From Government Intelligence To Private Investigator, With Mario Bekes

Stepping into the world of intelligence and investigations offers a rare glimpse into the human psyche, and few understand it better than Mario Bekes. Joined by host J.R. Lowry, Mario shares how his career as a private investigator and intelligence expert shaped his understanding of human behavior, fraud, and the challenges organizations face in uncovering the truth. From his beginnings in Croatian intelligence to building a thriving investigative business in Australia, this episode unpacks the lessons he’s learned, the role of technology in modern investigations, and his journey to empowering others through storytelling. Dive into this engaging conversation and discover the evolving world of private investigation and its impact on both individuals and industries.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcast/mario-bekes

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From Government Intelligence To Private Investigator, With Mario Bekes

Managing Director & Founder Of Insight Intelligence

This show is brought to you by Pathwise.io. Pathwise is dedicated to helping you be the best professional you can be, providing a mix of career and leadership coaching courses, content and community basic membership is free. Visit Pathwise and join now. My guest is Mario Bekes. Over the past 30 years, Mario has conducted various types of intelligence and investigation in the public and private sectors, applying his knowledge, expertise, academic research and training, and investigative and interviewing techniques.

Mario also leverages his professional experience, insights and investigations and human intelligence to serve people in other ways. He’s got a podcast called Life: The Battlefield, which is intended to assist those who want to change their lives. He does keynote speaking, he does a mentoring partnership program and he also does support for aspiring authors based on his own experience in writing seven books.

Mario lives in Sydney, Australia and in our discussion, we’ll be focusing on his career journey and intelligence and investigations, what it’s taught him about the human psyche and how he is leveraging that knowledge to help others outside of his core intelligence work. Mario, welcome and thanks for joining me on the show. I appreciate your time.

Thank you very much for having your show. I would like to welcome and say thank you to all your audience.

Before we get into the meat of discussion, I have to ask you, I know that you are a Guinness World Record holder. What record did you set and how did that come about?

I set this up between April and May of 2023. I was running the live audio broadcasting for the duration of 55 hours and 25 minutes, which means I was talking live online and on air for 55 hours and 25 minutes continuously. I have the guests as well, but the official title is the Longest Audio Live Broadcasting.

That’s a long time to be on the air and talking.

It is. I wanted to set up some type of benchmark to prove to people that on my own example, it is not just a talk, not just a theory, but how to do it. If you really put your mind, effort and energy, you can achieve these things. I said to myself, “Let me demonstrate and find a way I can do this.” I wanted to be a boxing champion, but that didn’t work well. I went to do the radio. I was on the radio 55 hours. That’s a record. I thought I was 70 hours. It was a long time.

As a kid, I had a goal of trying to set the pogo stick jumping record, which back then was probably somewhat achievable and I practiced all the time. At this point, it’s probably like you have to be on a pogo stick for days to set the record and I would probably not last nearly as long as I could back then,

I heard the expression, “Nobody can judge the effort.” That’s what I always say to people. It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s an effort. Thank you for asking, JR.

Mario’s Career Beginnings In Intelligence

Yeah, I was just curious. I saw that on LinkedIn. All right, so let’s get to more career-oriented things. Let’s go back to the start of your career. You got your start in Croatian intelligence Services, right?

Yeah, that’s correct. I said to people, “Be careful what you wish for.” I was born in a very different country than what was called Yugoslavia, 6 Republics, 2 territories. Everybody speaks different language, different culture, different region, but we are a typical common country and I mean, brotherhood, sisterhood, unity. I was a very troubled kid. I was twelve, and my parents told me to leave the home. My grandfather, who was second in charge of the secret police in ex-Yugoslavia, took me under his wing. He says to me, “I want to send you to military school, but you need to finish.” I said, “I have no grades.” He says to me, “Don’t worry. I’m a good party member.”

I started my career at age fourteen in military school in Yugoslavia. I was being caught off guard. Somehow, we had a civil war, but for democracy. I went into war straight away to fight for the independence of my country. At that stage, I didn’t know about democracy. It was communism. You really knew it. These are two different societies. I progressed slowly through being combatant for five years to the military security, military intelligence. Eventually, I said to myself, “I just want to get married. I want to have kids and these things,” but the government says, “We have a job for you.”

I was like, “No, I want to resign.” They’re like, “Yeah, let’s go work out these things.” They offered me that life of foreign intelligence. I was transferred from the Department of Defense to Department of Foreign Affairs and was called director of sector seven over the foreign intelligence. After days, weeks and months of training, I was being sent to Australia. I said, “Come on. Australia? Do you know how far away that it is from Europe?” “You’re going to like this.” I was stationed first in Canberra and then in Sydney, where I finished my career in foreign intelligence in 2004.

The full-time was in intelligence, so sort of Spy craft, for lack of a better way of saying it.

That’s correct. This is the world for the young man. I knew it will come to an end. This is not a job we’re doing for the rest of your life. This is not a movie. There’s no glory. There’s no martini shaken and not stirred and all these things. It’s very dangerous. It’s very murky world filled with lies and you are accountable. I was accountable, responsible to my government. At the same time, my boss had dinner at home and he couldn’t care less what’s happened to me here. I think it was 28 or 29. I was writing the letter because at that stage, I wanted to stay in Australia. It’s time embark on a different path because fourteen years in government sector is a long time.

What ended up leading you to decide to stay in Australia?

A woman. What else? I met somebody here and I was honest in all my lies. I explained to her like, “To be honest with you, I want to finish our dating on the 31st of December, 2003.” She says to me, “What do you mean?” I said, “That’s the expiration date of my diplomat visa in Australia.” I’ll try to be honest, but at that stage, I found out that actually I don’t have nothing to return to. My mom passed away as well and my father before that. I had no family. There was nothing to hold me back. I was trying to make a risk assessment, what am I going to achieve staying in this service or not.

I spoke with my boss over there who was a great mentor of mine. He says to me, “Mario, I think it’s time to settle down, so let’s go leave the door a little bit ajar.” I said, “I need to ask permission to marry.” He says to me, “Okay,” because I needed to ask permission to marry somebody in a foreign country. I decided to stay in Australia. I got a kid the following year and started my career as a bouncer and a courier. From 007 to everything gone. I became a bouncer. That was a hard pill to swallow, but yes, I did. I stayed because I want to have a family.

Starting Inside Intelligence Group

Eventually you formed your own company that focused on intelligence and investigations. Tell us a little bit about that.

I think the wrong thing is I was my father was always being set up. Everything is fixed in stone, from the Point A to Point B. You’re born to die, one factory. I was always petrified to see my father go in the morning, the same factory, day after day, semi-drunk along with the communism, the party and everything. That’s not happening. I will say from this point in time, I think what happened to me, my family, which was GFC, so we lost everything. We lost the home, I lost the family, I became homeless thanks to one good friend of mine. He put me in his garage. I decided to start my business.

I was like, “What am I going to do? I’ll start something. What am I very good at?” That’s investigations and interrogation. It was a heck of a job. I always say to people, “Those stories of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates starting in a garage, it’s like this, but that’s the romantic side. The flip side is you were upset because you didn’t achieve the same results. You wanted more.”

From 2010 it took two years to get my first client, 2012. I started my company Insight Intelligence Group, predominantly to do corporate investigations. I found myself in uncharted voters because I was in Australia. English is my fifth language. I’m fighting against the wind mills. I didn’t go school here. On that part, you meet people who teach you a lesson because you’re stupid and people who are there to hold your hand and guide you to that minefield. I started Insight Intelligence Group in 2010, predominantly doing corporate investigations, insurance claims, fraud and others.

How has it evolved over time in terms of the types of clients that you’ve worked with and the types of services that you provide?

I’m embarrassed to say that for the first two years I had no clients. I lied to myself like, “I’ll start doing the more infidelity work on my own try to pull, try to get some type of skills.” In 2012, my first corporate client landed after he was testing me for six months and they gave me the contract SLA. “What’s SLA?” “Just sign here on the dotted line.” “What does that mean?” You will find out later.” I said, “Okay.” It was a good feeling jumping from $500 per month to making $2,500 per month.

The first client was an insurance company. For me, that was the big jump from individual clients, lawyers, solicitors, individuals, business owners, to suddenly corporate clients. I need to learn very fast, very quick, how to talk, how to behave, how to address. As I said, English was my biggest downfall. I needed to hire somebody to check all my English. From that point on, I understood that with that first client, I know now how to approach to other ones.

I say this to all your readers, I had nothing to offer except my credibility. I’ll go to the client and say, “Give me one case and if I make a mistake, you can tell everybody not to hire me.” Nobody talks that way. I talk that way. They said, “Okay, if you talk that way, you’re confident you can do it.” I was biting and biting. Eventually, all our clients are corporate clients, the majority big law firms, insurance companies, banking and the financial sector.

What does your organization look like at this point?

The fourth was having a big car maker. He was the one who actually fascinated me. Some of his problems, he occurred when he started his business. People were saying, “He’s a stupid, he’s this and that.” He said, “Maybe I don’t know everything, but I hired smart people to help me to run.” Now, the business has about 400 employees and contractors and it’s great.

It’s not investigators. I know everybody’s names as I miss things. I hire very good people, people who want to work, people who know how to work. I can translate a vision. The most important I learned in the business is that not all my ideas are great ideas because they told me, “Mario, that is not good idea. We know this.” Now, we servicing most of the insurance companies and banking industry across Australia. Me personally, I’m doing a lot of trainings and mentoring in interrogation techniques.

Mario Bekes: Not all my ideas are great ideas.

Is it all in Australia or do you have any operations abroad?

No, we go overseas as well. We go to the Middle East or Asia because most of the companies situated here has operations in Asia or maybe the Middle East. I’m being called to be the guest lecturer and to talk about investigations that has been done, particularly surveillances, misinformation, and misinformation. That actually leads to another level because my company can’t perform some activities overseas because we’re not licensed to do these things. It’s good. I do consultancy rather than just performance hands on deck. It’s a good thing that can integrate our experience to day-to-day operations. That’s what it is, but predominantly, we are in Australia.

Are these companies having you dig into mostly criminal-type situations?

Mostly. Also, it’s an insurance-type of claims. There is a lot of fraud insurance because uncertainty drives the fraud. I always say to my clients, “Fraud is like a fire. It’s a triangle. To have the fire, you need to have oxygen, to have a source of heat of fire and the fuel. With the fraud, if you take one element out, you’re not going to succeed.” Investigations are usually the last resort because obviously, they can resolve it. They need factual evidence to support. They have like a gut feeling. The criminal is not that represented because the criminal requires police. The police have different powers and legislation. We can support some things, but mostly it’s fraud or theft.

Those are borderline criminal activities in corporations. Industrial espionage is something I’m doing quite a lot. Those types of claims, we are doing those investigations. We are doing quite a lot of for the insurance companies. We’re doing quite a lot of forensic work to find out if something has really happened, and in the previous investigation, to do a discectomy of somebody that has done it before us to see if the footsteps was being followed. We do reverse engineering for lawyers. We’re predominantly during the insurance companies and the banks.

Tackling Fraud Investigations

Are the fraud cases in these instances, what portion of the time are they just individuals or small groups and what percentages are you really coming up against organized crime?

I think organized crime is in everything. You can see the elements in this one because after all, in Australia, I always say to people, “When you have the very colorful country with a lot of different types of nationalities and backgrounds, any type of environment, it’s coming with their own modus operandi, how to steal, how to lie, all these disrespectful people, those criminal gangs and everything else.” They all try to exploit the little man, I would say organized crime is not that much represented, but the biggest driver is the money. We can put in paper the losses the corporations experience and all these things. Everybody needs to go by law when a corporation needs to investigate things. All these losses accumulate. At the end of the day, it’s a tremendous loss for every organization.

Insurance companies does have tentacles for sure because they know how to get the money, what company, because it’s not fair to consider organization have the people for 6, 7, 8 or 10 months at home paying the salary and everything else and that person is actually performing different activities or go for holidays. Obviously, that is of concern. What we try to prove is that this person’s claim is not a genuine claim, so they reduce the cost. I’m not sure in US, but now, law firms have a no win, no fee. They come to us. That’s another level of difficulty in investigation. The organization is going to experience a loss of like 10%, 15%.

The espionage cases, the industrial espionage, what types of industries does that really occur in?

There are no boundaries. There are no limits. The best example, I wrote the article. It’s on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the greatest tool. The Chinese turn it against everybody. You can protect all your digital assets, you can protect your paper. Everything. You can protect a person. What the Chinese did very is they will go on LinkedIn and they will find people who are retired in some type of industry, particularly in defense industry. That’s how the Chinese go. They will hire people for the civilian company to test out planes, for example. In hindsight, they are actually picking their brains with a bunch life experience and knowledge, technical and mechanical. You just do reverse engineering.

Mario Bekes: The Chinese turned LinkedIn against everybody. They’re picking the brains of retired people in the defense industry.

Defense is the one. The second one is in the food industry. That’s a big competition. Industrial espionage is not only about knowing what your competitor does, but as you know, there’s a big element of industrial espionage that nobody talks about. It’s a sabotage. Sabotaging products, sabotaging manufacturing, it’s happening now a lot. Car industry is another one thing we are seeing quite a lot. IT industry has been cutthroat recently because as I say, when the person in the company brings that abundant knowledge and experience with them, they bring all these password keys to do reverse engineering. IT industry, defense and the car industry. Food industry has always been a big problem but IT, defense and the car industries are the most open.

How Dangerous Is This Work?

What portion of the work you do would you describe as dangerous?

I think everything’s dangerous. I can’t say the danger is different. When I was in the war, I was in danger. That’s what it is. That’s what war is about. In videos, on the pictures, we are all happy, like brave, this and that. In reality, I always said to my son, “Once upon a time, we had the album and we’ll put the pictures, your mom or me, but there was a life between. In all these pictures, you are happy, smiling, but there’s a life in between.” That’s the danger because once when you shut down this media, once when I finish investigation, I’ll say I had opportunities in my life of people approaching me on the street, threatening me. “You’ve done investigation against me.” “Yes, I did.”

I’ll say that every aspect of my life, it goes to that part of being in danger. That’s where the precautions people need to take. I say, “When you go in the public, when you’re a public person, like you and I, you don’t talk about where you live, what car you drive, where you are going for holiday or how your house looks like inside.” That’s preventing a lot of people being curious about you. As you do your work, depending on the work you’re doing, clients know that in my work. They can see either that on a call to an insurance company, the company has done investigations, or that I’m the company. I say to my employees, “I’m that guy who’s going to rise or fall. You don’t need to worry about this one.” I would say 50/50. Now, if you ask me, I just think 50%, but it’s dangerous enough.

You’ve been doing this for a few decades now. How has technology changed the nature of the way you go about intelligence and investigative work?

I was in Berlin was doing research on one of the most modern agencies being caught. They were still printing the reports when the government fell, East German. I spoke there with the people who are very being involved and a couple of people from the German archive and everything else. They explained to me how the Americans had technology in Berlin because that was the only position so deep inside, the CIA position inside the Russian territory to control Eastern Europe. They have a technology. They didn’t have the human spies. That’s the reason why the Berlin wall was erected. Still, the CIA guy told me, “Pen and paper was the biggest frame for us,” because they counted the trucks, all these things.

Now, technology has changed dramatically. JR, I didn’t saw the computer in my life when I came to Australia in ‘98. When I heard that sound of the dialup, I didn’t know what it is. I was like, “What does this say?” Somebody could train you because you didn’t know. People are looking at you like, “Are you okay?” I was like, “What does that sound mean?” They say, “It’s a dial up.”

Technology has changed. Transfer communications, reports, and classified information- this and that- are tremendous. It can instantly cause either happiness or damage. That’s the one thing in the field of industrial espionage or disinformation, misinformation. However, one of the biggest things that we still need the human intelligence aspect is person-to-person communication. That’s what I teach corporations.

It doesn’t matter how much protocols you put in place, how much money you are pouring into the IT sector or cybersecurity, your executive is going to sit on a plane and on that plane, he is going to get the best looking woman who’s going to be so innocent and she’s going to know so much about you. It’s called social engineering and it’s going to get your brain. Technology has changed. As kids, we all said, “Look at how these people have the Walkman. What’s a Walkman?” Now, technology, as much as our frame has become our biggest tool of the trail because we leave traces everywhere. It’s a lot of change.

Just as little example, I had my birthday not that long ago and on my birthday, I was wished happy birthday by the hotel I was staying in. It showed up on the TV. I was wished happy birthday by the flight attendant on the airline that I was flying that day. I was wished happy birthday by a rental car company. You just think everybody gathers all this information. That’s a relatively harmless use of it in the scheme of things, but to your point, social engineering, certainly, I work in financial services. You have to be very wary of people when people start picking your brain for information because you have no idea what they’re really up to.

I was did a couple of videos on LinkedIn and I was having a meeting with one of my clients about something not related to communication. We were just chit-chatting. There was a table next to us. There was a marketing team that was so loud that I said to him, “You don’t need to be a spy. You just go to a store for the hearing aids. You can buy an amplifier for the sound. It’s like $50. Just listen. They were throwing all this information.”

I think to myself, “That’s wrong because they don’t have the culture. Have you noticed that people know your flight, your car and all these things? That’s the reality. We don’t control it. Once whatever we do is on the internet, that information is subject to being sold to the highest bidder. The details and how they’re doing. In Australia, I always say to people to be careful. I get phone calls every day. “My name is such and such. I’m calling from the solar panel company. Do you have a solar?” “Why are you calling me if you don’t know?” They’re getting even more information about you. Be careful what you put down in the public domain.

What are some of the other factors that are affecting how you go about doing your work that are different from the time that you started the business?

When it comes to the business, one thing I could understand was the lockdowns. That was the one thing that made us wonder how we want to proceed. I said to my employees, “It doesn’t matter what we do and how we do all this pivoting and everything else. We do investigations. We need to prove the client that we are capable of performing the task we’re doing.”

When you put the years of running my businesses, I saw a big evolution happening in a field of the business. At my age, I’m dealing with younger crews now. We can talk about music, a couple of movies. It’s a lot of improvising, adjusting and adapting myself in a field of the business to talk to clients, for example.

That’s another thing. I missed it during the lockdowns because everything was in Zoom. People are still bringing this communication as a main tool of doing the business. I say like, “It’s not that I don’t like it, but I don’t prefer that. I prefer face-to-face.” That’s the one thing I’m still struggling in, JR. I have seen the younger crew and younger members on my team enjoying themselves online. They love online. That’s like a thing. Working online is the one of those biggest hurdles and a conflict between generations. That’s what I see as a biggest challenge for my business at this stage.

Human Psyche And Behavioral Insights

You’ve done interrogations, you’ve done psychological profiling, you’ve done crime investigations, you’ve worked with whistleblowers and informants. You’ve participated in the spy craft of nations. What’s all of that talk taught you about the human psyche?

I had a great lecture on the academy. For me, everything was in my life was just coincidence. I was being sent to the police academy to do crime forensic investigations. It’s like my boss said, “Why me?” Actually, he was moving me away because I wasn’t part of that little group. I said, “He wants to move me away.” He said, “Go do this one, do this, do this course, do that course.” Whatever they did to me empowered me with more and more knowledge. In one moment, when I started doing intelligence work, it’s a different type of education you get. This lady, a psychologist, says, “All humans are predictable.” She says something else. She says, “We are living in a binary code. 101010. I need to teach you.” That number recognized human behavior.

Mario Bekes: All humans are predictable. We are living in a binary code of 1s and 0s. Recognize social behavior.

When you talk about police work or investigations, that type of work, police is using a lot of imagination. That’s how everything starts. You then try to work in theories and support with the evidence and the facts into the case. Intelligence work is not that way. You have a hint, but intelligence is not useful if it doesn’t fit somewhere into the strategic or tactical plan, or if it doesn’t support. After all, when you brief the government, you brief the role of human intelligence in the intelligence cycle. What happened with that interrogation type of work? Interrogation is always being considered not so welcome. We have the many examples in life, however, intelligence, they learn something new and that is how to craft interrogations more sophisticated way.

I’ll give you one example. One of my trainings involved a personal shipping container. It’s been there for three days. It’s locked. They come and use brute force and it doesn’t work. My lecturer said to me, that lady, “What would you do?” I said like, “I don’t know. He was there five days. I just brought my Subway and a Coke. I’ll say, “How about a Subway and a Coke?” He starts talking. We’ll see how he talks because he was hungry and then he talks about his mom and everything else. The people became softer. Human intelligence is becoming more sophisticated. Less interrogations, more applying that binary type of applying the code and hacking somebody by rhythm and their daily routine.

I’ll give one example. It’s no secret. We sleep in the hardest between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM. That’s where the war starts because people are zoning out in the morning, wake up at 6:00 in the morning, have their coffee and we think because we are drinking coffee, we’re going to be awake. It’s not. It’s our enzyme in our body. It’s all these mathematics.

Smart people have done these generations and decades of research to tell us that interrogation doesn’t work. It’s a tool of medieval age. Intelligence is more now and investigations have become more sophisticated. That’s what it is. It’s to understand their mind. People have the needs to do something. There’s always a motive behind it. You can get information now not just from the person you’re investigating. As I said, we always try to educate clients. Don’t look at the person of interest like this. Look at who their friends and families are because maybe you don’t have Facebook, but your friends and your families do have it. It has become a more sophisticated craft than before. I’m glad. It’s changing a lot, but human behavior never changed.

In the guardrails of an interrogation, there’s certainly a lot more law. We won’t say it always gets followed, but there’s a lot more law around that. It means that you’ve got to be more nuanced in how you approach getting information from people in those situations, I would imagine.

The law is the one thing you ask and I just want to touch base on this one. Law is a good thing for your organization. I said to people, “You get it for free, raw supported evidence. You just need to help to manage them.” I wrote a book called The Corporate Informant and Whistleblower Management Plan. I said to people, “Whistleblowers don’t necessarily have to be seen as a negative because all they want is to say something. Listen to that.”

I need to organize the management plan of the whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are the most useful tools in every organization because this is why some societies survive. There’s nothing worse when you have a competitor, opponent or some other country where the spies are working based on patriotism or loyalty like in corporations.

If the staff is loyal to the company, they found the cause themselves that they belong to the greater than the organization, you’re never going to be able to spy on them. They’re going to be first one to say, “I think these people are doing this, this and this.” That’s what organizations are failing. I try to educate them. Try to recognize. Firstly, try to build in your organization a sense that they belong as you are.

I appreciate you, JR. You are here with me interviewing me for the benefits of your audience so they can learn something. Maybe not. We can’t control this one, but what you try to do is to give them something new to learn from some guy from Croatia. I said to people, “If your organization doesn’t have that sense of loyalty, that’s where the whistleblowers start kicking because they love the organization. All they want is to say what they have to say, but you need to manage them accordingly.”

What about psychological profiling? How do you go about that? How do you teach people how to do that?

As I said to before, it’s a long process. It takes several different experts in that one to combine. It takes physical surveillance. You need to see the people who does at least fourteen days. Daily behavior includes who he or she sees, what he or she does, and what he or she eats. As I say, the deaf people reads the lips. On surveillance, you can’t do something from a distance, like record a sound, but they can see what they are doing. You need to go and search every possible avenue. Open sources, which is like TV, newspapers, radio, libraries and social media. I come back again. Social media, it’s a public library. You can’t stop it. What you put there, it’s there. You can’t remove it.

You bring the psychologists and then try to do those testing and thesis. How does that person actually function? You are replicating another one from your team to see that person. As I say, human behavior has a long tradition of being recorded from the days of the fraud and all these guys until now. We are all programmable human beings. We all have our needs.

When I was in intelligence work, when I was in that field, even now, I said to my son, “The day I left the service, they told me, ‘This document is for five years. You can’t say this. For 25 years, you can’t say this. You’re never going to talk about this. This needs to die with you.’” we can apply this to society. Sociological profile is a game of cat and mouse because if the other side knows that he’s being observed and you make an inquiry, they can change their behavior to sidetrack you. It’s predictable. Everything’s predictable.

Generational Changes And Communication Gaps

You said a few minutes ago that the tools and techniques have changed. The human behavior hasn’t really changed. Do you see differences from your time in the government sector working in military intelligence or national intelligence to the way things work in the private sector? Do people behave differently or is human nature, human nature?

The only thing I can say right now, at this very moment, again, is that I want to judge this according to my son. I said to him, he started medicine, so I said to him, “I’m seeing a lot of young people vaping.” I never saw them smoking, but I never saw people smoke that much. He says to me, “It’s because you are an old man.” I said, “Sorry, what?” He said, “We don’t need to smoke. We just do vaping.” They skip smoking. I used to smoke as well. I said to him, “What does that mean?” He showed me his mobile phone. He said, “We are online all the time. We don’t need to.” That’s the reality.

It’s the only difference I’m seeing, which frighten me, that the younger generation, human to human touch, is disappearing. It’s actually human tablet, mobile phone, computer to human rights. It’s online. It’s digital. That is something I’m seeing that has only changed. I think that human behavior will change because sometimes, I get a message from my son and his girlfriend and I need to decipher this, honestly, because I don’t know these abbreviations. I don’t know what it means. IDK. I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Google it.” That’s changing and that’s the landscape of business. I consider myself a dinosaur, but that’s the only thing that is changing. That’s going to change a lot of things in the future but not right now.

I think that’s fair. If you think about the history of humanity and you don’t even have to go back all that far, the industrial era changed the way that people interact with each other. The move to the cities changed the way that people interact with each other. The invention of transportation allowed people from different countries to see each other more readily, and that era changed it. Social media is now changing. People do change. To your point, you’ve got a son who’s in the generation who is very comfortable being online and interacting online. We do this, but we certainly prefer face-to-face interaction. What you do every day does ultimately affect the way that you think. If you spend all your time online with people and not with people, it changes human behavior.

When I talk to him because it’s like he’s the closest human being I can understand in this new generation. It’s a big skip in evolution. It’s literally like a revolution. It’ll not change. It’s like they will leave more traces. Investigation’s going to be less complex, but it’s going to take more time because it’s going to be a lot of covering on our online.

That’s what the people do. They’re using all these apps and all these social media platforms to communicate, share things and everything else. As I said, it’s easier now to transfer information because it’s more digital than before. “JR, I need to give you the papers. Can you make a copy for me?” “Here you go. It’s there online for you.”

In addition to everything you do in your core work, you have a whole bunch of other things you’re involved in. Let’s start with your podcast. Tell me about your podcast.

My podcast was a product of necessity rather than I just wanted to be podcaster. During the lockdown, I was doing podcasts. I saw a lot of true statements and checked versions of the events for the history. I was sitting in the office one day and I said to myself, “I want to promote something in my world,” and it was difficult for me to understand. I’m very happy to see you send document like, “Maria, I need this, this and this.” When people prepare for any work, they must do some type of planning. When I was trying to support my business, there’s so much complications. You need to do this, you need to do that.” Eventually, they can’t deliver.

I said to myself, “How about a startup podcast?” Everybody told me, “Don’t do this.” Luckily for me, I have a great mentor. His name is Professor Clive Smallman, and I used to run the radio show with him. He took me under his umbrella and he told me, “It’s not what you are by nature, but by nurture.” I said, “Clive, can you translate this for me?” He told me, “I want you to go university here in Australia.” I was like, “Clive, it’s an English.” “Mario, I’ll help you.”

He truly helped me to get up to my Masters and the podcast was just a pure product of necessity to promote my business. However, it evolved into something else, which was I wanted to interview people like yourself, people from day-to-day life with the real stories to empower others so my audience can learn. Of course, I saw in social media that podcasts has dropped 40% from 6.5 million during the lockdowns, back now at 3 million. It’s declining as well because it’s takes time and everything else, which is encouraging for me. That’s just why I started Life: The Battle. It’s because I wanted to share the story to my audience so they can learn from the real life examples, obstacles and minefields.

You do a radio talk show? You’ve mentioned that. What’s that about?

That’s how it started, on a local radio station, Alive 90.5. It was with Professor Clive Smallman. That was simple because he wanted to prove that I can, because I was afraid to talk in public. First, I will apologize to the public, everybody, for not using English as my first language. I’ll apologize. Clive is British, so he’s a little bit different, at least in Australia. He says to me, “I’ll teach you how to speak English properly and write and everything else. I started that radio show with him many years ago. That’s the old local radio station.

Now you do some keynotes, too, so you’re out speaking for money.

I never wanted this. I met somebody in my life just before the lockdown, before COVID. I was preparing myself to do a big presentation for my client in Singapore. I saw something happening. I said to myself, “That doesn’t make sense. These preparations, some COVID talks.” The COVID-19 was a number seven in line of all these SARS infections. COVID would be same thing. I then saw that one of the biggest problems if this happened, and I remember from military intelligence, the biggest downfall for everything in the world is logistics.

For some reason, I was in Sydney. A few days later, I met Daniel Tolson. The guy walks towards me, all slick and I was like, “Who is this? Who’s the guy?” My friend, Alison, says to me, “That’s a good friend of mine called Daniel.” He told me that I should start public speaking. I must say again that that was still in the stages when I wasn’t confident enough, but then I need to learn how to present. Now, I presented about two topics. One, it’s empowering people to prove them that the impossible is possible based on my life experience. I was going to say that talk about just negativity from your life. See the positive things in your life. Nobody knew that my son was diagnosed with epilepsy and now he’s okay because there’s a big brain surgery. He’s a miracle.

Literally, the doctor says he’s a miracle because they had no idea if he’s going to be okay. I learned with my son that every time he has a seizure, I need to put a brave face. I need to push myself and smile and everything else, even if deep inside, everything was just breaking, but then he was put back together. Daniel says to me, “Why don’t you bring those to public speaking?” I said, “Okay, let empower people through my life experience?”

In hindsight, I need to achieve something. I need to write the books in English.” I say English because my vocabulary is limited. Now it’s much more wider. The second topic in public speaking, it is interrogations, investigations and particular, industrial espionage, which is quite interesting for the more readers because it tells them how your brain is hacked. That’s two keynote topics I’m delivering.

That was probably right up Daniel’s alley. He was a guest on the show.

I like this man quite a lot and he invested a lot, particularly during the lockdowns. He’ll call me 2 to 5 times per day, “Don’t lose track. Don’t do this.” I was the type, as I said, at the beginning of my conversation, I knew everything. When I fail, I blame all. I need to learn to make the team and the people who can help assist. Yeah, he was the one.

What’s ahead of you? Last question.

I’ll not hold back, but I have a dream, actually. I want to be the new male Oprah. I think to myself, her style of interviewing, her style of delivering the message, the hope, it’s something I want to do. Working on this one plus my two businesses, it’s like the time is working against me. I’m hoping that in the next couple of years, I’m going to reach that position when I can host people like Oprah and say, “JR, remember three years ago? What do you think about it?” I want many people to learn, to hear the honest story of the people who are moving in the world like yourself. That’s in my pipeline at this stage.

That sounds like a great dream.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for doing the show with me.

Thank you, JR.

—

I want to thank Mario for joining me to discuss his career beginnings, his work and intelligence, how he’s applied his knowledge of the human psyche in other ways as well. He certainly has had a unique career journey. If you’d like to work on your career journey, you can visit Pathwise.io. You can become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Mario Bekes
• Life: The Battlefield
• The Corporate Informant and Whistleblower Management Plan
• Daniel Tolson – Past Episode
• LinkedIn – Pathwise
• Facebook – Pathwise
• YouTube – Pathwise
• Instagram – Pathwise
• TikTok – Pathwise

About Mario Bekes

Over the past 30 years, Mario Bekes has conducted various types of investigation in the public and private sector, applying his knowledge, expertise, academic research and training in investigative intelligence and investigative-interviewing techniques.

As Managing Director/Founder of Insight Intelligence, Mario acts as an architect and designer of solutions in corporate investigations, human intelligence and surveillance techniques.

Mario also leverages his professional experiences and insights in investigations and human intelligence to serve people in four primary ways:

A podcast called “Life: The Battlefield” which is intended to assist those who want to change lives Keynote speaking, focusing on topics such as how to navigate uncertainty, how to embrace adversity, and how to actualize your potential Executive Mentoring Partnership Programs for those ready to expand their influence and make a bigger impact in the world Support for aspiring authors, based on his own experience in writing 7 books.

Mario lives in Sydney, Australia.