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  • Kim Meninger

Career Lessons from a Corporate Spy

Updated: May 12, 2023

Career Lessons from a Corporate Spy


In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we are doing something a little different. My guest this week is Robert Kerbeck, author of the book Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street. He shares a fascinating story of his career as a corporate spy and the experience of being an actual impostor in the workplace. He also talks about leaving that role for Corporate America and how unprepared he was for the politics and self-serving behaviors he found when he got there. In the end, Robert shares his pivot to his current career as a writer and how that has brought him back to his creative roots. Throughout the conversation, he shares insights and advice to help others along their career journeys.

About My Guest

Robert Kerbeck’s true crime memoir, RUSE: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street is the story of how a wannabe actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy. Frank Abagnale, author of Catch Me If You Can, said, “Kerbeck has mastered the art of social engineering, or what he calls ‘rusing’, and taken it to a whole new level,” while Shondaland (the producer of the Netflix series Inventing Anna) described RUSE as “a story almost too good to be true with no shortage of wild stories.” Kerbeck’s previous book MALIBU BURNING: The Real Story Behind LA’s Most Devastating Wildfire, won a 2021 SoCal Journalism Award, the 2020 IPPY Award, and the 2020 Best of LA Award. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and Lithub’s Crime Reads.

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Transcript:

Kim Meninger It is so nice to meet you, Robert, I cannot wait for this conversation. I think it’s gonna be a little bit different than my usual conversations on this topic. And so I would love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.

Robert Kerbeck I think crazy might be the better word for this conversation. My name is Robert Kerbeck and I’m the author of a brand new memoir called Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street. And it is the true story, my true story of how a want-to-be actor became the world’s greatest corporate spy.

Kim Meninger And I just think there’s something really compelling about that term corporate spy that, you know, certainly piqued my interest when I read about you. And so I want to start at the beginning. How did you get to that place? What was… talk us through your career path?

Robert Kerbeck You know, some high schools have home economics class or woodshop. Our school had a corporate spying program. No, of course not. Right. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s insane. The story’s insane. Basically, I’m from Philadelphia, and the Kerbeck family, my family, my great-grandfather sold horse carriages before automobiles were invented. And then he switched to cars. My grandfather took over that business. My father took over that business, and I was supposed to take over that business. And when I was in college, I fell in love with acting. I wanted to move to New York to try to be an actor. But when I graduated college, I kind of didn’t have the guts to do that. I didn’t know anybody that had done that. I didn’t come from an artistic family. So I went to work for my father at the, at the car dealership. And I just found that wasn’t for me, the kind of trickery of car sales. It just didn’t feel right to me, which is, of course, pretty ironic. When I moved to New York to try to be an actor and I needed a survival job and I stumbled into a job as a corporate spy. When I moved to New York, I didn’t know anybody and a college buddy of mine, his brother was in New York trying to be an actor. And I was with him one day, and he very quickly kind of mentioned this new job that he’d gotten, and then he shut up right away. Like he knew he had said something he wasn’t supposed to say. And I said, Well, what we’ll do, you know, I helped me out, I’m broke. I need a job. What, what is this job and he very reluctantly got me an interview. I went to the Upper East Side and your listeners probably know the Upper East Side is kind of the old-money area of New York. It’s kind of the, the fanciest part of New York and I go to this doorman building, I was living in Hell’s Kitchen in a cave with two other guys. And I go to this doorman building, beautiful building, I take the elevator up to the penthouse. And this woman opens the door. I remember she had a martini and a cigarette, but that just might be the writer and me slightly exaggerating. But whatever the case was, it was the nicest apartment I’d ever been into. It was spectacular, like out of an Architectural Digest magazine. So I knew whatever the woman was doing, it was lucrative. And she brings me in for this interview, the strangest interview I’ve ever had, she never asked me a question about my skills. She didn’t ask to see the resume that I had brought with me. She just asked me some questions about my relationship with my father, and how was he taking me not going into the family business? And the answer to that was not well, so I, I left very discombobulated and but my buddy called me and he said, you know, you got the job. And all of a sudden, I felt very proud of myself. And he said, Don’t get too excited, because she hires everyone, because no one is able to do this job. And the very next day, I went out to Brooklyn, and this is the Brooklyn of the early 90s when the crack epidemic was hitting hard. It’s not the Brooklyn of today with you know, hipsters with beards and coffee shops. This was Brooklyn when it was rough and dangerous. I go to this rundown building, I go all the way up, fourth-floor walkup, I knock on this door, this attractive woman opens the door with an Irish accent and says you’ll come to work in my bedroom. And to that point, I had no idea what the job was, I was single, so I wasn’t too, too concerned. But, but she takes me into her bedroom where there’s a futon on the floor and a desk, and she says sit down at the desk. And she begins to explain that we use our acting skills, using accents and fake personas to call major corporations and get people there to tell us things that they definitely should not tell us, to reveal secrets about their personnel, about their strategies, about their plans, so that we can then sell that information to our clients.

Kim Meninger Wow. So what did it feel like to you? Once you found out what this job is going to look like? Did you have any doubts about doing that kind of work? Like how did you process that information?

Robert Kerbeck Did you know I was, I was kind of shocked, you know because I didn’t really know what it was? I thought it was some sort of telemarketing, you know, selling magazine subscriptions or something, um, you know, but I was like, well, okay, you know, let’s, let’s try this out. And, you know, you know, back in the day, you know, so remember before LinkedIn, and the New York Post, I think, describe me as LinkedIn before LinkedIn was invented. So back in the day, there was no way for corporations to know who was at a firm, you know, what the organizational chart looked like, and who the rock stars were within an organization, right? Obviously, everybody that goes on a job interview is going to say, I’m the best person in my group, I’m number one in my group, but to be able to literally ascertain that, you know, and something your listeners may not know, your, that your listeners that work in corporate America is that corporations rank their employees. They all rank their employees, they all have internal metrics that they use to rank their employees. And we would determine what those rankings were. So then our clients knew exactly who the top people were, who the rock stars were, who was number one on the sales team, who was number two on the trading team, who were the bankers that had the largest books of business, or who were just the best people in whatever department we were, we were looking at. And so you know, as I started doing this, I rationalized that because one I was broke and needed a job. And two, I rationalized that, that most of the information we were getting was designed to help people get a better job, because, you know, we were getting these org charts, we were putting them together, we were showing the rankings of who the top people were, and the top people were getting calls from other firms saying, Hey, we know you’re the number two person at this team, we know you’re the rockstar over there, we want to hire you away, we’re gonna pay you more money to do that. And so I said, Well, look at the end of the day, that’s capitalism. I’m helping people get a better job and, and how, how could that be really a bad thing? Now, again, that was a rationalization because the means we were using to do this, where were we were, you know, we were deceiving people, right? And so, so it, for sure is rationalization. It’s not a career that I would recommend for anyone. But it was a hell of a crazy story.

Kim Meninger Well, I’m curious, just as a side note, now that there is LinkedIn and a lot more information, are there still corporate spies? Are there still people who do the kind of work that you do?

Robert Kerbeck Corporate spying is alive and well, for your listeners out there, if you’re looking to pivot to a new career, email me go to my website, Robert Kerbeck.com, you could directly email me and I will be more than happy to tell you how to do it. It’s very, it’s very lucrative, a little dangerous. But yeah, you know, LinkedIn, as, as incredible as LinkedIn is, it still only has and I’m just going to pick a number 60 to 70% of the information on there is accurate at any given time about a particular firm, which means that 30 to 40% of the executives that work at a company aren’t on LinkedIn, or their profiles are way out of date. And most of these people are the rock stars right there. They’re the passive candidates, and all of my clients who are the largest corporations in America, they’re interested in the rock stars. And of course, if you’re a rock star at a firm, you don’t care about your LinkedIn profile, you’re killing it where you are, you’re the top person, you’re being paid well, everybody’s treating you great. You’re not worried about your next job opportunity because you’re a star. And that’s who the big firms are looking to poach is those stars because not only do those stars bring, you know their talents and their skills, but they also bring clients, right, they bring their current firms’ clients, they bring the other people at the firm that are their friends that are also rock stars, right? And so a lot of times, let’s say your number set your number, your corporation is number seven in a given market, right? If you take the top one or two people from the number one corporation or the number two corporation, you can literally flip those rankings because that’s how important talent is right you think about I always use the analogy of football right? How important the position of the quarterback is right? If you can, you know the top quarterback at your big rivals a free agent if you can sign that quarterback away, it can completely change your franchise and you can just look at Tom Brady when he left the New England Patriots that were winning all those Super Bowls. Last time I checked New England has not won a Super Bowl since I don’t even know if they’ve made the playoffs. Maybe made the playoffs once. And then Tom Brady goes to Tampa Bay, they win a Super Bowl. It’s the same thing in corporate America, if you take a rockstar away from Apple, or Google or Goldman Sachs or Pfizer, or whatever the firm is, you take rockstars away from that firm and you get them for your firm, it is guaranteed, adding hundreds of 1000s of dollars and in some cases, believe it or not billions of dollars to your firm’s bottom line.

Kim Meninger So it makes perfect sense. And, and I understand your justification to thinking about really helping people to get a better job. What was it like, in the day to day like, I would be afraid that someone’s gonna figure it out, I’d be terrified that I was going to break character or that somebody’s gonna ask a question, something was gonna happen, I’d be in a constant state of anxiety. Obviously, you had acting abilities. And I would imagine there’s some part of this, it might even be fun. But how did it feel to play this role?

Robert Kerbeck Was this is Gerhart calling from the office in Frankfurt, Germany? We have the European Union regulators here this week. And we need some information from states who doesn’t want to talk to Gerhart from the Frankfurt office, right? Corporations now are huge. They have offices all over the world, Tokyo, Dublin, Frankfurt, right? So all of a sudden, you get this call from Gerhart. Oh, my God, Gerhart, oh, this is so crazy. Hey, how’s it going, buddy, you know, and so you create this sort of a friendship, right? And we would use these accents and these characters to create a friendship where you became telephone buddies, where people enjoyed the conversation. And most times, not all times, but most times, they wanted to help you. Because what are people in corporate America trained to do? Be a good teammate, right? And so we would take advantage of that kind of desire to have good corporate culture. And we would use that to our advantage.

Kim Meninger And so I think it’s interesting, because when you and I were communicating, before we got to this conversation, you, you essentially refer to yourself as an actual impostor, right? We talked about the impostor syndrome a lot in this conversation, but you actually were an impostor. And so how did you navigate that in terms of, like, at what point did you decide, I’m not doing this anymore? Were there ever any points when you felt like, oh, I don’t know if I can continue to do this.

Robert Kerbeck Yeah, I mean, it was always, it was always a challenge ethically, you know. And, for a long time, I rationalized it because we were getting and this is gonna sound pretty hilarious. We were getting $8 an hour to do this job when we first started. So you know, it’s not like we were doing it to get rich per se, it was just to pay the bills so we could be an actor, so I could be an actor. And of course, I was going to be a famous actor. And what happened was, I was a working actor, and your listeners can Google me and see that I did, you know, 50 major TV shows, you know, every major TV show of the 90s and early aughts, I did er, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, Star Trek, Melrose Place, I was doing lead roles on these shows. And so the job was always temporary. And that was another way how I justified it. You know, it was temporary, ever, you know, it was almost always, I was almost always done with it, you know, I mean, because I was making more and more money as an actor. And in the late 90s, I booked up four different TV pilots, and none of the pilots got picked up. And all of a sudden, like, it seems, you know, very quick that that this happened that all of a sudden, all the wind went out of kind of my acting sails, and my career basically stalled. And all of a sudden, you know, now I was married and looking to start a family looking to buy a house. And that was the moment where I kind of, you know, crossed over to the proverbial dark side where I went, look, you know, I’m, I need to make money. This job is very lucrative. I’m incredibly good at it. People were throwing money at me, they were begging me to do the job. And that was the period in the early 2000s, leading up to the crash where again, LinkedIn had not been invented. And this intelligence that was not just organizational charts, it was also companies, you know, their plans, their strategies, their new products, anything and everything that a competitor of one another would want to know to get at a competitive advantage. And that was the moment where all of a sudden my income ratcheted up. You know, it was exponential increases, to the point where, towards the end, I was making $2 million a year as a corporate spy.

Kim Meninger Wow. Wow. And then you and I talked a little bit about this too. It really the big turning point was the crash right so that yeah, how, how did that affect your career path?

Robert Kerbeck Well, so you know, obviously the crash occurred. And then corporations were no longer so interested in what their competitors were doing, they were just interested in surviving, right, because we know many, many big firms went under. Many other firms were bailed out. So all you know, they stopped spending money on spies. So all of a sudden, I had no income, I had a mortgage, and I had to take a job in Corporate America. And I went to work for a major executive recruiting firm, based out of Hong Kong, it was my first job in Corporate America. And what I was shocked to find out was that the lying done in Corporate America face-to-face seemed to me to be far worse than the lying that I had done on the telephone. And if, if I hope your listeners do pick up my book, Ruse, and if they do, and they’re reading it, and they’re, they’re kind of getting upset at me, because I’m tricking this person and losing that person, don’t worry readers, when I go to work for Corporate America, I go from the, the ruse-r to the ruse-ee. I become the victim, I become the dupe, I’m the one that gets taken advantage of. And so I think the readers, a lot of readers, I know they enjoy that, because all of a sudden, they see this guy, who’s sort of the master deceiver, and all of a sudden I’m the one that’s being deceived because I was under the mistaken apprehension that my teammates, we were all pulling together, we were all working together, we were all trying to do our best to benefit the company. And what I didn’t realize was everybody was just interested in their own, you know, their own path, their own advancement, their own bonus check. And people were willing to do whatever they could, you know, to advance themselves, often at the expense of other people. And that was a thing that I kind of didn’t realize how cutthroat the corporate world could be.

Kim Meninger And what did that do to you, when you realized it?

Robert Kerbeck It was demoralizing, it really was because, you know, here, I had taken this job, obviously, I needed the job to not go broke. And, you know, I just thought like if I worked hard, and I did my best for the company, and that meant the company did better. You know, that meant everybody at the corporation would do better. And I thought that was what the purpose was, you know. And what I began to find is that everybody was concerned just about their own individual path, how much they were going to make, what their next job was going to be, you know, if they were going to get the promotion over you. And so there was this, this competitiveness, that was not really about the best interest of the corporation, it was the best interest of the individual. And that was something that I was, I was trying to do the best for the corporation. And it took me a long time to realize that and by the time I realized that they fired me.

Kim Meninger That was gonna be my next question because I just think it’s so interesting. The contrast between this world in which the point is to be deceptive, right, the point is to, is to lie and get this information in these different devious ways. And then there is almost like this innocence that you brought to this corporation and this disillusionment that followed. And then I was gonna ask you, where did you go into, you know, if you can’t beat them, join them mode, did you like how did you end up navigating that, but it sounds like you’ve never had a chance to even make that transition? What? What was the firing like? What did they fire you for?

Robert Kerbeck Well, I think, you know, I did an interview. And one woman said, you know, she described me as the nicest corporate spy you’ll ever meet, which was a very sweet thing for her to say. But I think the idea was, I always drew a line with the job, that the rousing was my job, but in my personal life, in my daily life, in my real life, I tried to be honest, straightforward. Good person, right? And so when I went to work for this corporation, that’s what I was trying to be honest, straightforward, good. And it just was not, you know, at least, you know, you know, certain industries are more competitive than other industries, you know, obviously, Wall Street, technology, very competitive. But I think most of Corporate America I think most of your listeners can, can relate to corporate politics, and to you know, you’ve got to play that game and a lot of playing that game, you know, that kind of that Game of Thrones, you know, analogy, let’s say where if you’re not, if you’re not on the offensive, you know, you you’ve really got to look out for your best interests. And when they fired me I definitely went into sort of the depression and had the proverbial midlife crisis. And at one point, I sat down and then I actually wrote a suicide note. But it wasn’t me writing a suicide note. It was this character that kind of came through me. And I had been an English major in college before I, you know, got into acting. And all of a sudden I wrote this basically a short story, I read it to an actor friend of mine. He said, That’s a great story, you should write a book. And so I wrote a book with this kind of crazy character. And the book was terrible. But the character was great. And the story was very compelling. The writing was rough. And that was the moment I realized, like, wow, I have a certain ability to tell a story. I know what good storytelling is. But I needed to do some work on how do I make the writing around that story better. And that was when I started going to writing conferences. I formed a writer’s group here in Malibu where I live called the Malibu Writers Circle and started writing short stories. To my great surprise, they started getting published, every short story that I’ve written has been published, a magazine started asking me to write essays. All of a sudden those essays got published, I wrote a play that got done in New York. And then and then all of a sudden, I started writing books, which now I’ve had two books published in the last three years. My book before Ruse was Malibu Burning, which was, again a true story about the wildfire a few years ago, your listeners may remember the wildfire that burned down half of Malibu, I fought the wildfire with my family, we saved our house, even though 17 of 19 on our street burned to the ground. And the LA Times asked me to write an essay about that. And then a publisher read that essay, and they asked me to write that book. And then, at one point, I was at a writers conference, and I was reading, I was reading an early excerpt from Ruse I hadn’t even thought about writing a book about, about the corporate spying. One of the reasons I didn’t want to write it is I didn’t want to get in trouble as in go to jail for writing it for, you know, the things that I had done in the past. And the people at the conference, freaked out about the book, they said, Oh, my God, we didn’t even know you know, corporate spying existed. You know, we all know the Russian spy on the Chinese, the Chinese spy on us, but mostly what no idea, major corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to hire spies every year. And they said, you gotta write a book about this. And so I wrote the book. I timed it out. So the statute of limitations had expired on any potential crimes. And now I’ve, I’ve written this book, which now is in development for a TV series, which is pretty cool.

Kim Meninger It’s so fascinating because you had if we sort of go back to the beginning, right, you were an English major, you fell in love with acting, you had this vision of becoming an actor. I’m curious if in retrospect, when you look back on the arc of your career, do you feel like you’re finally where you were meant to be? Or do you feel like each one of those led you to this moment, you couldn’t have gotten here had you not had all of these other experiences?

Robert Kerbeck That’s a great question. And I think it both of those, those points you made are true, right. In other words, I’ve gone back to the very beginning where I started, but I could not have gotten there If I hadn’t gone through all this stuff. As a young person, I was unable to sit still and write. So it’s not like I I’m like, oh, boy, I should have set, you know, I should have done, I wasn’t able to do it at that point. And I wasn’t really interested in doing it, I wanted to get out, I wanted to meet people. And theater, of course, is a really wonderful collaborative place to, you know, interact with people and you know, really, you know, get close to people and have a lot of great experiences. So, you know, being a writer is much more of a solitary pursuit, which is something now as a, you know, older person, as a middle-aged person sitting in a room for hours at a time, I’m able to do that now. But as a young person, I couldn’t do that.

Kim Meninger So what would you say are the big lessons or takeaways from your own journey? Like is there anything that you think about as if you were going to give advice to other people that you would say you’ve taken away from your experience and would recommend other people think about as part of their journeys?

Robert Kerbeck Yeah, I think the number one thing is take the journey you want to take right go on the path that is exciting to you, is inspiring you, is firing you up because you know if I had stayed with my father in the family car business sure I would have been a wealthy guy. Now it turned out that I’m sort of wealthy now. Anyway, right from corporate spying, which of course I had no idea was going to, was going to come up but, you know, go go on the journey you want to go on because, as we saw recently with this terrible COVID experience, you know, no day is guaranteed. And so if you don’t, if you don’t do what you want to do, you don’t want to turn around, you know, like, am I disappointed that maybe I didn’t have a bigger acting career? Sure. But do I regret that? No, I don’t have any regrets because I was always doing what I wanted to do, you know. And I think that’s, that’s the big takeaway is, you know, we’re all going to have life disappointments. We’re all going to have things that don’t work out the way we want it to. But you don’t want to have that big regret, that there’s that thing that you, you always wanted to do, but you didn’t do. And I’m also here to tell you, you know because here I am publishing books, you know, and I’m not a kid, it’s never too late to do what you want to do. Right. And I think that’s incredibly exciting, that it’s never too late to take a path that maybe, maybe you didn’t take before. But you can take it now.

Kim Meninger That’s a really good point, too. And I also want to acknowledge just there were a couple of times when you talked about now I have a mortgage now have a family how much your own external circumstances influence your path as well, you know, it’s, I would imagine, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But being an actor when you’re single, and taking those kinds of risks feels different from when you maybe have small children, or just different aspects of your lifestyle that take new take on new priority. So I think it’s also helpful for people to think if I like you said, right, like, Oh, if I, if I don’t feel like I can do it, in this very moment, I have this dream, and I don’t feel like now’s the right moment, it doesn’t mean that I have to give it up entirely.

Robert Kerbeck Right. That’s right. And also, you know, I mean, writing, and this just one example, for writing, you know, you know, to write more than an hour or two hours a day in terms of kind of new writing, you know, is a challenge, I mean, and sometimes I do, do it, but in general, I just tried to write for an hour to two hours in the morning, and then I spend the rest of the day maybe I’m editing something, maybe I’m working on an interview a podcast, you know, what you know, and so my point is, it doesn’t take a lot of time, away from your full-time job away from your family doesn’t take a lot of job. Time, when I first started writing, I would I just said half an hour a day, half an hour each morning, I would get up a half an hour early. And I would and I would mark that time, I would literally kind of keep track of it. And I’m here to tell you a half an hour a day, five or six days a week, at the end of the year, you’ll have a book, if you’re looking to write a book, if you’re looking to write your memoir, if you put a half an hour a day aside. And by the way, that could be anything you know, I want to, I want to learn to play guitar and write songs, half an hour a day, in a year, you will be a really solid guitar player writing songs. And you know, and those are just two examples.

Kim Meninger That’s a really good point. Because I do think that a big point of resistance or something that we think gets in our way is time. And so everyone says, Oh, I don’t have time for that, right? But time keeps passing anyway. And I think if it is important to you, those small, incremental chunks of time have that powerful cumulative effect as you’re describing.

Robert Kerbeck Yeah, somebody taught me that. I mean, I’m really grateful. You know, that it takes, you know, you, you set a goal, and then you, you only make yourself hit 80% of that goal, right? So let’s say you know, you know, I don’t know, you know, I want to, I want to write a certain amount per week, or I want to practice an instrument, or I want to learn a language or I want whatever it is, right, and you say what you feel like you could comfortably commit to that. And then you cut that down to 80%, of whatever that number is, right? So that it’s much more doable, right? So you know, you know, we might be working out like, I’m gonna work out, you know, four days a week, okay. Let’s just say three days a week for now, you know, you give yourself something so it’s more manageable.

Kim Meninger That’s a really good idea. Yeah. Is there anything else on your horizon? Like, obviously, you’re doing a really, you’re very, getting a lot out of your writing career, right? You’re doing really well? Do you see any other careers? And you’re?

Robert Kerbeck No, thank you. You know, it’s funny that a lot of people have reached out about this book, I wrote Malibu Burning about this terrible wildfire. And, and obviously, climate change is a big part of these wildfires. Because, you know, we obviously have a drier planet. So, you know, we have, you know, the rising temperature. You know, vegetation is drier, we don’t have as much rain. And so these fires start, and they’re very difficult to stop, right? And we’ve seen fires, not just in California, but we’ve seen them in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and New Mexico, people die, you know, people 1000s of homes. We’ve seen them in Australia and Canada and Europe, right? And so, but you know, watching a film about climate change, oftentimes, maybe not the most exciting film. And so a couple of people said, Look, you know what, watching a film about Malibu burning and, and actually having interviews with celebrities that lost their homes, Miley Cyrus and Nick Nolte. And, you know, who was the other guy lives around the corner from me, Robin Thicke, the singer, the musician. So, so people reached out said, Hey, why don’t you direct this movie. And so I kind of was interested in I loved the idea. And I love the idea of being of service. I write about wildfires to this day, all the time. And I speak about wildfires all the time. But I found that the directing thing was not in my bag of tricks, it requires a tremendous like to put together a movie, you have to have so much patience. Because there’s, you know, it’s basically you’re the CEO of basically a company. And it just was not in my so that career is not a career that I’m going to be taking up.

Kim Meninger Well, you obviously have some really exciting projects that you’ve completed, and I’m sure you’re gonna have even more books in writing ahead. Where can people find you if they want to get more of you?

Robert Kerbeck Yeah, you know, I always tell people go to my website, Robertkerbeck.com, you can buy Ruse, from anywhere you’d like to buy books, you can buy Malibu burning, you can also see the trailer for Ruse, which will give you a sense of the TV series. You can also read other essays that I’ve written. And, and if you do go to the site, you can also email me directly from the site, I love to hear from people. So please, you know, reach out and and again, for your listeners that are looking to pivot into corporate spying, you know, just let me know, and I’ll help you out as much as I can.

Kim Meninger Thank you so much, Robert. And we’ll link to that in the show notes as well so that everybody has access to your website, and I just so appreciate your sharing your journey with us. It’s fascinating. I can’t wait to read your book. And just thanks so much for being here. Oh, well.

Robert Kerbeck Thanks for having me.

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