introvert, it's very likely that she is an extrovert. If you are the person who tears yourself down, she is most likely the person who builds you up. If you're the person

who has a low libido, she is most likely the person that has the high libido. You're blowing my mind. And how would agents use this type of information to kind of get what they want out of a conversation? So there's there's a multiple layers that happen when it comes to developing a target, right? When when you talk about an agent, what our terminology is you're developing an assets, you're developing a target before they are an asset, an asset provides information, before they're an asset, they're just a target. You don't know if they have any information that's meaningful. So when you're developing a target, it's important to try to understand what the leverage points are for that target. What can you say or do, because you can only control yourself? What can you say or do that will

rapidly build trust in that person? And then once you have built that trust, you can use that trust to explore what they have access to in terms of sensitive information. If they have access to sensitive information, then they already trust you and you're that much closer to being able to have them give you that sensitive information, whether it's a thumb drive or a secret. So a big part of what we do when we assess an individual like I just assessed you is build a profile, just a temporary assessment is the term that we use, to determine whether or not what we're assessing is accurate. There's a chance that you actually are very, very focused on your wardrobe and today was just an off day. There's a chance that you're not in a

functioning relationship and that your partner is just like you. There's a chance that my entire assessment could have been wrong. So my goal is to assess quickly and then start to probe to see whether or not I get information that confirms or rejects my previous assessment. All in an effort of trying to build trust. By telling you what my assessment was, I actually broke some of that trust. When you didn't know what my assessment was, you may have trusted me actually more. more because I could have continued saying things that just seem to be in line with your beliefs. Now you know that I have a pre-existing idea. So whenever I say something to you from now on, you're going to wonder whether or not I'm just manipulating you. And the CIA trains you

to make anyone trusts you instantly. Is that right? It's not instant, but it's fast. We call it rapid trust, yeah. And what's the one trick that works on everybody? I don't mean. to be particular about terminology, but terminology is something that's very important to us. So we don't call them tricks. We call them tactics or tools, right? One of the fastest, most effective tactics for getting someone to trust you and trust you rapidly is by mirroring them. Now, mirroring at a very basic level is something that people do all the time, right? You make eye contact when you're mirroring somebody else's eye contact. If they're leaning forward, you're leaning forward. I mean, you and I are literally at the same table, leaning in the same way,

wearing the same color shirt. There's a lot of mirroring that's happening naturally. And mirroring subconsciously creates the idea that the person you're talking to is just like you. But mirroring that is visible is the most basic kind of mirroring. You can also mirror people through the words that you use. You can mirror people through the speed that you speak. You can mirror people through mirroring their beliefs or their ideas. So if you started talking about Christianity, I would start talking about Christianity to try to mirror your ideology. and then continue to build that foundation of trust. So these tactics are all very, very powerful,

they're psychologically viable, they're empirically proven. It's just a matter of how many can you layer in a shorter period of time as possible so that you can hook that target, confirm their access, and make them into an asset. So if you had to have like a three-step playbook, number one is mirror them. So if they're talking about something,

you're talking about that same topic. What's step two, step two, step three. So step one would actually be to listen. When you appear, you listen, right? I don't know if you recall when we first met, I was asking questions and listening to your story, more than telling you my story or making my demands, right? So step one is listen. Step two is mirror. If you don't listen, you can't possibly mirror because you won't be able to replicate their belief set. You won't be able to replicate their voice patterns, their words, their their speech pace, any of that. And then step three is to continue to explore, to probe further. You've got to give you to

get new information so that you can mirror that new information, but you also still have to listen. So you ask questions, you see how they respond to the questions. Some people have sensitivities. We call them red lights, green lights, and yellow lights at CIA. If you haven't discovered your secret spy superpower, then somebody else might be using theirs against you. CIA teaches us that there are only three types of people in the world. Those who motivate, those who manipulate, and those who are being controlled by one of the other two.

I created a three-minute CIA-style quiz to help you unlock your secret psychological advantage and identify your hidden blind spot. All you have to do is click on the first link in the description below or scan the QR code on your screen and you'll be taken directly to your private quiz. This test was developed to help you weaponize your natural-born gifts and use them to get ahead of 99% of people in power, wealth, and purpose. It was also designed to make sure that you can protect yourself against those who would use their skills against you. I want you to discover your secrets by superpower and use it for good

before somebody else uses their power against you. If I were to ask you a question about how much money you have in the bank, that might be a red light topic. And you will show me in your body language, and you will show me in your verbal language, whether or not that's something you're willing to talk about or not willing to talk about. Some people are a hard stop and they'll just say they're not going to talk about money. But other people will talk about money, but they'll talk about it on a periphery. They may not give a number, but they'll talk about generalities. Other people will jump right into specifics. And you need to know where that person's sensitivities are, red, yellow, green, so that you can pick the next round of questions to further probe and

further observe and further assess. Guys, we've been so passionate about finding the biggest geniuses. And this is just one of the many episodes. If you want to make sure you don't miss the next one, make sure to subscribe. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, let's pivot. You were applying for the Peace Corps. When a pop-up appeared on a government website and a FedEx envelope arrived with a plane ticket, a rental car, and a hotel reservation. What made you actually get on the plane? There's a phrase that we have for people who end up at the farm, CIA's training boot camp, right? And we call ourselves too dumb to quit. We make very high-risk decisions without thinking them through just because we are hyper-focused

on what comes next instead of what are the risks what are the implications so where I've discovered as I've gotten older that most people I meet would never get on a plane go to a hotel and show up to a car rental center for a paper reservation that they got 24 hours earlier via FedEx most people would say no to that they'd see all the problems all the risks but at 27 years old in the military that's not how I saw it at all. I saw it as like this adventure, this opportunity, this chance to go into the unknown, this to boldly go into the unknown and kind of see what comes next. Like it's so different from my normal life. My normal life is uniforms and alarm clocks and doing the same thing day after day and answering to a colonel and, you know,

dressing the same way and keeping my hair within regs. The idea that somebody would think I'm special enough to send me a paper airplane ticket overnight via FedEx, I'm all in. I'm all And that's exactly what made me a good fit for CIA and what makes other people not a great fit. And did the CIA know that about you? The whole process is part of CIA's training and vetting process to determine whether or not a new candidate could make it too full-blown officer or not.

Because once you're actually part of CIA, you never have the whole story. And you have to accept that you're not being given the whole story. You have to accept that your superiors are lying to you from the moment they tell you about an operation. And you still have to accept it and you still have to go out there and you still have to be the person on the X,

not even knowing how dangerous the situation really is, because that's part of the job. And that has to make you excited and that has to make you curious. And you have to be up for that challenge to really thrive at a place like CIA because it's a whole community of secret keepers. And the older they are,

the longer they've been keeping secrets, and the more skilled they are at manipulating you. And your only hope is to stay there, live last long enough, that you can become as skilled as a people above you. So you get off the plane, you walk into a waiting room, and you see 10 other people there who also had maybe no idea exactly why they were there. What did you think you were being selected for?

When I got my phone call, my invitation, my packet from FedEx, Everything was for an unnamed position in national security. So I knew that I was going into a national security type of interview. My mind was kind of running wild with, oh, it could be DEA or it could be FBI or it could be CIA. It could be NSA. And then I start kind of weighing the realities of what I'm good at and not good at, right? I'm not good at anything related to computers. So NSA is probably not realistic.

I had a strong military record, but I hated being in the military. So it's probably not the DIA. And could it be CIA? Could it be FBI? Who knows? So when I walk into the waiting room and I see nine other people, 10 other people in there, and they're all exactly what you would expect people to look like

waiting for a government interview. They're all in suits or pencil skirts. They're mostly Caucasian. They're all within the same five or seven years of age. They're all between 25 and 32. They all look educated. They all look clean cuts. They all look, you know, there's no dreadlocks.

There's no rainbow-colored hair. So I'm kind of, you know, confirmed that I am here. They are also here. And we are all waiting for something to do with national security because these folks look just like your central casting for government employee. And when the CIA told you what they actually saw in you, what landed the hardest? Did you end up building your identity then around anything that they said?

The thing that landed the hardest was all the dirty stuff that they just understood right away, right? The misaligned loyalty, I was always somebody looking to be loyal to someone. And I never really knew who I could be loyal to. So because of that, my loyalty would jump from person to person. I'd be extremely loyal to my mom. And then eventually, after enough instances of my mom violating my trust, then I would pull my loyalty away from her, but I couldn't just trust myself. I had to now align myself with someone else.

So maybe it was a teacher. Maybe it was a girlfriend. Maybe it was a best friend. And I would always be looking for someone to be loyal to because what I was always looking for was someone to validate my effort, my intelligence, my thoughts, my ideas, right? CIA figured that out very, very quickly. And one of the things that they told me in that first round of interviewers, they were like, We think that you would be a good fit for CIA's national clandestine service.

And they told me that they thought I'd be a good fit because it's a mission that I can be loyal to forever. And I wouldn't have to continue to try to find someone worthy of my effort, worthy of my intelligence, worthy of my time. It would always be in service of the American people and American primacy and the defense of the nation. And for me, again, 27 years old at the time, it was like a silver bullet. I was like, oh shit, you already know that I bounce around in loyalty. And now you're telling me that there's actually a cause I can get behind forever. That's a really compelling offer. How do they know that about you?

So part of CIA's recruitment process is how they recruit you. So things like phone calls and FedEx letters and whether or not you show up, whether or not you show up on time, how you dress, right? They watch you from beginning to end. But then the other thing that they have going on is they have access to your entire background. So for me, coming from the military, coming from a military academy, I was a more open book than the average person. So all of my childhood records that had to do with mental health, all of my military records had to do with physical health, disciplinary

infractions, you know, education, how I transformed from year to year, they had all of that. And when in 2007, when I was at CIA, we were already using AI to help consolidate large databases of information to create summaries and meaningful conclusions, right? So that inside the recruitment process just further expedited their capability. You were using AI in 2007, like a form of chat GPT or Claude? I mean, yeah, it's a very rudimentary form. If you could imagine, you know, now you can speak in plain text. You couldn't speak in plain text back then. You had to be trained how to use certain systems. There were lots of fields that you had to kind of fill in. None of the AI companies that come to mind now were the companies that we were using then.

So whatever that first generation was, either evolved, failed, was consumed by someone else, etc. But it's no surprise to me to see AI's capability now because even back then it was being introduced. You could profile someone and prompt this AI in 2007 to say, hey, tell me about XYZ person, give me a brief on this person. and it would do its research or homework through AI and give you that brief? Correct. It just wouldn't have the same access that AI has now. Right now, AI has access to the entire web, right?

When you're on an air-gapped system, it only has access to what's within that air gap. But that was a very powerful tool that we were able to use back then to scrub lots of clandestine files simultaneously. What's a big misconception people think about you and what you do? One major misconception, I think, is even in the title of this show, show, right? Like decoded genius implies that the people on this show are of higher intellectual capability, right? Geniuses. And many people think that CIA officers are very smart, very intelligent, above average intelligence. In my experience with myself and with many people at CIA, that's not really the case. We are pretty firmly average. If there are above average people, there are also

plenty of below average people because the job requires different skill sets. And for frankly speaking, there are certain skills that above average intelligence people just will never learn because they understand the inherent danger. They understand the inherent kind of villainy of what they're doing. So one of the major misconceptions is that CIA officers are brilliant. Some of them really are, but most of them are not. Most of them are very typical average people who are just working hard trying to do a good job for a mission that they believe in. And they get good at their job because they're there for so long. They get good at the skill,

but they also get good at the politics of being part of an organization that answers directly to the White House. So there's kind of two different skill sets that you have to learn to survive and succeed at CIA. And neither of them has to do with being born smart. What's shocking is how many smart people go to CIA only to then be very disappointed in the first two or three years and then leave and go work for something

that actually does challenge their intelligence, like SpaceX or Palantier or, You know, the list goes on and on of all these major companies, Google and Facebook, that absorb CIA officers who leave CIA and move on to the commercial sector. So you don't need to be brilliant to be in the CIA? You don't. You don't. You need to be a number of other things, but brilliance, not one of them. Interesting. And before the CIA trained you, you thought you were a good conversationalist. How would you train someone to be a terrible conversationalist? Terrible conversationalists come naturally. And you see a little. a lot of them. People who don't listen, and when I say listen, what I'm talking about is what's

commonly called active listening, but active listening is sometimes hard for people to understand. So if we just talk about observable behaviors, when you're part of a conversation and you don't keep eye contact, when you're part of a conversation and you interrupt, when you're part of a conversation and you do other things during the conversation, you check your watch, you turn through pages, you check your phone, you get up and go into the kitchen, and you're, you get up and go into the kitchen and start making a sandwich. These are all observable behaviors that demonstrate to the other person that you're not really engaged. You're not actively listening to the conversation. And because you are overwhelming your cognitive capability to listen and compute, you are actually bad at the

conversation. You can't make a sandwich and listen to what a person has to say simultaneously. Your brain literally cannot do it. You might pick up most of the conversation, but not all of the conversation and the person communicating to you actually literally knows every single bit of information that they shared with you. So when you come back after making a sandwich and sit down and you try to act cool and suave like you've been listening the whole time, they know you haven't. And what's difficult is a very skilled conversationalist in conversation with an unskilled conversationalist will immediately discredit you, discount you right then and there. And now they're just waiting for their chance to exit the conversation. This is how most marriage are

happen and play out because one person's trying to express themselves and the other person's only partially listening and before the conversation is ever over the person who's trying to express himself has already given up because they see that you're distracted you're being interrupted by the kids you're checking your phone you're checking your watch you're getting up to pour yourself a you know a glass of lemonade or whiskey or scotch whatever it is and the person seeking that validation is already quitting this reminds me a little bit about I had Orion Taraban on I don't know if you know

He runs the YouTube channel PsychHacks. And he told me that when a guy is speaking to another guy and you say something, if I repeat that back to you, you felt heard. But he said that when it's a male and female speaking and the female says something, it's not enough for the guy to just repeat it back. She wants you to feel how she feels. So is it different when you're going, having a conversation or trying to build trust or, or, or, or, relationship when it's a male versus a female? The gender argument is a age-old argument, and there are certain instances where I have seen why gender stereotypes exist, but all of that to say, my fundamental training at CIA taught us to be blind to gender, because gender, sex,

sexual orientation, self-identification, whatever you want to call it, it all is individualized. and that's tied to an individual's cognitive perspective on themselves. So whether you're a male or a female, if you're an emotional creature, you want to have your emotions confirmed. If you're a logical creature, you want to have your logic confirmed. So when this person told you that a guy talking to a guy wants to hear you say the same thing back, it's because he's assuming that most men are logically oriented. There are plenty of men who are emotionally oriented.

And if you try to logically adjust for an emotional man, you're going to fail. So you need to understand what they're actually wired for. You need to assess, determine, probe, and then reflect, mirror back. A perfect example of mirroring, as he was talking about, reflects back what they value, whether they value the emotion or whether they value the logic. And you've said micro expressions and eye movements are a myth for reading people. What should you actually be watching? There's a nuance here.

I think is important to understand, right? So micro expressions that haven't been baselined and micro expressions that are done in an uncontrolled setting, those are not reliable. They exist. They're not fabrications. They're not a complete myth, but they're not something that become operationally useful because you don't know if that person's squinting because they're thinking or squinting because of the sun. You don't know if that person's touching their eyes because their eyes itch from hay fever or whether they're touching their eyes because they feel vulnerable in the conversation. So you have to have an awareness of the environment, what we call the atmospherics, whenever you make those decisions or make those assessments.

So while the micro-expressions and eye movements are not a full fabrication, you have to be aware of when and how to use them. So what you're really looking for in a controlled situation is you're looking for derivations away from a baseline. So if they blink a lot as their natural baseline, then you want to notice when they blink less. So just the idea of blink rate as a micro expression is a misnomer. Somebody might have a naturally high blink rate.

They might have naturally dry eyes. They might have contact lenses. You never know. So you're always looking for the derivation from the baseline. When you look for that derivation, that's when micro expressions become useful if you're in a controlled setting. As soon as you're in an uncontrolled setting, outdoors with a stranger, who you've never met before, now all of a sudden you can't rely on those micro expressions and eye movements because you never know whether or not that's just their. baseline, that's just their temporary, their temporary presence, their temporary behaviors, or whether

there's some element of your presence that's affecting their expressions and their behavior. And that could be anything as simple as you appearing when they didn't expect you to appear, they're attracted to you. That changes their behaviors. They're not, they don't feel good. They have something, they had a bad lunch. You never know. So it's very difficult for professionals to assess and use those tools unless they have a baseline

and a controlled environment. And how long is it take you to build a baseline for someone you've just met? So the baseline that we built for you didn't take very long, but it's also not a firm baseline, right? It's a relatively nascent assessment. So it takes time. We generally say that it takes between three and six hours of contact time before you have a confident baseline of a person. Now that might sound like a lot, but three or six hours of contact time with a person could be completed in just two or three meetings. It doesn't mean you have to engage them for six hours. I could sit at your house and watch. you engage your wife and your kids for an hour, and that would count as an hour of baseline engagement, right? I could watch you at a business meeting and have an hour of time on target. I could watch you

in a social setting where we go out with the boys to a bar for two or three hours, and boom, right, there's three hours of assessment time. There's a Mayam Bialik clip where in four minutes without revealing a single thing about yourself, you learned she was divorced, her son, her son calls they're born in invisible string. She uses vegan protein. She said it felt like a man trying to get into her bed. What happens when you come across someone who knows what you're doing? Are there upgraded tactics that you would implement?

We call this spotting the spook. And when other trained operators, and that's what we're really looking for is people who are trained. There are some people who are naturally gifted in these social situations. some people who have learned how to behave this way through years of experience because of abuse or trauma or survival mechanisms, right? But when you're coming across someone who's actually trained, you can spot their training through the systematic application of the skills. So when it's spook versus spook, when you spot another spook, it's always fun because you both realize that you're seeing each other's systematic process. And there are certain tactics that you can use to try to divert. derail, probe, deflect what somebody is asking for or trying to do.

For example, one of the key tools in elicitation is a tool called silence. And if you just silent and you wait for someone to fill the silence, that's an elicitation tool. When two spooks are sitting across from each other, they're just quiet. And they're completely comfortable being quiet. And they won't break the silence until somebody acknowledges, I guess one of us is going to have to talk. right? And it's a, it's so different than when you come across somebody who's not trained to handle the silence. Because when somebody's not trained to handle the silence, you start to see their whole physical body break down. They start to get antsy. They start to move. They start to demonstrate their discomfort. And then they jump into a topic of conversation.

And that's elicitation. That's the power of elicitation. And that's just one of many different tools. So a lot of times when it comes to spotting the spook, it's less about applying the tools. surreptitiously and more about acknowledging that they're trained, respecting that they're trained, and then having a parallel conversation, another form of solicitation, but a parallel conversation that gives you similar information to what you would get from the primary conversation line,

but you're running parallel to it. Almost like if you've ever avoided traffic by going on a side road that follows the highway, that's the same kind of form of parallel conversation that we run. Outside of when you were in the CIA, Have you, has it been spook to spook where you've met someone, you're like, you're, oh, uh-oh, I know, I know this.

Yeah, I mean, it's happened more than a handful of times. When you're part of CIA, you meet a lot of your fellow peers, not just people at CIA, but people from other intelligence agencies that are both allies and enemies. And it's because you're hunting the same thing. There's only one or two really skilled North Korean nuclear scientists. So every fucking Western spy in the world is trying to find a, way to meet that person. So when that person is going to show up in Singapore at some kind of convention, they're going to be surrounded by other Israeli spies and British spies and French

spies and German spies. And you're all sitting there eating from the same shrimp dish. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, joined thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.ca.com.ca.com