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S2 Ep 13 Mastering the Art of Human Intelligence with Gavin Stone
58 Plays10 months ago
This episode of Dial It In features Gavin Stone, a security and intelligence covert specialist with 20 years of experience. He discusses his book on detecting lies and his expertise in human intel, surveillance, anti-surveillance, and tradecraft skills. Stone's unique abilities include elicitation, deception, detection, influence, persuasion, and damage mitigation in high-risk situations.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. Hey, everybody.
Co-host Introduction
00:00:23
Speaker
We're back, and Dave's not with me today. I've got my buddy Rich with me today. Welcome to the podcast, Rich.
00:00:30
Speaker
Thanks, Trigby. Great to be here. We are recording this the first week in January.
Favorite Christmas Gifts
00:00:35
Speaker
So how was your Christmas? What was your favorite gift?
00:00:37
Speaker
It was fantastic. I got a chef's knife, which I've been wanting for quite a while. So it's Japanese made, just cuts through everything. It's a lot of fun to play with. How about you? My favorite gift that I gave is I gave my kid, who was nine years old, a VR headset. And he is one of the games that he just absolutely loves is this game where you have lightsabers in your hands and then cubes are fired at you to the beat of popular music. Fun.
00:01:05
Speaker
As you're listening to it, you have to cut the cubes with the lightsabers depending on whether or not there's an arrow. So if there's a down arrow, you have to cut down with your hands and the right color lightsaber. And I played this and I got immediately addicted. It's a game called Beat Saber. And you can get expansion packs. And one of the expansion packs that I got was the Queen, Queen expansion pack. So my son for the last two weeks has been working through Queen's back catalog.
00:01:31
Speaker
Nice. Good education. And thinking it's fantastic.
Introducing Gavin Stone
00:01:35
Speaker
So our guest today, Gavin Stone, wrote a book called How to Tell if People are Lying to You. How to Tell if Someone is Lying. I should say that. I get the title right. But Gavin is a security and intelligence covert specialist. He has 20 years of applied experience globally, employed by government organizations such as the British Ministry of Defense.
00:01:54
Speaker
especially as human intel which in his he is adept at the full required spectrum of trait craft skills. We're going to get into what exactly that means. Of notices, expertise in surveillance and anti-surveillance together with time-sensitive human analysis and high-risk dynamic situations. Stone knows how to accurately watch people from afar or gain insight from a breath away and when the latter is needed he can avoid proprietary and exceptional skills and elicitation, deception, detection,
00:02:21
Speaker
influence, persuasion, and damage mitigation. Which does any of this apply to you and your job and sales at all? Just, just a little bit. You know, I've never been lied to in a sales position before. He has ranked number 28 in the world as a body language expert by global gurus top 30. His book is called how to tell if someone is lying. And he has also written a new fiction novel called the Unforgiven Spy available on Amazon and all major outlets. Welcome Gavin.
00:02:50
Speaker
Hello, thank you for having me. I noticed when you were talking there for the people who can't see, obviously, because it's audible. Rich, when you were calling that off, he had a little twitch on the side of his mouth and it was just a momentary smile of contempt, as if to say, I can do that. Yeah, just a bit. Gavin, obviously, lives in the UK. So this is my acrobat of transitioning and saying, Gavin, because my son will ask me later, what is your favorite Queen song?
00:03:17
Speaker
My favourite Queen song, probably Hammer to Fall. Are you familiar with that one? I am familiar with that, yes. I would say that's probably one of my favourites.
00:03:26
Speaker
Rich, Rich, how about you? Uh, just we will, we will rock you. I mean, classic. It's a classic. It's an American, American arena rock one. So I guess my second follow-up question is given your background, given that you, you're British and that you worked in the spy trade, are you James
Gavin's Path to Intelligence Work
00:03:45
Speaker
Bowman? I know you're retired. So does that make you Pierce Brosnan?
00:03:48
Speaker
No, I wish. And of course, Pierce Brosnan doesn't quite have the good looks that I have. I can't have everything there. But no, it's... Yeah, exactly. We're all in the same boat here. But yeah, it's something that Hollywood does kind of glorify the champagne and soup side of it. How did you get into the intelligence craft?
00:04:10
Speaker
I actually got into it in a completely different way to where it normally is done. So normally it's you have like what they call spotters on the college campus and they'll look out for students that really shine and these spotters will have a contact with MI6 and they will say look I've got someone here who kind of ticks the boxes who's really worthwhile. Me on the other hand I had a knock on the door one day and it was a friend of mine who said look I need some help with something and I said sure what you want and we
00:04:38
Speaker
we ended up tracking a guy down and I inadvertently got into something called process serving. I don't know whether you're familiar with it, but basically finding people with outstanding warrants or court summons and that kind of thing, or you have to issue them, personally serve them, sometimes called a per serve with this court summons. And I was right at the very bottom, the bread and butter stuff. And I just kind of ended up working my way up from there where I went on to private investigations and then
00:05:07
Speaker
government departments were hiring me for fraudulent things and then just built up through the government departments until I eventually got into the intelligence side of things so if you work in intelligence what does that really mean
00:05:19
Speaker
Okay, so your intelligence officers as they were, have you got MI6, MI5, that kind of thing, your intelligence officers, even CIA case officers, the way I like to put it is we're making friends in the most dangerous of circumstances. And what we're going to do, we're going to go over to a foreign country usually, we're going to find somebody that has access to secrets, to governmental secrets that we want, and we are literally going to become, we're going to inject ourselves into that person's life.
Human Elements in Intelligence Training
00:05:46
Speaker
And we're going to become, build such a relationship in a very short space of time that it, you know, kind of creates a bond that, that allows them to, you to pitch them and say, look, can you help us out? What are some of the trainings that you go, that you go through in order to learn?
00:06:04
Speaker
So we have to do a lot of human rapport building and being able to profile people reasonably quickly, get used to what makes them chicken, what motivates them, and then that's built up from there to the elicitation side of it, which I know you're...
00:06:19
Speaker
You definitely want to have a little chat about it in a short while. This is all the classroom stuff, as it were. And then you've got the other side of it where you've got all the shooting and the lockpicking and the other bits and pieces. But you're relying more on the human element than what you are on any of the practical stuff. I know Rich is really wanting to talk about elicitation. But before that, I want to talk a little bit about Hollywood. So you actually worked in human intelligence. Are there spy movies that are realistic?
00:06:47
Speaker
So some of them have genuine trade crafting, but I mean, obviously it's all for entertainment. So the truth of the master is, if you're getting chased through Moscow, and there's explosions going off and gunfights and whatever else, and you're doing your job very, very wrong, then you'll probably never work in the industry.
00:07:03
Speaker
Again, I mean, yes, every intelligence officer is trained to be able to do that because you are effectively in a hostile country doing an illegal act of espionage. So therefore you might need to use those skills to be able to get out, get an exfil and get home safely. So we do have that kind of training, but like I say, if you are using it, then things have gone really, really self. But on the flip side of that, you look at the trade crafting certain things, like probably one of the best ones was a series called Burn Notice. Are you familiar with Burn Notice?
00:07:33
Speaker
I love burnout. Yeah, that was great. In fact, they had a guy come in from CIA to actually teach some of the tradecraft. And so some of the tradecraft in that is genuine tradecraft. And a lot of the time, it's just silly little things like eating when you're nervous to calm yourself down and daff things like that. So that is good. But again,
00:07:54
Speaker
I think it got to about season three or four and they started running out of things to use and explosions started happening everywhere. But you've got the whole, again, it's poetic license. It is a lot of drama because that's what it's there for. It's there for entertainment. Nobody in intelligence has 24-7 of gunshots, explosions, car chases, women, yacht races, falling off cliffs. You wouldn't last a week.
00:08:18
Speaker
Yeah, and he had that great God's treasure that kept getting completely trashed over every single week. Yeah, the most inconspicuous color in Florida.
00:08:29
Speaker
The only other person that I've known who's worked in human intelligence, worked with CIA, and he is the most, if you look at him, he is the most vanilla person you'd ever see. You wouldn't look at him twice. And years ago, I used to play risk with him and two of his buddies from work. And it was awful because they would talk about things in the general sense. Like, Hey, do you remember what happened on Wednesday? And they look at me and they're like, Oh, come on guys.
00:08:55
Speaker
One time he called me and it was one of those overseas echo things where you could see here it was connecting and he called and he said, hey, hey, how are you? I'm good, man. How are you? And he was like, I'm good. Can you do me a quick favor? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Can you call my wife? Tell her I'll be home Thursday.
00:09:13
Speaker
Aren't you home now? Well, not really. Could you just do that one thing for me? Oh, okay. Okay. All right, great. Thanks. And he hung out. And we've never spoken about it, but it was clearly not at home. And he clearly was not in a position to talk to his wife. And I still to this day wonder what he really does. But if you ask him, he'll say he works for the State Department.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, the purpose of this podcast, Kevin, is we're trying to help small business owners get better at their jobs. And I know one of the things that I'm reasonably good at, I think Rich is too, but we really wanted to go to school on your ability to learn and garner things based on body language because both Rich and I, our jobs are in selling and we, I think are intimately familiar with
00:09:59
Speaker
knowing that what people say isn't nearly as important as how they say it. Would you agree with that, Rich? Absolutely. So, elicitation is fun to say, but I've never heard it in a sentence before. Oh, okay. Can you tell me what it is? Yeah. So, elicitation is basically the art of obtaining information from somebody without necessarily asking a question in an unassuming way. So, when it comes to questions, people are naturally guarded.
00:10:27
Speaker
if you go into kind of interrogation remote and i'm going to send you rich where did you go where did you go to school where you know all of a sudden you know and people do the same kind of mistake when they go on dates that they go on dates and ask questions where's if you were to use elicitation. It kind of keeps conversation flowing without it feeling like it's in interrogative so what you doing you making what's called provocative statements.
00:10:51
Speaker
And it's a way to get somebody talking where you can say one single sentence, one statement, and that will then get them to kind of give you more information. It will cut the conversation from being down like a 50-50 to you're giving 10%, they're giving 90. So for example, I could turn around to you and I could say, hey, that football shirt you got in the background, I bet that's got a story behind it. It's okay.
00:11:15
Speaker
From that, you will then more than likely start saying, oh yeah, I had this gifted to me
Building Rapport in Sales Calls
00:11:21
Speaker
and you'll tell me the story behind it. So it's something that rather than me asking a question and say, hey, that football shirt, where did you get that from? You can cut that off very quickly with a kind of, oh, it was a gift from a friend. And that's it, the conversation's over and killed. Whereas if I do it in a more provocative way and make it as a statement rather than a question, you're going to respond and you're not going to feel like it's an interrogation.
00:11:43
Speaker
Is that what you call open-ended statements? Pretty much, yes. With open-ended questions, you're trying to avoid the yes and no. You can say to somebody, did you stay at home Tuesday night? You can just say yes, and that's it. Your conversation's over, and you're at a point where you're like, meh.
00:12:01
Speaker
You got to move to the next question, the next question. Whereas if you were to use an open-ended statement saying, hey, what were you up to on Tuesday? They can't give a yes or no. They've got to kind of tell you what they were up to on Tuesday. And that kind of pushes the idea of them being more than a one-word answer, as it were.
00:12:17
Speaker
That was something I learned early on in my sales training is especially when you're calling people cold on the phone is most salespeople will ask a question that then the people can give the wrong answer to. Yeah. Gavin, how are you today? Well, your answer is going to be shitty. You're bothering me. Stop.
00:12:40
Speaker
Or, I'm in a meeting, call me later, click. So, what I counsel people to do is say, give them an affirmation to say, hey, thanks for picking up the phone. I like that. I actually had, I give some sales training to a call center a while ago, and they'd all got these scripts and they called me and they said, will you have a look at the scripts for me? And, you know, what should we do with them? I said, the first thing you want to do with them is throw them out.
00:13:05
Speaker
I said, there's nothing worse than somebody relying on a script that they're going to read word for word. I said, it doesn't sound human. It sounds monotone. You know, there's no, you're not building any relational rapport by doing that. And, you know, they pick up the phone and they'll turn around and say, hi, it's David calling from XYZ company. And you've lost them. You've lost the customer because at that point they're already thinking, how do I get this person off the phone?
00:13:30
Speaker
So if you call them up and you go for a completely different approach and I tell you the one I taught them, I rang the company and some lady answered the phone, you know, XYZ company, how can I help? I said, hi, can you do me a favor? I said, we're all having a great big bet here in the office, whether Terminator 1 or Terminator 2 was the best film. And you know, so far it's a 50-50 vote. You're going to make the difference. Which one would it be? Which one would you say? And she's like, oh, definitely Terminator 2. I said, I knew it. Brilliant. Thank you. You're on the winning team.
00:13:59
Speaker
you, you know, you're one of us and welcome the main and kind of, and I said, look, thanks for that. And what he did, he built that moment of reporting. It didn't matter what the answer was, whether she just said Terminator one or Terminator two, she was still, it was still the right answer. She was still on the winning team, building that connection on what it does. It kind of throws them for a second.
00:14:18
Speaker
Because they used to answer in the phone saying, how can I help you? And someone says, yes, this is my problem. Or this is what I'm trying to sell you. And it breaks that usual pattern, that cycle that she's used to, or he's used to. And what it does, it kind of takes them out of work and away from reality for a moment. And then when you've got that kind of bond and connection there with them, you can build on it and then turn around and say, look, you know, I've got a couple of things I'd like to speak to you about if you have a few minutes. And at that point, you've already kind of built a telephone relationship. Does that make sense?
00:14:47
Speaker
It's a genius and I'm totally going to steal it. Rich is nodding his head, sadly, saying now he's going to probably have to do something the same. And of course, it doesn't have to be Terminator 1 or Terminator 2. It can be any number of things. It can be pineapple on pizza. It can be...
00:15:03
Speaker
whether ice cream is better than chocolate. As long as you've got two comparisons, whichever one they pick is obviously the right one. If it's done right, it's crafted right, then the whole thing will work a lot better. And again, most importantly is the delivery. If this is scripted and somebody tries to read it, it won't work.
00:15:27
Speaker
Well, the problem with the scripts, and it kind of gets back to the idea of elicitation is scripting is based on telling you what I want you to know. It's not based on what I want from you, which is I want you to tell me what the problem is. I want you to tell me what you know, and I want to learn from you, not I don't want to tell you things.
00:15:45
Speaker
Exactly, yeah. In Cold Read Like a Spy, which I read last night, fantastic. It seems like a lot of spycraft happens in bars or cocktail parties. How much of that is true? A good
Engaging Targets in Intelligence
00:15:57
Speaker
amount is actually. It doesn't necessarily have to be a bar or a cocktail party. It can be anywhere. I mean, you know, it was done with a Russian diplomat in London out in the park.
00:16:08
Speaker
A lot of the time it's actually done on the dog walk, which is going to scare a lot of diplomats now who walk their dog regularly, but it creates a talking point. It allows you to infiltrate somebody's life. What you've got to do is you've got to start off by doing a surveillance on them long enough to establish what they call a P-O-L or pattern of life.
00:16:27
Speaker
And then when you know where they're going to be every week at the same time, whether it's walking the dog, whether it's shopping at the supermarket, whatever it is, you can arrange them to be there at the same time and you build up this familiarity and you do what's called a smile campaign.
00:16:44
Speaker
Be it a regular thing that they see in their life, whether it's every Saturday at the park, whether it's every day at the coffee shop, you just see them every single day and you smile and you build up that relationship of familiarity. And then eventually at some point you can do what's called the bump. And that's when you will go from the transition from just, you know, kind of smile and a wave to kind of, Hey, my name's Gavin or whatever the case may be, or whatever your cover name is.
00:17:06
Speaker
Um, or they approach you or you give them a reason to approach you. So it is done frequently in public places. So with that in mind, you know, obviously you do get a lot of people who out in restaurants, cocktail bars, parties, that kind of thing. It's the ideal opportunity when their guard is down to kind of, uh, take advantage. And I think that sort of transitions into discussion about body language is how can you tell when somebody's ready? Um,
00:17:30
Speaker
The truth, I mean, you can to a degree, but even when you're doing it, you are taking a gamble. Effectively, especially if you're in a foreign country, you are about to ask that person to break the law, risk their life, commit treason, and go through a treacherous act of betrayal to get information for somebody that they hardly know and that you've just met.
00:17:51
Speaker
And if you've done a good enough job of building that relationship up and kind of making them feel safe and secure, and that's the main thing, the safety aspect of it, making them feel safe, then, you know, you can kind of pitch them and it literally is a gamble. You know, as good as we'd like to all be, profiling and getting everybody's right and learning everything about everybody and saying, yep, this is the highest percent chance. There's always that very minor percentage that they're going to, no, not for me.
00:18:19
Speaker
So, but it's usually an educated guess, but usually goes well. We kind of skipped over the whole bit about profiling. What are some ways in which small business owners can use to profile their prospects? What are sort of the top five things that people need to be considering when they're dealing with somebody new?
00:18:38
Speaker
Oh, okay. So this is that's a loaded question. What we've got with this is the psychology behind the person and to understand people and profiling them and to put anybody into a box is really, really difficult. So it's just about so we have to do something called red cell, which is another CIA term where their job is to
00:19:04
Speaker
be the enemy and to say, right, if we were Russia or we were China and we were going to attack America, how would we do it? What would we do? So they think from the enemy's position and then that's how they go about building their attack. And then when they know how they would attack,
00:19:21
Speaker
They can then build on the defenses around it. So you've got to kind of do a very similar thing with who you're talking to. You've got to red sell that person and kind of say, right, is this a single man? Is this a family with seven kids and a dog? Who am I selling to? So you've got to kind of put yourself in their position and try and figure out what they've been through. And it's really difficult. I'm going to plug a friend, Chase Hughes, who does a book called 6MX.
00:19:46
Speaker
And it's one of the best profiling books I've ever read. It's 6MX, stands for six minutes x-ray. And it allows you to profile pretty much anybody in the world in six minutes or less. And you can get an idea of their personality type. And once you know what personality type they are, whether they're an intelligence personality, whether they're a strength personality, whether they're a victim personality, you can then know who you're selling to and have the advantage.
00:20:15
Speaker
That's amazing. Let's take a quick break because I know I want to get back to the body language discussion.
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00:20:20
Speaker
I, for instance, know that Rich is adding the card on Amazon right now.
00:20:31
Speaker
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00:21:59
Speaker
All right, we're back. One of the things that is a frustration for me, Gavin, is I think, and I think for salespeople on the whole, is they're really good one-on-one when they meet with people. But with the pandemic, we all did not be so much in person, and now we're doing a lot of virtual selling.
00:22:19
Speaker
So, which is why, to me, there are some things that are patently obvious when, when you're dealing with people on an online front, when it comes to body language, like a lot of times you'll see people with classes and you can see that they're clearly looking at their email because the screen is reflecting in the grass. So, you know, you've lost them, but how has that changed the move
Using Open Loops in Sales
00:22:40
Speaker
to online? Has that changed intelligence gathering? And then I want to ask some questions about like, what can you learn virtually from people?
00:22:47
Speaker
So virtually, I tend to look at the whole sales process virtually. It's a lot more difficult when you're dealing with a screen than when you're dealing one-to-one because you only have that two-dimensional image to go on. So it cuts everything down and it really limits what you can do.
00:23:05
Speaker
On the flip side of that, there are some advantages that you've got, whereas anybody who's ever written anything called Sales Copy will know about something called Open Loops. If you're selling online, this is absolutely perfect. And what they'll generally tend to do is say, right, in a moment, I'm going to show you how to pick any lock in the world using just a couple of paperclips. But before we get to that, I'm going to speak about X, Y and Z. And then what they'll do, they've got someone's attention for something that they really want. I don't know how to pick any lock in the world with a couple of paperclips.
00:23:34
Speaker
So you've got their attention and that open loop is relying on the human need for closure. The human need for closure is so inherently strong that if you were to text any of your family right now with, hey, you'll never guess what just happened, your phone will blow up.
00:23:52
Speaker
My wife is one of the worlds for it. If I were to turn around to my wife and say, oh, you never guess what, and she goes, oh, no, it doesn't matter. She goes, no, no, you've got to tell me, you've got to tell me. So this human lead for closure is extremely strong, so you can use it to your advantage. So what you do is you open the loop.
00:24:07
Speaker
You tell your audience you're going to come back to that in a moment. First, you're going to tell them about whatever it is that you want to. And then before you close that loop, you open a second loop and you close the first one. And what you've done is you've created another thing for kind of so you're right now. I'm about to show you how to pick the lock with two paperclips. And before I do that, I'm going to teach you in a few minutes also how to get into your bank account and add an extra zero to the end.
00:24:34
Speaker
So i'll come to that in five minutes now let's get on with the pangert paperclips so you teach them the paperclips there you go to the next bit of the meeting and all the time you still got their attention because i want to pay attention to all of this because i want to know how that extra zero is going on my bank account a bit so this is how you so you're constantly keeping that leapfrog of open loops going on and that will keep their attention to the end and as long as you don't open too many loops
00:24:57
Speaker
then it should always be one open, the second one open as you close the first one and keep that action going. And as long as you do that, that generally tends to keep people's attention span because they want the answer to that question. So they'll keep listening and keep paying attention. One of the things I was curious about, especially in the digital screen to screen, how do you tell when people are lying to you over webcam?
00:25:23
Speaker
What you're looking for is change. So you're looking for something different. You want to baseline the person as fast as you can. You can usually do it within a few minutes. If your camera is good enough and you can see their eyes, then you've got something called eye accessing cues. So if I were to turn around to you and say, Rich, what color were the walls in your elementary school classroom? Top. So yeah, so you've just gone up and left and then up and right before you've answered. So you've gone to two places for your memory recall.
00:25:49
Speaker
Now what I've done is I've just baselined you so I now know where you're going to go to give a truthful answer that's coming back from your memory recall. Now if I turn around to you and say, Rich, I want you to picture a purple unicorn that can breathe flames that's got big feathered wings. And I'm going to watch where your eyes go over to the right and then over to the left.
00:26:07
Speaker
So again, that's where your creative memory is. Okay. So that's going to allow me then to say, right, he's now creating something because other than probably, I don't think there's probably ever been a time in your life where you've had to create that image in your mind. That was rather unique. Yeah. Yep. So you need something pretty unique or something you know that they're going to be either, you know, deceptive about or have to create to be able to kind of gauge. And it could be anything. Imagine what it's like being married to X or whatever the case may be.
00:26:36
Speaker
And then once you've got that creative memory you then know if you ask them a question If I go back to you and say so, you know rich tell me about this and you your eyes go up and left up and right I know that you're bringing something back from your memory Whereas if if they do what they did when I asked you to to think of a purple whatever it was I'm glad you remember
00:27:02
Speaker
I can't even remember myself what it was. But yeah, to get the same eye actions, then that basically is letting me know that you're creating something, you're making something up more so than recalling it from your memory. So the eye accessing cues side of it is absolutely brilliant. The Pentagon did spend a hell of a lot of time and money disproving it and the reason it didn't work for the Pentagon, they were testing it on soldiers.
00:27:26
Speaker
And they were asking standard questions that soldiers don't really need to think about because they've been drilled that many times. This is here, this is there, this is how we do that. They don't need to think about it. And the other side of it was they wanted a clear map. They wanted, you know, you always go up and right when you're lying and up and left when you're remembering. And it doesn't work. It's different for each person. So you have to baseline them each time to know what is standard for them.
Detecting Deception through Changes in Behavior
00:27:50
Speaker
So that was why it didn't work. And that was why it's been kind of dismissed a lot over the years and had a lot of bad press.
00:27:55
Speaker
But if it's done properly and you do make your own map for each person, it's absolutely brilliant for getting an idea as to whether somebody's been truthful or not. So that's your kind of eye-existing cues. And then, like I said, the main thing is you're looking for change. If you were to say to me, Gavin, have you worked in intelligence? And I go, yeah. And you go, have you worked in security? I go, yeah. And you go, have you worked in hot air balloon sales? And I go, yeah.
00:28:20
Speaker
Then there's a difference. My pitch has changed. My body language has changed. My tone has changed. My answer's changed. You're looking for that different response. Generally, if you can, clusters of three or more, one singular change might just be coincidental. If they're scratching an itch and you think, oh, he covered his mouth. Is that a tell? But if they're scratching an itch, while they give a different tone, a different pitch change, a different speed, a different answer,
00:28:46
Speaker
then you're looking more along the lines of, okay, there's a cluster of tells now, and those are more indicators of deception. How much of an indicator is deception? Rich and I work and live, and I would say is probably the passive aggressive capital of the world, where people are just politely trying to get you out in scenarios as opposed to let you down or tell you the truth, which is, no, I don't want to buy from you. Please go away. So they'll say things like, oh, well, send me a proposal or I'll think about it or things like that.
00:29:16
Speaker
If we're feathering in a certain amount of passive aggressiveness, does the body language reveal more than what people are saying? Yeah, it can do. You've got to look at the whole conversation, and this goes back to baselining, especially if you're online and you can see them. Look at what's normal for them, and if they're normally giving you eye contact the entire time while you're talking, and you turn around and say, right, this is my
00:29:42
Speaker
pitch and they go yes, send me an email and all of a sudden they're not giving you that same eye contact, they're looking away. The change is different so that again is kind of indicating that they're really not that interested. So if I'm in a meeting online and I can tell that I've lost somebody, they're looking up in a way, they're clearly not looking, they're looking over here, they're not even looking at the camera anymore.
00:30:05
Speaker
ordering the book on Amazon. Buying a book on Amazon, six MX as well as how to sell somebody's mind. What are some strategies that you can utilize to get them back?
00:30:20
Speaker
So there's a couple of things you can do and what I tend to do with something like this is default to taking the blame. I go, do you know what? I'm really sorry. Do you know what? I've had a late night last night and I'm probably doing a dreadful job of explaining this. Do you understand what I mean? Does that make sense? Straight away, they've got to start thinking about everything that you've just said. They've got to come back to you and go,
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah, you've moved the blame away from them because they've wandered off in their own little world and taken it onto yourself and you've got their attention back. As soon as you've got their attention back, you can then pick up where you left off. The other way is, again, to ask them how it could be improved. Ask them how they would have done it and get their opinion. People love to give their own opinion on something.
00:31:09
Speaker
how many times of people you know. If I was running the country or running the world, this is how things would be. Everybody's got their own unique idea of how much better things will be done if they were doing it. One of the things that Rich and I really want to get back to in 2024 is actually meeting people in person. From an elementary level, what are some basic body movements that people make and what do they mean when people
Interpreting Body Language
00:31:33
Speaker
do that?
00:31:33
Speaker
Like for instance, I know that I've got my arms crossed right now, which usually means that I'm disengaged. It doesn't in this case, because my hands are cold. What are some things that people who aren't in the intelligence community don't have the level of knowledge that Rich and I do about what those kinds of things means? What are some things that people can look out for?
00:31:54
Speaker
Certainly. So I like the fact that you mentioned that you got your arms folded because that happens a lot. People say, oh, does that mean somebody's been defensive? And this is the exact reason why there is no body language dictionary. There's no direct translation of, you know, if you put his hands here and here, it means X.
00:32:11
Speaker
The truth of the matter is there's so many different reasons you can fold your arms. It could be because you've been defensive. It could be because you're bored. It could be because your hands are cold. It could be for any number of things. So what you have to do, like I said, look for what's normal for that person. So if they don't normally fold their arms and all of a sudden they do when they're answering a question, that's when you're going to say, okay.
00:32:31
Speaker
Was that something I said? Or was it because it's cold? Was it because of the circumstances? But to answer your question about the default, there are a few things that you can look for, especially in sales. One of the most important ones is if anybody puts something in their mouth, if they've got a pen, put it in their mouth while they're thinking about signing the line.
00:32:52
Speaker
or even if it's a finger, hair in the mouth, if they get their ponytail from around the back of their head and they're putting it in their mouth, anything along those lines, that's a need for reassurance. So the minute you see that, anything going in the mouth, I'm gonna keep it clean, anything going in the mouth.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, in the workplace I think, is a need for reassurance. There's some doubt somewhere niggling in the mind and whether this dates back to as a baby for feeding and whether it's got anything to do with when you give a kid a pacifier, it kind of makes them feel better.
00:33:28
Speaker
as it says in the name, pacifier, whether it relates back to that and something to do with the psychology of feeding as a baby as a form of reassurance, I don't know, that's just a guess, but that's a universal for pretty much everybody, not to be confused with when flirting's going on.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, what are some other common ones that people can learn from? So common ones, you're generally looking if people are open, if they've got a nice open posture, then generally that means they're comfortable and relaxed. If they have closed posture, you know, if they are
00:34:06
Speaker
kind of crossing their arms or turning away from you, that kind of thing, then that is more of an area of concern. Not always, like I said, could be anything to do with temperature and whatever else, so you do have to use a little bit of discretion on where you're drawing your conclusions from.
00:34:23
Speaker
But if you watch for the feet, then they will tell you more than anything because if you're standing, yeah. So TSA agents are actually trained to look when you go to the desk with your passport and they're looking at your passport, they'll sometimes lean over the desk to see which way your feet are pointing. And the reason being, if the feet are pointing towards the counter,
00:34:43
Speaker
it's telling them that they're okay there's nothing to worry about where if the feet are angled towards the exit while their body is facing the counter they'll be like ah what's going on here you know because if their feet are saying i want to get out of here i want to get to the exit but their body's saying oh okay so so yeah if you're if the if the
00:35:00
Speaker
person's feet are facing one way, but their body's facing the other, or they're not giving you that kind of... And again, this is very, very different for men, so I've got to be a little bit careful here. If you stand face to face with a man, you will watch them turn. They will kind of angle their bodies. So men generally tend to do that, whereas if you're face to face, it's kind of threatening. Whereas if you're kind of next to each other or angled slightly, then it's less
00:35:24
Speaker
aggressive. So if your feet are facing forward, then that's great. But if the guy's feet are pointing away, that generally means because they want to get away. Okay. And so if Rich and I are having a face-to-face moment and one of us turns slightly, what does that tell you?
00:35:44
Speaker
So if it's just a turn, it's generally, so if you're face to face, it's like I said, it's very confrontational. Whereas if you just turn slightly, all that say is that you're disengaging that confrontation. So, you know, you're not in an argumentative mode, it's very friendly. But so if you turn away slightly, no problem at all. But if you are kind of, you know, turned away slightly, but your feet are facing a completely different direction, especially, you know, kind of towards an exit, then that's your sign that
00:36:12
Speaker
you want to go, you've had enough. That's fascinating. I'm going to start looking at people's feet more. Yeah, definitely pay attention and it'll give you more of a sign as to what's going on in our mind. So that's two. Can you give us one more?
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah, one more, what else have we got? Body language wise, so yeah, so look for, if you're at let's say a desk or a table, and look for something which you know in the traders digital flexion. So if their palms are like flat on the table, and you ask a particular question, and all of a sudden, their palms go from being flat to kind of their fingers curling in, that's generally a sign of an uncomfortable feeling. So more uncomfortable somebody gets,
00:36:51
Speaker
the more the fingers will curl until that uncomfort goes to a level of aggression to become a fist. So the more it becomes a fist, the more the levels of discomfort are increasing and the more relaxed somebody is, the more open somebody is, the more the hands will be.
00:37:08
Speaker
with the fingers splayed and kind of chilled out because it's not something you're going to do in a threatening situation is have your fingers flat whereas obviously in a threatening situation you will have your fist clenched ready to attack so only some people will. So that's how it works. Look for what the hands are doing in regards to all the fingers curling in or are they nice and relaxed in their posture.
00:37:34
Speaker
That's amazing, and I'm sure we can read more about that in your Life's Count of
Gavin's Novel: 'The Unforgiven Spy'
00:37:39
Speaker
Books. Tell us about the new book, the fiction book.
00:37:41
Speaker
OK, so I've written a book called The Unforgiven Spy, which is my debut fiction novel, and it's got more spy tradecraft in it than any other fiction novel I've ever known or read. So there's a lot of like kind of Tom Clancy or some of the other big names out there have given little bits of tradecraft. I've crammed as much tradecraft as I could into this, which is hopefully some of it never been out before.
00:38:06
Speaker
deliberately in an attempt to try and get it banned. He'll go straight to number one. I was quite lucky and it never got banned although there is a little secret that I do reveal out there from the Freemasons and again it was kind of a little bit of a thing I thought hopefully the Freemasons will create about it and I thought what a great headline you know Freemasons secret society call for Gavin Stone's book
00:38:36
Speaker
to be banned for revealing secrets. Even they've left me alone. So the publicity that I had planned kind of didn't go exactly the way I wanted it to, but the book itself will speak for itself and a lot of people will hopefully learn some great tricks from it. That's amazing. I don't know a Freemason under the age of 60. Do you, Rich?
00:38:58
Speaker
I don't. My grandfather was a Freemason and he tried recruiting my uncles and my dad and myself into it and really hang around a bunch of old people. No. See, maybe I might have found my calling there now for a recruitment for the Freemasons. There you go. Well, teach them to pitch better.
00:39:19
Speaker
I wanted to go over one last thing before we bring off, Gavin, is one of the books that you have is really all about lie detection.
Techniques for Detecting Lies
00:39:26
Speaker
And I think the book is invaluable. And I think just about anybody who deals in a person facing job should read it. And it's a quick read, too. I think it's helpful. I found it. Can you give us a couple of ways you can tell if somebody's lying to you?
00:39:42
Speaker
Sure. So what I'll do, because the book itself is based on a term of coin called CCA, which is combined communication analysis. So it's a mixture of, I've got a background in psychology, body language statement analysis, that kind of thing. And I've put it all together to be able to help people detect deception.
00:40:02
Speaker
So there are several things you can go down like for example if you ask somebody hey have you seen my wallet or have you stolen my wallet have you stolen money out the drawer first of all listen for the word no it doesn't matter what comes after the word no as much as listening for the word no
00:40:18
Speaker
Because if you turn around and you say, hey, have you stolen my wallet? And they go, I don't even know where you keep your wallet. They haven't said no, it's not a denial. It's an answer, but it's not a denial. So sometimes people are given an answer that will pacify the person asking without actually denying. And that comes down to...
00:40:36
Speaker
Humans inherently don't want to lie. We know it's wrong. We know it's bad. Sometimes we have to, like when your other half turns around and says, does my ass look fat in this? You've got to tell those little white lies from time to time. Most of the time, we don't want to lie. We don't like to. And because of that, we're trying to avoid lying. And because we avoid lying, we look for little clauses. So that little clause of saying, well, I don't even know where you keep your wallet.
00:41:04
Speaker
means that you haven't denied it, you haven't lied, you've just said something that might be true. You might not know where you normally keep your wallet. It prevents them from saying an out and out no. So that's more from the statement analysis side of it. And I know enough about body language and how to read people digitally that I can tell that Rich has tried to remember where his wallet is right now.
00:41:27
Speaker
There you go. You're looking for the no. And if you don't get the no, ask yourself why. So that's the first thing. Look for anything that is completely out of the ordinary. So when I said earlier about we're looking for change, if you ask somebody a question, did you take any money out of the tin and all of a sudden they start screaming and shouting and going wild,
00:41:53
Speaker
Ask yourself, is that how they normally react? Because if the answer is no, then why? And a lot of these do seem like common sense things, but sometimes we overlook it because of our natural desire to believe in people. We don't want to admit to ourselves that our friend or colleague might have stolen our money or our phone or our wallet or whatever. So we kind of tend to try to believe in the answer that they give us. So that non-defensive answer is telling in some way or another.
00:42:21
Speaker
And because of our natural biases, you know, we do buy into stories and this in itself is something that Lena Sisko, a friend of mine, she turns around and says that, truth tellers convey and liars convince. So truth tellers will convey you what happened because they've got truth on their side so they don't need to worry about it. They can just say this is what happened or no, I didn't know whatever the case may be.
00:42:44
Speaker
Whereas lies will tell you a story and come up with all manner of things i've heard it time and time again do you know what kind of a person i am do you know how many years i've worked for this company do you know what i do on a sunday do you know and you get all these kind of crazy you know kind of what they call um not testimonials what's the word for them
00:43:06
Speaker
resume statements. I'm such an outstanding phenomenal citizen that I couldn't possibly be accused of stealing something and those resume statements, they're huge red flags.
00:43:18
Speaker
Interesting. What do spies do after they get out of the intelligence business? Other than write books, of course. Yeah, I was going to say, in my case, become an author. So the majority of them tend to go, a lot of the guys at MI6 go to a company called Hackloot or they're going to some kind of private intelligence company. There's lots of private intelligence companies now where they can work as a consultant or
00:43:40
Speaker
generally get paid a hell of a lot more for doing a hell of a lot less in the private sector. You get some of them that go down the route of sales because let's face it, if you can get somebody to commit treason in an afternoon, you can generally talk them into buying a Buick. And then the other side of it is
00:43:58
Speaker
is they'll go down the author route and they'll write fictional stories that are generally a recap of their career or they'll put a mixture of different events that they've done from experience into a book, hoping it'll become a film or whatever the case may be. And again, sometimes go down the route of TV. We were on about, what's it earlier? I forgot my name in the series now.
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah, they had somebody in from CIA to say, look, how does this normally work? Teach us the tradecraft so we can make this realistic. One of my all time favorite movies is a spy movie called Spy Game with Robert Bradford. Oh, yeah. Final question. Gavin, I know in the near future, you are moving out of the UK and in the United States. Eventually, yeah. When I need to buy a new car, will you come with? Certainly, no problem at all.
00:44:52
Speaker
Excellent. All right. Gavin is the author of How to Tell if Someone is Lying, available on all your major book retailers. And his new book is called The Unforgiven Spy. And I know Rich and I have a lot more reading that we have to do. Thanks for joining us, Gavin. No problem. Thank you for having me.