Welcome back guys to the part 2 of this fascinating episode of Women of Impact with the former CIA spy Andrew Booster Montey. Guys I'm obsessed with all those crime dramas. I'm watching them all the time on Netflix and so today I geek out with this CIA spy Andrew because we dive in and we dig deep into all the tactics, common and toxic people use to target and manipulate you and how we can actually start to protect ourselves and shut down the abusers before it's too late. And I'm telling you, my boy Andrew is not holding back. We get into the system and abusable use to progressively slowly, manipulate you. Now, understanding the foundation and context behind seemingly suspicious behaviors in a person is exactly what will help you identify them way sooner. And oh my god, guys, there's so much more to this episode. So let's just dive back in. I'm so excited. I'm Lisa Villu and this is Women of Impact with my boy Andrew Bruce the Monte, the former CIA spy. When I think about Dirty John's daughter who ended up stabbing him to think through what, you know, that, that my life is at stake at this point. So I will kill back, right? It had to take that for her to then make sure that he never does that again obviously I'm not suggesting people just going kill people but the fact that it was like her life or his she ended up having to take his but I think of how many of us don't feel the threat in that way right where it's your life or death but a lot of time it is from like a emotional standpoint like it it's the death of your emotions, the death of your soul,

when someone can do something like that. So extreme. You know, and I think a big thing is, you end up not only not trusting other people, you end up not trusting yourself. Right, and that distrust of yourself is one of the key things that a manipulator is looking for. Because if you already don't trust yourself, What that means is you put your trust somewhere else.

Because we all have to trust.

We all need a North Star. We all need a guiding light compass. So when a manipulator sees someone who doesn't trust themselves, it's the perfect opportunity to step in and be the thing that they trust. Again, I was mentioning how I know that that I'm privileged to be sitting on the show with you as a as a male on the show.

And I'm privileged to be sitting on the show with you as a male on the show. And I know it's not just because you like my hair or you think I'm friendly. Hair is dope, right? And you're very friendly. It's because CIA has a process for manipulating people. It's what CIA does. It's how it keeps America safe. CIA's job is to manipulate foreign targets into providing secrets to the United States that give the United States an unfair advantage in military, economics, and political power. Our job is to follow a very systematic manipulation process and identify the people who are susceptible to that specific manipulation process. It's what we're designed to do. And one of the prime things that we look for, when we're cultivating a target, just like Dirty John, just like the Tinder Swindler, when we're cultivating one out of many, many targets. What we're looking for is who is the person that demonstrates an inherent distrust for themselves? And then as we get to know and find those people, we then start to look for what the sources of their distrust of themselves. And when we find that the source of their distrust stems back to their childhood. Is that typically where it comes from? It comes from different places. So there are some people who distrust themselves because they made poor decisions in college or they made bad decisions with money when they were in their 20s or 30s. So there's all sorts of different places where people start to doubt themselves. But when you find someone who's self-doubt stems back to their childhood, now what you know is you have somebody who is deeply conditioned to be dependent on someone else. So George Santos was a politician, a corrupt politician who lied about his, lied about everything and still made it to Congress. That's what's crazy. When you look at his background, he came from a very poor Brazilian family, where he was one of several children, where mom and dad were highly successful, and the children were kind of left to fend for themselves with a rotating door of nannies and whatever else, right? So in this Brazilian corrupt family, this is where he kind of built his foundation. This is where his wiring was made. So is anybody surprised that as he became a 40 year old male in the United States in a predominantly paternal society that he felt absolute comfort lying about his educational background, about his work history, about everything else, to win a vote. And then, is it not the ultimate con to basically con a constituency into voting for you? I mean, that is exactly how manipulation works. You manipulate the emotions of people who are susceptible to that manipulation. So he knew what the right message was, what the right congressional district to get voted by saying the right things, just like spies collect assets by knowing what to say and how to change the vein of trust so that the target trusts the spy or trusts the con man or a constituency trusts their congressional representative or somebody trusts their doctor or somebody trusts the CEO of a company. Okay. Well, you've teased us enough now. You've got to tell us what those that manipulation prog... What do you call it? Yeah, the progression. Progression, yeah. Do you mind breaking that down? So, the first thing that you're looking for, if you remember, I talk about sense making. So sense making is a process that was refined and identified during the Vietnam War in the 1970s because it was very difficult for American interrogators to get information from the Vietnam War who were being captured. So the United States Army invested in this massive psychological program to be able to identify how we can systematically change someone's loyalty or how we can systematically manipulate people to a place where they comply with your bidding. So the first step in the sense-making process is called avoidance. And what avoidance means is you have to accept and acknowledge that every time you approach a stranger, their natural instinct is avoidance. And if you really think about it, it's how all of us are. The first time you meet somebody new, you actually want to avoid them. And they actually want to avoid you. But it's the societal construct that makes us say things like, good morning. How are you? What do you say 90 times? 90 times 10 when somebody says, how are you? Fine. Even if it's not true. Because in your mind, what you're really thinking is, how do I end this conversation? How do I avoid talking to a stranger? I'm already thinking about something else. I'm already going somewhere else. The last thing I want to do is actually be present and thoughtful in this conversation with a stranger. Right? So avoidance is the place where it all starts. So inside of sense making, you have to account for the fact that when you first approach somebody, they will try to avoid you. So a manipulator inherently understands that the first time they approach a target, the target will want to avoid them. Now the tricky part to avoidance is that within the societal culture that we live in, persistence is deemed a value. It's deemed something that we appreciate and honor. So when you try to avoid somebody, but that other person is persistent in catching your attention, or in the case of a manipulator, they're persistent in giving you something that you want, then all of a sudden you move out of avoidance and you stop trying to avoid them and instead you move into the next phase of the sense-making cycle, which is called competition. Competition is when there's an exchange of ideas and sometimes it's heated, like sometimes it's,

I disagree with you.

And other times it's, tell me more,

or let me, you know, prove it to me.

Competition is this push pool

where relationships start to get built.

Manipulators understand you have to push through avoidance

to get to competition.

But once somebody is in the competition phase of sense-making,

what they're really showing you is that they're willing to exchange ideas with you. If you think of it in terms of something we call social capital, it's a CIA term, social capital means I'm investing my capital in you. And I'm expecting a return on my investment. That's what competition is. So you push somebody through avoidance, you get them to start sharing their opinions and their ideas. Well, once you start telling me your opinions and your ideas, what you're doing is investing in this relationship. So once you get them talking, you know that that's the first hook. Yeah, exactly right. Once you push past avoidance, which you know you can do with a susceptible target, dirty John knew he could do it. The Tinder Swindler knew he could do it because with the right person, they can't avoid for very long because their J makes them feel like they're being rude and then society dictates that you at least show some friendly exchange. And like you said way earlier is that you just go out and do it multiple times and it's the one person.

So let's say you get avoidance from 20 people, but there may be that one person ends up going into the, so it was the face. They go into the competition phase. The competition phase. So that's when they're like, okay, so now let me narrow in on this person. Focus my resources and close the distance. Right, right, right. Right? So then in competition, you're getting them to exchange their ideas.

The whole reason that you invest in that person with your social capital inside of that competition phase is because you know that after enough competition, they will be so invested in the relationship that they will start to look for your validation. Validation that your ideas are credible or validation that you need to change the way that you think. And then the final phase after competition is called compliance. And compliance is exactly what it sounds like. Inside the compliance phase, you have now outsourced some element of your thinking or some element of your decision making to the other person. How often do you go to Tom, your husband, and ask him his thoughts on something?

All the time. How often do you ask him to help you make a decision? A lot. Sometimes I almost know though he's going to influence me and so I deliberately don't ask him because I need to figure out my own answer. And that's you being self-aware enough to know that you You don't want to be compliant.

You want to be independent, right?

But you are a highly educated, successful, experienced woman over 40. You have learned that the hard way. There are lots of men and women out there who have yet to learn that lesson, who believe that there's something honorable about finding a partner who they trust so much, that they can outsource every decision, every conversation, they can be totally transparent with the person, right? Because they're looking for that marriage that we were talking about early on, where it's two opposites who compliment each other. When you're so dedicated to finding that perfect fit, you're oftentimes more susceptible and willing to accept an imperfect fit and just choosing to ignore the warning signs. So that compliant piece is the final piece that they know, okay, they are now reliant on me and I can influence them in a way that I wasn't able to. Correct, if you go back to the larger SAD RAT, the SAD rat process, all of that compliance competition and avoidance phase, that all happens inside of no-like trust. That all happens inside of the development phase. Once you know that you have a reliable, susceptible, controllable source, once you know that they're suitable to constantly be manipulated, then you move them into the recruitment phase of that relationship. And now you switch their loyalty. They are no longer loyal to themselves, they are loyal to you. And that is what a manipulator wants. That is exactly what a sociopath wants. That's exactly what a narcissist wants. That's exactly what a psychopath wants. They want somebody who is wholly dependent on their guidance, their direction, their control. Because when they have that person, then all of their personal needs are met, right? Psychopaths get to hurt the person. Psychopaths have that tendency towards violence. Sociopaths get to manipulate that person and use them like a tool, narcissists get their constant validation and constant self-aggrandizement. And how long does that roughly take? Is it, is there an average? So the recognized average to turn a patriot into a trader, so this is a CIA standard, to completely switch someone's loyalty from their country to you takes about six months on average. So when it comes to a personal relationship where the stakes are much, much less, it can happen much faster. It can happen anywhere from 30 to 90 days to get someone to completely abandon their own personal values and switch their loyalty to you. It really depends on how much time and distance the manipulator can take to shrink the timeframe, right? The closer they are, the more it's called time on target. The more time on target they have with their specific target manipulation, the more they can control that person's environment, the more that they can train that person to adopt certain behaviors, it can happen very rapidly. And I think that's, that is a big part of why women have to slow things down. Like, I'm not saying that they have to kiss on the fifth date instead of the first date. I'm not saying they have to not go to bed with the guy. But what I'm saying is the thing that is really precious is our sense of independence. And once you merge your independence with somebody else, then there's it's hard to take it back. So the faster you give someone your independence, essentially the faster you've fallen through no-like trust. Is that something that weighs on me a lot? Is that when it comes to relationship specific, that's the thing that dense women's confidence that I've just seen the most. And maybe is that speed and that closeness? And maybe that's why. But when I think about someone who's been in a toxic business relationship or something, it's like if they've been manipulated, that the healing process and the damage emotionally, I've never seen as heavy as when it's a couple and it's someone that you actually fall for. And so kind of thinking is you're putting your hands together and doing that close-knast thing, I was thinking about how much that must be a big part of it because you get closer to them than you do to anybody and going back to just other things that you've said, the isolation and things like that, isolating someone that they're the only person you can emotionally turn to. Now, to the control part that you were just talking about, they really have like an ultimate control, if they can control not just what you say or what you do, but how you feel. And then when you put all of that through the lens of a personality type, and I'm not and con men are notoriously uneducated. Like they're they're smart, but they're not educated. So I would never imagine that a malicious actor actually understands personality types. But oftentimes the women who are conned are highly educated. They're very, very smart. Sometimes they're so smart that they talk themselves out of the warning signs that they themselves see. Right? So understand that if you are that highly successful woman, if you are that that woman who is longing for a partner that's a perfect fit, take your Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, find out what your what your Myers-Briggs type is because it will tell you so much about how you're wired. And once you know how you're wired, then you can start to understand both who you're

looking for because they will be the opposite of you. But you can also understand how the opposite

of you can present themselves in very unhealthy ways. So that gives you a chance to avoid the wrong

person and attract the right person. I am super am super pro woman and we've had this conversation. I was raised by a single mom and my grandmother. I have two sisters. I am so proud of my daughter. I am very proud to be raising a little boy who understands that that boys and girls are equals right. I'm super proud of my son. When I married my wife, I took her last name. Oh, wow. So can you realize that? So my wife's maiden name is my current married name, which totally confused the banks, confused my universities and everybody else, right? Made CIA very happy when I took my wife's last name because they basically had someone who had a legal name change. Oh, really worked out. So I am one of the biggest fans out there for women doing amazing things because from what I've seen, women in my life, women can do things that would make a man cringe or break under pressure. That said, everybody, including women, have to take responsibility for their own decisions. And the more we feel like there's some sort of safety in outsourcing our decisions, it's a false sense of security. When we feel like there's some sort of honor in subjecting ourselves to somebody else because it makes life easier or it makes us feel comfortable or it makes us feel secure, there's also inherent risk in that. That doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means be very, very selective in how you do it. Be very empirical, be very intentional, be very patient. Because the person who loves you, they're gonna love you whether it takes you seven days or 70 days to actually let them into your, what we call a secret life, right? So actually, yeah, if you don't want to break and down the three lives. So everybody has three lives, and these three lives dictate kind of how we interact with the world around us. There's your public life. Your public life is what you do every day. When you put on your clothes, when you put on your makeup, when you put on your fake smile, when you call somebody on the phone and you sound energetic, when you're actually tired. That- Who does that? That's you. That persona is your public life. It's what everybody sees and you do it so that you can protect your inner lives, which is your private life and your secret life. So if the public knows your public life, then you have your small group of friends and associates and peers, the closest group, they know your private life. So while your public life, they may think that you always look beautiful and smell great. In your private life, they know that milk gives you gas and your feet really stink. That's your private life, a small circle of people who really know you, and you show vulnerability with the people in your private life. You don't show vulnerability with the people in your public life. But then there's a third level called your secret life. Inside your secret life, that is a place where you and only ever maybe a handful of people will ever actually get to go, Because it's inside your secret life where you hide your shame. It's where you hide your embarrassment. It's where you hide all the things about yourself that you are the most guilty and fearful and regret and remorseful about. That's all in your secret life. When going back to the no-like trust model, when you let somebody into your secret life, you basically never let them leave. So even if they violate your trust, even if they disappear for 15 years and go do something else around the world and they come back into your life, they come right back into your secret life. Once someone gets there, you can't really ever kick them out. It's very similar to when you fall into trust.

...