 Robert, welcome to the show. Johnny and I are excited to have you. I'm excited to be here. It's not often that we have a social engineer on the show. Johnny and I talk to a lot of therapists, psychologists, so it's interesting to take a slightly different perspective, and you've had quite the past. So I'd love for you to share a little bit with our audience of your background and how you got into that role of corporate espionage. Thanks for having me. And as we discussed, I'm probably the first corporate spy you've ever interviewed. And apparently that was one of the things that my publisher was very excited about. As they said, there's never been a book written about this world of corporate spying. It's like an insight into a hidden world. I was a young guy. I grew up in Philadelphia, and my family is very well known in the automobile business. You know, Google, Kerbeck Lamborghini, Kerbeck Maserati. My great grandfather started the automobile business. My grandfather took it over. My father took it over, and I was supposed to take it over. And along the way in college, I fell in love with acting. I wanted to be an actor. I briefly went to work for my father, but it just wasn't for me. The dishonesty and trickery of car sales just didn't feel right, which of course, queued the irony because, you know, here I didn't want to sell cars. And then I become a corporate spy, which was far more devious. So then I moved to New York to be an actor. I needed a survival job. I didn't have the patience to be a waiter. I wasn't a late night guy, so bartending was out. And a buddy of mine had this job, and he mentioned it very kind of briefly and mysteriously, and I stopped him. I said, hey, what's your new job? And then he kind of stopped talking like he realized he said something he shouldn't have said, but I basically, you know, forced him to get me an interview. And I go up to the Upper East Side. And as your listeners and viewers know, the Upper East Side is kind of the rittiest area of Manhattan. I was a broke actor. I come to this fancy doorman building. I go get taken up to the penthouse. This woman opens the door. I remember she had a martini and a cigarette, but maybe that's just my imagination. And she interviews me, the strangest interview ever. She never asks me anything about my skills, my background. Eventually she sends me on my way. I didn't think I got the job, but then my buddy calls and says, you're hired, but don't get too excited because she hires everyone because no one is able to do this job. And that was how I got hired as a corporate spy. I went to work the next day and started training and began to see here. I thought we were doing some sort of telemarketing. And what I began to see is we were being asked to infiltrate major corporations on behalf of their biggest rivals to learn anything and everything we could about the firm. Basically, you think about a football team. We were trying to get the playbook on these firms, which we were then selling to their biggest rivals, so they could use that information to increase revenues. And we all know the Russian spy on the Chinese, the Chinese spy on us, but what most people don't realize is that major corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spy on each other. And we've certainly seen that in the news with some of the key hires that are being made. I know there's been lawsuits with Uber and this automotive industry and self-driving cars, all the technology behind it. But this is all happening with a good old-fashioned phone. So I know you mentioned telemarketing. And of course, for many, we're so immersed in the internet, we think about all the information that's available digitally. But this was actually garnering that information in an analog way through conversation. So let's talk a little bit about that first day on the job, since there wasn't really a skill set that they were inquiring about. I remember being, it was a woman that was training me. And indeed, when I was hired, it was the firm was run by a woman. Part of the reason she started this firm is she had been on Wall Street, and women were not given a fair shot to move up the ladder. This is, we're talking now early 90s. And so she basically went out on her own and started her own corporate spying firm, which became incredibly successful. And she only hired women at first, because she thought only women could do this kind of spying, which was very funny. And my buddy in the book, his name is Pax, he and I were the first men she'd ever hired. And she really didn't think we were going to be able to do the job. And at the beginning, the women were far better than we were. Because the women would portray themselves as assistants or receptionists, and they would call another assistant, and they would kind of be, hey, I'm the beleaguered assistant to this person, and you're the beleaguered assistant to that person, and these guys we work for are so horrible. So please help me out and tell me this stuff, otherwise my boss is going to yell at me again. They found that those kind of ploys were incredibly successful. So when we would call the assistant, well, back in the day, the assistants were mainly women, so we couldn't really be another assistant. And all of a sudden, that relationship that these women had figured out was a really great way to set up a mark. But for the men, it didn't work. And we had to learn our own way, like what ploy, as a guy, as a man, was going to be successful. And so what I learned is I would go executive to executive. And because I found the assistants and receptionists to be incredibly smart and tremendous gatekeepers, because that's what they're trained to do and paid to do. But I would get an executive on the phone often after hours, and I would go bro to bro, they would tell me anything and everything that I wanted to know. Sometimes I was shocked. Sometimes I couldn't get them off the phone. They were telling me so much information. Now, obviously, with your family background being heavily in the automotive industry, I'm assuming they weren't so excited about you going into this line of work. So how did that decision come about for you personally? And then how did you communicate that back to the family who probably wanted you to work at the auto jobs that they had created? My father was really disappointed that I was leaving the business, but I didn't tell him what I was doing because certainly it was not ethical what I was doing. And it was also quasi illegal. And we can talk about the close calls I had with the law later in the show. At one point, I was hunted as the world's most famous hacker, which I was far from. I was just an actor with the gift of gab. But yeah, so my father was disappointed. I couldn't tell him what I did. I didn't tell really many people what I did. If we were at a party and you asked me what I did, I'd say I did corporate intelligence. And then you'd ask me what that was. And I'd say if I told you, I'd have to take you out back and shoot you. And that was kind of my party joke for years. Yeah, that's probably a good way to end that conversation. Well, and it's funny too, because so many times people, as I've been, this book has been out now and I do interviews and people say, well, where we find corporate spies? And if I wanted to hire a corporate spy, because you're not listed on the internet, you don't have a website, corporatespying.com, right? Some of the buzzwords are corporate intelligence, competitive analysis, competitive intelligence. Some firms just call themselves research. And if you Google and you see those firms come up, which they will, those are the firms that are either doing the spying or hiring spies. Now, with that, obviously, being an actor, I'm sure helped tremendously, but not having any executive experience. How are you able to trick executives and get them to believe that the other person on the line is exactly like them? One of the reasons that I happened to be good at this job, and it was a very difficult job, getting people to give information was very difficult, was one, yeah, the acting, right? And kind of the gift of gap, but also because I came from this automobile family, where my family, the line going back were automobile dealers, and these are new cars, Ford, GM, as I said, Maserati, all kinds of cars. My family is very entrepreneurial, right? And I understood business, right? And I understood how to leverage relationships, and also how to leverage power. And what I learned is when you would go to an executive, if you could be at their level, or even slightly above their level, they were almost required to help you in the mindset of corporate America, where everybody, first of all, you're taught to be a good teammate, right? You know, when they talk about corporate culture. So if I'm going to call you, and I have some problem, and there's some emergency, and I'm making it seem like it's a crisis, and I'm at your level, and like I said, I prefer to be just one level above the individual I was calling to get information of. So now they're feeling that kind of pressure that this person's more important than I am. This person is higher in the organization than I am, and I don't want them to be my enemy. I want them to be my friend. And that was something that I kind of utilized in the back of my mind is I would be your best friend or your worst enemy, right? So just tell me what I need to know. We're going to be great friends. But if you start to give me a hard time about it, it might not be good for you. And that was kind of the social engineering part of it, that you were basically leaning on people to get them to tell you things that they shouldn't tell you. Now, with this gift of GAB, I feel a lot of times too much talking can actually undo the ruse and trip you up. So let's talk a little bit about what you would do to prepare for these calls, because obviously they're high stakes and mistakes could probably, as we're going to hear a little bit later, set the law after you. And on top of that, you have not only the ruse on them, but the ruse that you have to play into in yourself and all the information you have to keep straight to get the other person to give up that information. So how did you approach these calls? What was the preparation like for you before you'd ring that phone? Fantastic question. It's the first time I've been asked that question. I had a pad by my computer and phone, and I would write the name of the person that I was saying I was, who I was impersonating. I would write their title. I would have already done a ton of research on the company, what was going on with the company that day, last week, the next week, stock price up, down, big conference coming up, had they announced a deal, did the CEO just resign? I would do hours of research, sometimes days of research, because sometimes we would only get one chance if I'm calling the COO of the firm and expecting him to believe that I'm the head of the office in Germany. This is Gal Hart calling from his office in Frankfurt. He has a European Union regulators here, and they need some information from the States. So I would be doing some accent, because all of these firms are global now. They have offices in Tokyo, in Frankfurt, in Paris, in London, in Dublin, so you could do an Irish accent. All of a sudden, this executive in the States goes, oh my gosh, it's Ian Blumblum, the head of the Dublin. Oh, hey, Ian. And he may know that person, probably does, but not well enough generally that he's going to call you out and say, wait a second, this isn't you. But again, I would do research on the voices. Even back in the day, now you can hear people, most executives have done some sort of speaking, but even you could call and just get their voicemail. And I'd listen, this is Gal Hart, I'm not here right now, but he leaves a message and I will call you back, and I would hear his accent, I go, oh, I can do that accent. Again, I'd practice it a little bit, and so now I have the voice down, even if someone recognized it slightly. So there was a lot of research involved, and I did an event recently with Valerie Plame, who was the CIA agent, who was outed by the Bush administration in 2003. In the event I said to her, Valerie, you're the most famous CIA agent ever outed by their own government. She said, Robert, I'm the only CIA agent ever outed by their own government, which was really disturbing. But she was very funny. She said two things, which I found amazing. One, she agreed with my boss that hired me, that women made better spies. And the other thing was she said that the CIA agents also did a tremendous amount of research. Anytime an operative was sent out into the field, there was so much research, so much planning, because obviously you have an operative go out in the field and one thing goes wrong and the whole thing is blown. So when I was telling her about how much research we would do before we would even pick up the phone to make one phone call, it made a lot of sense to her. There is a frame in that example that stands out to me, and I feel like was probably part of a lot of these ruses, and the sense of urgency. So we all have a human desire to help our teammates. So you posing as a team member in another country, that certainly helped. But then there's also this urgency of, hey, I have the EU breathing down my neck, or hey, I have this deadline, or my boss is about to chew me out, or we're about to fail in this big project. And that false time constraint, that sense of urgency will lead people to be a little bit more pliable with the information than you just ringing them up and saying, hey, yeah, I was wondering about this, or hey, can you do me a favor? Well, and we get those texts, right? We get those emails, those phishing texts, those phishing emails, those, hey, blah, blah, blah, you've been hacked, you've been this, you click on this right away, there's a problem, and that's something for your audience to really be aware of, is that any time there's a time pressure, and you feel that when you read the text or the email, you really have to take a moment, put the device down, and think about it. Because as soon as you put the device down, and you think about it, or you walk away, you realize, wait a second, there's no rush, you know what I mean? There's nothing that's going to happen in 30 seconds, you know, my computer's not going to explode, my money's not going to all disappear from my account. And so I always tell people, you remember that line from Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, Alec Baldwin says, put the coffee down, right? Put the coffee down. Coffee is for closers. I always want to tell people, put the device down. Like when you get that text, you get that email, put it down, breathe, think about it, because 99 times out of 100, it's a scam. And reading the book and recognizing just the depths of how far this goes, but it also shed light on that this has been going on for a while. And if you look at what's, there's a lot has been exposed of the corporate spying and the other things that are going on within the government today. It's now shedding light of just how far this goes back, that it's always been there. And probably to what you're saying now, even more prevalent now, because anyone with a computer can fire up and start making these calls. And we've chatted with some social engineers before, and it's becoming a large market. I always say that I don't hack computers. I hack people. By hacking people, I don't need to know how to hack the computer, because I have the internal person do it for me. I've had people give me passwords. I've had people tell me about how their network was set up. Basically, if I can get somebody on the inside to do it for me, how easy is it? And one of the things I've been doing a lot of speaking now at cybersecurity conferences on cyber crime, and one of the things I talk about all the time, and I didn't come up with this, it's just the way it is, is that the weakest link in computer security in the network, in the firewall, in encryption, is the human being. It's not the computer. It's not the firewall. It's not the encryption. It's not the system. It's the human being that is either picking up the phone and telling you something they shouldn't tell you, or is clicking on the email there, they're doing something they should not do, and most times they've been trained not to do. Though I do think corporate America is way behind the curve on educating and training employees, because the stuff that I'm doing or that I did do in the past, because my spying days are in the rearview mirror, but I'm here to tell you I could pick up the phone now, and within 45 minutes, I could pretty much find out whatever you wanted to know about your biggest rival. It strikes me, obviously, there's the component of the rules, the research, but then there's also some parts actually in the conversation that you're leveraging. I'd love for you to lay out some of the different ways that you get human to actually give up the information. We talked a little bit about creating that false urgency, and we've all been there where we get that panic-stricken team member reach out to us. Of course, we feel like we owe them a favor, or as you said, the phishing scan that says the IRS is about to come get you, we need your social security number. Of course, that is not a skeleton key. There's going to be a lot of people who go, I'd love to help you, but I'm busy right now. I have this thing that's priority. Talk to me later. Get back to me. What were some of the other ways that you would set some frames to get people to give up the information in a timely manner for you? What I would always do is I would ask a question. I would start the conversation, introduce myself in a very friendly, gregarious way that, hey, yeah, this is who I am. We're on the same team. Sorry to bother you, but I just have one question. I just have one question. The one question, I already knew the answer to the question. I didn't need the answer, but it was a setup that I ask a question and you answer it. I would ask the question, and then the person would answer it, and I'd go, oh, great, that's what we had. Oh, and one last thing, one last thing, and then I would ask the first question of what I wanted. Then I would get that, and I'd go, oh, wait, I forgot one thing. Last thing, and then we're done. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they'd go, oh, okay. And then they would tell me that. And they'd go, oh, my God, my apologies. I forgot this other thing I need. Well, you said this was the last thing. No, no, I promise. I promise. This is the last thing. Promise. Oh, God. I need just one, and I would go on and on and on like that so that it was always just one more tiny little piece of information. And obviously, sometimes somebody would go, wait a second now. And they would basically, what I would call wake up from the hypnosis. But most times, if I could get people to believe me from the beginning, I would say somebody waking up in the middle of the call happened maybe one out of 10 calls. If I got them from the beginning, they were under my spell, they gave me all the information. And I would say out of 10 calls, I would say maybe six calls. I feel like the person never would even know that he or she had been ruse. A couple times I could feel at the end of the call that the person was going to check on me and follow up to make sure I was illegitimate. And of course, at that point, it was too late. But most times, and we prided ourselves, because we're going into these companies over and over, these big tech firms, these big Wall Street firms, we didn't want to make it hot and bothered. We wanted to be able to go in, stealth, get the information, get out without the alarms being sounded without mass email being sent to every employee at XYZ firm saying, look, these people are calling, they're saying this. Though I will tell you a funny story, one time, an email like that did get sent out as a result of our blah, blah, blah. And so this email goes out and I find out about it because I call someone else and they're like, oh, you're not who because we know when we got this email and this email came from the head of compliance and it said that you're not getting anything. Well, the very next call, I said, hey, I'm calling to make sure you got the email about the thing. Oh yeah, I got, okay, because this is the thing that they're doing, blah, blah, blah. And as a matter of fact, I need this information because I'm going to personally reach out to all these other people to talk to them. Here's some stuff I need because I got, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So because I knew about the letter now, I seem legitimate. So I actually used, and we did this all the time where we use the things that theoretically we're going to stop us and they actually help us even more. So there's that degree of plausibility that you're creating by already having the answer to the first question to create that quick report so that they feel like, okay, I am talking to the right person. He knows a little bit of information that you wouldn't know if you're an outsider. Little do they know that you did all this preparation for the call. But then this false time constraint comes up over and over again. Because if you start the call saying, hey, I need 45 minutes of your time, not a chance. But I'm assuming these calls could end up going that long, if not longer by just baiting them along and giving them that false sense of relief that you're feeling like, hey, you're really helping me out here. I've been in a jam. Thank you so much for that information. One last thing, really appreciate it. And what's interesting about that, I'm assuming many of those people ended the call feeling like, great, because they helped you out. They gave you a huge favor. And with that, as you were saying earlier, not only not setting off the alarm bells, but these I'm assuming are relationships that you want to nurture. So you have that main line to go back in for the next bit of information you need. You don't want to have to start all over from zero. Again, it's better to leave on the high note to leave that person feeling great about you so you can give them a ring a month later and get that next bit of information you need. And that was, we would call that a mole. And if you would get a mole, which was someone that would basically you could call back again and again, man, there was nothing better than a long-term mole because it just enabled you to get information much more quickly. And even if the mole didn't know maybe what you exactly needed the next time, they could point you in the right direction of who would know. And I can't tell you how many times I would call a mole and I'd ask them some question and they'd say, boy, I don't really know anything about that. I can't really help you with that. But oh, you know what? I know someone who works in that department. Do you want me to call them for you? Yeah, yeah. Could you call them? And here's the questions I want to know the answers to. Okay. You want me to call you back? I'm just going to hold. I'll just hold. And then they would call this person out. Now it's clearly they're an internal person calling another internal person that they know. So that other internal person is going to tell them anything and everything. And then the mole gets that information and gives it to me, which was another really effective way to get a lot of information. Now I'm not even getting it directly from the source, even though I am getting it from the source. I'm curious, would the work come through with specific things that week or was there was a list of information that they that certain corporations were looking for and hired the firm and then you had gotten that list to look through. Here's, here's where I have a mole. I can get this information. Okay, I have an in here. I think I can get this. How did that work out? Yeah, how did the assignments work? Yes. So the assignments, I'm not going to say that every corporation uses spies, but every corporation uses spies. Okay. And what they normally do is they're they're not hiring spies directly. They're hiring spies through a third party so that they have some sort of plausible deniability. So they're either hiring the spies. They have the consulting firms who often hire spies, the executive recruiting, the head hunting firms, a lot of them do spying themselves, but they hire spies. And so these corporations are hiring these spies. So they have some separation. But I'm here to tell you that I have personally presented my stolen data to two individuals that today are one step from being the CEOs of their two respective companies, which are two of the largest firms in the world. And these are, these are individuals that are on CNBC and talking about corporate ethics and blah, blah, blah. And here I am going, look, look what I got for you from your big rival. Check this out. Corporations are doing this all of the, all of the time and the assignments would come over. They would have certain firms that they wanted information on. They would have the information that they were looking for. But what they, the reason that they came to me is they knew that not only would I get this information that they were looking for, but in that process, I would find things out that they didn't even know about, like corporate plans that they were like, what, they're, they're opening an office in Las Vegas. Oh my God, you know, that's bad for us because that's our big market. And now they're going to take share, you know, whatever it was that I would find out that would really, they would just be blown away by, and they would be so grateful because corporations are like football teams and any, they are so competitive. It's so cutthroat, right? And if you're an executive, a CEO or a CEO, or a CEO at a firm, and let's say you're ranked seventh in your industry, you know, you're probably not going to be around that long because you got to get your firm up. So they're number one, two or three in that space in that industry. And so there's a lot of pressure. And so that's why these corporations are hiring spies because they got to find out how the top firms are being so successful, right? I'll tell you a little anecdote about Steve Jobs, legendary CEO of Apple. Apple is one of the most secretive firms on the planet and it looks like it's worked out pretty well for them, right? And Steve Jobs, what he would say to his employees is, forget about getting fired if you talk about anything related to what your work is, forget about getting fired. We're going to prosecute you. We're going to come after you, right? And that type of fear makes people go, whoa, wait a second. And Steve Jobs wouldn't even allow his designers to be listed in the Apple corporate directory because he did not want them poached, right? Imagine how many billions of dollars it would have been worked if I could have obtained those names, the iPad designers in the early days of the iPad, and then we were able to get that information over a rival firm and they were able to poach those people. You can't even count how much money that would be worked. See, now this explains a lot. So there's the case with Elizabeth Holmes. And she was, at the time, she was trying to put together this blood testing machine that would be able to diagnose all these different things that were going on and make sure that you were getting the right treatments for whatever you needed. And for a lot of people, the question was, how did she get this far in procuring all this money and raising her status and value to this point without anybody talking and getting information together that everything around them was failing miserably? Well, there's the reason right there. Nobody wanted fired, but no one prosecuted. And that all makes sense. And checking out her documentary, that was definitely one of the things that they were afraid of. And of course, we come to find out that Steve Jobs was her idol. The idea that she had, we want that idea to be true, right? We want that product to exist. What a great, incredible product for the planet that would be, right? So we're already behind the idea. We're living in an age where things are being invented so quickly that are so shocking and surprising and wonderful often that we believed that this could also be the case. Not only do we want it to be true, we believe it's going to be true. Whether it's today, whether it's tomorrow, whether it's five years now, there's going to be a way that you can do a print pick on your finger and we can find out anything that's going on way ahead of the curve. It's not invasive. It doesn't hurt. You don't have to spend a lot of money on it. So I think that's again, we wanted to believe that. And I think a lot of times in terms of the social engineering that I did and what I call Ruse, which is why the book is called Ruse, it was crazy in that the more outlandish the ploy, the crazier the story, in a weird way, the more believable it became. Yeah, less likely to be questioned. So let's talk about that. What was one of the more unbelievable ruses that you pulled? Obviously the accent thing, right? We were actors, so we could do accents. And everybody had their go-to accent. I mean, I had like three or four that I did, but the German accent, for example, do you know how many times people, when I did the German accent, how many people said nine? No, and wouldn't give me the information? Zero. Never. People, they just were like, what are the odds that somebody's calling me and putting on a German accent? It's ludicrous. People wouldn't even have had that thought in their head. And so they're like, oh, I got the guy. But I mean, look, there were so many crazy ploys. I would find out, for example, I would see people had relatives that there were multiple people in the same family that worked at a firm and we could utilize that to our advantage. Hey, I just spoke to your dad the other day. Oh my God. Yeah. Well, I know him from my work in compliance and blah, blah, blah. Oh my God. Hey, I just have a quick question for you. Well, now I know the guy's dad who's over here in this department and this is the young guy who's in his second year at the firm. So things like that, again, we're utilizing the information based on the research to leverage power. What is it? The famous quote, information is power. And that's basically the whole secret to a lot of things in life, not just corporate spine. The other thing that strikes me about this, I feel many have a misnomer or misconception around how much trust really has to be built when actually it happens a lot faster than you think. So it's not about creating this crazy bond of trust to get someone to give you the password. It's literally just allowing them to feel good in the moment and feel like they're talking to the right person. And that can happen really quickly. That doesn't need an immense back story or you proving six different ways that you are that person. In our mind, we're just looking for a couple clues that I'm talking to the right person, and then I got to get back to what I got to do too. So I'm using the favor and I got to get back to my work. I don't want to tie you up, but I also don't want to be tied up. So that's definitely working to your advantage. You mentioned earlier, so obviously consulting, we're looking at strategy. What are these other companies doing that competitive research? Super helpful. Then there's also headhunting. Sounds like to poach or pick off people inside the company who have this information that you can utilize at another firm. Were there any other use cases of corporate espionage that maybe people aren't really aware of that even surprised you when you started working? Well, just a backtrack for one second. Not just poaching people that knew secrets, but poaching who the rock stars were. We live in an era of LinkedIn and the New York Post, I think, described me as LinkedIn before LinkedIn was invented. But I'm here to tell you that even today, LinkedIn has about 70% of executives and my clients, when they hired me, they didn't want to know 70% of the executives. They wanted to know 99.999% of the executives and they also wanted them ranked and something that again, many of your audience members may not know is corporations rank their employees. And so we would often determine the internal metrics that the companies use to rank their employees. And sometimes it was related to pay. Sometimes it was related to a bonus structure, but there was often a specific ranking system and we would learn what that rank was. And so then if we could learn what employees were being paid and what their rank was, we could show our clients, hey, here's someone who is getting paid a lot and their rank time, you could go after that person, but you're not getting a lot of bang for your buck. But here's someone, younger person, usually in their career, look at this, they're not getting paid a lot. Look at how high their ranking is. There is somebody to poach because that individual is killing it and the compensation hasn't quite caught up yet. And so that information, in the business, they talk about actionable. That's really actionable information because now you poached that rock star, that young rock star, and now that's going to really help you and your team move up in the rankings and now you're not seventh anymore, now you're third because you poached that person and maybe then they told one or two of their other young hot shots and then they came over. So those kind of things were really invaluable in terms of information. And again, LinkedIn maybe has 70% of executives and you can't tell who the rock stars are. And when an executive search room interviews someone, everyone's going to say they're doing a great job. Everyone's going to in the interview say, I'm killing it and they love me, but how many people are killing it on a team of 10? One or two? Well, the other thing I think people don't realize, and we work with a lot of executives who have no digital footprint, they're completely private online. You're not finding them on LinkedIn. And even if you do find them, they're not responding. They have an assistant and a team of people screening all of that out. So to think that you're just going to poke them on LinkedIn and send a couple of messages or surf through the web and find their email address and get a hold of them, highly, highly, highly unlikely for many of these top performers inside the company. And if you can poach off a six or seventh best employee in that engineering department, and they can become the rock star in your department solely because they're being underpaid, then that's a huge win for that competitor. And all of my intelligence that I provided my clients had the cell phones of the individuals. So when my clients, if in one case it was an executive recruiting firm because they hired me to, or if it was the company themselves, they're accessing this executive on his or her personal cell phone. So all of a sudden, even if they don't take the call, they get this message. And usually people are like, wow, you've got my cell phone number. Now in this day and age, it's a little easier to do that than it was maybe 10, 15 years ago. Back then it was like, oh my God, how did you get my cell phone number? But again, that's something we really specialized in is getting that type of what we would call granular information that really is valuable to your client. Because now not only do they have the name, not only do they know about this person, not only do they know that they're a rock star, now they've got their cell phone. Yeah. And I'm imagining the rules like, hey, their mailbox is full. I've been calling their office line like crazy. They're not answering their email. Can I just get their cell phone real quick? I need a quick favor. That sort of thing, again, is invaluable to get the points of communication that are most effective to reaching these people. And as more and more of our lives have moved online, there's a huge value in being the ghost, in being unavailable, inaccessible online. When executive recruiting firms were hiring me, they were only interested in those candidates. We call them passive candidates, right? You call them ghosts, right? They're only interested in those people. They don't want the person who's on LinkedIn and is firing off emails and their resume here. They're not interested. They want those passive candidates that aren't on LinkedIn or if they are on LinkedIn, their profile hasn't been updated for six years because they're killing it where they are. And they don't want to be inundated with requests. And so how do you find the ghosts? And that's why these firms would come to us. Having one of the motivators to move these people to give you this information, you had chatted about using urgency, but another one of the motivators that you found worked really well. And we know it to be a great advertising motivator is fear. Could you speak a little bit about that, how you used Y2K and some other fear to get the information you need? What we would do is we would just try to figure out where the pressure point was, right? Where was the pressure point that by pushing on that, it was going to make somebody give, so to speak. And so one example was Y2K, back in 1999, everyone was worried that the computers were not going to work when they switched to 2000. And so it wasn't me. It was Pax in the book Pax. He recognized that. And he recognized that, man, we would call up companies and say, look, we're having to re-input every single piece of data in the computer by hand. And the people in the other end of the phone would go, oh my God, you poor thing. I feel terrible for you. What a horrible job. How can I help you? And they would tell us anything and everything that we needed to know because they were trying to help us because the Y2K thing, right? A lot of times, as I mentioned earlier, I would use kind of go guy to guy, because again, unfortunately, our society is still at the upper levels of management skewed towards men than women. And fortunately, it's rapidly balancing out, which is great. But still, especially in certain industries, you get to a certain level. And most of the people in the board rooms and the CEO suites are men. And so I would be one of those guys at that kind of level calling someone who is one or two levels below me. And so right away, there's a hierarchy there. It's I'm up here, you're down here, I need help, you have to help me. Otherwise, you're never going to get up here. And so I would use that kind of power play to my advantage. Well, who wants to even ask the guy who's a little bit above them questions and start getting suspicious of them? That's not going to look very good on you and not a position that you want to be at. And we would get some questions, I would get some and they would always be very, very apologetic. Hey, right. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to question you, Mr. Johnson, COO of the firm. But you know, you know, we get kind of crazy calls and could I just and I go, well, what do you want? I'll tell you, you want my cell phone? Yeah, if you could tell me your cell phone number, that'd be great. Here's my cell phone number. Now they look you up on the system. They see your cell phone. And they go, Oh, okay, great. So could I ask you just one more thing? I'm like, what, the cell phone wasn't enough? Well, just tell me the name of your assistant. You were in the name of course, I know that because I would not have made the call if I didn't know. And I go, Margie is my oh, okay, look, I'm so sorry, Mr. Johnson. I'm so I apologize. I just wanted to be sure. No, no, you did the right thing. Anyway, we got to move on. Here's what I need. Boom. And again, you know, obviously, this is this type of social engineering is not ethical. And it's something in the book that I reckon with a lot, right? You know, because you guys read the book, reckon with the morality. And I talk about this in the book that the way I just the way I rationalized it, and it is a rationalization, it is a justification, was that, you know, there was a review of the book. And I really liked the headline that this writer had, he said, shank the man and rake in the box, shank the man and rake in the box. And that was kind of what I'm like, look, does anybody really feel sorry for these corporations? You know, I wasn't stealing the credit card numbers, you know, or taking money from the elder, you know, I was basically going into the largest corporations, you know, in the world, getting information that oftentimes was used to get people better jobs. And there were other spies being hired, you know, so it just seemed to me to be kind of part of the capitalist system. It doesn't make it right. And again, I'm not proud of it. But it is obviously a hell of a good story. There's definitely parallel with both of the fields that you have been in for a while. I mean, in sales is certainly going to help out in getting this information and being good on the phone. And I'm sure if your whole family has been in cars, that's where you got to give the gap from because they were quite good at selling. And then of course, the all the pretexting that you're going to do as an actor learning a role, pulling that off, which plays right into this as well. I think it's funny because, you know, we talked about me being an actor, but when I went to college, I started out as an English major and then, you know, wanted to meet women because I was paying for school myself wanted to meet women and basically where am I going to meet, you know, attractive women, the theater. And so I started doing theater. And then I found out that actually fell in love with the theater. And I think it's interesting and maybe for your audience too, you know, I've done a lot of pivoting right in my life. I've done a lot of pivoting from career to career to career. And it's funny now that here I am a writer, which is where I started. So it's almost like I've gone completely back to the beginning, which I think is kind of cool. It's also ironic. But I hope it's inspirational for people that, you know, it's not, you know, because, you know, here I'm getting books published, you know, and I'm not a kid. I think it's pretty cool that people can do whatever they want at any point in their life. Well, let's talk a little bit about the transition because you go from working for someone else to then creating your own agency, if I'm not mistaken, and then hiring and training others. So once you got good at this and you realize like, Hey, this is a line of work that I'm excelling at. How do you make the transition into training others, finding the right people for this job, recruiting your own agency? Simply what happened was, as we rolled into the aughts, right, there was such demand for spying, it was insane. Remember, LinkedIn had been invented. LinkedIn, I think we started around 2005. But it wasn't until the crash that LinkedIn really took off because everybody lost their jobs or they were afraid they were going to lose their jobs. So they posted themselves on LinkedIn. But until, until, 2008, 2009, 2010, the only way you could get the kind of intelligence that was on LinkedIn, and then of course, all the other stuff too about plans and strategies, was to hire a spy. And so there was so much business, I realized, I just couldn't do it all. And I didn't want to let this kind of work go by the wayside. And then the more I would say no to people, the more people would offer to pay me. And in the book, there's one scene where I turned down this guy and he says, well, what if I pay you for the whole project in advance? I'm like, pay for it in advance? And he said, yeah. And I'm like, oh boy, really, he's off FedEx to check, it'll be there tomorrow. The whole job was paid for in advance, like the next day. Obviously, I took that job. And that was when I realized I needed help. And so I went to my old buddy, Pax, who was the guy that had got me into the job. So he started working for me. But then even that wasn't enough. And my wife's good friend had a boyfriend who was a musician. He was a bass player. He was an unemployed LA musician, just like unemployed LA actors. There were a lot of those running around. And so she begged my wife to let him come and interview. He showed up late. He showed up riding a skateboard. And I'm like, there's no way this person is going to be able to do this job rusing major Wall Street firms, people that have MBAs. But it turned out I was wrong. And he was the only person I've ever seen do the job that was as good, if not better than I was. And so he worked for me for many, many years. And so then there were three of us. And so we were able to do a lot of work, which that's why at a certain point, doing this job of corporate spying, I was making millions of dollars a year. With that, there are certainly people giving up the information on the other line who are putting themselves in a precarious situation if not losing their job over making the mistake of giving up this information. So we obviously talked about corporate greed, corporations, I get that. But how did you feel about the ethics of people potentially losing their job by coughing up information to you? That was the hardest part. And again, you guys have read the book and you see there are a couple of big scenes in there where I deal with that. I never heard of somebody losing their job because of my calling. I would have people on the phone and they'd say, I could get in trouble for this. But usually those people would end up not giving you the information because if they were that suspicious that they were saying I could get in trouble, they realized they could get in trouble. So they weren't going to give you the information. Is it possible that somebody got fired because somebody later found out that they gave me this information? Of course it is. I never heard of that personally in any of my calls. Because a lot of times again I would go back to the person that had given me the information before and theoretically they would have picked up the phone and said, hey, I got in a lot of trouble because of you or somebody else picked up the phone and well, I'm the new assistant because the other one got fired because of you. I never had that happen. But I'm not saying that it couldn't have. And there is that one section in the book where I write about an experience with how I felt about taking advantage of a mole over a long period of time. Yeah. So let's talk about that example because I'm certain that there are many listening who are like, I could never do that as a job. And how do you feel coming out of it the other side now? One of the coolest things about the book is Frank Abagnale who wrote the book Catch Me If You Can, which was made in that wonderful movie with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio. Frank Abagnale, I publish or sent Frank Abagnale a copy of the book. I do not know Mr. Abagnale, but he read the book and he flipped over it. He wrote a really wonderful blurb and he's recommended me to a whole bunch of people, speaking organizations because what he wanted me to do was to take what I had done and now turn it around and use it for good. That's what he did. I don't know how much you know about his background, but he was doing all of the scams and then he started to work for the FBI and he started to help them understand how he had done what he did and help them catch criminals and eliminate some of the ways that, you know, check fraud because that's what he was involved with was possible. And so he really encouraged me to start speaking to cybercrime conferences, cybercrime firms. And so I've been doing a lot of that. And so it's fun for me now because I can talk to people and some corporations now are hiring me to do testing. So basically now I'm going to call and I'm going to ruse. My only thing was whoever I ruse at your company, they can't get in trouble or penalize because I'm going to tell you that nine times out of 10, the person's going to give me information. And they were fine with that. And so now we're going to set up some ways where they have training and education. Because again, most of the corporations, they tell people, don't do this, don't do that. But there's no practicing of it, right? You know, it's like, you could tell somebody how to hit a good tennis shot or how to hit a golf ball. But if they don't practice it, there's no way they're going to be able to do it. And it's usually lumped in with all the other training that they're undergoing. It's just one part of a massive onboarding process. It's not the focal point for anyone. It's no more than an hour. And there's no demonstration. There's no like, hey, we're going to bring in this guy and check this out. Okay. He's going to live call right now to somebody here, somebody there, somebody there to get to find out this and listen to what he does. Listen to that. He's doing accent, you know, so that you have to, if you don't personally know the person well, you have to verify who they are. So in that situation now, what are these recommendations you have for companies around the verification to stop the ruse? Well, look, the first thing is if you don't know the person well, like we talked about before, if it's an electronic issue, you have to put the device down, back up from your computer, take your hands away from the keyboard and ask somebody, ask your booth mate, your cubicle mate, the person in the office next to you, your boss, your assistant, somebody else to look at it before you do anything. Because usually once you get a second person involved, they're going to confirm what your instincts are, and then you know it's a scam. So that's how I advise with the technology. And of course, a lot of firms also have like a hotline that you can reach out and say, hey, I got this email, and then they can kind of go onto your computer and look at it too. And in terms of the phone call, I think that's the area that corporations have really fallen asleep is that they think phone calls don't happen anymore, that everything is done. Right? I mean, we are of an age where we use the phone a lot, but younger people don't use the phone in the same way we did in terms of the voice call, right? And so corporations have kind of forgotten that there are people that are still making voice calls. I have all kinds of tricks that I use to get you to pick up your phone, because a lot of times people don't pick up the phone, but when I call you, you will pick up that phone. One very simple one that nobody thinks about it. So I'm going to call you. You're not going to recognize the number. Maybe it says anonymous, maybe it says a number you don't know. So you're not going to answer. As soon as that call goes to voicemail, I dial your number immediately again. Now it's come through a second time. Now you're like, okay, something's going on. Again, maybe there's a problem. Maybe this is my kid's school, and this is a teacher whose number I don't know. Maybe my mother, something happened, and I don't know. So you know what? I got to answer this call, because this could be important. I'm telling you, nine times out of 10, that second phone call, the person picks up the phone. If they don't, then I resort to, there's a thing called call spoofing, where you can get your number to show up as someone else's number, someone that they know. You can get your number to show up as some sort of authority number. I could have it show up as compliance. I could have it show up as the regulatory agency, whatever I want to do to make that, and we get these calls at home now too, all the time. I got a phone call the other day from the actor, Sam Elliott. Sam Elliott, okay? We know Sam Elliott from Big Lebowski and all that stuff. Well, I happened to know Sam, and Sam has been a big supporter of mine, and he's done a lot of cool stuff for me. So I have his number in my phone, and somehow some agency figured that out. And so all of a sudden, I'm getting this call from Sam Elliott, and I see the call come in, and I think to myself, well, Sam Elliott has never called me. I mean, he's been a big supporter, but he's not calling me to hang out. And I realized that it was a call spoof, and that somebody had used a relationship I had to try to get me to pick up the phone. You have relationships with people, and you see that number coming in, or that name. Again, you're going to answer the phone. There are definitely times where ruses go sideways. We talked a lot about great numbers, the pro professional here in terms of the ruse. But what happens when you get in that gut feeling that the ruse is going sideways? How do you rescue it? And when do you know to cut bait? Again, remember, I want to keep things very cool. I want to, I don't want to hackle suspicions, anger. I'm not about that at all. And so if somebody doesn't want to give me the information, I push a little bit, but I don't do anything crazy. I put them to sleep. And the way I put them to sleep is people will say, hey, you know what? I'm sorry, but I just don't believe you are who you are. And if you're really who you are, send me an email, tell me everything that you need. And I'll look at it. And I'll say, and I say, you know what? No problem. No problem. I said, give me like 60 minutes. I got a couple of other things I got to do. But give me like 60 minutes. I'll write something up and I'll shoot it to you. Worst case scenario, I'll have it to you by the end of the day. And it'll say everything I need. And it'll show I am who I am. And okay, well look, I don't mean to give you a heart. No, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. I'll shoot it over. Look for it in an hour or at the end of the day. Worst case scenario, send a first thing tomorrow morning. Now that call's ended. Person's like, okay, I didn't give out the information. They're going to verify who they are at some point. But what I've done is I put that person to sleep so they're not calling around or emailing around and telling everybody else that this guy's calling. I bought myself basically the rest of that day to get what I need. Now you left us hanging. He said you were hunted. So what is the story of when the heat was on you, Robert? Well, there were a couple of times, but I think the craziest and scariest time was Pax and I somehow got onto the radar of the authorities. And when I say the authorities, like everyone, the FBI, the SEC, the US Marshals, it was insane. And we didn't quite understand like how we had gone from never having much trouble to now basically being hunted by every agency in the country. It didn't kind of make sense to us. They showed up at Pax's place. They left messages. And I kept saying to him, you know, he had to call me on a pay phone. And I kept saying, look, do not respond to anything. Do not open the door. Do not call them back. You know, they were leaving messages. You know, we know what you're doing. It'll go easier on you if you turn yourself in. And I said, look, if they had a warrant to arrest us, they would have come and arrested us, but they haven't. So they're fishing. They were fishing. The authorities were fishing. Pax was very close to crumbling. And I really, it was a lot of work to get him to keep his mouth shut, which eventually failed. The reason that we kind of got away was the authorities were hunting this man named Kevin Mitnick. And Kevin in the early 90s was the most famous hacker in the world. Every agency was after him because Kevin was infiltrating major companies, mostly the phone companies. And he was going into these phone companies and he was creating havoc and learning all about their systems and shutting down systems and doing all of this crazy stuff. The phone companies had gotten together with the authorities because what they thought Kevin was trying to do was to shut down the internet, which was just becoming commercially viable. Right. And so imagine one person is shutting down the internet. Like today we kind of laugh about that, but that's what they thought that Kevin was doing. And so everybody got together and everybody was going after Kevin and they stumbled onto our trail because they thought we were Kevin because Kevin used a lot of social engineering again to set up his hacking, right? Because the weakest part of the cybersecurity is the human being. And Kevin knew that just as well as we did. So while we were, you know, basically, you know, in panic mode that we were going to be arrested any day, you know, by, you know, 30 people all wearing different colored jackets with letters on the back from every agency. Right. When that happened, they found Kevin and he had been on the run. They found them, they arrested him. They arrested him as a domestic terrorist. They put him in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and he ended up spending, I think, like 40 years in jail. And what was fascinating, you know, and this kind of ties into the whole rusing world was once the authorities found Kevin, they were so busy patting themselves in the back that they got their man that they just completely forgot about us. They completely dropped the ball. It was like, and I, it was amazing to me, but they were after Kevin, they got Kevin, they got their person and they were done. There was nobody going like, wait a second, what were those other guys doing? You know, and I think what's most fascinating about that is what Kevin was doing, which was quite similar to what we were doing, but Kevin wasn't getting paid. Kevin wasn't getting any money. He was just doing it for the thrill of the chase. Whereas we were being compensated and compensated well. So in a weird sort of way, if anyone should have been punished, should have been us. So we really dodged a bullet with that Kevin Mitnick situation. So Robert, considering your career, acting, writing, Abagnale putting as writing a blurb for the book, I imagine you had put together a screenplay. The book is a perfect name for a movie. So what's the scoop? Yeah. Thank you for asking. Yeah. You know, when Frank Abagnale gives you a nice blurb, Hollywood pays attention, right? So a production company reached out a really great production company with many shows on air. Together we found a showrunner, a wonderful guy. He's written, I guess what they basically call the treatment, the pitch, but it's for a TV series, not a film. It's for a TV series. We are actually about to go to market with it. So basically you pitch the studios and hopefully somebody jumps up and down and says, yeah, we want it. I think we're probably going to be doing that. We don't have a date yet, but obviously we got Labor Day coming up and then Hollywood comes back to work right after that. So sometime in September, I think we'll be pitching it and knock on wood. And who do you want to play you? I have no idea because obviously it would be the young version of myself. What's been really cool about the process is my father, you guys read the book, my father dies at a young age. So my father's been gone for a long time, but he's a big part of the book. And in the treatment that the showrunner has written, my father's actually like the anchor of the story in an interesting, like the moral heart of the story. And so it's a really big, it's like one of the, yeah, it's one of the series leads. And I would love, my daddy would ever do it, but Leonardo DiCaprio to play my father. That would be pretty epic. I'm curious in all of this, obviously, as someone who is a professional at the ruse, I'm sure there's a thrill when you're able to pull off the ruse. How does that impact your personal life and your relationships and the way that you trust people outside of this? Because to wear that hat consistently, frequently, pulling one over on other people, how easy is it for you now to just be real and authentic in the relationships you have in your life? Or were there any downsides of being a professional ruse maker? I'm going to come back to that and just say one thing for your audience. One of my favorite parts of the book is that is after the crash of 2008. And the rusing business kind of goes away because corporations are just trying to survive. They're not paying any money for spies at that moment of time, because they were all going under and just trying to survive. And so I had to take a real job. And I take this corporate job as a headhunter with this firm base out of Hong Kong. And what I found much to my chagrin and embarrassment was that the lying done face to face in corporate America was far worse than the lying that I had been doing over the phone. And in the book, as you guys know, I get duped over and over when I'm working in corporate America. I'm all of a sudden the ruse, the victim, which is pretty funny. Like the guy that's doing all the rusing, now he's in the real world and he's the sucker. And I think the audience kind of likes that because they get to see me getting my comeuppance, so to speak. In terms of the other thing, I drew a line early on with the rusing that I wasn't going to ruse in my personal life because I just knew that that was a line I wasn't going to cross because it just no good was going to come of that. So I did my best to separate the job from my personal life. And so I wasn't creating characters in my personal life. I wasn't dating three different women with three different names. I was going to try to be a good human being with the exception of this crazy job. I love that. Thank you for stopping by and sharing this story. We love asking every guest what their unique X factor is that makes them extraordinary. What do you think your X factor is, Robert? I'm going to give you two. One is luck. It's just luck. I've just had lucky. And we make our luck in a lot of ways, but there's also just luck. So I've just been fortunate. And then the other one is, believe it or not, I'm a really good listener. Oh, we believe that for sure. You can't pull off a ruse without listening closely. And so that's something I'm proud of is that the expression, we have two ears and one mouth. So to listen twice as much as you talk, I really try to do that with the exception of being interviewed. I would imagine again, that comes from the automobile sales as well, because a good salesman knows how to listen because he's selling to somebody and he needs to understand what they're looking for. You're looking to understand their objections. What is the objection to buying the car? What is the objection to giving me the information? And I could hear in the silence on the line what your objection was before it was even voiced, right? And so a lot of times before it was voiced, I could give the counter and they hadn't even given the objection. And all of a sudden they're like, oh, okay. And now they don't even say the objection because I've countered it before they can even say it. Definitely some sales skills at work there. Thank you so much, Robert. It was an enjoyable read and I'm sure our audience is going to love it. Can you tell us where our audience can find more about you? I think the best place is my website, RobertKurbeck.com. You can buy Ruse from the website. Also the trailer, there's a trailer now for the potential TV series, which you can view on there, which is kind of cool. And then there's some other writings I've done and you can read about my crazy story with OJ Simpson, which is part of the book. So this is a lot of fun stuff. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, gentlemen.