658 – Lie your way to riches: Tom interviews Robert Kerbeck

Episode 658 – Robert Kerbeck
Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

Hey, everybody, is Tom here with episode 658 of Screw the Commute Podcast. I'm here with Robert Kerbeck and he lies for a living. And guess what? I'm thrilled about it. Now, many of you know I lied for six years straight in my former entertainment business, and I have a TV show in development in Hollywood that goes after liars and cheats. So how is it that I could be so happy of having a super liar on my show? Well, you'll find out in a few minutes. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 657. That's Amy Biddle. She is a brilliant lady, much smarter than me. I interviewed her and I actually made a deal with her to help promote my school. So you'll see her emerging then. But you've got to listen to episode 657, and any time you want to listen to it back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com and then slash and the episode number 657 for Amy, and I know you'll want to pass on this one 658 on Robert. Now I want to thank everybody. We just started a patriot on account to to fund our scholarship program for persons with disabilities. It starts out as little as $3 a month. So check that out. It's through screwthecommute.com/patreon. You'll be doing something that will really help people that kind of got a shitty, you know, deck of cards or hand dealt to them and we're going to fix it.

We're getting them hired in internet marketing and digital marketing where they not only can learn from home, they can get hired from home. And this is real. And it's kind of one of the things from the pandemic that's one of the small silver linings is that I've been preaching 28 years. You can work from home. And after the pandemic people were saying, Oh, you can work from home. I didn't know that. So yeah, you can. I've been doing it myself for 45 years, so I know you can't believe it was my little baby face whenever you see my videos, but that's true.

All right, let's get to the main event. Robert Kerbeck's true crime memoir is called Ruse. Lying The American Dream. From Hollywood to Wall Street. It's the story of how a wannabe actor became the world's greatest corporate spy. And many of you may have heard of Frank Abagnale. He's the author of Catch Me If You Can, said Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering or what he calls "rusing" and taking it to a whole new level. And then Shonda Rhimes and the company, Shondaland's producer of really enormous amounts of shows, including inventing Anna, described Ruse as the story, as a story almost too good to be true with no shortage of wild stories. So, Robert, are you ready to screw? The commute?

Looking forward. I'm looking forward to it.

Good, good, good. So, hey, Robert, I am thrilled to have you here. Yes, I've. I'm a professional liar, too, but not to the level you are. So how did you get started in this? I saw you in a in a darn exercise video with O.J. Simpson. I mean, I guess that might be a good start for you that he meant to you or what?

Okay. That's the first time anyone said that. That is funny. Yeah. You know, I was a young guy. My hometown is Philadelphia. And the Kirby family name is well known in Philadelphia because my family are big automobile dealers, and my great grandfather sold horse carriages before cars were invented. My grandfather took over that business, my father took over that business, and I was supposed to take over.

Well, isn't that a good primer for learning how to lie? Being a car dealer?

Yes, it is. It is. And that was part of the problem when I graduated college and I went to work for my dad, I didn't feel great about the kind of trickery and dishonesty in car sales. It didn't feel right to me, which of course ended up being quite ironic with the career that I stumbled into as a corporate spy. But eventually I just couldn't do it and I really wanted to try being an actor. And so I finally moved to New York. And as your listeners know, artists need survival jobs, and 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, but he was very mysterious about it. He kind of started to talk about it and then he shut up right away and I said, Dude, help me out. I'm broke. I need a job. And so he, you know, kind of reluctantly set me up with this interview. I went. To this woman's place. This this business was run by a woman. She was living on the Upper East Side. I went to her apartment, which was in a doorman building penthouse apartment. And when I went into the apartment and saw how luxurious was, I knew whatever this woman was doing, it was really lucrative. So obviously, I was quite intrigued. And we had this very strange interview where she didn't ask me a question about my job, my skills. She didn't tell me anything about the job. She sent me on my way. I figured she wasn't hiring me. My buddy called me and said, You got the job, but don't get too excited because she hires everyone because no one is able to do this job.

That's and that's kind of a challenge, isn't it?

Yeah, it was a challenge. And the next day I went and I began my apprenticeship as a corporate spy. Of course, I didn't know quite what I was getting into. I go to this woman's apartment in Brooklyn and she invites me into her bedroom and I was like, What the hell is this for?

Well, that's the casting couch. You actors should know about that, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But you should have lied and say, Oh, you're the most gorgeous woman I've ever seen, so.

Well, she actually. She actually was quite attractive, you know, so. But she, you know, sits me down at this desk in her bedroom. You know, there's a futon on the ground. And she begins to tell me that what we're doing is we're calling corporations and we're using our acting skills to create personas, voices, accents, personalities to trick people at major corporations to tell us things that they definitely should not.

All right. So give me some of that German accent that that I heard.

Yeah. This is Gail Hart, the calling from the office in Frankfurt. We have the European Union regulators here speak, and they need some information from the states.

So what how many different voices can you really do? Great.

Well, you know, I can do a couple, but it was funny how each person had their own accent that was like their go to accent. Like the woman who trained me, hers was Irish, you know, somebody else was British, mine was German, you know. So we all had the one like I could do other ones. But for me, the German one just worked just close. I never had anybody tell Gerhart or whatever German name I was using. I never had anyone tell him, Nein, you know, because one of the crazy things about this job and the bruising was and it's a little counterintuitive, but the more outlandish the ruse, the more believable it became.

Right? Right. Yeah, I've lived that for sure. Now, now, let me take you back, though, for a minute before we get too far ahead of ourselves. I was not aware that the CIA recruited from Lower Moreland Senior High School. Is that like the hotbed for spies in the country? I don't know.

Well, I'm impressed. You've done your research. Yes. So Valerie Plame, who was a CIA agent who was outed by the Bush administration in 2003, and I did it. I did a book event with Valerie and Valerie. I said you were the only you were, you know, outed by the government. And Valerie explained to me that she's the only CIA agent that has ever been outed by the United States government. Yikes. Which is pretty incredible.

Well, how does yes, how does she know that there aren't 50 other ones in that school getting ready to come up to the ranks?

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. But yeah. So Valerie and I went to high school together. We were the same class. We went to school from third grade on. We're very close. And of course, I didn't know she was a CIA spy until 2003, and she didn't know I was a corporate spy until very recently. And of course, it was hilarious that here we'd known each other all these years and we kept these secrets for obvious reasons from each other.

Now, you didn't go get married to her, did you know?

But we just did a book event together and we spent the weekend. I was with my wife. She was with her husband. And man, I love her. She's a great person. She recently ran for Congress in New Mexico and fortunately she didn't win. But she's just a really great person. And when you hear her story and what she went through, you know, she didn't ask for her life to be blown up. And and it was a really you know, she went through a lot. It was a very stressful experience.

Why did they do it? Why did they do it?

You know, I mean, going back in time, her husband wrote an article, I forget I think it was The Washington Post. He wrote an op ed and it basically said Saddam Hussein did not have yellowcake uranium and so he did not have weapons of mass destruction because I guess you needed the. I'm not a weapons expert.

Yeah.

Yeah. But you needed the uranium to be able to make. The weapons of mass destruction. And he said he doesn't. Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction. And, of course, the Bush administration, they didn't want to hear that people there wanted to go to war with Iraq. Obviously, we did go to a war with Iraq. We did find out that this gentleman, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband, was correct. He was right. And in revenge for Joe Wilson writing this op ed, they outed Valerie Plame to get back at him.

It makes sense. It makes sense. Yes. So, no, no love lost between spies, I guess, huh? Now, did you ever do things in person? Were you only on the phone and computer?

Well, you know, remember, back in the day, we didn't have the Internet stuff. And so using the phone was commonplace. But there were times that we did go in person. We would go to events, we would go to parties, we would go to bars. But what I learned pretty quickly was not only was that going in person much more scary and and potentially dangerous because now you're people are putting a face to your voice. They're meeting you, you know, are you walking into a trap? That was one event I went to where I was really sure that they were, that they had just brought me there to trap me. And all of a sudden the authorities were going to come out and I was going to be arrested. And so what I began to realize was the anonymity of the phone call was actually safer. And also in a weird sort of way, easier because these corporations and today, even more so than in the nineties and aughts when I was kind of at the height of my spying career. Corporations have offices all over the world. They had all offices all over the world in the nineties, in the 2000s. So you could be from anywhere, you could be from London, you could be from Tokyo, you could be from Frankfurt, you could be from Dublin, you could be from Kansas City. And so people in the corporation would go, Oh, I've got Gerhardt and Frankfurt on the line. Hey, buddy, what's going on? How can I help you? Right. Everybody is taught to be a good to be a good corporate teammate. And so we would utilize the anonymity of the voice over the phone in a weird sort of way that we were actually able to get far more information utilizing that.

Okay. But but I understand from my research about you that you still practice, you're in person stuff like, for instance, pretending to be drunk while playing ping pong at a wine tasting, things like that, you know? So you're not fooling me. I've I've been around the block, buddy, but. Well, also I in my anti scam work, the scammers say if you think you're too smart to be scammed, I want to meet you.

Oh, please bring it on. Right, exactly on right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, look, those are the people that are the perfect marks. The people that are. I tell people in cybersecurity all the time, overconfidence is the killer. When you think your network is impenetrable and your people won't give up information. I mean, you're done. I'm. I'm getting anything I want from you and your company.

Exactly right. Yeah. So. So I run into a lot of that. So. So this was going big guns for a while from, you know, up to a couple of million dollars a year for you. And then what happened?

Well, what happened was the crash of 2008 came and obviously business stopped on a dime. All business stopped on a dime. Commerce stopped. And so corporations that previously had been spending tremendous amounts of money on corporate spying because they wanted to know what their rivals were up to. And I describe what we were hired to get. People say, well, what were you hired to get? And I say anything that a rival would want to know. I basically used the football analogy. We would get the playbook on our clients biggest rivals. We would know everything about them, their top people, what they were paying, what their future plans were, or what their strategies, products in the pipeline, anything and anything that a corporation would want to know. But when 2008 came in, business stopped. Corporations were just trying to survive, right? So they weren't they didn't care about what their competitors were doing in that moment. They were just like, Well, we've got to just survive. So all of those kind of expenses, including corporate spying, were just they were eliminated. Right. And so one of the one of my favorite parts of the book is when that happened, I had to actually take a job in corporate America. I had to leave my tool shed, my converted tool shed where I practice my using. And I had to literally go and get a job in corporate America. I was in New York City working at this major executive recruiting firm. And what I found, which was really quite amazing, was that the lying done in corporate America face to face was far worse than the lying that I'd been doing over the telephone. And and if and if you have any people that are kind enough to pick up a copy of Ruse and you're seeing my that I'm tricking people and you're kind of getting mad at me. Don't worry. I get my comeuppance when I go to work in corporate America. Boy, everything the tables get turned in. I become the victim of a lot of ruses.

Well, yeah. And they say in corporate America, your friends stab you in the chest instead of stabbing in the back.

You know that? No, no. Truer words could be said. That's exactly what it was. And I was so naive that I thought these people were my friends and I thought they were into me and supporting me. And, you know, and that's exactly what they were doing.

You ended up a pseudo selling your company.

When I say.

Sudo because she didn't get the money, right?

Yeah, that's right. That this headhunting firm brought me in, that they were going to buy my company and they were going to pay me all this money and they were going to do this and do that and none of it happened. And they ended up stealing my top researcher, top spy that I personally trained and and basically took him and so no longer needed me and then fired me and gave me nothing.

Yikes. Yikes. Oh, boy. I'd be hitting them back. So. So. So then what did you do?

Well, you know, then I basically had the proverbial midlife crisis, you know, because here I've been doing this job that I was never really proud of the job. I mean, it's obviously a hell of a crazy story. My publisher said nobody's ever written a book about corporate spying before. I don't know that that's true, but that's what they told me. And yeah, so I just was I was always conflicted morally about the book and ideal a lot with that in Roose the moral issues. So I didn't want to go back to spying but I didn't want to go broke. And so for a long time I was just down in the dumps. And one day I, I wrote basically a suicide note. But it wasn't it wasn't me contemplating suicide. It was in the voice of a character. I had been an English major in college, but I hadn't done any writing for basically since then. And I wrote this little piece and I read it to an actor buddy of mine, and he said, You know, you got to write that character in a book. And I did, and I wrote this book, and I'm here to tell you that the book was terrible, but it inspired me and it inspired me to learn to improve my writing and improve my prose. My craft started going to some writing conferences, started getting better, started getting short stories published in magazines.

Well, you got it. You got a book that's that's not so terrible called Malibu Burning. I tell him about that.

Well, that was that was basically my first book. You know, I live in Malibu and we had this terrible, terrible wildfire a few years ago that burned down half the town. My wife, teenager, and I fought the fire, saved our house. 17 of 19 homes on our street burned to the ground. So we were the only ones left. And it was a hair raising, obviously life changing experience. The L.A. Times asked me to write an essay about it, which I did. And then a publisher read that essay and asked me to write a book, which I did. And that book turned into Malibu Burning, which I'm honored. It's won a number of national awards, got a lot of attention. It's being made into a documentary because, as your listeners know, wildfires are getting worse, larger, more ferocious areas that never burned or burning. And so we all have to start looking at what we can do to mitigate these fires. And there are a lot of simple things that homeowners can do, and they're unfortunately, we're not really doing them the way we can. And that's why these fires are getting worse.

Amazing. Amazing. What do you dig a moat around your house or what? What do you do?

You know? Yeah. I mean, the simplest thing is you can't, you know, people think that there's some wall of flames that just hit your house and burns it down and incinerates it. And that's not really how these fires work. That can happen. But in general, what happens is there are all these embers flying through the air, just basically little tiny rock sized pebble sized fireballs. And you just have to make sure that there's nothing around your house that's flammable. You know, a lot of times it's not the house that burns down. It's your your lounge chair that's sitting on your deck has a cushion. And balance on the cushion cushion obviously is flammable. It catches on fire. Then the chair is wood, the chair catches on fire. The deck is wood, the deck catches on fire, The deck catches the house on fire, the house burns down. So a lot of times it's it's moving. Anything that's flammable away from your house or inside your house, you put wet towels around all your door frames so that because sometimes embers sneak in under your doors. So there are all these little tricks you can a lot of times you need to install ember resistant vents so they prevent embers from getting inside, like the vents in your home. All homes have vents and those things cost $100. So these are such simple things.

Or all these things in that book or is just the story.

Of it. Yeah, Yeah. Well, the book is the book. I write books that are page turners. You know, people say Roose reads like a spy novel, which I love that I'm really grateful for that review. But Malibu Burning, you're in there, you're feeling the heat from the flames. But while I'm telling these intense stories, I'm also showing tips about things that can be done, because at the end of the day, we want people to enjoy reading a book. But if it's about something that's important, we want to give them some takeaways that can make them safer or improve their lives. Whatever it is.

I'm totally into it. All right. We've got to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we're going to ask Robert what's a typical day look like, him promoting his book and what will we see when we buy our copy of Rue's Lying The American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street. So, folks, about 25 years ago or so, I kind of turned the Internet marketing guru world on its head and that people at my level were charging 50 or 100 grand to teach you what they knew. And I knew a lot of these people, they're they're they're rip offs. They'd be hiding out, I don't want to say in Malibu, but maybe if you gave them 50 grand up front. So I said, I'm going to turn this on its head. So I charged an entry fee, which is like ten times cheaper. And then I tied my success to your success. So for me to make my 50 grand, you had to make 200 grand. Well, people really like this and 1700 plus students to the program still going strong. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. You're getting a immersion weekend here at the giant retreat center here in Virginia Beach.

We have our own TV studio where you shoot your marketing videos. We edit them for you and send them to you when you get home. It's all one on one. So you're not lumped in with people more advanced or less advanced than you. So it's it's the just powerful program and I triple dog dare other people to put their program up against mine and they won't do it. I think Robert just fell off his chair, but we'll revive him here in a minute, folks. So anyway, check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. There's no high pressure here. If you can't see the value of this, then I probably can't help you. So check it out.

All right, let's do some CPR on Robert since he fell off his chair and hit his head and we'll get him back. So, Robert, what's the typical day look like for you now that you're promoting your book? And it's possibly going to be a TV show or a documentary and then tell us when we buy our copy what we're going to see in the book.

Well, you know, I think the the book is kind of two books in one. So there's obviously corporate spying, corporate espionage behind the scenes. Look at how that's done and how corporations, you know, we all know the Russian spy on the Chinese, the Chinese spy on us. But most people are shocked to find out that major corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spy on each other. So that's obviously a big part of the book. But there's also kind of this whole Hollywood, you know, look at my life as a young actor. I was a working actor. I did 50 major TV shows, including Star Trek. I have my own Star Trek card. And so you're going to see all these interactions with Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Yoko Ono, Kevin Spacey, O.J. Simpson you referenced earlier. So you see all of these insane interactions I had with these people, and there are a lot of fun to.

So it's a it's a story. But well, we still learn how you did some of this stuff.

In terms of the bruising.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's there's countless you know, basically I call them ploys, right? So there was the the compliance ploy, there was the inside ploy. There was the dropping the grapefruit ploy, you know, so there were all these different ploys that we would use to set up Mark's inside a company to get them to release information or even find information for us. You know, I talk about major corporations today, spend billions of dollars, and soon it will be trillions of dollars a year in terms of cyber security. And they only spend a minuscule fraction of that on training and educating their employees not to fall victims to social engineering or what I call cruising. And I'm here to tell you that, you know, I'm not a a hacker. Hacking computers. I just hack the people and I have them hack the computers for me.

Exactly. Yeah. It's beautiful. It's hard to believe that now. Well, what I wanted to ask you is, do people have to get back to you sometimes? And then how did you handle did you have different phone numbers or how did you answer the phone if if you had more than one thing going at a time?

Yeah. So that's a great question. And so in general, we did not want to do that. Most times when people say, Hey, let me get back to you, they're not going to give you the information, they're going to check on you, they're going to verify you. They're actually doing what they should do in that moment, which is, you know what my spidey sense says? There's something wrong here. Let me call you back. Now. Every once in a while, someone's like, look, I'm really busy. I want to give you this information. Let me call you back. But I'd say that would be one out of ten, nine out of ten times when people are saying they're going to call you back, they're not going to give you the information. And so we would press that. We need the information now. And your listeners, I'm sure we're all getting phishing texts, phishing emails, phishing phone calls. And one of the common denominators in all of those scamming attempts is the sense of urgency.

Urgency, urgency. Scarcity is there's a copywriting technique we use all the time.

Exactly. Exactly. And so we would be pressing, Look, this is an emergency. We're off site, we're in Washington, DC, we're meeting with the US regulators, we're in Brussels meeting with the European Union regulators. You know, this is a major catastrophe for a corporation. And so this is why I need you to do what I need you to do.

I love it. I love it so much. Now, what's interesting to me is that even though you're totally outed with this book, people are still calling you like crazy to hire you, right?

I would say that's been the most surprising thing out of this whole book experience, is that by writing the book, I had more requests to hire me than I had in the previous ten years. I mean, my you know, my email was filled with major corporations saying, Oh my God, we've been looking for a great corporate spy. How much do you charge? We've got tons of work for you, you know. And I said, Don't you know that I'd actually outed myself? I wouldn't be a very good spy if I started spying now, because I basically put a target on my back. One of the things about writing the book now is I waited for the statute of limitations to run out on any potential crimes that I'd committed. Right. So. So theoretically, I'm completely in the clear and I don't want to jeopardize that.

You can work, though, totally legitimately, from the opposite side of the fence, right. Teaching them.

That's what's going to happen. That's what I do now. And by the way, if. Are any of your listeners that are looking to pivot to a career in corporate spying? Please reach out. Go to my website, RobertKerbeck.com. You can email me and I will send you these contacts and and you could become a corporate spy.

Well, we need a training course on how to do it.

I know, right? That's true. Yes, that's right. And it was funny because over the years, so many of my actor friends wanted to try this job. And so they would basically go, look, you're making this great money. You're working from home. Please, please. So I would eventually go, okay, look, come on in and forget about lasting the day. Most of them didn't even last an hour. And it was. And here's the funny thing is it was almost never the moral issue. It was never like, wow, you know, I don't feel comfortable. It was like, Oh, my God, I can't do this. I cannot come up with lies spur of the moment, think on my feet charm, convince people I can't do it. It's impossible. And in all the years I did it and all the people I trained, I can count on two fingers. How many people worked out as spies?

Well, that's why you have to to. To start the Robert Kerbeck improv, you know, So instead of being funny, you learn how to lie instantly.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I definitely could teach that class, you know?

All right, so what? What's a typical day look like for you, though? Do you get up early? Do you have a morning routine? Do you the family involved in the business? What do you eat? Let's hear what your entrepreneurial life is like.

Well, you know, for me, I always find if I want to do new writing. So if I'm working on a new project, a new book, for example, I need to do that first thing. So I'll usually spend an hour or two doing what I call new writing. And then at a certain point, I'll switch over and I'll start working on I'll do some interviews, I'll do podcasts like this one. I'll be working with the showrunner and the production company on the Rose TV series. I'm working with the producer and director for the Malibu Burning documentary, and then I go surfing.

Oh, wow. Watch out for sharks. Some guy just got nabbed yesterday. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I didn't see that now.

Yeah.

Where?

I don't remember the name. He was on TV last night talking about it. He said he thought it was a seal. Well, apparently not. It was a great white. Caught him right on the inside of his right thigh, which is where your femoral artery is. And he kicked it in the head and got loose. And he was he said he was kind of annoyed because it tore his wetsuit and he got into the beach and he's bleeding out basically, so. Yeah. This was just on on the news yesterday. But I don't I don't know. You guys are nuts. You surf from people. I mean, you're going into the living room of a beast that didn't even knock on the door. I mean, Jesus.

Don't don't remind me. Don't remind me. And again, for your listeners, if they're into the whole surfing thing, that I actually have a nice surfing scene in rooves, that's a lot of fun. Oh, beautiful. And it involves a great white shark. So there you go.

All right. So what did you say to him? Yeah, So. So, so is the family involved in the in the business? I mean, like I said, what you have a the exercise, you know, what's your entrepreneurial life like?

Yeah, you know, you know, my my wife used to read all of my stuff, but basically she says, you know, you're writing too much stuff now. I can't read at all. So I'm on my own. And yeah, you know, I mean, look, I live out here in in gorgeous Southern California, so I'm blessed with the ability to get outside. I like to exercise outside as opposed to a gym. And obviously I'm here by the ocean. And white sharks aside, it's pretty spectacular to get out there. I do a lot of paddleboarding, too, which is an amazing thing. If anybody out there is interested in doing something like that, I say get out there. Paddleboarding on lakes, rivers, ocean. You can get into all these places that are often inaccessible by human beings. You know, I mean, even the other day I was seeing these people from Philadelphia in my hometown and the Philadelphia airport. There are all these like waterways and kind of swampy river things. And I saw these guys paddleboarding in and out of there. And I said, Man, that's spectacular because there's no way to get to any of these places on foot. And so you do you get to really be out in nature in a way, even in a major city that you just it's just spectacular.

It's yeah, it's beautiful. You can get out there in nature and and think up all your lives nice and quiet.

Come up with my my next ploy.

Well, it's been so great having you on. I've had just a lot of fun talking to you about this. So, folks, you want to go to RobertKerbeck.com, the best place to buy the book. He's got all kinds of access there of different places where you can purchase. But it's Ruse. Lying The American dream from Hollywood to Wall Street. I'm going to buy my copy as soon as I get off this darn recording because I love this kind of stuff. So. So thanks so much for coming on.

Oh, Tom, it was a pleasure. It's nice to meet a fellow liar.

Yes, exactly right. At least one that admits that they're alive.

That's that.

That's the thing. All right, everybody. This was an episode of what is it, 658. Robert Kerbeck, make sure you pass it on to everybody, because this is a lot of fun. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.