EverydaySpy Podcast - The CIA’s Dark Secret to Influencing Anyone (Only Use For Good)

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260907 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor,

free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. So maybe give us like one or two techniques you were taught on that work really effective to really get somebody to let their guard down and start to trust you. So one of the first things that we're taught is that nobody is as they appear to be. Everybody in every culture, every age, every education level, they're all pretending. And they don't acknowledge that they're pretending, but they are pretending. So all people are made up of three lives.

there's a public life, then there's a private life, and then there's a secret life. Your public life is the life that you present to the world. That's your mask. It's your mask. It's your hair. It's your clothes. It's your confidence. It's your worry.

It's your favorite TV shows. It's the shit you talk about when you're not trying to talk about anything important. That's all public life. That's our safe haven. It's our space. It's our shell. We put that up so that we keep the wrong people out and the right people we can keep at a distance until we do.

deem them worthy of coming into our private life. Keep our guard up, right? Does that make sense everybody that's here? You're in sales, business, every prospect you talk to you, they're going to have a mask. The guard is up. How do you get them to let that, how do you get them to take that mask off, let the guard down?

This is good. The second life is called the private life. So once people get out of their public life, or they let you into their private life from their public life, that's where you start to see what people's vulnerabilities are. Right? Your private life is like your family, your close family. They know that your feet stink.

They know what your hair looks like when it's all messy. They know that, you know, you get gas if you eat too much beef. They know secrets about you that your public life doesn't share. Yeah. But they still don't know your deepest secrets. Yeah. Right. So inside your private life, you have a small group of people.

And there's power for the people in your private life. But when you really want to move someone, when you really want to influence and persuade, someone you have to get out of their private life and into their secret life there's only a handful of people that we ever let into our secret life your secret life is where you are self-aware of your own biggest vulnerabilities it's where you know you aren't as successful as you want to be where you know you're a little bit abusive or a little bit manipulative or a little bit of a dick sure it's where you know that you cheated on that girlfriend and nobody else knows it's where you know that you sometimes think about cheating on your wife sure all that happens in your secret life and

we all have a secret life. Inner self. So when you want to recruit a source and make them a highly productive, highly loyal source, you have to systematically go from their public life, into their private life, into their secret life. Because once you're in someone's secret life, this is the magic of it all. You're never allowed to leave. Because it's that emotional connection.

Because that's so powerful, even if you don't see them, to them, you're still one of their most closest confidants. 10 years go by, 20 years go by. It's the reason we almost all have that friend in college that, as I tell you this story, you're thinking of that friend. Where if they showed up tomorrow on your doorstep, it would be as if a day hasn't passed. So how do you get that emotional connection where they willingly allow you to get into that inner self of themselves? Like, what are you saying? What are you asking? I mean, I know there's a lot that goes into that. It's not just one thing, but give us maybe an example of how that process works.

So we have a framework that we use. It's called sense making. And sense making is a three-step framework that starts with avoidance. The first time you meet somebody, in their public life, they will try to avoid you. It's true for all of us. The first time I meet a stranger, I try to avoid them too. It's a natural survival instinct. After you avoid, after you push through the avoidance step, you get into this step we call competition.

And competition is an exchanging of ideas and opinions. and then after you get through competition, you get into compliance. You have to get through the sense making process before you can be accepted into the secret life. So just as a quick kind of example, you meet a new person. That new person doesn't trust you.

Of course they don't trust you. They don't know you. Whether you're trying to sell something or whether you just run into them on the street, they don't care. The guard's up. Their guard is up and you are firmly in their public life. Yeah.

Well, if you engage through that public, life. If you engage through the avoidance, they try to avoid you, you don't avoid them. They continue to try to avoid you. You continue to engage. What's going to happen is they're going to realize that you see something in them that nobody else sees. And then they're going to feel interesting. They're going to feel good because you're around them. Okay. And then they'll engage you. And then when they engage you, you have this opportunity to what we call develop and assess them. Okay. They're going to tell you information. You're going to tell them information. And you're going to compete in the information the same way that a team that's on the same school competes for

scrimmages. Sure. Right. It's not someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. It's an exchange of ideas and information to build a relationship. So do you try to align your ideas with their ideas or you take their ideas and you somehow like align yours to like not necessarily be perfect to theirs but like where it's somewhat similar so they start to like pull in or what do you mean? So that whole competition phase, is really two steps. The first step is you mirror and reflect their values, their beliefs, even their physical behaviors.

Because what you're trying to do is get them to express more of their opinions, express more of their ideas. Because once you have that information, once that cat's out of the bag, it can't go back in. Once they admit that they have doubts about this other person, they can't just later on say, oh, I made a mistake. I actually really trust that person. You're more of putting the focus on them rather than.

you. So you're probably getting them to talk most of the time and you're more listening and navigating conversations. Your job is open-ended questions that have a natural flow to the topics they're bringing up. 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. Does that make sense to everybody?

What he just said, open any questions that have a natural flow that don't sound scripted. Because if it sounds scripted, then the guard goes back up. The guard goes back up. Go back up. See, it's sales. That's a big thing. Keep going. This is really good.

So you go through this first phase of mirroring and reflecting. And then when the body language starts to demonstrate that they are mirroring, you, then you start to change your behaviors to get them to follow your lead. You said something really brilliant here that most salespeople have never really heard. Most salespeople have been trained that you have to mirror the prospect. Did you hear what Andrews said? He's getting them to mirror him. Why is that so important to not mirror everything the prospect does, but learn how to get

the prospect to mirror what you're doing? So the mirroring process is a tactical step. It's not a strategy. Strategies are long-term tactics or short-term. You are mirroring and reflecting their values and their beliefs, not because you have them. You're mirroring and reflecting their body language, not because you feel the same way.

You're doing it so that they see themselves in you. And then once they see themselves in you, they project themselves onto you, and then they want to keep up with you. So you go from sitting forward like they're sitting forward to leaning back. And then if they lean back, that is an indicator that the power dynamic has shifted.

That now they're following you. Yeah. So they're compliant to you now. Yes. That's what you're saying. And the final step is compliance. And what that compliance means, remember we start to avoid, compete, comply.

When they get to that compliance step, the stronger you have competed with them, the more information, data, and leverage you have to get them to comply in their best interest or even against their best interest. Because they've essentially built a power dynamic where you are in the position of power. You are the one inside their secret life.

They view you, I want to say like as they trust you. They view somebody they can trust, maybe even authority or something that they trust they can feel like they can tell more of their inner stuff to. Correct. And trust is such a good word. And people misunderstand what trust is, right? Trust does not mean you're the mentor.

Trust does not mean you're the big brother. Trust does not imply responsibility, right? You have to think of yourself like you think of a safety deposit. box. It's a tool that you put something in and then you walk away and you never think of it again. Yeah. Right? It's not a mentor. It's not a reference point.

It's a tool that's there that you trust to be secure. If you can be somebody else's safe deposit box, then they never have to worry about you. And the only time you come to mind is with a comfort that their stuff is safe. Yeah. And you can tell them things that you can't tell anybody else. Because I'm assuming these other people you're trying to get these secrets from, like human nature says that we kind of want to tell somebody these secrets, right? Right.

Biologically, that we don't want to hold them for the rest of our lives, I'm assuming? There's a survival instinct that inclines us to share secrets with our own tribe because our tribe is supposed to protect us. So we feel like we have to share our secrets with the people who are responsible for protecting us. So it makes it so that like this is why criminals can't keep their crime. secret. It's why adulters can't keep their crime secret. It's why people who embezzle money can't keep this crime secret. It's because they feel like they have to share it because somebody else

has to help offset the risk of discovery or the loss of survival. And they want justification. They want validation, yeah. Validation. So let's go into tone out of it. This is important for persuasion influence, you know, whether you're in sales business, you know, whether you're a CIA agent listening to this. So what's the most important? What, So when you're reading somebody, is it more important the words they say or how they say those words? It's a great question because the words that somebody is saying are carefully crafted. They have put effort into their words, but they're not putting any effort into their nonverbal

cues. And nonverbal cues are anything other than words. So the pace that someone is speaking is a nonverbal cue. The volume that someone is speaking is a nonverbal cue. their ums, their errs, when you see them processing through an idea, that is a nonverbal cue. So the words themselves are the last thing you can trust. You have to look at the body language, you have to look at the tonality, the tempo, the pacing. That's going to tell you whether they're comfortable, whether they're being truthful, whether they're actually transparent. That's going to

tell you if they're uncomfortable because you're crossing from their public life into their private life. It's going to tell you when to push harder. It's going to tell you when to sit in that tension and let them get comfortable with the tension before you move forward. It's everything. Your tonality, that's how the brain interprets the meaning behind what you're saying. That makes sense. So your prospects are interpreting your words or questions, not by the words, but how you say those words. So that's what I always say. Why do salespeople selling the same thing to the same prospects at the same price points using the same script? How did they get completely different results. It's not the words. It's how they say those words. It's the tone. It's the body

language. It's the same reason that we like certain motivational speakers and we don't like other motivational speakers. Even though they're all talking about the same thing. Some of them use dramatic language and pauses and they bring us to the edge of our seat with excitement. Others just tell you the facts and nothing but the facts ma'am. And it's just a completely different experience. Yeah. Even though they're saying the same thing. Even though they're all talking about mindset and they're all talking about morning routines. What about, how does, how does the body language affect the tone when you're reading somebody, like to see if they're telling you the truth?

What are you looking for? So there's this idea out there that micro expressions are the key to determining of someone's telling you the truth. And what the truth is, is that at CIA, we don't rely on micro expressions. There is a- Define micro-expessions for everybody here. So micro-expressions are when you look at blink rate or when you look at someone sucking on their teeth or when you see like forehead wrinkles or eye twitches or blink, you know,

different tiny changes in the face especially. The only time micro expressions are reliable is when you're in an interrogation setting where you control the environment. Because they can't leave. Because they can't leave. You control the environment so they can't go anywhere. But as soon as that you're in a position where the environment is conducive to them leaving, you can't trust micro expressions.

Yeah, because if you're on a Zoom call, they can just click it on. If you're sitting in an office, they can just stand up and walk away. So when you don't have the control of the environment, you have to rely. on what we call baseline. Baseline is how you identify whether or not a person is having a large deviation from normal or whether they're in a small deviation from normal. What do you mean by that? So people who walk in, let's just say they're walking into a car dealership, right?

When we walk into a car dealership, we're primed for a certain number of things. We know whether or not we are interested, how interested we are, we know how much time we have. We already know whether we hate buying cars or we love buying cars or something in between. So we have a baseline when we walk in. A good salesman will see this person has a baseline. They won't start jumping into sales conversation and they won't try to make you buy a car in 20 minutes. Welcome to the store today.

How can I help you? Just looking. And that's bingo. What a good salesman is going to do is going to see this person is somewhere. They have a mental frame right now. But I don't know what it is. I have to learn their mental frame by observing their baseline. Maybe you do that by letting them walk around for five minutes.

Maybe you walk up to them and you have a conversation about something other than buying a car. And that's going to give you a chance to hear how fast they're speaking. Are they jittery? Are they caffeinated? Yeah, because if they're jittery or talking fast, that implies that their nervous system is reacting and they're nervous probably because they feel like you're going to sell them something. So how do you calm their nervous system? How do you disarm them?

Right. And you won't even know unless you take a baseline. Maybe they're just a nervous person, right? Maybe they're an introvert and they are already terrified just to be out in public. You have no idea. So you've got to get a baseline of 20 minutes or so to see what is normal. And then once you know what normal is, you can understand how your inputs increase or decrease or don't impact what their normal is. That's how you can start to fare it out whether somebody is a compliant buyer or whether somebody is a resistant buyer or whether somebody just hates salespeople right out of the gates.

Or maybe somebody came from a sales family and they're here. to test you. You don't really ever know until you get a baseline. Yeah. And in a sales situation, human brain recognizes patterns. What pattern are they used to anytime they come into a retail store? What pattern? The question, welcome to the store today. How can I help you? That's a pattern they recognize, right? Because they've heard that since they're kids. And so immediately they get a knee-jerk reaction. Oh, just looking. And they know it's an ingenuous. And it's an ingenuine question. Yeah, exactly. They know you're, it's like showing up on a sales, like, how's your day going? They know you're generally not interested in how your day is going. So instantly, the trust goes down in you because they know you're

trying to build rapport. Right. Yeah. A lot of people believe building rapport is asking those type of surface level questions. Why is it not? Repor, it's funny. Trust building. Yes, CIA uses the word rapport. Okay. And we use rapport specifically to explain a positive interaction with another person. That's what rapport is. It's not just an interaction. It's not a neutral interaction. It's a positive interaction. So it actually takes effort to build rapport. And the whole reason that you build rapport is because from that rapport, you are gaining something that we call social capital. Social capital is just like real money, just like real capital, only it's used in social

situations. So imagine you go to work and you get a paycheck and then you put that paycheck in your bank. You go to have a meeting with somebody. You build rapport and you put that social capital in the bank. And you start building up this social capital because at some point in time you have to spend, the rapport, the capital that you've built. You have to ask them a hard question. Sure. You have to make them uncomfortable. You have to put some pressure on them to get them to move off of the X that they're on. Yeah. That's called spending your social capital. Okay. The thing is, as long as you have more

capital in the bank and you're never outspent, they have essentially a social obligation to stay in place. They have, they can't leave. They comply. They comply. That makes sense. Okay. So I want I heard you talk about this on a couple podcasts. You talk a lot about perception versus perspective. What does that mean for everybody watching, listening to us? So all human beings live in a world of their own perception. We are the star of our show, right? Everything happening is happening to you.

Where you came from, where you're going, what you're thinking about, whether you're hungry, whether you have to go to the bathroom. You're the star of the show. It's your perception of the world around you. Well, guess what? The world is much bigger than you. Yeah. And when it comes to a social interaction with another person, guess what they are also doing

from wherever they're sitting, living in their own perception. Yeah. Right? Where they're coming from, where they're going to, how their gut feels, right? They're worried about whether or not you can smell their bad breath. Yeah. We all live in our own perception. Well, the problem is if we live in our own perception, at all points we're competing

with each other instead of finding commonalities. because my perception is right, your perception is wrong. My perception is better. Your perception is worse. And we're all thinking that all the time. Perspective means that you stop focusing on the subjective beliefs of your experience. And you start trying to observe the objective realities of your target. So you're putting yourself in their shoes.

How did they think? And you're not putting yourself in their shoes with assumptions. You're putting yourself in their shoes by looking for objective, measurable facts. That person looks like they're about six foot three. What must their knees feel like? If they're 55 and six foot three, it feels very different on their body than me being 45 and 5 foot 11, right? They're carrying extra weight.

What must that feel like? I can see that they smell like coffee. They must have had coffee this morning. How is they, are they crashing right now? Are they buzzing right now? Yeah. Right? Whatever.

You can start to- You're almost trying to emotionally connect before you talk to them possibly or while you're talking to them. putting not you're putting yourself in their shoes, but you're generally trying to understand their inner self, really. Yeah, you're trying to understand their experience because when they start to share information with you, it's just information unless you can put it into a frame that is their experience. Somebody who says I was up at 4 a.m., who's super fit, that means something different than somebody who's up at 4 a.m. and they're 60 pounds overweight.

you can start to imagine how different the experience must be. So you can actually frame it and understand it better, which allows you to ask a better follow-up question. It allows you to create a better personal connection. It puts you in an emotional state. Like it puts you an emotional state to be able to connect with them. That's the number one way to influence is to master the emotional connection where that other human being, whether you're in the CIA or in sales or whatever,

it feels like you understand them, their needs or desires their wants, even their fears, and do that without judging them. And the magic is they're not doing it to you. Yeah. Because they've never heard this conversation. They've never gone through the practice. So every time you try to objectively perceive somebody else's existence, it makes them subconsciously feel good. It makes them feel interesting.

It makes them feel relevant. It makes them feel heard. It makes them feel seen. So what are they, what's releasing in their brain? We're talking about it's releasing dopamine. What are they releasing there? Because there's a chemical that's being released in their brain that's causing them to feel these feelings. Yeah, all those feel-good chemicals.

So they're getting their dopamine fix. That's going to let their guard down because it calms their nervous system. Actively reducing their cortisol levels, which is also further reducing their resistance. You're building this almost like an external reliance on what your actions are to feed their good feeling. And you want that because at the end of the day or at the end of the conversation, you're going to walk away. Yeah. And when you walk away, you want to take their dopamine hit with you. So then when they go wherever they're going, they can't help but wonder like,

when am I going to see that guy again? When are we going to have another good conversation again? It's like, it's even if in dating, in the dating world as well, like you leave and they, they don't know if you necessarily like them, don't like them. It's kind of a mystery. And that's why it's so, it causes so much curiosity where they want more of that, 100%. Right. We talk about persuasion and influence.

and the lay world kind of talks about them as if they're the same thing, but they're not the same thing. Yeah, what are the difference? At CIA, we define persuasion and influence as two different elements of the same outcome. Persuasion is only what happens when you're physically with a person. Okay. Right? Physically with them in real time, physically with them on a webinar, physically with them on the phone.

You're either persuading them or you're getting them to persuade themselves. That makes sense. Because you have to be engaging them in real time. Yeah. Because persuasion is intrinsically tied to emotions. Yeah. And you can only really observe, trigger, and trip emotions in real time. Yeah.

So when somebody's with you, your only option is persuasion. Yeah. When you are out of the picture and they're thinking about what you said, you're influencing them. So that's like Steve Jobs. Everybody still loves Steve Jobs. He's a legend because he influenced. He's not even here, but you still think about him because of the influence. Correct.

Tom Brady's not really playing football anymore, but he still influences your, you know, like, wow, he's the greatest of all time because of the influence. Exactly. And that influence is really powerful because it has a long tail. And you are literally amplifying the success of your persuasive moments during that long tale of influence. So you talk to someone on Monday, you don't talk to them on Tuesday. If you were good at persuading them on Monday, the emotions that you have,

triggered are coming back up again on Tuesday. And then you talk to them on Wednesday. And from their perspective, you've been part of their life for three days. But in reality, you've been part of their life for two hours. Yeah. It's just the influence. Does that make sense? So anybody ever like you're in a type of sales situation, you could be selling to even a consumer. You could be selling to a business. And you have this first call, discovery call, whatever. Then you have to book the second call. well why do a lot of those people not show up to that same call because you haven't mastered it had to influence them where they're thinking about that conversation all the way up to that call why did why do like top top top top top top top top top top top say this people get most people to

show up because of the influence so what he's saying here is they they're still thinking about that conversation two three four days later because you influence them you guys getting this yeah good stuff here really good is always like we geek isn't this fun for you guys psychology people i love the sales people all right so uh we talk a lot about uh you know human beings make decisions emotionally that's in our limbic system emotional part of your brain reacts before the neocortex that justifies that how do you get them to stay in that emotion side of their brain so you can kind of control that emotional state. So they don't really go over to that logical side where they try to start to analyze everything.

We have a tool at CIA that we call feeling questions. Feeling questions are literally questions that include an element of emotions. How did you feel when? Take me back to the day that. What do you remember about whatever this thing is, right? You're trying to get the target to use their own words, their own vocabulary that is tied to their emotions. You want them to say things like, I felt frustrated, I felt happy. I was good, I was bad. You want to see physical and nonverbal cues that are signs of emotion. You want to see

furrowed eyebrows. You want to see clenched teeth. You want to see sucked lips. Because now you can tell they bought into that emotion. And now you know that they're just straight face. They're just telling you surface level stuff. Exactly. And you know that you're in the emotional brain. It's, it really is like a light switch because the emotional brain always works faster than the rational brain. Yeah. Right. Your right brain is way fast. faster than your left brain. So once... Yeah, survival part of the brain.

You're like you're reacting. I hear a tiger in the woods. Yeah, it's sympathetic. Yeah. Exactly. So once you get them, once you have the first trip wire, everything after that, they're going to stay there. The only way they get out of there is if you slow down or you stop or you pause or you

break momentum enough that their rational brain can catch up and then they come back into their rational thought process. That's so true. So you have to get them there, keep them there and look for those verbal and nonverbal cues that they're talking and thinking emotionally. Are you guys trained? tonality and how to influence by tonality. Absolutely.

What do you train with that? It's a big thing that we do. Yeah. So when it comes to the tones that you're using in your speech, you've got to understand that the way you say something, how you say something is oftentimes more powerful than what you say. Sure. So if you raise your voice, if you speed up, if you use complex words or if you use simple words,

right, the tone that you take in the conversation is going to trigger some kind of emotional response. It might be defensive. It might be sadness, it might be anger, it might be joy, right? But the tone that you deliver is a primer for the emotion you want them to demonstrate. So if you want someone to get frustrated, you're going to talk in a frustrated way. You're going to use your tonality. Tripping that emotion.

Because you know it's going to instigate them on the right side of their brain to show the emotion you want them to show. And likewise, if you want them to feel really reflective and sympathetic and sad, you're going to talk in a certain way. More concerned tone, tone that shows empathy. That invites them. Yeah, to feel the same way. Yeah, I love that. Everybody picking up what he's putting down there? I love that.

Okay, so what are your thoughts about the way politicians communicate? We were talking about a little bit about that. What are your thoughts about how they communicate? You know, somehow politicians have not learned anything from the business world. Right, yeah. Because there's, I think you said it, you said a great backstage, right? If a politician could learn how to speak like a salesperson, They wouldn't win by margins of 2 or 3%.

They'd win by margins of 20%. If they knew how to influence. I think most salespeople, unless they've been trained, most salespeople have not really been trained the right way. Most salespeople, I believe, kind of actually communicate like most politicians. That's why they don't make a lot of sales. But the very best, you know, get the guard down, open them up, influence, right? Politicians just don't really go through much of that training.

Maybe the CIA should do that a little bit. I don't know. I mean, it would be great if the two. could actually collide, but we'll see the two different branches of government. The Royal Canadian Legion is celebrating its 100th anniversary. And now our change has a $2 coin to mark this milestone. Honor the Legion's mission to carry forward stories of service and sacrifice to new generations and their dedication to supporting veterans and their families from coast to coast to coast.

Celebrate this enduring legacy. Find the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Legion $2 coin today.