How To Read Behaviour Like An FBI Agent - Robin Dreeke - #063

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. Today, my guest is Robin Dreeke, and he is the ex-head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Division. Now, that sounds like an incredibly secretive and exciting job to have, and it really is. Today's discussion takes us through Robin's 21-year infield career, including when he was in Manhattan on 9-11. He was out for coffee with his friend as the first plane struck the North Tower and then back on the 25th floor of his department when the second plane hit. Apart from that, we're also going to learn the verbal and nonverbal cues that both you can use to help encourage trust and make your communication with others more effective, and also to be able to detect deception in other people. Robin really is the real deal. It's evident that he has a very terrifying and wide ranging skill set of personal and interpersonal communication. I'm super happy to have him on. I'm not going to pontificate anymore. Please welcome Robin Dreeke. Oh yeah, PS. We did have some connection issues during this episode. I promised that any of the cuts I made weren't due to Robin giving away national secrets, and also the irony of a podcast about communication being beset with communication problems is not lost. But there may be a couple of jumps here and there, so just bear that in mind.
So Robin, is this the moment where the FBI burst in through the door of my bedroom and tell me that we need to stop this interview is that when this happens?

**Robin Dreeke** (1:59)
No, because I duck and weave really well.

**Chris Williamson** (2:02)
And you're on the other side of the screen, so you're going to be fine. Well, anyway, thank you very much for coming on. Welcome to Modern Wisdom. It's a pleasure to have you here.

**Robin Dreeke** (2:09)
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited about it as well.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
It's going to be a great conversation. So can you tell the listeners at home what your job roles were, please?

**Robin Dreeke** (2:20)
Sure. So I'll kind of give you a chronology from the beginning to the end without taking a million minutes to do this just because it's not boring. But it's good to frame the background of where I came from to where I arrived and where I'm still going to. And that is so my background is I graduated from the United States Naval Academy here in Annapolis, Maryland. And from there, went on to become a Marine Corps officer. And from there, I joined the FBI and I joined the FBI in 1997 And worked counterintelligence for my entire career. So I was assigned to the New York Field Office in Manhattan. From there, I went to Norfolk, Virginia. From Norfolk, Virginia, I went into management. So I went up to the J. Edgar Hoover building here in Washington, DC. Also, during my entire career, I worked for Russians. So that's kind of the new vote thing these days. Although for 21 years, no one is listening to me.
And so, when I started running the behavioral analysis, you know, the program at headquarters, during my time in New York, before I got there, I got on our behavioral analysis program for counterintelligence. And what the behavioral analysis program is, and a lot of people know about the profilers and the behavioral analysis units from things like Criminal Minds and movies like that. Those are the criminal guys, the guys who work on criminal cases. My team, we work nothing but counterintelligence cases. And my team's whole strategy all the time was how we're going to create a good healthy engagement with another human being. Whether you're trying to recruit a spy, talk to someone, interview someone, whatever it is, we're always strategizing engagements. And so from FBI headquarters, I eventually escaped, thank God, because I'm not a headquarters guy, I realized. And they asked me to go down to Quantico, where I taught counterintelligence interviewing and source recruiting and things like that. And then I took over our behavioral team as the head of it back in 2010-ish. And I ran it for three or four years until sequestration, which was a big budget thing we had, eliminated my team and a bunch of things. And so I went back down to the street and I worked as an agent on the street, working counterintelligence from the last couple of years before I retired. So yeah, my entire career has been nothing about trying to recruit spies, catching spies, talking to sources, nothing but intel all the time.

**Chris Williamson** (4:34)
Right. I mean, that sounds like the stuff that novels are made of, right? There's a lot of kind of the typical spy stuff, that sounds like the proper James Bond shit.