EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Agent: The ONE Survival Rule That Keeps You Alive When Everyone Else Dies

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

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What was the scariest moment for you in your story where you felt like things were out of control and you had to like get a grip on your mind? Yeah. So it's it's so powerful. So my book, Shadow Cell, when I was going through the process of writing it, it was like this weird sort of cathartic healing exercise where I had to revisit my years at CIA mentally. And then I had to revisit the feelings. the emotions and the highs and the lows and all that stuff. And I put those in the book,

but I had to relive those personally along the way. So that's why I really appreciate this question because the most scary, the most harrowing, the most uncertain point was when I identified that I was under surveillance in an aggressive hostile country and I was undercover as a CIA officer. So what nobody talks about in the movies is that you train for, events like this and you prepare for events like this. And in the back of your mind, there's like this little kernel of confidence where you're like, oh, I can't wait to use this in the field. I can't wait to actually detect my surveillance. I can't wait until I'm, you know, tip of the spear. But when that moment actually happens, you realize that that confidence is really just a tiny

kernel way in the back of your brain. And everything else is so much louder. The worry, the fear, the doubt, you know, the idea that you'll never see your wife again, the idea that you'll never see your own homeland again, those are all the things that crowded my mind in that moment where I confidently identified, I'm under surveillance. And let's walk it back a little bit. Like I know you were essentially, your unit was brought in to identify a mole from an adversary of the U.S. And, you know, that's what led up to that moment you just described. But like how did you maintain like your composure when you're in like the enemy's territory to not like give away who you were and how did you live the day to day life without being in so much

fear like minute by minute like walk the audience through that absolutely so one of the first things that CIA teaches its field officers to do is identify risks and then calm your own central nervous system. We all have a sympathetic response to outside stress. And the sympathetic response actually has four different responses. Most people only remember the first two, fight or flight. We all understand that when you're faced with a threat, you either want to run or you want to fight. But there's actually two other responses. One is called freeze and one is called fain. So when you freeze, it means that you really don't take any action at all. You don't know what to do. everything just kind of stops. And for anybody who knows what it's like to freeze in a moment of

stress, then you understand that sympathetic response very well. The last one, which is fain, that's, you actually start to, or fawn, excuse me, you actually start to try to appease your threat. You try to calm them. You try to soothe them. You try to make them show affection towards you, right? Anytime you've seen a child who gets in trouble and then right away they try to give you a hug or they, you know, they immediately beg for forgiveness and they want your approval again. That is a fawning action. So your fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, these four sympathetic responses all happen in your body. CIA teaches us that three of those four responses will almost immediately get you killed.

If you try to fight, if you try to run, or if you freeze, you're almost certainly dead. You've lost all of your opportunity. Only when you train your fawn response, do you actually start to disarm your opponent? So a lot of what CIA teaches us when it comes to self-defense, when it comes to surveillance detection, when it comes to neutralizing an enemy, when it comes to winning or building trust, it's all based around the idea of strategically and tactically applying this fawn behavior in your sympathetic response. And I can imagine that a lot of times people in general, they let fear, like, dictate their life on a day-to-day basis. Like, how can people, like, apply what you just shared in their own daily life to be able to train their mind to not be so drawn to living in fear on a day-to-day basis? It's a great question. And you kind of have the answer in the question itself, because you specifically said, how do we train our mind? That is the answer. You have to train your mind. And what does training mean?

Training means repetition. Training means practice. Training means something that we call stress inoculation, which means exposing yourself to instances of fear intentionally to inoculate yourself, just like you inoculate yourself against the flu or you inoculate yourself against COVID or whatever else. You can inoculate yourself against fear. When it comes down to it cognitively, your brain has two hemispheres. fears. Most of us know that. There's a right brain and a left brain. But what most people don't realize

is that your left brain and your right brain work at the same time, but they work at different speeds. Your left logical brain works much, much slower than your right creative emotional brain. So what that means is when you or I see something that scares us, let's say we see a snake and it's coiled up and it's reared and it's ready to strike and it's hissing at us. Both sides of our brain see the snake at the same time. But the two hemispheres work at different speed. On your, on your emotional side, it sees the snake and it immediately is like, I'm going to die. I'm so scared. Stay away from snakes. And it sends that impulse into your body and it creates all the shit that you don't like about being afraid. The cold sweats, the heart racing, the butterflies in your stomach, the tunnel vision.

all of that comes from your emotional brain, processing the information faster. But your left brain, your logical brain, is also working at the same time. And it's saying to itself, what kind of snake is it? How big is the snake? Does the snake even have teeth? Have I seen this snake before? And it's your left brain that ultimately lands on the conclusion, oh, that's just a garter snake. And that garter snake isn't going to kill me.

It isn't going to hurt me. And for anybody who's had the instance where you immediately startle, and then you realize what scared you and you calm down right away, you have felt that response where your left brain works slower than your right brain and ultimately your logic takes over. So the only way that you can speed your left brain up and slow your right brain down so that you can control your fear, sorry for the long answer here, Doug, but the only way you can do that is through practice and repetition and training.

Go do the things that make you scared. Go stand on the high diving board time after time after time until your logical brain says it's really not that far. It's only 10 meters. And your creative, emotional brain has a chance to calm down and say, yeah, maybe you're right. Like 10 meters won't kill me. I've watched 100 people dive off of this diving board. So you referenced at the beginning, you know, that the scariest moment of your life essentially was when you realized that you were being tracked and that people kind of had an idea that. you were there to do the thing that you were there to do, right? What did you do like immediately

in that moment, like walk the audience through, like you figure out you're being tracked. You're like, oh my gosh, my life is at risk. Like how did you in that moment calm yourself down and make that move to get yourself into a place of safety? Absolutely. To be very kind of humiliatingly honest, CIA believes that all people are born with a spy secret superpower. For some people, that means they can win deals for others they can spot liars some can even seduce lovers I built a free three-minute test to help reveal to you exactly what your secret hidden superpower is all you have to do is click on the link in the description below take the test and start using your spy superpower to stay ahead of 99% of

people the first feeling you have is joy because you're like oh I can see my surveillance team it worked right my training worked my experience worked and I I'm catching them. I know I'm under surveillance and then you give yourself like an internal high five. But then right on the heels of that of that internal high five where you realize where you're patting yourself on the back for how good you are. Right on the back of that, you realize, holy I'm under surveillance. They have every advantage over me. They're watching me.

I don't even know how many of them there are. I don't know if there are drones. I don't know if they're tracking my phone. I don't know if they're waiting for me at my hotel. I don't know if there's a van right around the corner that's going to scoop me up. And that's when the panic starts to set in. And in that moment, when you feel your heart rate creep up or jump up and you feel your emotional brain take over, that's where the training sets in.

And the training teaches you, I'm getting out of control. My heart rate is increasing. I can feel the sweat on my face. This is going to show in my, I'm going to start shaking and walking. I'm going to start to give signs that I'm aware of the surveillance team following me. So you have to start calming those things down. So the first thing that I did after patting myself on the back and realizing that I was then scared immediately afterwards is I started trying to slow my heart rate.

Your heart is the key to everything in your body. And if you think about it, it makes total sense. When your heart rate increases, it increases your blood pressure. It increases your body temperature. It increases the amount of oxygen that gets to your body. brain because blood carries oxygen to the brain. So now your brain goes into like a hyper alert mode and that hyper awareness really just makes you that much more attuned to what's causing you the stress. Anybody who has anxiety knows exactly what this feels like. You, you're spooked or you're

startled or you're worried about something and then you get fixated on that thing because your brain becomes hyper, like hyper aware, hyperattentive, hyper engaged in the thing that's causing you fear. the trick to neutralizing all of that is just to lower your heart rate. So CIA trained us to lower our heart rate through a breathing technique called box breathing. It also trained us to lower our heart rate through a mental exercise of absolutism. So you're kind of creating a false dichotomy that makes it so that you're not worried about all the what ifs. There's really only two what ifs that matter. What if I succeed? What if I succeed? What if I succeed? What if I fail. Everything else is just artificial stress. So I start box breathing to lower my heart rate. As I lower

my heart rate, I run myself through this false dichotomy. As I go through the false dichotomy, I land on the fact that I really have no other option except to continue to execute fawning behavior in my surveillance detection route like I was trained. And from that moment forward, once you have a decision, every step you get calmer. Every, you know, every mile that you cover, you understand that much more about your enemy. And even though you can't predict the future, you can predict the present. And at that exact moment, you're not currently being arrested. What was really interesting to me is like, you know, in your situation, you were going after people that had some like similarities as far as how you were trained, right? And when you're nervous,

or you're anxious. I know for me, like, if I'm like in an important meeting, you know, sometimes my speech will be different because I'm just like, all right, I don't want to say like the wrong thing. It's not going to get me the result that I want, right? Like, how did you like stay, like, calm when talking to people when you knew like in the back of your mind, you could say the wrong thing. Your tone could be off and that could be it for you. A lot of it comes down to preparation. I can't overstate the value of training. Doug, I believe in training so much that when I left CIA, I created a training company, right? Training is what changed my life at CIA. Training is what changed my future of success as a business owner versus a government employee.

Training has changed everything from my physical body to my cognition. So I very much believe in value training because of what CIA showed me. And when you train and prepare for a, whether it's a board meeting or whether it's an interrogation or whether it's an asset, briefing in the field, you are the one in control of 90% of what could happen because you're prepared for it. You're prepared for almost everything except for the emergency situation where there's an earthquake that hits your chairman, your chair meeting, right? Otherwise, anything short of an earthquake, you're ready for it because you've rehearsed it. You've rehearsed them arguing with you. You've rehearsed them saying yes too fast. You've rehearsed, you know, somebody skipping the meeting.

You've played it all so many times that by the time you show up, the game is already yours. And I think that like so many people are like just worried that we're being like tracked. Like people are afraid of like texting certain things on our phone or keeping certain things. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm just being tracked or targeted. Like I heard you in a recent podcast say like most of that's just not true. Like the average person is not being tracked like we think we are. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah.

And I want to be very specific here. You 100% are being tracked. Every person is being tracked. But you're not being tracked by the government. You're being tracked by a commercial entity or. or a platform or a cell phone provider or a digital interface that you voluntarily carry in your pocket. Your phone knows everything about you and it's in your phone's best interest to record everything you do. Every time you navigate to a certain location, every time you do a search for a new

Japanese restaurant, every time you send a text message to your wife, it wants to track those things. It wants to track whenever a notification comes in from your wife that you got a text message or it wants to track how often you use your calendar app versus your versus your Google app, right? So make no mistake, you are tracked all the time. When you're being targeted, targeted is different than being tracked because tracking is something that's done as cheaply as possible at scale. Targeting is something that's done to very few people when you dedicate a lot of resources. So just as a real quick example, imagine, imagine somebody who's an actual criminal is using Google Maps to go from one restaurant to another

restaurant to a coffee shop to a shoe store on Monday. So no criminal activity at all. They're just navigating around their neighborhood or they're part of the city. That's what they're doing on Monday. On Tuesday, they commit a crime. On Wednesday, their cell phone gets associated with the crime somehow, and now the law enforcement targets that cell phone. phone. Well, once law enforcement targets that cell phone, it can go back through all the data that the cell phone carrier has collected already. So they reach out to Sprint and Verizon and Google and they say, hey, this phone number is associated with criminal activity. We need everything you have on this phone number. And now because you spent, because the criminal spent Monday shopping for shoes and

buying coffee, the law enforcement team can identify what neighborhood they probably live in. And if they have home as one of their nav points on their operating system. Now they don't even need to look for the person's house. Law enforcement knows the criminal associated with this phone lives at this address. And the investigation gets cut short because they can go straight to the house and they can arrest you and they can bring you in and they can interrogate you. That's what happens when you're targeted. Nobody should worry about being tracked. It sucks, but you actually get a lot of convenience and security from being tracked. And if you get targeted, there is a goal that you can do about it. You're if you're targeted because they have more resources, more time and a stronger dedication

to finding you than you have to going without being caught. Would somebody have to do something pretty like dramatically bad to be tracked by the government? To be targeted by the government. I want to use these words very specifically, right? And yes, you essentially have to prove to be a threat to society, whether that's a criminal threat or an intelligence threat or an extremist threat, you have to be pretty significant. Now, don't get me wrong, we are starting to move into an age where just simply opposing your government can make you a target. We have to accept that, whether you like it or not, whether you're pro-Trump or not, we are moving into an age where disagreeing with the government on its own kind of makes you a target sometimes. The same rules

apply. Once you are targeted, you can't hide.