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The core element of being able to control a relationship is understanding the truth of feelings. What all people feel becomes their point of view on reality, so when you understand and learn how to manipulate how people feel, you can direct them to feel any way you want.

Both as a screenwriter and entrepreneur, the idea of being able to take someone's perspective, to actually think like they think, is really important. The idea captured in that quote is what I call a frame of reference. In my marriage, the biggest arguments I have with my wife are when I say to her that I'm unable to penetrate her frame of reference. People feel a certain way and see the world a certain way, and if you can't get inside that, then you're in trouble. What I like about the quote is that if you can see their perspective—the elements that come together to make them feel the things they feel—then you can steer that relationship.

It's not about getting into people's perspectives; most people don't have perspective. The average person has no perspective; they live in a world of perception, how they perceive the world around them.

In our evolutionary process, humans and the matter that is our brains were always worried about survival. We've never outgrown that. The technological development and evolution of the world have happened exponentially faster than human evolution. So while you and I are sitting here in 2023, our brains work essentially the same way they did in 1823.

If you think about it, just 200 years ago, humans had to worry about how to make it to the next day, how to survive. They were always focused on the here and now, on making it work today so they could live tomorrow. You and I don't worry about how to make it through today; most people are thinking about what they will do this weekend.

What I perceive is real to me; to hell with what you perceive. What I perceive is the truth.

Ninety-eight percent of human beings are trapped in their own perception, so the two percent who live in the real world, who have perspective, are able to manipulate the perception of everybody else.

When you first approach someone, you must keep in mind that nobody is what they appear to be. Every human being has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

In spy mode, you have two objectives. Objective number one is to get into someone's private life as quickly as possible because unless you're in someone's private life, you'll never get into their secret life. Objective number two, once you're in their private life, is to become one of the few people who will ever penetrate their secret life. There's only one reason why you want to penetrate someone's secret life: because once you're there, you never leave. Once someone has trusted you with their secret life, their loyalty to you is beyond question forever because they believe that you have earned the right to their secret life.

There are three developmental stages of the human brain. From birth to seven years old, we're all sponges; we don't differentiate between true and untrue information—there's just information. This is one of the reasons why my son, when he was four, fell head over heels in love with his grandpa. His grandpa is wrong pretty much all the time. He just lies; he tells stories that never happened. He just makes stuff up, right? "Oh, the reason this is happening is because of that," and I'm like, "No, that's not true at all." My four-year-old son didn't care, but Babu (as he calls his grandpa) tells the best stories. Now my son is 10. He has left that first developmental stage, but because of those years spent with his grandfather, he is now predisposed to believe him. The second developmental stage happens from 7 to 13. In that period, you start to differentiate between true and untrue information, but you choose which information to give more value to. You still absorb it and retain it, but you might have a preference for one bit of information over another. This is the phase where you're like, "Yeah, I know I ate broccoli once, and it wasn't terrible, but I don't really want to eat it anymore." Before that, if you give a four-year-old broccoli, they'll put it in their mouth. From 7 to 13, people start to have a preference for information but still absorb it all. Puberty lasts until you're 25 years old. During this period, you resist some forms of information. Now, you have the cognitive capacity to hear something and reject it, not even letting it enter your brain. So, from 7 to 13, you hear and retain information whether you like it or not. From zero to seven, everything comes in. From 13 to 25, you're actually rejecting information. When we create a dossier on someone, we're looking at those first 25 years. Where did they spend the first seven years? Oh, they spent it in China. We can assume a number of things because they spent the first seven years in China. Oh, they spent their first seven years in Alabama, New York, or Canada. There’s lots of stuff you can pull from the foundation of how they were programmed. From 7 to 13, they did this. If they were in places like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Turkey, or Syria, you can assume that some pieces of information they were never exposed to. They were predominantly exposed to one style of information, and if they were given other information, they may have absorbed it, but the chances are they were never exposed to it. Then, you look at their puberty years, 13 to 25—where were they? What were they doing? What college did they go to? What high school? What countries were they in? Now you know what they were exposed to and what they likely rejected based on their predisposition in these formative years. Now you're talking to them in their 30s or 40s. After 25, neuroplasticity is still a thing throughout your life, meaning your brain can always learn something new, but your worldview has been set by 25. Unless something comes in and challenges your worldview, and you give it permission to do so, you're never going to change the way you think after the age of 25.

Humans are laughably predictable.

A big part of the process of bringing someone from public life to secret life is to systematically drain them of their resources so you can see who they really are. It's when they're at that low point that you can replicate or mirror their core personality back to them, and then they let you into that secret life.

Questions are always being asked by the person in control of the conversation.

People have exchanged what works for what sounds good.

There's what's really happening, and then there is your perception of what's happening.

The more you learn about something, the more you realize how much there is to learn.

When I teach a client, my objective as a service provider is to bring them maximum proficiency in the minimum amount of time.

There's an exercise at the CIA that they put us through called the Four Temperaments, and they break these temperaments down into four animal categories. The categories are lions, foxes, cheetahs, and bears. Lions are people with a temperament to organize; foxes have a temperament to create ideas; cheetahs have a temperament to take action; and bears have a temperament to build relationships.

You want to ask questions that disarm the person you're interviewing because every person you interview is in their public life. They need the job, want the job, and are prepared for the interview—public life. To find your way into their private life and see how they actually behave, you can't ask them questions about the job or questions that go against HR policy or federal guidelines. You have to ask elicitation questions, parallel questions. A question like, "How would you plan your perfect vacation?" is completely disarming. If they say, "The first thing I would do is make a list of all the places I want to go and how much it costs to be there, and check the high and low seasons," you know you're talking to a lion. Lions want to organize. If someone says, "I'm just going to jump on the next plane to Fiji," you're talking to a cheetah—they just want to take action. "What will you do when you get to Fiji?" "I have no idea, but I'm on the next plane." If someone says, "I've thought about this a lot, and I'm either going to Antarctica, Africa, or Saudi Arabia because there's all this cool stuff going on in all three places, and they've got fantastic reviews," you're talking to a fox. A fox is full of ideas. If someone says, "I'll go anywhere my husband wants to go," or "I'll go wherever my best friend takes me," you're talking to a bear.

We have this concept at the CIA called the Thousand Personalities. Everyone has a core personality that, when under-resourced and drained of all excess time, money, and energy, is who they truly are. But then, you have a thousand personalities that you can play depending on the scale of your time, energy, and money. This idea of a thousand personalities has been incredibly valuable in marriage because it allows you to be gracious and forgiving to any of the personalities that present themselves.

One of the first lessons they teach is the strong empirical connection between childhood trauma and high achievement. The science is out there—I’ve looked it up myself. The connection is extraordinary: people who experience the right amount of childhood trauma—enough to make them feel they have something to prove, but not so much that they had to adopt external coping mechanisms—often achieve more.

For me, legacy is all about the foundation you give your children to continue to progress and achieve more than you did. The big thing lacking from my childhood was love and support. I was fighting for my mom's attention while she was fighting for the survival of her family. That's a pretty low bar, so if I can just give my kids love and attention and provide an experience where we're not struggling to survive, that's step one. But I also know, empirically, that they have to experience some level of trauma if they're going to be high achievers. Do I intentionally create whatever that trauma is, or do I try to guide them through it as it happens? Or do I accept that my children might not be high achievers?

I think everyone is pushed violently by the winds of evolution to pursue fulfillment, which I have a formula for. A recipe is probably the right way to think about it. The recipe is that you have to work really hard to attain a set of skills that allow you to serve not only yourself but also others in a way that you find exciting.

I've always told people that the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. Self-respect—you have to do something that makes you think you are worthy of respect. No one can give it to you. You can't stare in the mirror and say, "I love you, I love you, I love you." It won't work. You have to do something that you believe is worthy of respect.

Tying your self-esteem to the sincere pursuit of something feels like the only way out of a death trap.

I work with so many people who are trying to build businesses. I'm always telling them, "Success is not guaranteed, but the struggle is." This is going to be hard no matter what you're trying to do—whether you're trying to be a piano teacher or build the next Microsoft—it doesn't matter. It's all going to be hard. The question becomes: Will you love the struggle or not? Because you may never achieve your goal, and even if you do, it's some time down the road. If you don't love the difficulty, you're going to have a hard time.

What would I do and love every day, even if I were failing?

The closest thing I've found to spy work is business. It's the closest thing out there. You have to get into the head of your client just like you have to get into the head of your target.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to know how to make good decisions. What people think they need is a great marketing funnel—and you do need that, yeah—but that's down the road. You do need good copywriting skills, good sales skills, and you need to make a good product, for sure. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to solve novel problems. That's being an entrepreneur. And if you can't solve novel problems, well, you're screwed.

Moral flexibility is essentially the idea that you can shift your ethics and morals around some other objective. If you don't have that, if you have strict morals and strict ethics, you're not going to do well in clandestine operations.

Moral flexibility is the concept that you can change your personal ethics to fit a larger goal. Ours is American primacy. The CIA believes, and the government of the United States believes, that as long as America is the strongest country in the world, the world is a safer place for Americans. If you don't like how that sounds, then you don’t want to work in the government. We're not worried about the security of Nigerians; we're not worried about the security of Australians; we're not worried about human rights in Sri Lanka. That's not our first goal. It might be somewhere like goal 75. Goal number one is to keep Americans safe and give Americans every opportunity to succeed in a world dominated by the United States.

We like to self-destruct because, in our brains, we create this low-probability outcome where all will be forgiven, and we’ll be able to reset. What we don't like is that people can reinvent—you can always reinvent—but you can never reset. This isn’t Nintendo; there’s no hitting select or start and starting all over again. You don’t get to do that. You have to finish the game, and then you can restart. You can reinvent, you can recreate, but you can't go backwards; you can't reset. We keep thinking we can reset; we keep thinking we can go back to the blank slate that never existed. We can’t. We have to keep playing the game. You can retreat, or you can advance, but you can't restart.

We like to self-destruct because we are misinterpreting the moment. We’re telling ourselves a lie in our heads, telling ourselves that it’s better to start over than to start where we are. It's never better to start over. You are the sum total of all of your experiences, good and bad. You are zero to seven, seven to thirteen, thirteen to whatever age you are now—you are the sum of all of that experience and all of your learning. You use the mantra, “Don’t forget who you are,” or “Remember who you are.” What you’re really remembering is everything that brought you to where you are. You can't pick and choose; you can't reset. It is what it is, and it's a superpower. But it’s a superpower for everybody. I’m nowhere near the financial success that you are; I’m nowhere near the achievement that you’ve achieved; I’m nowhere near the notoriety that you have—nowhere near it. But you still invited me to come here. There’s something I offer of value that made this conversation interesting and relevant to you.

People don't spy for the reasons they think they spy. People spy for what's known as a core motivation. There are only four core motivations, which fall into an acronym we call RICE: Rewards, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego. Every human being is driven in every decision by those four things.

Do you take out one drug dealer, or do you follow the drug dealer to find the larger kingpin? The first thing we do when we suspect we might be under scrutiny is amp up our situational awareness to observe whether or not we think we're being observed.

The way the human brain can rationalize through a dangerous situation and come to the wrong conclusion is incredible.

The CIA recruits heavily for people who have anxiety. What are some of the superpowers of having anxiety? You're paranoid all the time—a huge advantage. You worry that you would give yourself away. The other nice thing about people with anxiety is that they have a very real idea of where their true limits are because their true limits are often tied to their level of comfort. You might say, "I would never do these things." You can fathom espionage because it’s just psychology. It’s really just a question of whether or not you have the competency and skills to execute it. Today, you might not. But if we spend three, four, five weeks together, even just doing superficial training, you’re going to feel like, "I think I could do this. I’ve got anxiety, but I think I could do this." My wife has been deployed all over the world; she has Generalized Anxiety Disorder and has been medicated for her anxiety disorders. She’s operated all over the world because she learned the skills.

Confidence is a perception, not a real thing. Confidence is how you perceive your emotional reaction or your emotional relationship with the environment around you. Confidence doesn't exist—it can't be measured, improved, or reduced. Confidence is a non-sequitur, an empty word. What we mean when we say confidence is competence. We want competence in what we're doing because the more competent you are, the more comfortable you are executing. The more comfortable you are executing, the more comfortable you are taking risks. When you take a risk, it's called courage. There's a relationship between confidence, competence, and courage. Because of all the unethical business owners out there, they summarize it all as confidence and try to sell you some course that tells you if you look at yourself in the mirror and say, "You know you’re worth it, you deserve to succeed," you’re going to have more confidence. Or if you stand in a certain way, you're going to have more confidence. Confidence is tied directly to competence. If you increase your knowledge in something, you increase your competence. You can give the rational, logical side of your brain—the left side—more accurate information from which it can process a probability matrix of your successful outcome. It’s all about making good decisions. You make good decisions when you have superior information. You have superior information when you have superior competence. The more competent you are in a skill, the more courageous you are in taking risks revolving around that skill.

The individual who executes the operation is tailored to fit the operation because they need to get through the public life and the private life into the secret life as quickly as possible.

Why do we think George Washington became the first president of the United States? Because he earned it and the American people voted for him? France was the reason we won the American Revolution. You don’t think that had something to do with it? You don’t think France had a say in who became the leader of the new United States? I’m not saying that all of our presidents have been given to us by foreign powers, but it’s part of the equation.

There’s a famous quote in the world of foreign policy that says, "There are no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests."

It’s also predictably human to assume that a friend is a friend. There are no permanent friends. There are people from my life from ages 13 to 25 who are not my friends anymore because our interests diverged, and that's normal and natural. It's also normal and natural to feel pain when it comes, when you outgrow somebody or when you have to leave somebody behind because your interests have diverged. The saddest thing to me is people who, when they feel that pain, that dissonance of leaving behind something from the past, instead choose to give up on the ambition and double down on the anchor.

We are still an adolescent country, so we get very myopic and focused on the thing we're playing with right now, losing sight of the larger vision. The world has watched us do this for too long, and they don’t make the same mistake twice, especially not authoritarian countries. Authoritarian countries have the benefit of rulers who sit in office or in a place of power for 15, 20, 30 years. They don’t deal with the kind of tumult and transition that we have in the United States.

Knowing that humans are laughably predictable, if China becomes the next global superpower, what’s the laughably predictable thing that would happen next? The most predictable outcome is that China would take the number one spot, and we would fall to number two. Who’s always everyone’s target? The guy in the lead. Right now, the world is unified in viewing the United States as Enemy Number One. Even if there are allies, we're still Enemy Number One. You think NATO likes the United States? No. France and Germany have both said they don’t want the United States in NATO anymore. The Chancellor of Germany has said he wants Germany to have the largest army in Europe specifically so they can't be bossed around by the United States anymore. Everybody’s over-dependent on the United States military. The President of France, early in the invasion of Ukraine, shut Biden down and said, "You are exacerbating this conflict with the rhetoric you're spitting in Poland and the United States, when the U.S. isn't even within Russia's firing range." France and Germany have something to say. Biden has been successful with his policy in Poland because Poland has a long history against Russia, so it’s a natural way in. Poland already hates Russia and will take any help it can get from anyone in NATO. So the U.S. comes in and says, "Hey, we'll help you, Poland, we’ll back you up," and Poland backs the U.S. up. But Canada, France, Russia, Germany, and the UK have a very different story.

France, specifically, is so well-funded, holds a grudge, and is so adept at targeting Americans that they have made a huge impact in the space of economic and industrial espionage against the United States. If you talk to an intelligence professional, you'll hear the same thing over and over again: “Fuck France.” You’ll hear those two words from every intelligence professional because we’ve all been bested at some point by the DGSE. They either stumbled into one of our cases, false-flagged and pretended to be the CIA, recruited NASA from under us, or who knows what. They know how to target Americans, and nobody knows they even exist. It’s the perfect kind of clandestine operation.

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