Susan Carnicero spent 20 years as a CIA operative, several of them running polygraph examinations, and now sells the agency's deception-detection method to governments and corporations.
Most preparation for a management meeting is about knowing the company: the numbers, the industry, the history. Her method treats the meeting as a triage exercise instead. The point is not to establish what is true, but to work out which two or three of the ten topics on the agenda deserve the remaining time.
"And so, the more you allow a person to lie to you, to be more deceptive, the harder it's going to be for them to tell you the truth."
Carnicero was recruited into the CIA out of a public relations job at a Fortune 500 company, was outed by Aldrich Ames, moved to the agency's Office of Security to run polygraph examinations, and now runs QVerity. The host, Justin Thomson, spent an investing career interviewing thousands of management teams.
I listened to the full interview so you can skip it. 23 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 principles that matter.
👤 Guest: Susan Carnicero, Founder of QVerity, a former CIA operative of 20 years who ran polygraph examinations for the agency's Office of Security, and an author of "Spy the Lie"
🎙️ Host: Justin Thomson, Head of the T. Rowe Price Investment Institute and a former portfolio manager who says he interviewed thousands of management teams
📰 Published: 9 September 2026
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page | ⏱️ 23 min | ✅ Time saved: 10 min
Key Takeaways
Lies of influence are the dangerous category, because a lie of commission or omission can be caught
Convincing statements, non-answers, lack of detail and qualifiers all sit in it, and they sound good
An investor who has followed a company for years is the easiest person in the room to influence
The method is a navigation aid, not a truth test — it says which topic to dig into
A question that produces no cluster of deceptive behaviors is a topic to leave alone
The worst question analysts routinely ask is "give me some color"
It hands the management team the floor and lets them tell the story they came to tell
A denial does not have to be the word no, and the evasive move is to skip the denial entirely
Qualifiers such as "basically" and "for the most part" carve out the exact area you asked about
After two attempts at the same question, stop — every extra lie makes the truth harder to get
Video calls cost you the lower body, and it is easier to lie through a screen than in person
1. From PR To The Polygraph
Carnicero did not apply to the CIA. She was recruited out of a public relations job at a Fortune 500 company, on the recommendation of someone inside the agency who knew her. She said the agency takes people from every background — analysts, security staff, economists.
Her move into deception work was involuntary. "And I did one level of work for a while, and then Aldrich Ames decided to out me, and I ended up going to Office of Security, where I did polygraph for a number of years"
Thomson asked whether her training was physiological or behavioral. It was partly academic — she has a master's in forensic psychology — and mostly volume: "And then when I ended up going into polygraph and started to study people all day long, you know, for hours at a time, you would naturally start to pick up some of the behaviors and you could see where the deception was"
The method itself was developed inside the agency, and she credits years of following it for making deception identifiable
Spotting a lie is the start of the process, not the end. Asked what she does once she sees deception: "You know, you identify the question, identify the stimulus, identify the behavior. When you see deception, you need to ask those follow-up questions"
2. Trust Had To Be Trained Out
Thomson opened the section on bias by naming his own. As an analyst and portfolio manager, he said, "I was too believing." Carnicero said she started in the same place: she wanted people to like her and wanted to avoid conflict, and she says that has not entirely changed — "I still don't like conflict. I still try to keep things mild."
What changed it was evidence, not instruction. It took seeing enough bad behavior, and being wrong about people, before she began paying attention
The change she describes is a decision rather than a skill. "But it really took a psychological switch to just be aware that, people are going to lie to you if it's in their best interest, they're going to lie to you"
She does not go looking for deception in ordinary conversation, but when it appears, "I immediately kick into that mode where I start paying attention to what's being said"
On what three decades of the work taught her: "I have learned probably in my last 30 years, more than that now, of doing this kind of stuff, that there's a lot of bad people out there." Some of them, she said, want to beat you and prove it — not that they are better, but that they can get one up on you
3. When To Drop The Charm
Thomson said he found two ways to get a management team talking: "One was charming them, or two bludgeoning them." He put it to her that her method is non-confrontational and that she is "clearly a charmer" — so does bludgeoning ever pay?
She adapts to the person across the table, and says so plainly. "And to say that I adapt my personality to the person I'm dealing with is 100% true"
People have tried to take advantage of her niceness, and when someone is being a jerk, she said, she can be a jerk back — but not to the point where it damages the communication
The adjustment she actually makes is smaller than bludgeoning. "You know, instead of bludgeoning them, I might just be a little less friendly, a little less charming" — very serious, straight to the point, and letting them know "I'm on to their game"
4. Lies Of Influence Win
Thomson had read one of her books, "Spy the Lie" — "I read it on the plane over from London" — and asked which of its three categories of lie is the most pernicious: "Lies of commission, lies of omission, and lies of influence."
Her answer was immediate: "Definitely the lies of influence." The other two are catchable. A lie of commission is a denial of something you did — "The lies of commission, you can get caught, right" — and an omission shows up in the shape of the answer, "easily seeable and easily catchable"
Influence is a family of moves rather than a single one. "They can be convincing statements. They can be, you know, non-answers. They can be lack of detail. They can be the qualifiers that we talked about. There's just so many and they sound so good"
What makes them work on investors is the investor's own position. She tied it back to the bias Thomson had raised, and said that is where people get snookered: "Because, for instance, if you follow the same company for so long, or you were investor in this company for so long, you were vested because you wanted it to work"
5. Questions That Add Info
Thomson steered the conversation to question design and named the failure mode: "I think you need to be careful in this business to avoid asking questions that confirm the thesis, or the view that you already have; that's called confirmation bias."
Her rule is that a question has to bring back something you did not walk in with. "We're asking questions that give us more information than we came in with"
Where a management team has missed its earnings, the question is "Things like, what impediments do you have to meet your guidance"
What she refuses to ask is the question that reads a fact back for confirmation. "Not, okay, so, this is what you said. Is that right? I'm not going to ever ask those sorts of questions"
Public information is already available, so the meeting is not the place to collect it again: "I can read what's in the newspapers. I can see what's in the industry and all those sorts of things, but I'm really more interested in what that management team is going to tell me"
The method finds the problem, not necessarily the answer — and for some clients that is the whole assignment. "They don't have to get the information. They just need to know if the management team is lying"
6. Deception As A GPS
Thomson described a client of his who "could smell a rat straight away" — not evasiveness as such, but where the problems in a portfolio were, and then went after them. Carnicero said that is what her method is for.
She calls it a navigation aid rather than a verdict: "When we talk about this methodology, we use it as a GPS"
A management meeting covers seven, eight, nine, ten topics, and the value of the client Thomson described was knowing which ones to ignore: "Every topic wasn't a problem"
Deception marks a topic for research, not a conclusion. "So, when we talk about the GPS and we asked the questions and we see the deception we know that scenario that needs further research"
The absence of the signal is used as hard as its presence: "If we ask a question and we don't see a cluster of deceptive behaviors, we're not going to worry about that"
The binding constraint is the clock, because you only get a certain amount of time in front of a management team: "So, you want to focus on the problem areas and not on the areas that aren't problematic"
7. What Evasion Sounds Like
Thomson asked about what the book calls the L-squared method — listen and look — and put a direct question to her: "What is evasiveness in C-suite tend to look and sound like?"
The primary tell is a good answer to a question nobody asked. They give you a lovely answer, "canned and exactly what they want to say" — and then: "But it doesn't answer the question that you were asked"
A denial can be part of a cluster of deceptive behaviors. The stronger signal is when the denial never arrives: "Or better yet, they don't deny, right. They ignore the denial altogether. And denial doesn't have to be a no"
A non-specific denial counts as evasion too — someone saying they did not do anything, without addressing the particular issue
Qualifiers are the quietest version of it. "Some of the qualifiers that we talked about can be evasive" — she named "basically" and "for the most part." The carve-out is invisible unless you are listening for it: "And if you're not in L-square mode and you don't catch the fact that they're carving out that area you just asked them about, you're going to miss it"
8. Open Questions, No Preamble
Thomson raised something he finds infuriating: "One of the things I find most infuriating about questioning techniques, interviewing techniques is when journalists or investors make a statement within their question to show how much they know." He asked whether a prologue to a question is ever justified. She allowed that a short one is sometimes useful, but said it is not the normal case.
Closed questions are the wrong default for investors, because the job is collection: "For most of the investment community, we're not going to ask a lot of close-ended questions because we're trying to gather information"
A closed question has two narrow uses: "I would use a close-ended question to confirm what they said, perhaps, or I would use a close-ended question to, you know, dig into a specific area of what they've just said"
"But for the most part, the most useful questions are open and the questions that allow them to share information." Thomson's restatement: "So, ask the question to draw out, without crossing the bounds of legitimacy, but to draw out information"
9. Where Management Takes Over
Asked to describe convincing versus conveying, Carnicero drew the line between answering a question and selling an answer. To convey information is usually a simple yes or no: "Did you do something? No."
A convincing statement tells you what to think about the thing rather than describing it — that the person is a good person, or that the company is doing great, with a few examples of how
They are hard to argue with in the room. "And the problem with convincing statements is they're hard when you're sitting in the room talking to somebody, they're hard to refute," because you usually do not have contradicting information to hand
Someone who genuinely did not do the thing will often use a single convincing statement rather than reciting chapter and verse. "And management teams are good with convincing statements"
Asked for the worst question she routinely hears from analysts and investors, she named a phrase used on nearly every call: "Give me some color." Her objection: "You've just invited them to go down this little merry path. And they can say whatever they want to say"
You are then left trying to capture what they said and ask follow-ups, "but they'll lead you down the path." Thomson's summary: "So open-ended questions are good, but not so open-ended that they allow the company to provide their narrative, rather than what you want to hear"
10. When To Stop Asking
Thomson asked whether she knows instinctively when to pursue a line of questioning and when to move on. Her answer was a procedure rather than an instinct.
Option one is to press immediately: "If you see deception at that point you could ask a follow up question right there"
If they dig in, the next move is to re-ask the same thing differently. "You could use what we call a repurpose question, which is you ask the question, but in a different way." If that produces nothing, "it's time to move onto the next question." Option two is to hold the follow-ups to the end of the interview
Order the agenda by importance, because the meeting can run out before the agenda does. "You want to ask your most important questions first, because you may run out of time." Management will be expecting those questions, she added, because they know what is going on in their own companies
She flagged a vocabulary rule: her team never uses the word lying, only that someone is being deceptive
Pressing makes the truth less likely, not more. "Remember I said to you earlier that it's harder for people to admit that they've lied than it is to tell you that something is wrong." So after a couple of attempts, you "give up that ghost and move on"
11. Lying Is Easier On Zoom
Thomson asked how the method adapts to meetings held on video, where visual cues are harder to read. Carnicero said her own firm made the same shift, from in-person meetings "to Teams and Zoom calls."
The camera crops out most of the body. "You can't see what's going on in the entire body. You can't see if they're sitting there playing with a pencil or things that you would normally see"
The weight moves from watching to listening — what they are saying, rather than what they are doing in the room
She is blunt about the net effect: "So, that makes it harder for sure, and it's easier to lie to people through a screen and through a telephone than it is in your face"
The upper body still reads on camera: "The second that you asked that question, you're in L-square, you know, you can see them swivel, you can see them sit back in their chair or lean forward"
What is lost is below the desk — the feet, and what she calls "the anchor point movements"
12. The Last Question To Ask
Thomson closed by taking her advice on the spot, asking whether there was anything he had not asked that he should have. She said it belongs at the end of every interview, with one change to the wording.
Her version puts the topic, not the interviewer, at the center: "Is there anything that you and I have not talked about that you feel needs to be discussed?"
The payoff is what it surfaces unprompted. "And you'd be amazed at how much people will tell you that whatever that is, that was bothering them"
Thomson's sign-off, with the obvious joke: "I'm not going to lie, this has been truly perceptive, truly insightful, and I think, above all, it's practical advice"
Bonus Insights
Thomson's framing of what her firm sells, in the introduction: it helps governments and corporates "ask better questions, interpret suspect behaviors, and identify whopping great lies"
Entry to the CIA is not one route. People apply and come in as analysts, security staff or economists, depending on their background; she was recruited
On the book, Thomson said it is "highly readable" and that "you can consume it very quickly"
The show's stated premise, from Thomson at the top: "At T. Rowe Price, we believe asking better questions gets you better insights."
Carnicero's bottom line is that an investor should not expect a management meeting to produce the truth — the method is a way of ranking which topics deserve the time that is left, and the tells that do the ranking are the canned answer, the missing denial and the qualifier that quietly carves out the thing you just asked about.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
QVerity (Carnicero's firm, which teaches governments and corporations the CIA-developed method for detecting deception and asking follow-up questions)
Zoom and Microsoft Teams (The platforms her own client meetings moved to; she says they cost you the whole-body cues and make lying easier than in person)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Spy the Lie (One of Carnicero's books, which sets out the categories of lie and the listen-and-look method; Thomson read it on the flight from London and called it highly readable)
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