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The Secret Modern Work of Private Investigators with Tyler Maroney

Lace Gilger
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In this episode, we interviewed author and private investigator Tyler Maroney. We dig into what it’s like to be a private investigator, what’s fact and what’s fiction, and how you can learn to be more engaging, open-minded, and observant like a PI in your own life. Plus there are some incredible stories!

Tyler Maroney has worked as a private investigator at Kroll, the Mintz Group, and now as co-founder of the private investigations firm Quest Research & Investigations. Before becoming an investigator Maroney was a Fulbright scholar and worked as a journalist. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, and Frontline.

In this episode we discuss…

  • How Tyler got started in the world of Private Investigating.

  • Why journalism and private investigation require a unique blend of skills.

  • Some of the skills you may not think are required are super valuable in today's world - like accounting.

  • We dig into stories from past cases.

  • Why you have to remove your ego to be an effective PI.

  • The line PIs and companies walk in sharing how they get their information and from who?

  • Who hires a PI to gather intel on someone or a corporation?

  • Where confidentiality begins to blur.

  • Why do people go to PIs versus the police to investigate for them?

  • How companies can direct investigations with PIs but also remain independent.

  • How PIs go about investigating crimes outside of the US with little to no regulation.

  • The real rules you need to follow if you’re going to become a PI.

  • How to use humor to disarm someone and bring them to your side.

  • Creative ways to approach someone and get them talking when they don’t know you.

  • What are some of the most common issues PIs are hired to investigate?

  • What are some of the skills you can begin to use in your life today that will make you think like a PI?

  • Homework: Go and find that “cold case” in your life that’s bothered you in the past and look at it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Thank you so much for listening!

Please SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE US A REVIEW on iTunes! (Click here for instructions on how to do that).

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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable.


[00:00:19] AF: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with over 5 million downloads and listeners like, in over 100 countries. I’m your co-host, Austin Fable. Today, we have another incredible for you with our guest this week, Tyler Maroney. 


Tyler Moroney is a private investigator. This interview is going to be a little bit different. We dig into all the tactics and tools and habits you can form to be a great private eye that you can use in your own life to become more observant, to dig up information, to be more tenacious, start off conversations on the right foot. It's really an interesting look into what the world of a private investigator looks like, which is something that at least for me, normal individuals don't get a peek into beyond what you see in Hollywood.


Before we dig in, you knew it was coming. Are you enjoying the show and the content that we're putting out for you every week? Of course, you are. Do us two favors real quick. They're really helpful for Matt and I. First, leave us a five-star review on your podcast listening platform of choice, if it's Apple, if it's Google, if it's Castbox, if it's Spotify, leave us a review, please. It helps others like you find the show and all this great knowledge.


Next, go to our homepage at www.successpodcast.com and sign up for our email list today. Our subscribers are the first to know about all the comings and goings of the show, you have access to exclusive content you won't find anywhere else. Specifically, when you sign up, you're going to get our free course that we spent a ton of time on, How to Make Time for What Matters Most in Your Life.


If you are on the go, good for you. Text ‘smarter’, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222 and you'll be signed up today. 


Let's talk more about Tyler. Tyler Maroney has worked as a private investigator at Kroll, The Men's Group and now as co-founder of the private investigations firm, Quest Research and Investigations. Before becoming an investigator, Maroney was a Fulbright scholar and worked as a journalist. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune and Frontline. His new book, The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence is Reshaping the World is available wherever books are sold. As Tyler mixes the interview, we would recommend shopping at bookshop.org, which helps support your local bookstores with every purchase.


It was a great conversation. I am a huge true crime nerd, so it was great to get a look under the hood as to how these things are done, especially in the modern technological world we live in. Without further ado, I’ll be quiet and let Tyler do a little bit of the talking. Here's our interview with Tyler Maroney.


[00:02:55] AF: Tyler, welcome to the Science of Success.


[00:02:58] TM: Thank you for having me.


[00:02:59] AF: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you making the time. It's interesting. The world of private investigating has been something that has always intrigued me, so I’m excited to dive in. We're here to discuss your book, The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence is Reshaping the World. Before we jump in, I’m very curious and I’m sure there's a number of audience members that are, but how does one even begin a career in private investigating and making a name for yourself in the industry? How did it all start for you?


[00:03:22] TM: Well, I got quite lucky in the sense that I had been a journalist for about a decade when I met somebody who worked at the world's most famous corporate private investigations firm called Kroll. I met this person socially. One thing led to another and it turned out that private detective companies often hire former journalists, especially investigative journalists. One thing led to another and I applied for a job and got it.


I say I got lucky, because I met somebody. In many ways, my voyage into the world of private investigations is typical in the sense that I joined it from a different profession. In many ways, we are all refugees from other industries; accounting, the law, law enforcement, the intelligence services, academia, technology, the list goes on and on, especially at the largest of the investigative firms, the most valuable teams of investigators are those that bring different skill sets and mine was investigative journalism.


[00:04:26] AF: It makes me think of in the typical spy movie, or like a Mission Impossible, there's five members of the crew. Every crew member's got their own specialty. It might not be explosives, but accounting in this case, adds a lot of value to particular cases depending on what the goal is.


[00:04:42] TM: Yeah, it's true. In the movies, you've got the tech geek and the muscle and the brain and the charismatic protagonists. I’m glad you mentioned accounting actually, because all jokes aside, one of the first big private investigations I ever worked on involved mixing a group of private detectives with a group of forensic accountants. We had never worked together before. It was an internal investigation to try to show that employees had been stealing from a travel agency.


We walked in the door thinking that we knew exactly how to crack this case, by interviewing the right people and using our charisma and our talents and speaking to people. We didn't really get very far within the first couple of days. It was only when the accountants started showing us spreadsheets from their analysis of expense accounts and vendor payments from within the company that we developed some real leads. They were able to pick up pretty quickly with their Microsoft Excel talents, some patterns in the data that we just would never have seen. It was one of my first lessons as a private detective is being able to work in collaboration with others who have talents that you don't have and being able to rely on them.


[00:05:57] AF: Yeah. I think teamwork and really putting your ego aside and saying, “My skill set might not be the best way to crack this case,” and taking a back seat from learning from someone who might have that skill set is key and solving really any goal. I’m curious too, how do you make a name for yourself in the industry? I mean, you mentioned Kroll where you work now. Is there a web of private investigation teams that are well-known, maybe not to the common man, but to some of these larger organizations and groups that might be in need of these services more frequently?


[00:06:28] TM: There are. That's a valuable way of developing business for yourself and your own reputation. It's interesting you say how do you make a name for yourself. Most people in the business, I think, are trying to avoid that, in the sense that they are keeping their egos out of it, because so much of the work that we do, like the work that lawyers or accountants do for instance, or even law enforcement officers and intelligence operatives is very confidential and it's very private and it's wrapped in the secrecy, or at least the privilege of legal proceedings.


There are many, many cases that are written about in the news that involve the private detective, but nobody knows that and the private investigators are fine with that. I mean, if you have a giant ego, in many ways, it's the wrong profession for you. I’m glad you brought that up, because that thinking has contributed, that thinking did contribute to why I wrote my book, because I felt that there was an opportunity here to exploit the fact that the work we do is so fascinating and so global and so fun, but very rarely highlighted.


I spent some time putting my journalism hack back on and reaching out to private detectives I know around the world, or was introduced to and getting their permission and their client’s permission to tell me eight or 10 stories about the work they did, that would try to highlight the value and the crucial role they play in global commerce and disputes. In that sense, I was lucky enough to get just enough people to agree to contribute to this book, which again, is designed to tell the stories of what happens behind the headlines.


[00:08:16] AF: I definitely want to dig into some of those stories, obviously, without giving too much away, we'll leave some mystery for the book. I’m curious, you talk about the ego and the inability to openly talk about a lot of this information that might later – the outcome may be public, but the process, you really can't let people know you're involved. What's that line look like and is it often blurry? I mean, if a company's using a private investigation firm to gather information, for the example you used earlier when they thought that there was some stealing from employees within the company, why wouldn't they just go to the police? How is that line blended between private investigation work, versus maybe detective work? Also, how much these organizations may publicly state that they've elicited services like your own?

[00:09:01] TM: It's a great question. It's something that I learned only when I joined the profession. The easy answer to why we are called in by companies to do, what we usually call internal investigations, as opposed to law enforcement is that in many cases, the alleged bad acts, whether it's a crime, or a fraud, or an ethical lapse, or whatever the misconduct might be is not proven yet and there is simply not enough evidence that what the rumor is, or whatever the tip that came over the anonymous hotline was to the company had any heft to it, or any muscle.


In many ways, what our job is is to come in and work usually with the general counsel's office, or the outside counsel, so the lawyers who are hired by a company or an NGO, to see if there's a there-there, so to speak. That involves collecting internal documents, interviewing people both inside and outside the company and being able to assess whether or not there is a threat to the company, whether it's a cyber-attack, or a theft of assets, or the misconduct of employees within a company mistreating other employees.


What often happens in those scenarios is if we develop evidence of some wrongdoing, we then take our findings and we go to law enforcement. There are a number of opportunities where I and my team will go and meet with the FBI, or the US attorney's office, or district attorney's offices or regulators and simply present what we have found at the direction of our client, because they really want this resolved.


Now having said that, I will just add one twist to this, which is the other advantage for companies to hire private detectives as opposed to calling the cops is that they can direct that investigation. If you call law enforcement, they are going to do whatever they need to do, however they need to do it. Not that they will do things that are unacceptable to the company, but they will do the investigation however they see fit, as they should.


Working with a team of private investigators, we can work with the company to try to figure out what's really going on. If in fact the answer is nothing, that no one has put their hand in the cookie jar, then hopefully, they'll pay our bill and off we go.


[00:11:29] AF: It's so cool to hear you talk about this. I mean, for you, I mean, you have a very even keel to your voice. I’m sitting here smiling, because this just sounds like so much of the things you see out of movies and out of the shows. I know that all of that's very fictionalized. I do want to bring up one case or one end. We've talked about why a company would not call the police. Maybe would come to you for help with an investigation.


On the other side of that coin, I’m curious as to is there ever a case where a company may not want to know certain tactics that were used to get to a certain conclusion? I think again, way too dramatized, but the show Billions, the main hedge fund leader, there Bobby Axelrod has this investigator who digs up all sorts of things for him. There's many instances where it's like, “How do this?” The guy is like, “Do you really want to know?” Is there ever a case, and of course, again, I preface that with obviously, very, very dramatized. What's that line there too? I mean, is there any instance where someone might just say, “Here's the outcome. Here's what I want,” and they are not very interested in how this information may have been obtained, or is that just stuff that Hollywood puts in there to make a good thriller?


[00:12:34] TM: No. That's very real. I will say that my firm makes a real effort to be very transparent with our clients, because in most cases, we're collecting information that might lead to some legal proceeding, which means it's actual evidence. We want to make sure that that food chain of collection, so to speak, is tight and it's accurate and it's clear, because you don't want to get the goods and then be told that you can't use them, because the way you obtained it was somehow corrupted.


It's not uncommon for clients to hire lawyers who then hire private detectives, or hire private detectives without their counsel and simply say, “Get me the answer to this question and use whatever tactics you need to do.” Now, my advice is that that's a huge mistake, because nearly everyone who does the work that I do, we do outside of the United States is not managed, or trained, or regulated in any way.


To become a private detective outside of the US, in most countries you simply are one, because you declare yourself one. What this means is that in many cases, people who come out of law enforcement or the intelligence services who have very specific, fascinating skills bring those skills to the private sector, where they don't necessarily apply. For instance, in United States you are not allowed to pretend to be somebody you're not when you're doing an investigation as a private detective. You're not allowed to create a fake company and approach somebody under the auspices of doing some fake deal with them, using this deception.

I write about this in my book. There are very clear legal lines around that. That doesn't mean that there aren't situations where we can be creative about how we approach people. We can talk about that in a little while, but the real pitfalls of that deceptive approach is that you end up being known as the rule breakers and in many cases, committing crimes. I mean, probably the best example in recent years are the work that was done by a firm called Black Cube, which is staffed with former intelligence operatives, who worked with the lawyers on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film executive.


They were engaged in pretending to be people and setting up fake companies and using deception to try to trick some of Weinstein’s victims into handing over information, or otherwise, discrediting them. Now look, there are plenty of people around the world who want a private detective who's going to use those tactics, but those are not the clients that most of us in the industry, hard-working professionals, well-credentialed work for.


[00:15:20] AF: That's a great example. I’ve got to buy it, you let it out there. You mentioned creative ways to approach people, if you're not going to pretend you're somebody else, or pretend to be doing a deal. Obviously, we want to leave some mystery for the book. We do want everyone to go out and buy The Modern Detective, but can you share with us a story, maybe one from the book that's got a really nice little spy twist to it?


[00:15:41] TM: Sure. I’ll actually give one that's not in the book, that is similar to one in the book, that involves investigations into counterfeit goods. Now this is a very common assignment for especially the larger private investigations firms, because companies that manufacture apparel, or high-end jewelry, or even pharmaceutical goods often hire lawyers and private detectives and accountants and others to try to figure out where their counterfeits are being sold, where they're being shipped, where they're being manufactured.


This is a huge industry, because there are so many people out there who want to take advantage of luxury brands in particular and create fake goods and sell them, because it's so lucrative, number one. Two, because law enforcement has not caught up with that as a crime yet. Meaning, if you're caught with a small amount of street drugs, you could spend decades in prison. If you're caught with some counterfeit pharmaceuticals, or Gucci sunglasses, you might get a slap on the wrist and not see any jail time, but there's still a lot of money to be made. That door is closing pretty quickly.

The reason I bring that up is because it's not uncommon for private detectives to go undercover, in the sense that they are acting like say, consumers. There are a number of cases where I have gone into luxury watch retailers and asked questions about watches and looked at different watches, or pharmaceutical goods, or clothing. The idea is to get your hands on as much of this product as possible, because in many cases, there are clues that you already know that your client i.e. the manufacturer has given you to help you identify whether the goods are counterfeit or not. For example, serial numbers, or the font, the typeface of the boxes that goods are carried in.


You want to be able to go in and examine as many of them as possible. Also, ask questions of the middlemen and the clerks, some of whom were in on the counterfeiting, to develop as much intelligence as you can. Because if you were just to walk right in the front door and tell everyone exactly who you are and what you're doing, you probably wouldn't get very far.


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[00:19:51] AF: What does that conversation, or that flow look like? You're hired by the company to basically, bust these retailers that might be selling counterfeit goods. First of all, are these major retailers, or are these smaller, independently owned shops? Then secondly, when you find this information, you're relatively certain that the font on the box doesn't match, or the serial numbers aren't correct, what happens to that information after that?


[00:20:16] TM: In answer to your question about where are we going, it's really a mix. Sometimes, it's going into a retail luxury store. Other times, it's walking into a corner deli or bodega. Then, it's being able to go in and look around and see what's happening and get a lay of the land, because you know that say, there's some product that's being sold out of a certain store. You might combine some conversations with the clerks and the owners and the cashiers with some surveillance on the back of the store, watching the product being brought in. You're taking down, for instance, everything that you can learn about trucks they're moving in, from license plates, to models, to the people themselves who are driving the trucks.


Now, this is not to suggest that everybody in that supply chain is involved, but it will help you develop clues as to where product is coming from and chasing it all the way down that food stream. You might start with a bodega and end up in a warehouse somewhere on the waterfront and realize that that's only one out of 15 steps. It's going to take you back to a plant in Costa Rica, or Vietnam, or Tennessee.


[00:21:25] AF: It's so fascinating. I mean, it's just so cool. Have you ever, and it's okay if you can't answer this question, but has there ever been a time where someone has asked you if you're a private investigator? You've been reviewing these counterfeit goods and someone gets a little bit suspicious? If so, what does that look like?


[00:21:40] TM: Not in the context of a counterfeit case. There are many situations where I will use full disclosure and humor to try to get in the door. I had this very clear memory. One time, was showing up at the house of a witness, someone we thought would have very valuable information for us. We were working for a guy who'd been indicted for insider trading. It looked like the government's case was pretty weak.


One of the things we were doing is interviewing people – this was actually also in the healthcare, pharmaceutical space. Interviewing people who worked with him in the past and had been sources for him and knew his world. We were doorstepping, as we call it, which means showing up at people's houses unannounced.


I knocked on this woman's door and I was wearing a suit. I looked very formal. I said, “Hello, ma’am. My name is Tyler Maroney. I’m a private detective.” Almost before I finished the word detective, she burst into laughter, because she didn't believe me. She thought I looked like a door-to-door vacuum salesman or something.


[00:22:48] AF: Heck of a vacuum pitch.


[00:22:50] TM: Yeah, exactly. Then I laughed and then she laughed. I said, “No, really. I’m a private detective. I can prove it.” I pulled out my business card and I asked her to Google me. She did that. She kept her screen door closed and did her little due diligence on me as I stood there like an idiot. It was cold, actually. It was in the middle of the winter. Finally, when she was convinced that I am who I said I was, she invited me in. We laughed for another 10 or 15 minutes about how ridiculous it was that I showed up Sunday in the dark wearing a suit, telling her I was a private detective.


It's almost because it flew so fast and hard in the face of what she had expected a private detective might do and how we might behave, that she was willing to talk to me. I acknowledge that that doesn't happen very often, but those are situations where being made, so to speak, although I made myself very intentionally, worked to my advantage.


[00:23:47] AF: Let's zoom out a little bit now. I know that the format of the book is story and then a little bit of a lesson behind it, but what are some of the overarching key skills that private investigators must have?


[00:23:58] TM: Obsession, anxiety, paranoia. In all seriousness, I think that it's a mix of truly refusing to take no for an answer. Meaning, being willing to look under every rock for information. Then if there's nothing under those rocks, then go out and find other rocks. If you have to make rocks and then look underneath the rocks on too, but to be more practical. It's your resume. The assumption is that FBI agents are great private detectives, or former police detectives are great private eyes.


One of the things I’ve learned is that many people who come out of law enforcement don't really enjoy the job, or may not be as good at it as they had hoped, because their prior profession required them to catch bad guys. You’re often building a case against criminal behavior and testifying to that effect. I would say that, I don't want to say the overwhelming majority, but a huge percentage of our work is not designed to root out criminal behavior. It's much more nuanced than that.


By way of example, I can describe how we're often hired by presenting companies, a dispute. That dispute might be over a patent infringement of a technology, or it might be over a breach of a contract. It doesn't mean that it raises to a level of criminal behavior. That really requires you to understand and this goes to the answer to the question, what your client really wants and how you can find that information and the how is one of the things that I really wanted to build into this book. It's the tactics. It's the methodologies. Because each chapter describes not just who the client and who the private detective and who the subject is, usually some bad actor, or a suspected bad actor, but how we got that answer.


One answer to that is what I just described, which is being able to walk into scenarios in, many cases, dangerous scenarios, but still be the person who can demand credibility. I have one chapter in the book where I described walking into the house of a man who had been a witness for the government in a murder trial 25 years earlier. We suspected he had provided false testimony. It turns out that he did. I got lucky, because I found him 25 years later living alone, having recently come out of prison. My bet was that he was of the age where he had decided to put all that criminal behavior behind him and maybe was willing to have a come to God moment for a second and confess his sins, so to speak, which he did.


Another answer to your question is doing your homework as a private detective and really knowing who you're talking to, why they might talk to you and how to elicit that good information. One thing I often teach people in this business is don't ask questions, have conversations. That might sound like a bit of a cliché, but it's something that I’ve learned, even experienced journalists and private detectives aren't very good at, because there's often this assumption that the only way to get information out of people is to hound them, is to intentionally interrogate as opposed to interview. If you can simply get somebody talking, then you're halfway there.


[00:27:21] AF: It's so funny. I see a lot of parallels here and basically, just sales. I mean, to be a great private investigator, you have to be persistent, you have to have experience, you have to be tenacious, creative. You're not just hounding people, you're starting a dialogue. You're trying to establish some rapport there. I think, just listening, you list these things out and these different pitfalls that people fall into. I think it's a lot like any business development function really.


[00:27:47] TM: Yeah, I agree with that. Because when you're doing business, the development, when you're marketing, I mean, my feeling on that and it's something I do a lot is not to sell your skills, or your company, or your reach, but to sell yourself, because they're not buying your corporate entity and they're not buying the list of offices that you have on your website. They're buying you and your ability to listen to them and to find the information they need.


To add to your question about what a private detective needs and what skills we use, I would add to that something that I talk about in the chapter in my book called hashing, which is technological innovation and savviness. I mean, increasingly the work we do takes place online and this has been true since the worldwide web was in existence in the mid-90s. Increasingly, we have to be able to find digital information, whether it's out there, or it's been deleted, or moved, or altered in some fashion, whether it's on social media, or sitting on a hard drive somewhere.


The chapter I’m referring to involves a case where I went into an office with a very savvy private detective I often work with, who is what we call a computer forensic technician. His talents are to be able to take the hard drive of a laptop, say, or a cellphone and remove the contents, copy those contents by what we call imaging the hard drive and then forensically preserving it. Meaning, not just copying and paste it, so to speak, but making an exact replica of it, so that we can then search it later on a separate drive, and knowing how to carve out information that people might have deleted, or thought had disappeared forever.

With respect to social media, as keeping up with social media. I mean, you may have followed that in recent months there are a lot of people who are moving off of certain platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, to places like TikTok and Parlor and other places. Simply knowing what the platforms are and what people operate on them and what information can be found there is hugely valuable to be a private detective.


[00:30:01] AF: Yeah, especially in an ever-increasing digital world. I mean, I have to imagine, there's probably two sides to the coin really. It's one side is engaging with the people themselves, but then, there's got to be a massive amount of information you can yield just from things that people don't even think about they put online, like post every single day.


[00:30:19] TM: To use one example, this is not to downplay the talents of amateur sleuths. I mean, we actually take advantage of that often. I often wish that we didn't have the strict confidentiality of many of the cases that we do, because I would love to crowdsource more cases. I would love to have 50,000 people out there poking around social media that are 10-person teams. One example of a case where we were able to do that was years ago, we were hired by television producers for a documentary on HBO that eventually aired, called The Case Against Adnan Syed, which was a follow-up in many ways, to the hugely successful, if not the most successful seminal podcast serial about the case of Adnan Syed, who many feel was wrongly convicted for murdering his former girlfriend in high school in 1999.


I bring up that case, because one of the things we decided to do is in addition to using all the skills we have internally is to take advantage of what other people had done and follow leads on Twitter and Reddit and to see what other people had done, because they had filed their own public records requests with the counties in the police office and had dumped that documentation onto the web. Or they had put out theories that we had never considered.


In fact, one of them even made it into the film, where we described that there were these impressions on the body of the victim that were shockingly symmetrical. No one had been able to figure out what they were. Although, we still have not been able to figure that out, there were some really creative ideas as to what made those impressions, which might have led us towards identification of either the actual killer, or someone who knew what was going on.


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[00:34:09] AF: It's been a long time, but I’ve actually listened through Serial twice. It was so fascinating to me. I remember in one of the episodes, they actually retraced Adnan’s steps. I believe it was from school to a Best Buy and analyzed where pay phones were back when the murder took place. I mean, it was really my first deep look at what I assumed at the time, was real investigative work outside of the movies. Well, it was groundbreaking podcast for many reasons, but the first true crime/look into what private investigating looks like when you're nothing but a reporter with nothing but your sense and a little bit of can do attitude, I guess.


[00:34:45] TM: I couldn't agree more. Sarah Koenig who is the host of that show begins the first episode by confessing that she is neither an investigative reporter, nor a private detective, nor a police detective. In other words, she's trying to convince us that she has none of the skills necessary to do what she's about to do. When in fact, she proves over the course of the series that she has many of those skills. Now, she's being a bit modest, because she had been a very well-respected reporter at that point. In fact, had covered the case if I remember correctly, for the Baltimore Sun. It's not like she was just plucked out of obscurity.


To your point exactly, I think what she did well was she realized that it was not only a fascinating story, because of the characters and the personalities, but because she took us step by step through this. I will say that it's one of the things that I love about good media, like True Detective, television show that you may have seen. If not –


[00:35:41] AF: Love it.


[00:35:41] TM: - I highly recommend it. Yeah. It's one of the reasons that the first season is so compelling is that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play these detectives who are so different. At the end of the day, they're collecting crumbs and they're swinging from limb to limb, to mix my metaphors. Their viewers are right along with them, as they're compiling evidence towards this big, climactic ending. It’s not only that we fall in love with who these people are, but we're with them on that journey and that's what I tried to get through in my book as well.


[00:36:15] AF: Yeah. One of the things that I thought was interesting about really, both True Detective and Serial were two pieces of it really. Two things that glared out to me was one, I thought it was really cool, or interesting how Sarah, when she was talking to Adnan in prison, even when the evidence pointed to him, she still reported back the facts. It was like, she didn't have a slant. He'd say, “There was no way I could have gotten to Best Buy and back during my free period.” They'd go trace it out and they'd call and be like, “Well actually, barring you didn't hit an accident, or any traffic, you could have done that.”


The other aspect of it too, which was both Serial and True Detective is the time some of these investigations can take. I mean, in the example of True Detective, it was years. With Serial, I mean, depending on who you talk to, the jury is still out as to whether or not Adnan was guilty. Does a typical case really take years and years? What's the average arc of one of these things?


[00:37:10] TM: Well, I wish we had years, to be honest with you. We always have budgets and deadlines and both of those come racing up behind us much faster than we wish they would. Hearing you talk makes me think that there's one other thing I’d like to add to my answer to your earlier question about what does it take to be a great private detective, or even a not so great private detective, is simply to have a contrarian perspective on life.


I think, both True Detective fiction and Serial non-fiction do this, because they both begin with the premise that what we've been told may not be true. That the official record may not be accurate. I think that's something that I’m even learning, having been a journalist for a decade and a private detective for 15 years is being able to look at a police report, or the conclusions of a prosecutor, or an article in a credible newspaper, like the Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal and realize that it's possible that the detective, or the reporter got it wrong, not necessarily because they're corrupt, but because maybe they were fed false information, or maybe because they were just not up to the job.


It's something that I learned very early on in the business, which is something that I encourage everyone to think about, is to not really take anyone's word for it. Really go and look for yourself, because most of the cases that we've had profound and surprising success on are those where we've looked over the same documents that other people have looked over, but with a critical eye, and thought that whatever it was, needed corroboration. I hope that's not too general of a comment to make, but I think it applies not just to my field, but to others as well.


[00:38:59] AF: I couldn't agree more. There's one thing that I heard in the research before the interview that I want to touch on before I let you go, because I know we are coming up on time, and that's the role that body language plays. When you enter a room with someone, like for example, say you're rooting out the false testimony after 25 years, what role does that initial contact play when you're looking at them, you announce who you are, you start asking questions, does body language come into play? If so, in what way?


[00:39:27] TM: I’m actually going to say, this might be a controversial statement that body language in my opinion has nothing to do with what anyone is thinking. I worry a little bit that we have been affected by police dramas, or by fiction that over dramatizes this a bit. I say that, because just think about what we're going through right now. We're living through a global pandemic and hundreds of thousands of people are getting sick and dying and we're moving around and people are losing their job and there's rampant homelessness and it's really difficult what we're going through.


Imagine someone showed up at your house, a private detective to interview you and you had just had a big argument with your spouse, because you just lost your job and they want to interview you about something that happened to you 25 years ago. Well, maybe you're shifting in your seat, because you don't really want to be talking to this person right now. Maybe your eyes are darting around, because you're worried that the child who has fallen asleep in her bedroom earlier is going to wake up and come down and be hungry, and so you actually have to attend to that.


I would actually be very cautious of that as evidence of somebody's guilt, for instance. I worry a little bit that we think that because somebody is like I said, darting around or shifting in their chair that they are essentially physically confessing to something and really think through more whether or not that's “junk science” and if there are other ways to get information from people. This is not to say that it's complete bunk. I think that our hunches and our intuition are valuable tools in this work, but I wouldn't be overly reliant on it.


[00:41:10] AF: Yeah. No, that's great feedback and a great call out. I’m pretty aligned with that as well. We've interviewed several experts on the show around body language. I think depending on who you talk to, how bought in you are on body language depends on how firmly you're going to stand on that hill. I do remember in interviewing Joe Navarro, who's a well-known body language expert, he did give the same disclaimer saying something similar to what you said.


He had a story about how they were interviewing this woman and they had suspected her of wrongdoing. I think she was involved in an attack scheme, or a fraud scheme and they came in and brought her and asked her some questions and she was fidgeting. She was sweating and she kept looking around and they left the room and they were like, “Oh, we've got her. Look at her. She's definitely guilty.” They walked back in and right before they could ask her something, she was like, “Pardon me officer, do you mind if I step outside? I parked in a 15-minute parking space and I don't want to get a ticket.” The whole thing, their whole thought that they had had this case cracked, if she was guilty was really her just being afraid of getting a parking ticket.


I’ve always been a little curious about that and I wanted to get your take on it, just because I feel like in some instances, you can definitely sense something's wrong. You just have to be really careful on what that something might be.


[00:42:18] TM: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. This applies to many other – and just to keep this within the confines of law enforcement, or criminal justice investigations, where we have learned now that for instance, people confessed to crimes that they didn't commit. I know that's impossible for many people to imagine, but it happened day after day after day, especially imagine, you're 19-years-old and you've been accused of murder. I either have to stay here all day in the precinct, or I can just tell these guys I did it, because I’m terrified. Tomorrow, they'll learn that I was a 100 miles away from the crime. What's happened suddenly is that you are now essentially, have proven yourself guilty.


I only bring up that example to make clear that I think we are sometimes fall into old narratives about how the world really works, where casting a critical eye on evidence and on information can benefit us all.


[00:43:12] AF: Well, Tyler. This has been a great conversation. Just being able to explore your world and ask you questions about the world of private investigating is fascinating in itself. I do want to be respectful of your time, but I’ve got a couple more quick questions before we let you go. I’m curious, who's your favorite fictional private eye?


[00:43:28] TM: Oh, that's a good one. I’ve been rereading a lot of Raymond Chandler novels. I moved to LA recently, having spent most of my life in New York. Raymond Chandler has a number of private detectives, who are hard scrabble, tough talking, classic hard-boiled types, who you both hate and admire at the same time. One of the things I love about Raymond Chandler's detectives is that they're so well sketched out. He was a wonderful writer, really literary. Many people consider him to have soared above the genre as a writer.


I would also add to that an anonymous private detective, that fictional one is among my favorite too, The Continental Op, which who was developed by Dashiel Hammett, another great writer of detective fiction. Dashiel Hammett himself was a private detective, unlike Raymond Chandler. Hammett truly brings to the game experience of having done this work. When you read about the work of The Continental Op and others that he sketched out, you really do get a sense for how this work was done generations ago, that has inspired all of us in many ways.


[00:44:37] AF: Great recommendations. We'll be sure to include those in the show notes as well, for listeners who may want to check them out. Tyler, last question we always ask all of our guests. If you could give our audience one piece of homework to go out this week and start doing, what would it be?


[00:44:51] TM: Towards becoming a private detective you mean, or doing investigative work?


[00:44:54] AF: It could be anything. I mean, I think there's been a lot of overlap in some of the qualities we've discussed here that private investigators have to have that might fit in other aspects of people's lives. Really, it's your choice here as to what the homework you'd like to give the audience would be. Keep in mind, we get e-mails about this homework all the time, so people may actually go out and do or implement whatever you tell them.


[00:45:14] TM: My answer is that whatever field you're in is “to go and find that cold case.” I put that phrase in quotes. That is always nod at you. Whether it's the Harvard Business School review article, or the tweet from your ex-girlfriend, or the unsolved murderer from your hometown. Look at it with fresh eyes. Don't be a cop about it. Don't be a private detective. Don't be an accountant, but just let your mind go where it needs to go. Towards doing that, always get the primary source. I know that might sound like something that's boring, but it is a way into a case.


If you're interested in investigating a crime that is unsolved, get the police file. Don't Google. Stay away from Google, because you will never get out of it. You will end up reading other people's opinions. I really think that getting a primary source and putting fresh eyes on it, regardless of what that source is is the most creative thing you can do and the best way into solving a mystery.


[00:46:22] AF: I love it. You got me thinking that maybe I’ll drop everything I’m doing and go out and investigate a cold case. Tyler, for listeners out there who may want to learn more about you, may want to learn more about the book, where can we go to connect with you, reach out to you and obviously, buy the book?


[00:46:37] TM: The book is available anywhere online. I’ve been recommending Bookshop, which is a great resource for buying books that helps local bookstores online. Bookshop.org. There's also of course, Amazon. It's sold on Target and Walmart and other places like that. Many bookstores are carrying the book right now, but it's as we all know hard to get out, so I encourage people to buy it online. I’m on Twitter at @Tydamar and also, under my name on LinkedIn. I really appreciate this conversation and I appreciate that question.


[00:47:11] AF: Absolutely, Tyler. Well, it's been fascinating. I mean, obviously, you and I have a lot of – we could probably go back and forth on HBO shows that we've both watched, or Netflix documentaries all day long. I’ve always been very fascinated by this world, and so getting a chance to talk to you, someone so accomplished and on the front lines is really been fascinating. I’m sure we could go for much longer, but maybe we'll do it again sometime, but I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing with our audience all this great information and giving us a peek into your world, which is just truly fascinating.


[00:47:37] TM: You're welcome. You have asked wonderful questions and had a great conversation, just like a classic private detective.


[00:47:44] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.


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