Even if you have like the perfect sort of background story, you still need to be super comfortable with the lie, you know, and to, you know, if someone comes to you on the street, what's your name, you know, your background, you need to be super comfortable with lying. So how are you able to achieve that? If you remember, we were talking earlier about how they recruit for different jobs. And one of the personality profiles that they look for in a field operator, they're looking for something called moral flexibility. And moral flexibility means exactly what it sounds like. It means that you have a set of morals that you believe to be true, but you're flexible, right? Maybe you don't use one today. Maybe you use it tomorrow. And there are many, many people, if you don't know this, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. There are many, many people who are very good naturally at lying. And they are morally flexible by nature. That's just their psychology, right? It's not that they're cheating spouses. Yeah. They just sometimes want to have sex with a different person. Yeah. That doesn't I mean, it's very difficult for somebody who's black and white to understand this because people who think very black and white are thinking in absolute terms. Right. You have to be loyal to this and you have to be loyal to that and you have to be committed. and there are lots of people out there who are able to have a commitment but then they're also flexible. They're able to say, I would never hurt a person but as soon as somebody threatens their child, they will hurt that person. Yeah, absolutely. And they won't lose sleep over it. So that's the kind of person that CIA recruits for the kind of job that I do and I am that kind of person. I am that morally flexible person. I don't want to hit you but if you threaten my child, I will hit you. I don't want to hurt anybody, but if you threaten my family, I will hurt you. I don't want to, you know, when I, here's a perfect example, it's a quick story. I was, I was driving back from a training event. I was in CIA. I had just gone through a one week training. The training I was in was a driving and first, first response, like first aid kind of training, field triage. And I was about four hours from home. So the Training was at a secret location about four hours outside of Virginia. And I'm driving back to Virginia, back to my home, and I'm not in my own name. Right? So I've got a driver's license that isn't me. And the car is rented under an account that isn't me. And I'm driving back. I'm still in the United States. I'm an American citizen. I'm a CIA officer. And there's this, as I'm driving, there's this horrible car accident. And I'll never forget it because I was driving on a, on, um, in the United States, we have highways and highways are two lanes going in one direction and two lanes going in an opposite direction. And they usually have a small gap of grass or maybe they have, uh, some kind of rail between them. So I'm driving and it's high speed, but it's also busy. So there's lots of cars and the cars are moving fast. And as I'm driving and I'm listening to music, I'm probably two hours into my drive. I see a big what's known as an SUV in the United States like a big truck and I actually see it hit the curb and turn upside down in the air and I'm driving not underneath it, I'm driving behind it but I actually see a car that turns, hits the thing and then flips upside down and crashes and when it crashes cars are driving out of the way it's spinning, everybody's moving 70 miles an hour I don't know what that is in kilometers but I see this horrible accident and I know I just got back from a driving and first response course like I could help but my driver's license is not mine and the car I'm in is not mine and if I go to this scene there will be police here soon there will be ambulances there will be reports there will be documentation and we were trained that when you undercover when you in any identity other than your own you have to avoid any kind of documentation, any kind of U.S. government documentation or foreign documentation. So even though I could help, I didn't help. And I was okay with that because I have that moral flexibility. So they look for people that can see the gray area. So not like black and white, but nuances and are flexible. Absolutely. And that's a great way to put it. That's the same way my wife puts it is it's living in the gray. It's not living in a world of right and wrong. It's not living in a world of good and bad. It's a living, it's living in a world where this is good for me now, but bad for me later and being able to understand how to navigate that world. Really fascinating. And, you know, in the book, you mentioned that Falcon, you know, the country you were in, tried to trick you into a honey trap, I think you call it. Can you tell us what that means? Absolutely. So honey traps are very common. If you haven't discovered your natural born spy skills, then somebody else might be using theirs against you. CIA teaches us that there are only three types of people in the world. Those who motivate, those who manipulate, and those who are being controlled by one of the other two. I created a three-minute CIA-style quiz to help you unlock your secret psychological advantage and identify your hidden blind spot. This test was developed to help you weaponize your natural-born gifts and use them to get ahead of 99% of people in power, wealth, and purpose. It was also designed to make sure that you can protect yourself against those who would use their skills against you. All you have to do is click on the first link in the description below or scan the QR code on your screen to start your spy quiz now. I want you to discover your secret spy superpower and use it for good before somebody else uses their power against you. Romanians use honey traps very often. Really? Yeah. So honey traps are sex exploitation operations, what we call sexploitation, sexual exploitation. They're what you see in the movies anytime a beautiful girl talks to a man. Now the movies make sexploitation operations. They make these honey traps, these honey pots. They make them very fake, right? Like a movie honey trap, beautiful girl walks into a bar and she's flirtatious with this guy and that's how it works. And it's always fancy and it's a beautiful first world bar and she's in a cocktail gown and everybody looks great. That's not how they work in real life. Okay. Because sexual exploitation in real life, most people's sexual frustrations are very dark. They're not the kind of like most people don't have a $40 drink at a bar when they have some sort of tension in their life. It's usually that's where they go because they have to be there for work. or that's where they go because they have to be there for an event or maybe that's where they're staying and they're staying in a luxury hotel but when they're when people are looking to do something kind of sketchy yeah they go to sketchy places so most actual sexploitation operations are sketchy they're gay men approaching straight men who are bi curious oh interesting it's very difficult for the average person to understand how dark actual operations really are. Because if you want to get somebody to think about what the goal is in espionage, the goal is to turn somebody into a traitor. Right? You're not trying to steal secrets about like, what's your password? You're trying to steal secrets that the government has given that person. They've been trusted with a secret So when you think about the average trader the average trader is somebody who is seen by their country as a patriot They built a 15 career in the military They're a politician. They've grown to the top of their company. These are people who have spent decades earning trust. And now you have to find a way to get them to violate that trust in just a few hours or a few weeks or a few months. How do you do that? You don't do that by approaching them on healthy issues. You don't talk to them about their kids and how they play soccer. You don't talk to them about the joys of marriage. You don't make friends with them on positive, light things. You connect with them on very dark, very secret things. Because when somebody is willing to go with you to a ladyboy bar where you buy them a ladyboy prostitute, once somebody has sex with a transvestite and you've paid for it, then they'll tell you any secret you want. Because what could possibly be more secret than that? Wow. Right? And that's the way true espionage works. So to get back to your original question, I was approached, I was at a hotel in Falcon and I was in my Alex Hernandez persona. And as I was checking into the hotel, I was being given all the royal treatment because I was a foreigner, like I said, trying to bring business to Falcon. So they treat you very well. And part of that good treatment is they usually try to send you prostitutes. They try to set you up with people who will benefit you, but who will also compromise you. So as I'm sitting there in my hotel, I get a phone call from the hotel concierge and the hotel concierge says, we are we are gifting you a in-room massage. And all you have to do is tell us what time to send the person up. and right away because we had studied a falcon i knew what i was getting into i knew that what that person would would be bringing with them is more than a massage yeah and i also knew because of that phone call that my room was bugged had to be because they wouldn't send somebody up to give me an in-room massage unless they had already known the room would be wired to record so that gave me some very interesting and valuable information because now i knew in that room I had to behave. I had to not just make good decisions about, you know, whether or not I would have sex with somebody, but I had to also think about every phone call and every piece of paper that I took out and every note that I wrote down because it was going to be wired. Wow, that sounds really stressful. And I want to get into that in a bit, but I was really curious, you know, just coming back to the honey trappers, what techniques do they use to sort of charm their targets. Do you learn anything like that in the CIA, for instance? Absolutely. When you're trying to target somebody with sex or trying to target somebody for sexual exploitation, it's not at all what you think it is. It's not what you see in the movies. It's not what you see in books, this whole charm offensive. If you really think about what charm is, charm is nothing more than being able to quickly connect with somebody. And when you're talking about connection, what you're connecting with is not somebody's hobbies or interests. You're connecting with them emotionally. So when honey trap operations are built, the target that you're looking for is usually profiled so that you understand what their emotional foundation is. Now, there's only a few core emotions that drive most people. Joy is a core emotion. Anger is a core emotion. Fear is a core emotion. But so is shame And so is guilt And so is disgust Right And what ends up happening is anywhere in the world most people hide their shame and their guilt and their disgust and they overemphasize their joy and their happiness and their confidence. When you see somebody who's confident, probability-wise, they're most likely not actually a confident person because there's five or seven other core emotions. So how could everybody be happy? Clearly one out of every six people is happy, but the other five are not happy. They're just hiding it. So when you're building these sexual exploitation operations, you're looking for people who are pretending to be something they're not. They're acting like they're happy, but in fact, they're really angry in their soul. They're angry. How would you know whether someone is faking it or someone is truly confident and happy? Well, there's two ways. The first way, again, when you're talking about sex operations specifically, those aren't operations that you just wing. You don't make them up. You don't go out into the street and find somebody and then try to lure them in with sex on the first date, right? You have a dossier. You target the person. You create a profile. so for weeks before you ever meet them you've got information about their travel patterns and their phone calls and and what they're interested in and what they wear and what they drink and who they're talking to and all that stuff right so the you don't see that in the movies this is a big part of why it's important to understand real world operations versus the movies in the movies it's like you know beautiful lady walks in and she sits next to a guy at the bar and they hit it off that's not how it actually works in real life that woman would have been chosen for that man based off of his profile does he like tall women or short women does he like fat women or skinny women does he like young women or old women does he like women who are bossy or women who are passive and then they would go in and they would find the perfect person to fit his profile. The other thing is the perfect person is very rarely actually a trained intelligence officer because that perfect person, the person who actually has sex with the target, that person doesn't need to know how to collect secrets. All that person needs to know how to do is get the target to have sex with them. And then the photos, the cameras, the photos, the microphones, all of that creates the compromise. And then all you have to do is have an officer come in next. So if you go back to my story, the hotel called to offer me a massage. The person who would have come in and given me the massage and more would not have been an intelligence officer. That person would have been a hired masseuse slash prostitute. The cameras that were in the room would have guaranteed that whatever happens in the room was recorded. And then what would have most likely happened is the masseuse would have left or even right after sex would have happened, there would have been a knock at the door and that would have been the intelligence officer who would have then come in and been like, you know what happened here. I know what happened here, but nobody else needs to know. That's how these operations actually work. And they are notoriously successful by former Soviet states and by the Russians, which is why Romania is one of those countries that not only does these operations, but does them well because Romania was brought up in the world of the KGB. Thank you.
