1164: Julian Fisher | How to Think Like a Spy

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Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger.

On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers.

Today, we actually have a spy.

Sometimes we even have the occasional former cult member, Fortune 500 CEO, rocket scientist, or investigative journalist.

If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more.

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Now, today I said we have a spy and we do.

Julian Fisher, former, well, allegedly a former spy.

He's not allowed to say, I don't really know how that works because like when you're a Brit and you're a spy, you're not allowed to to ever say that you were, but then you can write a book about it.

I don't know.

Anyway, we explore how spies are trained and made, what skills they need to develop sources and connect deeply with others to get them to betray their country.

We also discuss how to think on your feet.

And Julian has a bunch of great real-life stories about mistakes that he's made, lucky breaks that led to life-saving lessons, and a whole lot more.

So if you like our undercover and spy stuff, you're going to dig this one.

It's also a bit more practical in the networking and relationship development stuff as well.

So I think you'll enjoy it, even if you're just looking at this stuff for business or personal use.

Now, here we go with Julian Fisher.

Well, thanks for coming in, man.

I appreciate that.

Not at all.

My pleasure.

Great to be here, Jordan.

Coming in means something different when you're a spy, I guess.

From the cold.

Into this lovely, warm embrace.

That's right.

Jordan Harbinger podcast.

That's right.

Give me a brief overview, a very brief overview of your career.

You know, where did you start and how does one become a spy, so to speak?

I was fortunate enough to get to Oxford University, which is always a great start.

And that gave me a springboard to go into the city, financial sector in a venerable institution.

That was a springboard to work on Japanese stocks and shares in a subsequent job, which gave me a yen for travel.

So I applied for government service overseas.

And that was like my entry into the world of broadly intelligence security and diplomacy.

And I was lucky to be posted in a number of places in Africa with that overseas agency.

And from there, I went to work for a gentleman called Tim Spicer, who had set up a private security company, which had a private intelligence arm.

They did a lot of work in Iraq, post-the invasion of Iraq, providing security for the reconstruction teams there.

And I was asked by Tim to become his head of Africa.

I did that for four or five years, and then I went to set up my own company called Africa Integrity, which specialised in Africa intelligence to support ethical engagement.

I see.

So it's many years of experience in private and public sector.

And you can't say which agency that you worked for.

Is that allowed or not?

Not specifically.

Got it, okay.

Really, as far as I should go is to say that I worked in foreign affairs for a British agency.

Wow, okay.

They try and leave that nice and vague.

They do indeed.

I suppose that makes sense because spies.

They're sort of meant to be secret, aren't we?

Yeah, that's kind of the idea.

It's meant to be a secret.

And you have to convince other people, depending on what line of work you're in, you have to convince other people to betray their country.

And the consequences for that are pretty high.

I mean, I'm thinking about Robert Hansen, who went and betrayed the United States and gave away all these counterintelligence secrets.

I assume somebody like that, who's high placed in the FBI counterintelligence and was responsible for looking for moles and turned out to be a mole, we're probably still recovering from that damage.

Absolutely.

I believe Hansen died recently in prison.

Yeah.

He gave up the rest of his life in the cause of becoming a traitor.

Yeah.

And that's the extraordinary thing, because that's what spies do.

They travel abroad and persuade people to betray their countries at the risk of imprisonment, if not torture, and potentially in certain countries, execution.

And so we see with the likes of Hansen that he gave up his freedom.

We see with the likes of Burgess, Philby and Maclean that they gave up their reputations, in some cases their freedom, their ability to remain in the country.

But people do it.

When I talk about spies, I really mean intelligence officers, the person going to recruit those individuals to become traitors, if you like.

And they do it for those spies because the latter are trained in a set of skills.

All of these skills are well within the realms of what we understand.

Everybody has access to these skills.

Everybody can develop these skills.

Everybody can train themselves and everybody can perfect them to do broadly what spies do, which is persuade other people to do what they want.

And of course, in the case of the spy, it's an extraordinary achievement and it's an amazing thing to be doing.

But there's nothing to stop a civilian, anybody, anywhere in the world, from using that same set of skills to good and effective ethical ends.

The whole difference is spies do it with intent and they do it with purpose.

And if you can learn to take those sets of skills and turn them intentfully and with purpose to particular goals, you will make a big difference in the progress of your life personally and professionally.

So do agencies that recruit people to become spies or foreign intelligence officers, whatever, do they recruit people who already have these skills or do they recruit people that they just think they can train these skills?

That's the billion dollar question.

It's inevitably the case that that some people will have them more innate and will have developed them more consciously, perhaps, over the course of their life.

But actually, those kinds of characters are quite rare.

So I think, as in so many cases, what the ages are looking for is potential.

And it's the recognition, not so much that somebody knows how to target, use cover, use cultivation, use techniques of influence, but somebody has the hunger and the personal capability to learn all of that.

That's, I think, the major difference.

Because we know there are some people who perhaps are a little bit more closed-minded about things and about their own capabilities.

And the services are looking for those people who are open-minded and ready to experiment, ready to take risk.

I've met a lot of intelligence officers from various agencies, various countries.

Many of them are very unimpressive people in many ways.

If you're listening to this, you're watching this, I'm not talking about you, but I meet these people who work for French foreign intelligence, or they're retired, you know, because otherwise I wouldn't know.

German, US, UK.

And I just think this guy, but it's like, if you really have to turn it on all the time in order for me to think you're not someone who has their head stuck in their butt, that's not a good sign.

Because if you don't know me and you're thinking, I don't need to be nice to this person, I don't need to worry about this person.

I don't need to connect with this person.

You don't really know that.

And then if you turn it on later, it seems so stinking disingenuous.

So I would be more drawn to the person who is friendly, outgoing, connects everyone, even if they don't think that I can help them with anything.

Bingo, I couldn't agree more with you about that.

And I've had people say to me that I look like a librarian or I look like an accountant.

I think that's probably rude to librarians and accountants, in all honesty.

And one might say, well, okay,

job done.

It's meant to be a secret.

Sure.

But that's a cheap answer.

And the reality is there is a breed of officer, trained intelligence officers, who can be a bit disingenuous and do have to turn it on.

It isn't entirely natural for them.

Now, whether or not you would notice the switch on is a different question.

But it turns to me, if you've met somebody who's fully retired from the profession, then they're not likely to have to manage that segue much more.

The reason that I kind of brought this up, I've spent a bunch of, unfortunately, too much time in Hollywood, right?

And when you meet an actor like George Clooney, for example, he's so charming all the time.

David Dukovny, really cool guy, pretty cool guy all the time.

Because if you can act like a really charming, cool guy that everyone loves, why on earth would you turn that off?

You'd leave it on almost all the time.

So if your job is to connect and network with people and get them to like you, why are you an ignorant stick in the mud until you're on the clock?

That part doesn't make sense to me.

I don't turn my personality on and off depending on whether or not these cameras are rolling.

I'm pretty much the same guy all the time.

And so if I have to become myself in front of other people for this show, My wife told me this.

She goes, I always wondered if you're going to be like the same.

And I used to hear this all the time.

Oh, wow, you're like the same person that I hear on the the podcast.

There's really no difference.

That is a much more powerful, in my opinion, impression of someone than somebody who goes, I need something from him.

Now it's time for me to smile and act gregarious and connect and see what I can do for them.

It just, that to me immediately turns me off when I see people do that.

And I can't be the only one who feels that way.

I get what you're saying because the most important thing, which you project very clearly, is authenticity.

The Jordan I'm sitting talking to here is the Jordan I was talking to 10 minutes ago outside the studio.

That's fairly clear.

And I think what's interesting about actors, and I've had the good fortune to work with a number of actors, even though their whole job is about pretending to be people they're not, they're actually as authentic off the screen as they are on the screen and vice versa.

And I find that very interesting.

It's the same point you're making.

They're playing themselves.

They're playing themselves.

It might just not be the serial killer version that they're playing.

And I think that's right.

The difference maybe with intelligence officers is this, that you mentioned spending a lot of time in Hollywood, and there's a Hollywood view, there's a Hollywood image of what is the intelligence officer like.

It's the the Bonds and it's the Borns and I think that's really ingrained in people's psyche.

It's not necessarily the case that a spy has to switch on and become charismatic to engage with you.

I like to think about very different, what I call spy styles.

A few of the spy styles that I would point to, for instance, are at one end, the exciter, and that is the classic spy type.

The person that you can look at and say, yeah, I would follow that person.

They're clearly a leader.

Perhaps more sort of special forces than civilian intelligence, maybe.

The bombs and the bombs.

But there's also the validator at the other end of the spectrum.

And the validator can be quite introverted.

They can be quite shy.

They can be quite non-flamboyant.

They fade into the foreground.

But when they engage, they engage very meaningfully and they connect very strongly with the people that they need to engage with.

Now, I completely agree with you that if there are cases where that's being done purely for professional reasons, it leaves me feeling as uncomfortable as it leaves you feeling uncomfortable.

And I think the best spies bring something of a real genuine connection when they're building those relationships.

It seems like that's the only way that this is really going to work.

Because if I'm going to convince you to betray your country and if you get caught, your whole family gets executed.

But if you do it right, you get a blue passport and you get to live in New York.

The stakes are pretty high.

So am I going to trust the person who seems to only have a rudimentary understanding of world affairs that they got from watching TV news in America?

Or am I going to trust the person that feels like they're actually my friend and not just just being paid to act like my friend for three hours a day?

I agree with you.

We're all capable of reading people pretty acutely and we do it all the time.

We do it from the moment we're born, basically.

We teach ourselves to switch off often, but we all know when somebody's being inauthentic.

We just know it.

Unless you have some sort of disability where you can't pick up on these things, you are doing this automatically.

Absolutely.

Even if you can't say why.

You know that person who's in the party looking over the shoulder for the next most interesting person to go on and talk to.

You just, you want to avoid them.

And they may be flamboyant, they may be charismatic, they may be larger than life, but you just don't feel right about them.

So of course there has to be a personal connection.

Because if you're going to take that risk, right at the basis of this is trust.

You've got to trust that person that they're going to protect your identity, they're going to protect their dealings with you, they're going to look after you if something goes wrong to the extent that they can.

You have to trust that they are giving something back to you.

And that's not just material considerations, financial considerations, undoubtedly.

But actually, part of what is given back quite often in those relationships is emotional connection.

And that has to be genuine.

I don't think anybody really can do it without being genuine.

This is the paradox at the center of espionage.

You have to be an authentic person to do it well.

And if you're not, you're soon caught out.

But also lie about who you are.

Yes, it's a huge paradox, isn't it?

You know, you can imagine that moment of unmasking when you say, well, okay, you know, you've been talking to me.

But I've got something to tell you.

Actually, I work for the CIA or I work for the Mossad or I work for the irgc or whatever it is and and by the way having just admitted that i've been lying to you for the past three years i'm now going to ask you to risk your life

yeah by giving me secret intelligence how about it it's a tough sell it's a tough sell isn't it so unless you've got a genuine authentic connection already i think it's an impossible sell i've always described it as being about three things have your self-awareness others awareness and situational awareness and if you can't combine those three things effectively you won't ever be a good spy that actually sheds some light on things.

What's this place with all the pythons that you wrap around your neck?

Ah, in Uida.

It's in Benin.

Oh, okay.

It's in West Africa, south coast of Benin.

And it's the center of voodoo, which people often mistake as hoodoo,

which is...

I don't even know what hoodoo is.

That's a real thing.

Hoodoo's in a vertical commas black magic

concept, whereas voodoo is

a legitimate religion, followed by a lot of people in that part of West Africa.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

And they worship the python.

One of the consequences of worshiping the python is you're not allowed to harm it.

You're not allowed to go against its wishes.

And they have a temple there in Weida, which I visited on a project some time ago.

And I foolishly decided to go to the temple and allow them to put one of the many, many pythons that live there around my neck

without realizing that were it to strike or to do whatever pythons do, which is harmful, nobody would intervene.

Right, they're not going to help you.

They would not help you.

It's God's will.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

The python's will.

But fortunately,

we simply got okay, me and the snake.

You know, I petted alligators or crocodiles, rather, in Gambia.

So there's something about traveling to West Africa, which obviously makes me take leave of my senses and decide that it's okay to pet very dangerous animals.

Yeah, it must must be the jet lag.

I don't know man.

That seems crazy to me because they put the python around your neck and you go, oh, so how do you defang these things and de-venom so you can venomize them?

And then they don't.

Right.

The answer is they don't touch them.

No.

I mean it's the veneration of the python in that part of the world is so great that each residential property has a python hole so the pythons can come and go.

So it's a doggy door for snakes.

Absolutely.

No thanks.

They can slither and light at any time, day or night, and you're not meant to evacuate them should they come into your living area.

And so you could just wake up with a python next to you?

Absolutely.

I think, in fact, adherents of voodoo would consider that very good luck.

Consider that a good sign.

At what point doesn't it become bad luck when one kills a member of your family?

I mean, that's not good luck.

I'm not going to question their beliefs, but it's not something I think I could subscribe to.

I have to say,

luckily, I was staying in a hotel.

No Python hole.

I was not on the ground floor, no Python hole.

Oh, man.

I've read the book, as you may be able to tell from some of the questions I'm asking you, but I read the book, and I like that you're very detailed because a lot of this stuff tends to be like 10,000-foot or 30,000-foot overview of something like develop rapport.

And it's like, okay.

Yeah, how'd you do that?

Dot, dot, dot, you know, colon, what?

What do I do now?

And there's, there's plans in there that you can, you know, here's how I would do a.

dossier.

That's not the word you use, but like a file on somebody.

So when I meet them, I have a plan.

That's really useful.

And I do that when I'm talking to you right now, it's probably very similar to what you would use or have in your head when you're meeting a contact.

It might not be a PDF, but it might be similar.

Really interesting thing you just said there, Jordan, that you've read the book.

You'd be surprised how many interviews I've had with people who clearly haven't read the book.

It's actually the norm.

People always go, oh, gosh, you're so talented.

No, I just literally do the most basic level of homework on the guest, and it's already cleared the bar in the 99th percentile.

And here we are connecting, and we're off able to talk about things which in many other encounters, I'd still be stuck in the weeds of, so what happened when you were 12 years old?

The point I'm making is that we're already able to connect at a very different level of discussion about the world and about people, because at the end of the day, this is what it's all about, interpersonal connectivity, because you've done your homework.

And that's actually essentially all I'm saying.

Don't go around breaking GDPR or equivalent privacy laws and what have you.

And, you know, obviously be very careful about how you keep data on people.

But essentially, what I'm talking about is a hypersonic version of just making a note of when somebody's birthday is and being aware of what they're interested in and making an effort when something of interest to them comes along.

In other words, just not being a self-obsessed

a-hole.

Yeah, exactly.

There we go.

There's a cultural difference.

Put people's birthdays in your calendar, set the alarm for one or two days before, so you're not wishing them happy birthday only on the day because that's what everyone else is doing.

And then you put a little list of things you know about them in that calendar entry.

Like, hey, man, you're still playing pickleball?

Happy birthday.

It's on Thursday, isn't it?

That is such a huge.

I've used that to keep in touch with hundreds or maybe even a thousand plus people over the course of the year.

And just remember, what was her kid's name?

What's her husband's name?

So that aside, tell me, you had a nurse from Iran when you had an accident as a kid.

Can we talk about that?

Because it seems like you learned quite a bit from her about alliances, which I think might have informed your work later in life.

Most definitely.

I think Maya was probably the person who made the most significant difference to my life.

I ended up meeting her because when I was 11, my older sister took her own life, and this cast me into a very severe period of emotional turmoil.

I won't seek to put a label on it and I don't think anybody would ask me to.

I think it's fairly clear that an 11-year-old losing his sister to suicide is going to be quite traumatised by it.

I mean, a year later, in the midst of my trauma, I didn't used to be able to face going to school because I was being bullied about that event the year before.

And one morning I got the bright idea of being able to avoid going to school by walking in front of a moving car.

Now, I can't say that I was intending to kill myself, but I was certainly intending to get out of going to school.

I think we probably now call it a cry for help.

As a result I ended up in hospital in a fairly serious state which required quite a number of medical procedures, surgical interventions, and had the good fortune to meet some incredible staff.

Our NHS staff are almost universally fantastic, I have to say, but I met one in particular, Maya, who was not very much older than I was.

She can't be more than 18 or 19.

And she had fled with her mother as recently as 1979.

Now, we're talking about 1982 when I was in hospital.

In 1979, there was an Islamic revolution in Iran, and a number of people were arrested as counter-revolutionaries, and her father was one of those.

He was a medical doctor.

She never saw him again, as far as I'm aware, has no idea what became of him.

She fled with her mum, ended up in Birmingham, which is roughly in the middle of the UK, where I'd been born and brought up, and sought to become a nurse because she wanted to honour her father's memory by going into into the medical field.

But she failed her exams the first time around because she

didn't speak English, essentially.

That'll do it.

It's an impediment.

And then had the bright, I mean, I think fabulous idea of asking one of her teachers to get in contact with universities where they offered Farsi.

And through that, she met a young student called Dan, Israeli by background as it happens.

And Dan and she would meet every day over the course of a summer and they would have two hours of conversation, one hour in English, one hour in Farsi, so that they would improve each other's grasp of the language.

Dan works for the Nosad now, probably.

None of these fluent and farsies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By the end of that period, she was able to take her exams again, didn't do as well as she should have done.

And then Dan's father stepped in.

Dan's father was, he was involved in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham, reasonably well-to-do business person.

And he said, look, if you continue working with my son, help him through university, I will pay for you to go back to school and to retake over the course of a year.

Because at that point, she was essentially terrified that that she was going to have to follow her father her mother's footsteps and become a cleaner.

Nothing wrong with being a cleaner, but she wanted badly to honour her father's memory.

And so Dan's father was as good as his word and a year later she retook our exams, passed them and then got a place as a student nurse to become a state-enrolled nurse.

And I met her, I think, in the first year of that programme.

And she said to me one day, Kuchulu, which I understand means little one, dear one.

She said, allies are the most important thing in life and always remember that.

And I always have.

I mean, it just made such a profound difference to the way I thought about the world.

Of course, I believe in the importance of education.

I think we should always be on a lifelong quest to learn.

But if you don't have allies on your side, it doesn't really matter how accomplished you are intellectually, how accomplished you are academically.

You won't be able to make those breakthroughs.

You won't be able to do the things that are just that little bit beyond.

It's about social capital.

Yeah.

That's the phrase.

I took to heart what she said, and I made a point of building relationships with people who would be helpful, supportive and in a position to do that.

But all the while without seeking to do that in any exploitative way, manipulative way.

What is personality profiling and why is this important?

You have this contact Silas and I think it's a really good example of personality profiling, cultural awareness and things like that.

And I think that's an important skill to build.

It is.

I mean, I would say all I mean by personality profiling is getting to know somebody, actually stopping to think about somebody.

We so often go through our lives and we come across somebody and we'll happily label them.

I met Jordan the other day.

He's a podcaster and broadcaster and a celebrity personality.

Let's go with that.

Sure.

I met Jules the other day.

He's an author, former spy maybe.

I met a doctor.

Doesn't really tell us anything, does it?

What I mean by profiling is actually, where does that person come from?

Is it a doctor who was brought up in a family of doctors going back generations who didn't have to fight to get there?

Or were they born in northern Nigeria and had to fight even to get to a Western country where they could get the education and the training to become a doctor?

So starting at that cultural level, really, it's just understanding where does somebody come from.

It also extends to contextual situational awareness.

Where does somebody come from?

Because where they come from tells you a lot about who they are because you have to be a certain type of personality, a certain type of character to get from A to B.

That's a really good point.

There's definitely a difference between somebody whose parents were both doctors, not that they didn't have to work hard to get there, but whose parents are both doctors and they were born and raised in Los Angeles and then went to medical school and came back and worked in their practice there.

There's definitely a difference between that person and the person who went from Russia, came to the United States as a teenager, got into medical school, and their parents were both auto workers like mine or something like that.

There is a difference in personality based on the background of those people.

I think there is, and there's a difference in the way in which we wish to engage with them.

I think.

Now, let me be absolutely clear.

I am not belittling anybody in this.

I'm not saying that if you're fortunate enough to be born with privilege, you know, I don't blame anyone.

No, lean into what they're saying.

Exactly.

We're all just...

I would, with the exception of those people who take that privilege and squander it, I have no objection.

I think that's a wonderful thing that we can pass on knowledge, we can pass on wealth, and we can pass on contacts and social capital from generation to generation because we rise by lifting others.

I genuinely believe that.

Something I say in every show, I assume that that.

I didn't know that, and I'm not actually joking.

I was like, that's pretty good, man.

Where'd you pick that up?

It must have been said to me by somebody who's already been on one of your shows.

Maybe.

It's at the conclusion of every single show.

It shows that we have in sync in our views.

Man, this is

quite fascinating.

You mentioned organizational awareness and how spies pick their targets.

You discuss organizational awareness.

You think about it and find contacts who say, know an industry well or are well connected because they're rich or they're famous or something like that.

And I feel like this has been a background process of mine.

And it can go wrong, right?

If you're in Hollywood and you're just a social climber and you're trying to get around famous people, it's really transparent.

But if you can make friends with people that maybe have deep connections in the fitness industry, wellness industry, and you're just friends with them and you rarely talk about fitness, but then when you go, I need to contact this person.

They just have the Rolodex for days.

And I feel like I've sort of naturally come by that for much of my life.

And I'm that person for podcasting and digital media for those people.

I think there's a difference between targeting and networking.

I think lots of people mix the two up and they misunderstand what I'm talking about when I use the phrase targeting.

And we know people who are adept at building their roller deck.

But there are two types of roller deck.

There's a roller deck with a bunch of cards that mean absolutely nothing because if you picked up the phone, the chances are that person will never remember you.

You were chips that passed in the night.

And then there's targeting.

And targeting is focusing on relationships because that relationship is meaningful.

not necessarily just for your professional advancement, not necessarily just for your personal reasons, but it's advantageous advantageous in the widest possible terms.

Sometimes that can be strictly personal.

Sometimes that can be professional.

Sometimes it can be for everybody.

Sometimes it might be charitable.

It might be philanthropic.

But you get my point.

There's a reason to develop that relationship.

Rather than that networking idea that, oh, I've met somebody who's a sound engineer.

I might need them one day.

I'll put their number into my phone, forget about it till five years later.

Call them five years later and they're like, well, who are you?

And anyway, I've moved on and I'm now,

you know, I'm now a glassblower.

So what are you talking about?

You know what I mean?

That's the difference meaningful connection building i use the phrase targeting if you want to talk about that in the professional context i talk about goals allies you set your goals you understand where you're going you make an assessment of the types of people that may be able to help you get there who may become goals allies on that journey and then you target that type of person And you can be doing that in a preparatory way.

And spies do this all the time, by the way.

Sometimes they might be thinking about targeting for problems which are way over the horizon.

They're constantly looking ahead, thinking, well, where's the next geopolitical problem going to come from?

Or you might be doing it for an immediate requirement.

And the same goes for personal or professional targeting.

But the difference between that and networking is, again, it's not just going to a conference and picking up as many cards as you can.

It's why am I here?

What am I trying to achieve?

Who would be best placed to come with me on that journey in a collaborative alliance and then seek to only engage with them as an individual rather than just a name or a function or a job.

So it's more depth, quality over quantity, which should surprise no one who's listened to the show before.

It seems like we talk about that a lot on the show.

It's common in your profession and yet people will literally go and meet as many people as they can and collect the business cards.

Never get a follow-up email from them.

Maybe you hear from them three years later or they follow up, but it's like there's no action here.

There's no reason for us to really stay connected that I can think of other than you're casually maybe going to ask me for something in a few weeks.

That's right.

That's really transparent, isn't it?

Especially if somebody contacts you and they haven't seen you in three years.

Hey, remember me, we met in San Jose.

And why are you calling me?

You want something, don't you?

And it's immediate.

Again, remember what we said a short while ago.

We instinctively know these things.

We don't necessarily react harshly as a result, but we instinctively know these things.

Whereas if you're spending time building up quality relationships, that shouldn't be an issue.

There's a parallel here, and this is a passion of mine.

I'm sure we would come to it anyway, but I'm going to jump the gun,

which is about networking online.

For me, there's targeting, then there's networking in person, and then there's building up thousands and thousands of friends online.

Okay, fine.

If you're an influencer and that's your job and you are seeking to reach a wide audience, and for somebody like you, as wide an audience as possible, absolutely right.

For the vast majority of us, it makes very little difference if you have 10 friends on social media or you have 10,000.

It really makes very little difference apart from manageability.

This striving for likes, for connections, and all the rest of it, I think that's probably going to do an awful lot of harm to young people.

And the young people are who I'm trying to reach with this book, by the way.

What I really want to say to them is get out there, meet people, build meaningful relationships.

Because a lot of people measure the quality of their social circle in the amount of people that they have or followers or whatever, because it shows a visible, tangible metric of popularity.

I think people mistake popularity for real connection.

And that is a huge mistake, especially in the professional sphere.

A lot of people might know who you are, and that means you're popular, but that doesn't mean that they're connected with you or that they feel necessarily some affinity for you.

It's just that they know who you are.

It can actually be bad depending on the industry that you're in, I would imagine.

I think that's probably right.

And there's a distinction to be made between using it as a means or tools as an end in it, a tool as an end in itself.

You know, if your end in itself is to have 20,000 followers and numerous likes every time you put something out on whatever social media it is, that's pointless.

Now, of course, if you've developed something, a capability, a genuine capability, a genuine talent, you genuinely have something that is to be consumed, whether that's a talent for podcasting, whether it's a talent for writing, whether it's a talent for singing, and you seek followers so that you have as wide an audience as possible.

That's an entirely different thing.

It's not targeting, that's a different thing.

That's building your customer based.

That's right.

That's totally different.

You mentioned in the book, you ask who has access to the information that we want and how do we structure an approach that they're likely to be receptive to.

The great example of this is you volunteering for this campaign.

Tell me about that because you ended up finagling a spot in the House of Commons and you're sorting essentially these boring papers, but then you're gaining access and you're gaining experience with these sort of blue-blood upper-class folks.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, there was a particular end point here was that I wanted to have Winston Churchill as my referee on when I was coming out of university and trying to find my first job.

Back in those days, very long time ago, paper curriculum vitae sent out by post with a stamp on it, covering national the rest of it.

And a very important part of that was to have two people prepared to give you references or testimonials.

And I was quite active in the Conservative Party in my youth.

And I'd volunteered to work in the 1989 European elections, which it was great fun, actually.

Campaigning, it was just, it was enormously good fun.

And I was working with a fantastic candidate who went on to sit in the House of Lords.

And I've got a great deal of time for him.

But in the process, I thought, well, rather than just doing this for its own sake, what am I trying to achieve?

So I thought the next step needs to be to work in the House of Commons and there's a cadre of research staff in the House of Commons.

So every time during this campaign somebody from the a senior leadership from the Conservative Party, which was then in government, came along to campaign with us, I would make a point of getting to know them, making sure almost obsequiously carrying their bags around with them, trying to build a relationship and at the end of each day say to them, Do you know of anybody who needs a research assistant?

Nine times out of ten, the answer came back no, but on one occasion it came back yes and I ended up working in the House of Commons as a research assistant to an MP no longer sitting.

But that wasn't enough for me.

I wanted to have a really big name.

I sat down with a list of serving MPs, and the first one that jumped off the page at me was Winston Churchill.

I thought, I've got to have Winston Churchill as a reference.

Now, just to be absolutely clear to everybody listening out there who's confused, it's Winston Churchill, the grandson.

that I was working for.

I'm not that old.

I look old.

I'm not that old.

And so I set about cultivating him.

But I made a point of finding out what were his areas of parliamentary interest.

When did he contribute to debates?

What did he say?

What angle is he coming from?

What are his interests in foreign affairs?

And there was a Reuters feed outside his office, so I would sort of linger by the Reuters feed, wait till he came by, and then make a comment about something that I knew that he'd be interested in.

So I was thinking about him.

You know, it sounds manipulative, but in actual fact, I was thinking about his interests.

I was giving him a reason to engage.

All right, maybe I need one of those good luck Pythons, but alas, all I have is an anaconda.

We'll be right back.

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If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, spies every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust.

I'm teaching you how to build yours for free over at sixminutenetworking.com.

Look, you're listening to a show about networking and relationship development, whether you know it or not.

And this course is taught to three-letter agencies.

That's how I developed it.

I'm teaching you most of that stuff in a non-cringy, very down-to-earth way.

And it's free.

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Y'all should know that by now.

The course takes a few minutes a day.

You can binge it.

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And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course, especially the spy folks.

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You can find the course, again, all free at sixminutenetworking.com.

Now, back to Julian Fisher.

If somebody does this to me and sets up a news alert for North Korea and then emails me when something interesting comes up, I'm not thinking, you manipulative SOB.

I'm thinking, oh, this person took the time to set this up so they could hit my attention and it worked.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's what I was doing.

Some people do think it's manipulative.

I clearly don't.

Whether it was or not, the end result was I was able to say to him, Do you need a research assistant?

He said, I don't, but I do need a speechwriter.

So I became a speechwriter for Winston Churchill.

That was a gutsy move for him to just be like, actually, you must have been so fresh-faced.

And he's like, I want you to write the things that I say in public.

The funny postscript to that is there's one speech which he gave where it was so poorly written.

And I admit that now.

I look back on it.

It was gauche.

It was ill-informed.

Politicians, that's what they do, is they say things that are gauche and ill-informed.

I think you were probably right on target, man.

You're just ahead of your time.

Yeah, I read the room.

Yeah.

But the respondent to it, his phrase was, if I recall correctly, I don't know who writes the honorable gentleman's speeches, but I suggest he finds a new assistant.

Winston sent me a copy of it kindly by post.

He was amused about it, as was I.

And he went on, actually, to give me a really lovely reference and helped me to get my first job at an organisation of stockbrokers, which I wouldn't have expected to get into back in those days.

It was very much dominated by fee-paying school.

Upper crust, super educated people who have, I don't know, played polo on weekends or something.

Absolutely.

Everybody called Kaznov the blue-blooded stockbrokers.

How did you fit in?

I didn't.

I was fortunate that I worked with some consummately charming people, and they all embraced me, and they respected the fact that I was a reasonable economist.

So in that context, I wouldn't put myself up as an academic economist, but they respected my professional ability, and over time we got to know one another.

But there was always what I call a glass partition.

So we talk about, we know about the glass ceiling.

Sure.

I could have probably gone all the way up to partnership in that firm if I'd stayed there.

But there would always have been that glass partition between me and the other people.

They had a different way of speaking.

They did different things.

They went to different places.

They knew each other.

They went to each other's country estates.

I was never going to be part of that.

It's one of those things where people say, oh, yeah, Vale, the snow was terrible this year.

And I go, I would not know.

That's right.

Because my parents took me to a lake that you can't put boats on.

And they told me I should go ice fishing.

And I didn't catch anything also.

You know, it's just...

Exactly.

I have

an equivalent story to that, that I took a message from one of my colleagues while they're out at lunch one day.

And it was somebody calling to organize a skiing trip.

And they said, could you just leave a message that I'll meet this person at Val de Zer.

And I'd never heard of Val dear French.

It's a skiing resort.

Okay.

I think we have a bad connection.

Can you spell that?

Oh, of course,

Oh, naturally.

Yeah, I wasn't quite that sharp back in those days.

I didn't dare ask if they would spell it for me.

I spelled it phonetically.

How did that happen?

Okay, so I wrote it.

This is P-D-I-Z-A-E-I.

Exactly.

I then went out and came back a bit later, and there was a group of people around the desk all laughing at the way that I'd spelled Valdez.

I look back on it and I think it's excruciating.

Yeah, oh man.

But that hurts.

It taught me something, which is a little bit of humility, which is important too.

And just sometimes just ask.

If I just said to my boss, who is an absolutely fabulous guy if i just said to him i don't really know what this is he'd have just told me and he wouldn't have judged me but talking of john my boss said in the end to that story really is that i said to him you know i don't really belong here this is a totally different social class and so on yeah why on ask did you employ me and he said well i had to employ you really because i wanted to phone the house of commons and asked to speak to winston churchill one thing i i love about the book is you talk about how to tailor outreach how to use social media like facebook or linkedin and use the you may also know connections and things like that.

I do get a lot of pitches like you don't know me, but 17 paragraph letter, the ask is somewhere in the middle, maybe at the bottom.

Now I have an AI thing that reads it and summarizes it.

It comes with superhuman, which is my email client, but I don't want to have to look at that.

I usually just don't read it if it's too long.

I can't spend 20 minutes reading your email when it's your life story followed by, and so can I come on your show or something like that.

It's not going to work.

You tailor the outreach and you talk about what to do instead.

But one of the best rules of thumb is respecting boundaries and don't stalk.

I don't have this problem yet, thankfully.

But the rule of thumb is, would this person be happy that I know this about them?

That is a really good heuristic because I think there's quite a few people that will try and say something about me in an email that's personal.

And it's very clear that they asked a lot of people.

It's a little invasive and it doesn't make any sense.

When what they could have done is said something like, I know you're you're interested in travel in North Korea and I heard on your show that you went to Paris and you liked it and you think French food is great.

I mean, something along those lines is fine.

There's a really fine line between, hey, man, you did your homework and get off my porch.

Yeah, totally.

Well, don't think anything replaces instinct on that front, actually.

We've just got to instinctively know when you're overstepping that boundary.

It would be like if somebody...

sent you an email, for instance, with the title, we rise by lifting others.

I would say that's right on the margin.

Of course, they know, as you've just explained, it's a catchphrase of yours.

It might catch your eye, but it could also just be seen as a little bit too on the edge.

I would personally, I wouldn't do it.

I would say my instinct would tell me that you wouldn't react particularly well to that.

Somebody went to a coffee shop and the wall said, we rise by lifting others.

It was just a phrase that was on the wall of this coffee shop.

They sent me a picture of it.

They sent me a picture of it and they said, this reminded me of you.

And then they said, I love your show.

And by the way, I thought this guy would be really interesting.

Yes, I'm his publicist, but that's not why I'm

doing it.

And I read the pitch.

I like that because it's actually saying, okay, here's a third-party thing that's going on that I'm connecting to.

So if I just play something back at you by just quoting you in your own words in an email, it's not bad, but it's not great.

But that thing of saying, okay, I saw this and thought of you.

Yeah.

Okay, that's doing two things, isn't it?

That's saying, I thought of you.

That's quite important because we all like people to be thinking about us.

Doesn't matter who we are.

Let's put our hands up.

And it's also saying, I know enough about you and I'm sufficiently interested in you, not only to think of you, but to think of you in connection with something, whether that's a phrase or a way.

Exactly.

If you know that they're a little bit cheeky like me, there was some sign I saw in a bathroom that said something a little bit vulgar.

And I took a photo of it and I sent it to somebody and I said, this reminded me of you.

And they called me because they were laughing so hard.

It had to do with the length of someone's member and standing close enough to the urinal not to make a mess, basically.

And I was like, I don't know why, but this reminded me of you.

And then I want to say we've all been that.

You son of a, you know, it's one of those.

And you can play with that a little bit.

But yeah, would they be happy?

Basically, are they going to be smile when they see this?

Or are they going to close the window blinds because they're a little bit unnerved by the fact that you know this?

I would say to people, use your instinct.

And if your instinct is telling you no, just don't do it.

Don't take the risk.

Nothing is creepier than finding out somebody's done a little bit too much homework on you.

Yeah.

And I didn't care as much until I had kids.

Now I'm like, okay.

Now you're not invading my privacy.

It's my kids and my wife's privacy.

And that's not okay.

No, I know exactly what you mean.

And with people able to find out so much about anyone who has anything of a public profile with through AI.

AI, yeah.

The worst, I think, is when you get something that's clearly been AI generated and they've got AI to look at something.

And so I've had emails, and I'm fairly liberal with my email address, and perhaps I shouldn't be, but I've had emails come to me where you can see it's the same font as was delivered by a particular AI machine.

And they haven't bothered to change the font from the first sentence that says, you know, I read your book and I really loved it.

I had one particular one.

Just I'll very quickly tell this story because I i think it illustrates a hell of a lot i've read your book i thought it was fantastic i'm a book promoter and i think we could do really great work together and here's what i do ai chunk of text yeah copy paste copy paste spacing is different absolutely yeah and then signed off and i wrote back and i said it feels to me like you probably just copied and pasted from ai there but i'm going to give you another shot so would you mind telling me what it is particularly about my book that you like no response they came back and said could you send me a link to it oh gosh so they had lied about reading the book yeah i mean that clearly is the very far end of the spectrum this is a good point this is a good point we're not just whining here people because a bad pitch if it's not successful let's say i get a pitch where somebody goes this guy'd be super interesting and i go actually he's been on the show before and they go oh my gosh i'm so sorry i sent this from my phone i should have searched your website here's another person i think would be interesting i searched your website you haven't had them on yet fine you get another chance yeah should you have searched my site yes but it's not the end of the world however the person who writes with AI, I loved your latest episode with Andrew Callahan, who did this.

AI summary of episode.

Paragraph about me, paragraph about what I want.

So I now have read this whole thing.

And then I go, I've already had this guy in the freaking website.

This email must have taken them 20 minutes to write.

Oh, wait, no, AI did it.

And they sent this 100 times.

So then I just block their entire email.

I'm never going to hear from them again.

So it's actually better to have a slight little mistake that took me a few seconds to read and correct than a long thing that looks like you put effort into it, but was completely fake.

Something about getting bamboozled just really pisses me off and I can't be the only person who feels that way.

No, I get it.

And I want to echo what you said there.

This isn't whining.

The reason I think we're both telling these stories is to help people because

it is tricky.

Let's be honest about this.

It's hard.

Selling yourself is hard.

None of us is comfortable doing it.

We hate writing those emails with some rare exceptions.

We certainly don't want to make cold phone calls to do it.

All the rest of it.

This is hard to do.

So if you're going to do it, don't waste your time by doing it in a ham-fisted way is what I would say.

In the chapter in the book where i talk about this i call the perfect pitch because ultimately a spy is pitching somebody as well they're effectively just saying i need something from you and i'm going to give you a reason why you might want to give that to me because that's all it's about you've got the targeting you've got the use of cover you've got cultivation you've got use of elicitation assessment of the motivations and then and only then do you think about a pitch obviously it's different when we're talking about somebody wanting to help me with publicize my book or somebody coming on your podcast, but the same principles apply.

Don't fall at the first hurdle by sending something that you haven't properly researched or haven't properly thought through.

If in doubt, just put yourself in that other person's shoes for a minute.

Yeah.

If you got that email, how would you feel?

Because that will tell you an awful lot.

Yeah, I think the truth is people think they're getting away with it with the AI thing and they're not.

They're really not.

Any sort of template that you think looks good from AI, realize that that AI is telling every person pitching my show to use that exact same template.

And it's really obvious.

And it's a way to set you into my immediate do not read box because i'm getting 30 of those per day and people are going i don't care i'm not booking up for a podcast if you're trying to find a job you're doing probably doing the same thing you're sending an email to somebody in an industry and they're going i had another one of these stupid ai things from a guy who graduated from a college program and thinks you're going to write this to me they're seeing so much of this i want to switch gears you have a really interesting anecdote about being uh in the elevator in zimbabwe it's not quite related to what we're discussing but i can see

it sort of comes back to targeting, really, and a bit of sinking on your feet.

But the biggest lesson about this is what you can pull out of the bag when you're panicking, really.

So the brief background there.

I had many years of engagement and dealings with Zimbabwe, which is a beautiful country full of amazing people.

It's a great tragedy that its leadership has let it down so badly over the past decades.

And I've travelled back to and from there for many, many years.

One particular time I went there in 2008 was after a really seriously unpleasant election period during which a lot of people had lost their lives, the opposition candidate Morgan Changreuro pulled out because he felt that the threat to his supporters was too great.

And then Mugarby had gone on to win by 99% or something.

Oh, yeah.

Very believable.

We know the playball.

It was a febrile atmosphere.

And one thing that the then President Mugarby had done was whip up very anti-British sentiment.

He blamed Britain for everything as the former colonialists.

We were responsible for his disastrous economic policies.

We were responsible for hyperinflation.

We were responsible for the state of the road, you name it.

And I travelled there soon after the election to go and see a friend of mine who happened to be a very senior figure in Mugabe's party, had been to a university near where I was born.

And we'd really struck it off.

And I'd gone in to see him, actually, just relationship maintenance.

I wasn't after anything.

He was on the top floor of the ZANU-PF building, which is based, and I'm not joking, it's based on a street called Rotten Row, the ZANU-PF headquarters.

I don't know whether they were aware of the irony of that when they selected that address.

But I was coming out of the meeting, which had gone very well.

We got on very well, had a cup of coffee and ate some cake, as I recall.

I got into a lift, and I'm slightly claustrophobic.

Talk about being the sorts of things that you wouldn't expect somebody with this sort of background to have.

You know, a bit of claustrophobia is not necessarily what you might expect from somebody who seeks work in the intelligence field.

But I'd forced myself to get into the lift because the lights were out in the stairwell and it would probably have been quite dangerous to go down it.

And then came down one floor, doors opened again, and this group of people got in.

The first two were sort of wearing suits, looking fairly respectable, and then a group after them of God knows how many, 15 maybe, people dressed in sort of ragged clothes but carrying pangas, which are those long curved blades.

Like a machete kind of stuff.

Like a machete, basically.

In an office building.

In an office building.

I might get out of the elevator at that point.

Well, I was sort of penned at the back.

I thought I'd just hold my breath, literally because they all stank of local beer which they'd obviously stoked up and they were on their way to campaign should we put it in diverticomas and often that meant going to an opposition rally and beating a few people up or worse hence the pangas so it was uncomfortable but i thought i should probably have got out yeah

i'm here yeah i'm committed to the bit all right start going down again and then suddenly big jolt and the left stops between two floors, which is bad enough.

And I'm beginning to think, okay, I'm claustrophobic.

I'm surrounded by people with pangas.

I'm British.

They hate the Brits.

This isn't stacking up terribly well.

And then the lights went out.

So I had a mobile phone, fairly rudimentary one, but it did have a torch.

So I reached into my pocket because I was just, by this point, I just needed some light.

I needed to see what was going on.

And illuminated the situation with the torch, which of course just drew attention to me.

So suddenly I've got all these people with their pangas stinking of local brew saying, you know, who are you?

You're a Brit, you're a spy, what are you doing here?

You know, we don't don't welcome you here.

What are you, you're a colonialist, all of this stuff.

And it was threatening to get quite nasty.

But I noticed that of the two gentlemen who got in first, leading this group, first of all, they were wearing suits.

So that told me something.

They're probably senior.

And number two, I noticed on the lapel of one of them, he was wearing a little enamel badge, and it just said United.

Now, I don't know how much your audience will know about football, some people in the UK.

Our Premier League soccer is or or was dominated by a team called Manchester United.

Back then, it had a roll call of some incredible players, as I understand it.

Now, I know nothing about

but I did know that if I saw somebody wearing an enamel badge that said United, chances were it meant Manchester United.

And so I just gambled.

I just turned around to him and I said, how was the match the other day?

And I had no idea if there'd been a match.

And I've certainly no idea who would have won it.

I literally don't think I've ever seen a soccer match from beginning to end in my life.

but it was worth a shot.

Excuse the panel again.

And it worked.

And he sort of looked at me for a bit, sort of quite quizzically, and he said, yeah, it was good, actually.

Ronaldo was playing really well.

And then somebody else said, no, it's not Ronaldo.

It's this other player.

And within a few seconds, the whole attention had shifted from me to football, soccer, British soccer.

And there was a healthy debate going on about who was the best player in Manchester United at that time.

And I had been completely forgotten.

By the time I left that lift, we were rescued, taken to the ground floor, I was exchanging my telephone number with the guy with the United batch, you know, and that was another way in to quite a senior person within the party as it happened.

That's great.

Hey, I'll give you a call like someone about to get stabbed with a panga.

If you can just

look, just look for the evidence of something else.

There's a technique called blue catting as well.

It's slightly related.

It's not quite.

It's the idea that people say, I bet I can make you think of a blue cat.

And immediately you're thinking of a blue cat.

And you can't stop thinking of a blue cat as long as I'm saying blue cat to you.

It's a distraction technique.

So all I was effectively doing was just saying, okay, the focus is on me.

I need the focus to be somewhere else.

Oh, interesting.

So I was doing a version of blue catting by saying, I'm going to invite you all now to expend your mental energies talking about something which I knew, to be fair, I knew enough about Africa to know that soccer is incredibly popular.

And Manchester United was by far and away the most successful and popular team on that continent.

I feel like I've done this by accident.

I haven't had a police experience when I was in former Yugoslavia and they were very upset with me.

And I've told the story on the show before, so I'll skip the details.

But basically, they were figuring out when and how they were going to beat me up, basically.

And I started talking about food and different kinds of drinks.

And it shifted from them figuring out which, how many holes to put in me, I'm sure, to this place does not have the best burgers.

You guys don't know what you're talking about.

They want burgers, but this place and the drinks over here are good, but the drinks that I make in my bathtub or whatever are even better.

And this stuff is too commercial.

And I remember my friend was getting his ass kicked in the next room.

And I thought, man, he should have talked about Pleskowicza because it might be going differently.

So that's the blue-catting thing, right?

I mean, it's just basically

the energy away from the, redirected the conversation.

In a conflict situation, which is what this is, your mind is geared to conflict.

If you insert something into the mind that jostles with the mental space, That helps.

It's not going to work every single time, but it's always worth a shot.

Far be it from me to promote smoking on your show, but one thing I did used to do when I was traveling frequently in Africa was carry a packet of cigarettes.

Because even if I wasn't smoking myself, if you do get into a conflict situation, the first thing you do is offer somebody something.

It does a couple of things.

First of all, it keeps their hands busy.

Keeps their hands busy.

They get less stabby when they're smoking.

And creates a sense of obligation.

That human sense of reciprocity, you've given me something, so I owe you something, is very strong.

So if the thing that you owe me is to not stab me,

that'll be a good start.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll take that trade.

No kidding.

In the book, you go over different types of cover, which I thought was really interesting.

There's differences between saying what you were really doing in Africa, which resulted in people saying that you were a spy and then just leaving it at the sort of boring, I'm a consultant.

And then everybody's praying you don't say anything else about your job at that point.

But I thought the note that overlapped with the undercover cops and undercover law enforcement that I have on the show is keep it close, keep your cover story close to the truth, ensure plausibility.

So if you're shy, you don't say that you're a performer and make it about something that you know about.

This guy I ran into on an airplane a while ago, he was an older guy.

He told me about how he got recruited by the CIA, probably, I guess it must have been in the 80s.

And he was like, I don't get it.

I work for Ford in Indonesia.

He was like the head of Ford in Indonesia.

And they were like,

that's what we need because no one's going to go, you're CIA, because you are so well known in the business community in Indonesia.

And you're going and having dinner at the president's house because you're the head of Ford in Indonesia, whatever it was.

And so that was actually perfect.

He told me this on the airplane and he goes, I didn't know anything about being a spy.

And they said, that's good.

We don't want you to act like a spy.

We want you to act like the head of Ford in Indonesia and just tell us information that you get from the people that you go to parties with, basically.

The best cover sometimes is being yourself.

Yeah.

The authenticity bit is what draws me back to.

If you are a spy and you're in a difficult place, you don't want to be advertised in the fact that you are.

So just present yourself as bland, anodyne, boring.

The more boring, the better.

Just don't draw attention to yourself.

That's defensive cover.

Much more interesting, I think, for your well, I mean, some people will be very interested in that, but others will be more interested in what I call offensive cover, which isn't quasi-militaristic, so forgive the term, but I can't really think of a better one.

What I mean by offensive cover is the way in which you present yourself to make yourself interesting to another person.

How do you come across to draw another person to you?

And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to pretend to be something you're not, or pretend to know something that you don't.

And the more that you understand the thing you're presenting as, the better, obviously, because authenticity shines through every single time.

So it seems like a good offensive cover would be, let's say that you're a Russian hockey player living in the United States.

You spent most of your adult life here in the NHL playing for the Detroit Red Wings.

They send you back to Russia.

You're hanging out with Vladimir Putin.

That's good offensive cover.

You're celebrity.

You're well known.

You're not lying about being a hockey player.

But if you genuinely are.

You're genuinely a professional hockey player.

Yeah.

But then, like, hey, when you go to Putin's palace, we'd love to know about the security measures that they've got over there.

I think one really powerful potential cover is a recruitment consultant.

Like for jobs, essentially?

Yeah, because

a professional recruiter, because that gives you an opportunity to go.

First of all, you don't have to be expert in anything, if you think about it.

That's true.

All right.

I got that going for me.

Second, you've got a good excuse to talk to lots of people.

Because, of course, the first thing you come up against whenever you're trying to build a relationship, which is ultimately aimed at getting somebody to give you something that they don't necessarily want to share with you, is why are you asking me this question?

Oh, I use this all the time.

I ask people these deep personal questions, and I go, Hey, no obligation to respond, but I'm a journalist covering this for a podcast.

And they go, Fine, off the record, they'll tell me

all kinds of personal things.

Absolutely.

Now, journalism is a difficult one for the agencies to use because it's checkable, obviously.

Unless you're a BS journalist like me, right?

You can check it all you want.

I actually do have a podcast.

Well, quite a bit.

But again, there we go back.

That comes back around to if you can have somebody working with you who's genuinely doing the thing that they do, which gives them the opportunity to go and ask the questions.

Brilliant.

Actually, being around here put me in mind of something.

A few years back, we were filming Spies and we filmed down in Granary Square, which is just by St Pancras and King's Cross.

I was with the production crew and they were scouting around for locations.

And going in and telling somebody at a reception, hey, I'm a production assistant scouting for a location, opens a lot of doors.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Just putting it out there for anybody who might be interested.

Oh my gosh, it's one of those things where people are like, oh, wow, seriously, I might be on TV.

So come on in.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Julian Fisher.

I probably shouldn't have been this, but whatever.

There's a lot of nice roof decks in New York.

And I went back there after living in Hollywood for a while and I met this guy who was a location scout and he told me all about how his job worked.

And I thought it was really fascinating.

And then when I went back to New York, I remember thinking, I always wanted to check out all these roof decks.

So I started to just go into where the doorman is and go, hey, I'm location scouting something for Paramount.

Can I check out the roof deck?

You can obviously escort me.

I just want to go up there, take maybe a couple of photos.

And they were like, let me call the manager.

And the building manager was like, somebody from Hollywood wants to see the private roof deck?

Absolutely.

So I just would go up there.

I'd bring girls up there and I'd be like, watch this.

You know, we're going to go up to the roof deck.

There you go.

You see, you're instinctively thinking like a spy.

It was awesome.

There are some very nice private roof decks

in Manhattan.

And you're just thinking, man, this is wasted on the person who actually has access to this.

Or some hedge fund manager who never uses it.

Yeah, hedge fund manager who never uses it.

Or it's a common area for a company, but nobody works in the office in that location, or they never go up there because they just smoke up there.

And then, or they ban smoking up there, so everybody just goes downstairs now.

And it's like, man, such a thing.

This is really, really nice.

Yeah, it's really incredible.

It has a full view, panoramic view, Statue of Liberty.

And you're just thinking, like, there's nobody up here.

It's incredible as well.

Or they only go up there for lunch.

They never go up there any other time.

So you go up there in the afternoon or in the evening.

It's just amazing.

Situational awareness.

I mean, situational awareness is great for all of us because it's equivalent to mindfulness, isn't it?

Just take a little bit of time to appreciate what you've got, guys.

Just, you know, get out there.

And if you've got access to one of those roof decks, go and enjoy it and just drop into yourself for five minutes and enjoy the fact that you are where you are.

But I have to say, on that note about location scouts, that is a job.

In another life, that's the one I want to do.

I think it must be so

interesting.

You probably go to some of the same places that you went to as a security consultant.

I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Yeah.

Tell me about your trip to Congo.

That was a location scouting experience going on.

Yes.

So this one, there we do get into consulting as a very useful cover.

Because

on that occasion, I was working for a mining company that had interest in the east of the Congo.

And at that time,

there had been a war with Zimbabwe, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and had been incredibly bloody.

It was so deadly that it was known as Africa's Third World War.

And it affected primarily the east of the country, where there's a lot of minerals.

And I had a client who wanted to understand, as the war had come to apparently a close, because a peace deal had been signed, they wanted to know, is it possible to go back in?

Can we commence our operations there?

And they asked me to go in and find out for them, which was the sort of thing which I used to really enjoy doing.

Now I think about it, I'm like, what on earth was I thinking on?

But, you know, back then I was younger and I jumped on a plane and ended up, of all places, in Kinshasa.

Now, the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the biggest countries, I think, if not geographically, the biggest country in Africa.

And it basically occupies that central chunk.

And it width is about two-thirds of the width of the entire continent.

I was meant to be looking at what was going on in the east on the border with Rwanda and Uganda, but I've flown to Kinshasa, which is all the way on the other side of the continent on the west coast.

And the reason I'd done that is because I knew a chap there who was a former military leader who was by that point being appointed to the Transitional National Assembly, which was their sort of transitional parliament as they're implementing the ceasefire deal.

And Patrice had agreed to meet me in Kinshasa, and he would help me.

to make contacts and make an assessment of the situation on the ground, ground truth, essentially.

So I'd flown into Kinshasa and the night before, I had gone through Johannesburg, and I'd stayed in a place in Santon.

Santon is a really upmarket part of Johannesburg, five-star hotels, and all the rest of it.

And I got chatting to a chap.

Let's call him Paul.

His job was head of African government engagement for a really well-known consulting firm.

The following day, having arrived in Kinshasa, I went to go and find my friend Patrice at the Palais de Perpes, which was where the Transitional National Assembly was meeting.

I turned turned up there, only to find at the appointed time, I discovered the place was absolutely deserted.

Literally nobody there at all.

And weirdly, I was able to get into the building.

The doors were open.

I walked in, wandered around these deserted corridors, knocked on a few doors, couldn't find anybody, literally nobody there at all.

And I thought, what's come wrong here?

This is really very strange.

So I got on my phone.

And I was trying to call Patrice.

It was a really bad reception.

Mobile telephony back in those days wasn't that good anyway.

And I was in the middle of I had my head down as I was pushing my way out of the door and I suddenly felt this slap to my hand and I heard the phone hit the ground and go skidding across the tarmac.

I looked up and I was looking right into the barrel of an AK-47

and I was surrounded by soldiers who were acting as police, security guards for the Palais de Pub, who obviously hadn't done a very good job because

they were round the back.

Gambling and be around the side of the building.

Exactly, sort of sinking the odd beer or whatever.

But they were quite angry, obviously.

And they wanted to know what I was doing there.

And I said, I would phone Patrice and get you to talk to him, but my phone's broken.

And they weren't having any of it.

Their position was that I was in the wrong place, the wrong time.

The word spy came up, because it always does.

You know, they were demanding that I explain what I'm doing here.

I work for an international consulting company.

And we've been taken on by your president because he wants to understand better the terms and conditions and salaries for the army because he's looking at how he can improve them as the ceasefire deal is implemented.

So I was immediately just reaching for something I knew that they would be interested in.

Of course, you're going to talk to the president about giving you guys a raise.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

But of course, there was a certain amount of suspicion.

Can you prove who you say you are?

How do we know you're telling the truth?

So I said, well, if I can just lower my hands, and I reached into my top pocket and I pulled out a business card and I had to do it.

For the guy you met at the bar the last night before.

Exactly.

Oh, my goodness.

My name is.

Right.

And that was enough.

I like to say that's a clever cover story.

I lied.

I just made up a lie right there and then because it was the easiest way.

I couldn't say, well, look, I'm here to work out what's going on in your war zone in the east of the country, you know, because that's probably going to fuel your suspicion that

exactly.

But it turned out that unit had previously been in the east of the country, and we got chatting.

And I had my packet of cigarettes and I doled those out and we sat down and we got chatting and we spoke for about two hours, partly about terms and conditions and salaries, but also partly about conditions in the East.

So they went a long way towards telling me everything that I needed to know without me actually ever having to set foot in that war zone.

But even though you avoided the war zone, you still almost got shot.

So there's a special knack there.

That's right.

Do you have talent?

Building rapport is obviously this, well, you got lucky a few times, but it's a skill that you have.

The story of Maria at the bar in Rapongi illustrates it pretty well also.

I'd love to get that one out of you.

So this was,

well, I was in a professional context, but I wasn't trying to conduct elicitation for intelligence reasons.

I was working at that time as a Japanese bank, stockbrokers, in fact, and I'd gone to Tokyo where I was basically schmoozing some clients, and the clients decided to take me to Roppongi.

Now, Roppongi is effectively the red light district of Tokyo.

Isn't the US Embassy there?

I don't think it's very far away, actually.

That's right.

I wonder why.

Yeah, well

which one came first?

Yeah, yeah, which one was there first?

I don't know.

So So there are lots of people sneaking about for all sorts of different reasons.

Actually, to be fair, there was no sneaking about going to this topless bar.

It doesn't matter.

The whole idea is

just, you know,

absolutely bald-faced, let's go and sit in a bar and watch women take their clothes off, which is basically what it's all about while drinking exorbitantly priced cocktails.

Now, in the course of this, it became clear that if somebody was prepared to pay for it, you could also go and have a private dance in the back.

And I was quite young in my 20s, and I've never liked this sort of thing anyway, but frankly, I was a bit terrified.

I was like, you know, this is like

skeezy.

Yeah, I was not happy.

But I was with clients and they got a wadge of

yeah and out and they're like, okay, we're going to pay for you to go and have a private dance.

And this woman, Maria, in Adversary Commons, was allocated to me.

And we went, it was a corridor and down each side, it just had little cubicles which you had a damasque curtain across and there was a seat in there and a mat in front.

And it was just like, this whole thing is just and an ashtray right I mean the whole set and no hand sanitizer cannot believe it nothing exactly pre-COVID obviously yeah really just quite horrible and so I sat down and Maria sort of pushed me into this little stool and then she started taking her clothes off and I like please don't do that I really don't want you to do that and initially she was really upset she was like don't you find me attractive you know this and I'm like no it's really not that I thought I've got to come up with a reason so I said well you know I'm getting married and I don't think it's fair that was enough so I said but she said okay but we've got 10 minutes.

What do we do?

I said, well, just sit and talk to me.

So she sat down on this sort of tiny little stool together and we shared a cigarette.

So we got chatting and very quickly it became clear that she didn't want to talk about her background at all.

She was extremely jumpy about it until I told her about some personal matters of my own background, some of which we've touched on today.

And my sharing of vulnerability with her gave her the confidence to open up to me and over the course of several other private dances that night, she told me her story, and it was truly horrific.

Ultimately, her home country, the country where she had nationality, was the Netherlands, but she'd been trafficked.

There's no two ways about it.

She was tricked into coming into Tokyo, offered job modeling jobs and all the rest of it.

Sure.

As I say in the book, cover can be used for criminal ends as well.

She'd ended up working in the Red Light District in Amsterdam.

as a result of experimentation with drugs.

And somebody came along and said, look, I'm a talent scout looking for models, and we're going to fly you to Tokyo.

And we're going to do a full shoot.

And

you're going to be famous.

And of course, actually, all they would intend to do was to traffic her.

And she became essentially a sex slave.

I began to understand why she didn't want to tell me the story initially.

And my concern was, I've got to do something to help.

You put yourself in my shoes for the moment.

By sort of session number three or four, I was thinking, I have a moral duty to try to help this person.

But of course, she had bodyguards in a vertical.

Well, they're watching her.

They're always watching her.

Do her say anything, yeah.

But right at the end, as we were coming out, it was five o'clock in the morning or something ridiculous like that, she was standing in the vestibule with this man who I took to be her minder, nasty piece of work.

So I reached into my pocket and pulled out every denomination of currency that I had.

And, you know, there's some dollars, there's some sterling, there's some yen.

And I went over to her and I pressed it into her hand as a tip.

And as I did so, I leaned over and I said, will you just tell me your real name?

And she did.

She whispered her real name back to me because in that split second, it's almost like she didn't have a choice i could see she was startled by the idea and obviously concerned that she was going to be overseen but her bodyguard was or mind i was too busy sort of pretending not to notice the exchange of cash which she was probably going to extort from her shortly afterwards anyway and with that i was able to go to her embassy and say look you know i've got the name of somebody who i understand has been trafficked from your country this is where she works this is what her name is and i think you've really got to try to do something about it because she's had her passport taken off off her.

She's got no way of proving it.

And the guy said to me, wow.

He said, you know, not many people are able to get that sort of information out of somebody like that.

Right.

He said, well, are you a social worker?

It's the most productive lat dance I've ever heard of.

Yeah.

God, you got a lat dance.

And then he said, as I turned to go, he just said, maybe you should be a spy.

Yeah.

Foreshadowing.

Wow.

That story hits close to home for reasons that I wouldn't necessarily want to share on the show, but it reminds me of one of my other favorite episodes, folks, Daniel Levin.

I I don't have the episode number handy, Daniel Levin, L-E-V-I-N.

It's also about trafficking.

He wrote a book about it.

It's very interesting.

Yes, I haven't read it, but I will make a point of that now, actually.

Oh, yeah, you'll love that.

I mean,

it's, I think it's not discussed enough.

Let's put it like that.

Trafficking, yeah, I do.

It's so prevalent, and it affects so many countries where we just turn a blind eye.

There are certain things which are, so we say, a little bit politically contentious, which are a cover for nothing much more than sex trafficking and human slavery.

And I think it really, we've got to be more honest with ourselves about this.

What happened to Maria?

I don't know.

You don't know.

That's a short answer.

There was no way they were going to tell me the upshot of that.

I'd like to think that they were able to make contact with her one way or another.

I was in two minds about whether it was worth talking to them because sometimes you put somebody's life in danger by trying to help them.

But I thought initially about just going to the police and I thought that's if you're going to put somebody's life in danger, that's probably the way to do it.

I thought if I would talk to the diplomatic service, our country's diplomatic service, they would have a better set of protocols for how to handle handle it.

Yeah, their high-level police liaison will go to a high-level police officer, not one that's going to run to the Yakuza boss who runs that club and matter out.

So, I mean, I think it's right that I don't know what happened to her, and I wouldn't have asked them to tell me because she deserves her privacy still, obviously.

Indeed, yeah.

Tell me about this Hungarian border guard.

I love the way you

handled this one.

Yeah.

Amon, yes.

Again, actually, I was really young.

We're old enough now.

We don't have to talk our way through borders anymore, man.

That's true.

That's true.

Part of the reason you

missed missed these days.

You know, it was fun.

I think every young person needs to go through an experience of a hairy border moment or two.

Yeah, I agree.

It's a rite of passage.

It is a rite of passage.

A little harder these days with the fall of communism.

You know, you wouldn't want to do that in North Korea first.

Exactly.

And fairly within the European Union,

borders are all open anyway.

And that would include and up to Hungary, which is where I was traveling to and from shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I was part of an initiative from my University of Oxford to build relationships with young people who were experiencing capitalism or free markets for the first time.

And that included Hungary.

And I went to Budapest, but I couldn't have...

No, this was the first time I ever travelled abroad.

Having not had a particularly wealthy upbringing, to put it politely, we didn't have overseas holidays.

And so the first time I ever managed to go abroad was to go to Hungary on this sort of exchange, if you like.

And I had to travel by train because it was too expensive to go by plane.

This was pre-EasyJet days.

And also, Budapest was not exactly a destination high on the stag do list back then.

It was the Bachelor Party list back then.

It should have been, though.

It should have been.

It's got a lot going for it.

Budapest in the 90s was something else, man.

The whole Eastern Bloc in the 90s.

It exploded, didn't it?

But I was going there almost immediately after the war fell, and things were still very fragile.

They were still very fractious and febrile.

To cut a long story short, because it was the first time I'd ever been abroad, I didn't realise it had Sonia passport, so I hadn't signed my passport.

And on the way in, when we travelled across the border on the way in, I'd been slightly startled by the border guard coming in to check my passport and sort of confronted, opened the door to the compartment where I was sleeping, stark naked.

And he was so

taken aback by

he neglected to stamp me in.

He didn't want to spend any more time with you than it absolutely necessary.

Exactly.

Now, all of this meant that when I was coming back out, and I had very little money with me by the end of this, so a few foreigns really, and, you know, sort of £20 in sterling, something like that.

When I was coming back out and they came to check our passports, there was this young man who could speak pretty good English, Amon, basically talked to my passport and says, okay, this is a regular.

There's no signature and there's no entry stamp.

There's a brand new passport, nothing in it.

So he put it in his pocket and he said, right, we're going to have to get off the train and deal with this.

Heart sinks, obviously.

This was before the days of knowing really how to deal with demands for bribes.

I didn't really know what I I was expecting, but eventually I got sat down in one of those classic sort of Eastern European rooms, bare walls and sort of bulbs swinging over you, and there's bare bulbs, stank of full ashtray, all that stuff.

It was like the full-on cliché of an interrogation room, which I suspect is just where they just hung out when they didn't have anything to do between the three or four.

It was the break room before you got here.

It was the break room before you got there now.

Suddenly, I'm thinking, I'm in the middle of this huge interrogation.

Essentially, he just wanted way more money than I had.

I never can tell if this is a false memory, but I remember him using the word infraction, which I just think was amazing.

In English.

In English, yeah.

I mean this guy was quite well educated.

That's the point.

This is why I was able to get out of the situation.

But I literally didn't have the money that he was asking for.

So he said, you know, whatever it was, $50 for infraction number one, $50 for infraction number two.

And I'm like, well, I've got like $17

equivalent.

And I put it on the table in front of him.

And he's like, that's not good enough.

And he said, I'm going to have to report this to my superior.

And I thought, I was like, okay, the train's going to get more expensive, too.

Absolutely.

And then they might actually take me to court.

And I might actually have to defend my infractions, minor as they were.

But whatever else happened, I was going to miss the train.

So I just instinctively grabbed for the thing that connected us, which was the shared language.

He was able to speak English.

And I said, look, I want you to help me here.

I'm stuck.

I'm in a horrible position.

I'm a young man like you.

I've got very little money.

You can have it if you want.

But just let me get back on that train.

Because if I'm stuck here, then I don't have anywhere to go.

I haven't got a credit card.

I've got no way of getting money.

I don't know anybody here.

I'm throwing myself on your mercy.

And, you know, and he's like, I can't help you.

I'm not senior enough, basically.

And I said, well, I bet that's where you're wrong.

I bet you are.

You know, look at you.

You speak pretty much fluent English.

You're well educated.

You should be at Oxford University with me, not on a border post like this.

Of course, you've got the...

influence to do something about this.

Everything changed.

And he got up and said, okay, let me see what I can go and sort out with my superior.

And he stepped outside for a bit, probably for as long as it took him to get my passport out of his pocket and then came back and he's like, Yeah, it's all right.

I've sorted this out for you.

You're right.

I was able to say the right things.

I've got this done.

And he pushed it over and pushed the money back to me.

And that was a really important lesson to me there: that this was somebody who was looking for recognition.

He was probably overeducated for his position.

He'd probably been promised the earth with the end of the Cold War.

And he was still stuck in some godforsaken border office, middle of nowhere, getting drunk to get through it and shaking down poor, poor, unsuspecting backpackers, whatever, librarians.

And

on this occasion, he met somebody who just almost out of desperation just appealed to his sense of self-importance because I was like, I'm sure you can help me.

I'm sure you've got more influence than you think you've got.

And at that point, it was almost like the challenge was, okay, I have to show that that's right, that this person's confidence in me is justified.

I love this.

There's so much in the book about validation, earning mind share, getting in the right mindset for a meeting, pro-social behavior, encouraging pro-social behavior.

But I think a good little couple of tricks I want to end with, you recommend walking to important meetings.

I love this.

This is such a good idea.

And I find that when I can't do this, I really come in with much more anxiety than if I'm able to walk, even just a block.

Yes.

I walked this afternoon.

That was why you're late.

No, well, that in this place.

That's really hard to find.

That's because I got the wrong place.

Yeah.

That's how good a spy I am.

Yes.

I was joking about that when we were waiting for you.

I was like, and this guy works for your intelligence service.

There's two doors come on man

but no i had walked here i got off the train at some pancras and yeah it's a 20 minute walk and the sun's sort of shining as much as it shines in the brush of summer yeah but more important than that it just gives you that moment to the way i put it is you know when a spies go into a meeting they're conducting anti-surveillance they're getting rid of the physical followers they all want to make sure that they're not being followed

It's essentially making sure that they don't carry with them surveillance so that that team can then identify the person they're meeting.

maybe stretches the analogy a little too far, but I talk about mental anti-surveillance, you know, because we bring with us all of the stresses of the day, all the things that we're worried about, all the baggage, especially with phones in our hands, you know, so I could have come to this discussion with you two ways, couldn't I, really?

I could have had the concierge come and pick me up, in which case I would probably have been reading emails, which would have been zinging in my mind as I sat down with you.

Or I could put my phone away.

Walk, which we know anyway, I mean, I'm no scientist, but I understand from psychologists, does stimulate our creativity.

I always find as I write, when I'm writing fiction or even if I get stuck, go for a walk.

And the answer sort of presents itself.

So we all know from experience that walking clears the mind, stimulates creativity.

To me, it's like you're doing a form of mental anti-surveillance.

You're getting rid of those mental emotional demons.

that might otherwise mar the first 10 minutes of an interaction.

And sometimes that first 10 minutes is really important.

I love the idea of walking to a meeting.

I do this before shows too.

I'll even go for a walk.

If I have a show in my own house, I'll go for a walk around the block before I jump into my show, or I'll go out in my gym and do something really quick.

I have to have some sort of reset, mental reset.

Sometimes it's a shower and sometimes it's a walk.

It depends on the circumstances, but I love that.

I never thought about it, I used to think of it as just a ritual, but you're right.

It does get rid of a lot of the baggage.

I don't have the emails in my head.

I'm not just getting off of a call or something like that, right?

I've got music in my ears, maybe something like that at the moment.

And your circulation's up.

You're feeding your brain, literally.

But I would add, while on that walk, just also practice a bit of mindfulness.

You know, be aware of where you are.

You're going to take notice of where you are.

Just enjoy the fact that you're walking past a particular bar or a particular park.

I try to notice something, even if I'm walking a familiar route, I just try to notice one new thing on that walk.

By the way, before we hit cut here, do spies still use dead drops in meetings now that there are encrypted messaging apps and stuff like that?

Right.

This is one of my favorite subjects.

Is it?

I've always wondered this because it's like, why do I need to meet you and then risk getting executed when i can send you a message on the internet so i i talk about human intelligence and the age of artificial intelligence the challenges of artificial intelligence are first of all cover as i mentioned when talking to you about that anecdote in congo they could have checked me out in no time now so cover becomes much more complicated also technically as good as we are our enemies must be expected to be equally good, if not better.

So actually, while it feels like you can encrypt something and it's going to be 100% safe, you can never take that for granted.

And so in many ways, you need to go back to first principles, what they call Moscow rules.

Because my biggest secrets, personally or professionally, I just don't commit to the digital world.

I literally write them down and keep it somewhere where only I know.

So it's in my head or it's on a piece of paper.

And states do that as well.

So that's why human intelligence recruitment has become much more important, because however good your intercept of state communication is, we don't really know what Putin's planning to do, for instance.

We don't know what Chinese state plans to do, for example, with regard to Taiwan.

Because the really important things, they're just not going to broadcast because they know that intercept is a vulnerability.

So actually those human intelligence capabilities, the recruitment of humans who can get to the information you want, becomes much more important.

And in fact, those very stone age versions of remote communication, dead letter drops, brush contacts, may well be making a renaissance.

Yeah, I never would have thought of that.

I suppose that makes complete sense.

You think, oh, like, what's encrypted on my phone?

But somebody has come up with a way to read the screen on a phone through a wall and we just don't know about it.

Or, you know, there's a Mossad guy listening to this nodding right now and going, of course, we put Pegasus on the phone.

I want you to send something through your encrypted app because we're reading what's being displayed on the screen using this vulnerability or whatever.

Or you have a meeting in a park and

you've got lit readers at work.

There's so many different ways that we don't think about it.

It feels like you can engage in secure ways, but as you think it through, you start to realize just how incredibly difficult that is.

And some of those age-old techniques are valuable for precisely that reason because they were developed to be foolproof.

And in many ways, they still are foolproof.

Yeah.

So the best cover is a newspaper with eye holes cut into it and you're talking behind it, right?

So nobody can see it.

Or go back to what we said earlier.

The best cover is somebody who's doing the job that they actually do.

So you just go to a meeting with everybody watching to the office of Ford in Indonesia and you're an auto supplier and you're talking with somebody else and whatever it is.

Yeah, that we're calling hidden in plain sight.

Hidden in plain sight, exactly.

You know, in the digital age, a lot of people think that they can replace in-person contact and relationships with digital ones.

And I really don't believe that to be the case.

I think one of the biggest challenges that intelligence agencies are going to have is a whole generation.

that comes up thinking that you can befriend someone online.

And it's the same thing as having real rapport in person.

and that's going to be a big challenge for trust building and things like that i think in the future it's not just the intelligence agencies i think it's a challenge for every employer everywhere that young people today don't understand the value of building personal relationships or i say that but on one or two occasions i've been very favourably impressed when i've spoken at universities or schools recently there seems to be a bit of a move a bit of a backlash and i would say now jordan that if i go and talk to a group of middle-aged executives they're more likely to be the ones playing on their phones and checking their emails than if I'm talking to a group of 16 and 17 year olds.

Because they know that it's dangerous.

Us middle-aged guys are the ones we think we've got it under control.

It seems like, wait, I think there's some hope.

I'm not going to write them off.

I don't think there's any generational write-off going on.

That's phenomenal.

That's great news.

Even if those skills may be becoming more rare, I have no data for that.

I would love to see a backlash against the technological stuff that my generation fell into.

I think it's there.

Yeah.

I really do.

Excellent.

Julian Fisher, thank you so much for coming into well, not my studio, but studios here in London to do this.

it's been an absolute pleasure i've really enjoyed talking to you jordan thanks ever so much for inviting me along

you're about to hear a preview of the jordan harbinger show with an undercover atf agent that infiltrated the infamous pagans biker gang everyone was saying hey motorcycle enthusiasts bikers are all bad so they did this whole study and basically got a study came back and said hey listen 99 of them aren't you know one percent of these bikers might be problematic or gang members or what have you but the rest aren't well then the bikers the real bikers the outlaw bikers we're like, hey, this is great.

We are the 1%.

We're proud of being the 1%.

I mean, you know, people think these are just a bunch of morons running around partying, and they're not.

They're very sophisticated in how they move their money.

They're very sophisticated in their structure.

And they're also very sophisticated in what they do.

People are always like, oh, whatever made you decide to do a two-year undercover deal.

And listen, I didn't sign up for a two-year undercover deal.

That's just what it turned into.

Very few of these run for two years.

You're always kind of just seeing how it's going to play out.

And that's where, you know, some of this dumb luck comes into it.

They assigned me to this hit squad inside the gang.

Most of the gang members don't even know that this group exists.

And it's selected by mother club members of what they consider to be their heavy hitters, you know, the ones that can do the real damn, dirty work.

And so Hellboy, he had approached me.

He's like, hey, they want you to be a part of this.

We were going to be targeting Hell's Angels and we were going to be killing them.

You have to be very quick.

in thinking.

The reason why to go undercover is from the outside, you can deal with, you know, maybe some low-level members.

You're never getting anywhere near the leadership.

The only way to do that is to go undercover in the club and go up into the ranks.

I would have failed if I didn't have some dumb luck on my side, and I had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case.

To hear how Ken Croak spent two years risking his life going through initiation in one of the most ruthless biker gangs in the world, check out episode 673 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

I always love the spy stuff.

I always love the practical stuff.

One of my weapons that I use all the time is asking for advice.

When you ask somebody for advice, even if they don't like you, they find an affinity for you.

This is called the Benjamin Franklin effect.

And there's a famous story where he borrows a book from somebody that doesn't like him and they become fast friends as a result.

I actually ask for advice all the time from a lot of different people, even if I am quite sure about the course of action that I'm going to take already.

And a lot of my friendships, I would say, especially with a lot of the high-level people that you hear on the show or that you know that I'm friends with through various stories I tell on the show, those come from me asking that person advice and then ending up going out to lunch with them and asking them for more advice.

You think you're taking from them.

And if you do this right, actually they feel great giving the advice and they feel attached to your outcome, which is a really good place to be.

After the show, we also discussed a little bit about deception detection.

Jillian told me that people who are too precise with things, such as I left at 7.32 a.m.

instead of 7.30, that's a little bit of a tell.

I wanted to get into more detail about that.

Maybe next time if we have them on the show, we can discuss why that is.

Also, asking someone to recall a detail from a story out of order.

So they tell you the whole story and then you say, wait, what happened before you went to the pub again?

What did you say before the speech began?

They'll have a delay because they have to replay the entire lie, the entire story in their head.

A true recounting would be quicker.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this.

I don't know.

I'd have to test this out and see because I feel like if you ask me what happened before something else, even in a true scenario, it might take me, I'd have to replay the thing in my head as well.

So I'm not sure if that actually is ironclad.

Somebody tell me if you've tested this and let me know.

Last but not least, he did let me know that detecting deception is an art, not a science.

Most of the stuff you see on YouTube is not used by spies, not used by any intelligence agency, not used by law enforcement, because it's actually just bullshit.

All things Julian Fisher will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Also, our newsletter, WeBitWiser, you guys love this.

I love writing it.

You love reading it.

The idea is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, and your relationships in under two minutes, just about every Wednesday.

So if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It is a great companion to the show.

JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Hey, don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

And this show, well, it's created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Frogery, Tata Sedlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Yeah, that's it.

That's it.

This whole thing, just upheld by that skeleton crew of amazing people.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's into the spy stuff, into the networking stuff, definitely share this episode with them.

Maybe they just love a good yarn.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

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