EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Spy: Discipline Is Bullsh*t — Do This Instead To WIN At Anything

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

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What can my listeners take away in terms of like the skills that they might be able to adopt that can radically improve their life, their health, et cetera. I mean, I feel like there's like there's so much, you have so much knowledge to offer. So, you know, I asked myself this question, not exactly this question, but something similar before I came here today. Because you're the first person to invite me into a conversation that has any overlap in the health space. Yeah. I've been on a lot of conversations that had to do with, you know, geopolitical. politics and how to do with current events and have to do with, you know, you name it. Even, even like hip hop culture.

But you're the first one to introduce me to an audience that's like looking for health solutions. Yeah, health audience, yeah. Wellness, wellness minded. Wellness minded, exactly, right? And wellness and health play a huge role, a huge role at CIA. Interesting. I mean, it's, I mean, everything from the fact that we have our own exercise scientists on site and they're dedicated to training field officers individually.

So, like, we have two gyms in the main headquarters, building and those gyms are staffed with professional trainers whose exclusive job is to test and prepare field officers for field operations. That's it. And field operations is like being out in the world, like espionage, being a spy. Right. And even that has a thousand shades of gray because some spies are paramilitary spies who are out there, you know, coordinating laser strikes and actually bringing in cruise missiles and like, you know, killing terrorists. Other spies are sitting in cafes in Paris like schmoozing with world leaders and you know they've got a pot belly there's all sorts of spies there's spies that have that are not neurotypical that are very much on the autism spectrum there

are some spies who are you know polygots polyglots and have multiple languages under their belt there's all sorts of spies everybody you can imagine because you need that kind of diversity for the world that we live in whoa but what we all have in common is that if we don't maintain some semblance of consistent congruent health, then every dollar that's invested in us is a dollar at risk by the federal government. Interesting. Because without a spy, you have no way of collecting secrets and intelligence from overseas. So you need the spy to function for as long as possible. Even if that is a 55-year-old male spy who's 25 pounds overweight, you still need to find a way to optimize his performance in the field for what he brings to the table. Wow. So what do they

teach you? What are the secrets? So the biggest one that I wanted to talk about was, that self-discipline is a myth, right? So there's so much out there talking about self-discipline and how self-discipline has to almost be like a battle with yourself. You have to choose to be disciplined. CIA teaches us that the whole concept of discipline is a resource-intensive approach that has a negative return on investment. Right? So it takes a great deal of resources to meet a certain level of discipline,

And then the returns you get from those resources are diminishing until you have a negative return on investment So like think about how hard people work to be disciplined and then what happens when you slip up Then you beat yourself up you talk trash about yourself all the head trash kicks in you're like oh, I'm never gonna be good enough I'm never gonna be smart enough I suck at keeping a diet. I suck at getting rest It's just it's this just dynamic trail like flushing yourself down the toilet So they teach us to just let go of discipline let go the whole concept of self-discipline and instead adopt a mission mindset that's focused on consistency. Consistency is actually easy.

Discipline is very hard. So as an example, wake up and drink a glass of water every day. That doesn't take a lot of discipline, right? It's like wake up and drink a glass of water. Does that mean wake up and immediately drink a glass of water? No. It means wake up, go pee, drink a glass of water? Sure.

Wake up, eat, drink a glass of water? Sure. Like, we don't care. But drink 500 milliliters of water after you wake up, right? And before you go to work. That kind of thing is actually really easy to adopt. And it's life-changing. Absolutely life-changing.

We can go into all the physiological reasons as to why it's life-changing. But when you understand that the real magic of it is giving yourself permission to be consistent, instead of, you know, beating yourself up about not having self-discipline. It changes the whole dynamic. And that applies to everything from exercise. to saying kind words to your kids, to, you know, doing a little bit of work every day. It's just a matter of being consistent. Yeah.

And so what do you do you do when, you know, for example, you miss a day? You know, like what does the self-talk for when you falter, right? Because like not every day is going to be a quote-unquote perfect day. Right. So consistency means that you're always trying to be consistent. It doesn't mean that like seeking consistency in and of itself is a practice. of consistency. Oh, I like that.

More than actually being consistent, right? So you miss a day, you acknowledge you miss a day. Hmm. Okay, I'll make it up. I'll do it tomorrow. I missed a day. I consistently miss every eighth day. Wow.

Like, I just unlocked something about myself, right? For some reason, I have capacity to maintain, you know, a consistent schedule for seven days, but not eight days. Now I can actually ask myself the question, what's happening on day seven? That makes it so I can't do this on day eight. Change that thing. and now boom, now you make it to 15 days, right? But you have to be able to have that.

Without consistency, you can't measure your own progress. Right. You have to be able to measure your own progress to be able to empirically go back and change your system so that you can make additional progress. So it's a very boring, nerd-friendly approach to optimizing yourself, but that's how we do it. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I recently did, from January through about May, I was on a bit of like a fat loss journey. I did like a cut. You know, I kind of, I was about 15, 16% body fat. I got myself down to about 9% body fat. And the way to do that, I mean, it's like consistency is the name of the game. Absolutely. And you really, day to day, you don't, there's no, you don't really see progress day to day.

Like the scale goes up, it goes down. It's not linear, right? Like, it's not like you're losing body fat or losing weight, which is the easiest kind of metric to track, right? because it's, I have a scale in my bathroom. That doesn't, it's not like that declines on a day to day basis. Your weight is influenced by water retention, how many carbs you ate the day before. Temperature, even like inflammation from a good workout the prior day. I mean, that will make you store more water and you'll see the scale go up, right?

But it's like only when you zoom out, are you able to see the progress? And you only progress when you consistently stick to, in the case of fat loss, a calorie deficit, a diet that allows you to sustain a calorie deficit. Right. So you touched on something, I think that was really powerful there. One of the things that we're always encouraged to do with the agency that's different from what conventional people are taught. Conventionally, conventional means, like, what society expects of you, you're taught to visualize your goal, look for your goal, and then always measure your success against the goal you're trying to achieve, right? Makes sense. We've all heard that before.

It makes sense. That's what we're all doing. I want to be a vice president. Today I'm a senior director, so I'm two steps away from my goal. What CIA teaches us to do is look from where you started from to where you are. So always look back to determine your level of success. Don't look forward to determine your level of success because the end goal can very well change. President changes and goal changes. Mission needs change and goal changes. International disaster happens and goal changes.

So you can never count on the end goal to be consistent. Yeah. But you can always count on the starting point to be consistent. So you can always measure your success and your progress against where you started from, but you can't always measure your success and your progress against where you're trying to go. Well, how do you stay flexible then? Because like you're being sent all around the world, right? You're in a different location.

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these practices that you need to stay consistent with. So how do you maintain a flexible mindset when your external environment is constantly changing? Because you understand that the continuity is the internal environment. Your choice and your power of choice is the thing that goes with you everywhere you go, right? Your mission mindset is the thing that goes with you everywhere. So whether you're in India or whether you're in Pakistan or whether you're in Brazil, if you have the focus on having water every day after you wake up, it doesn't matter where you are. And you'll find your way to clean water and you'll be prepared to have that clean water. You'll if you're committed to having the right balance of, you know, low fat meats, high-carb

foods, you know, your right mix of grains and vegetables and everything else, you'll just find the local versions of every one of those categories, right? And that's what you'll do. Yeah. And then there's also an element here where you have to accept something that Hollywood doesn't ever kind of demonstrate. We don't thrive in the operational environment. Hmm. We, that we often say that your best health is the first day you arrive on and up. from that day on, you're deteriorating every day. You're losing sleep, you're increasing stress, you're reducing your caloric intake,

you're getting worse. You're going to get sick. You're going to get, you know, chased. It's only going to get worse after you arrive. So your best day is the day you arrive. So you really want to be an optimal condition the first day of a mission. And all you need to do is start accepting

that you're going to go from a thriving-based operation to a survival-based operation by the time it's all over. And then you come back to Langley or headquarters or whatever else, you go partner up with your trainer and you start the process of rebuilding, reconditioning, and, you know, essentially healing from the damage you did to yourself on the op. Wow. Do they set you up with a trainer? Absolutely.

A nutritionist, a trainer. We call them exercise scientists because that's technically what they are. So they're holistically, they cover all gambits of what you, you need to rapidly recover from the deterioration of being on an op. Hmm. From a nutrition standpoint. Nutrition and physical, yeah. Yeah.

What kind of guidance do they give you? So they guide our supplement use. They guide our dietary choices. They do it all based on, you know, VO2 measurements, body fat measurements, the composition of your body, where your age is, where your heart health is, et cetera, et cetera, right? They're able to kind of calculate what's optimal for you to get you back into essentially the kind of condition you need to go back out in the field.

Not what's optimal for you to be a dad or to be a professional, but optimal to get you back in the fight. So it's never like, it's never a game of being 100%. It's a game of getting you back to 80%. Wow. Do they stress train you? Like training in super high heat temperatures

if you might potentially have a mission in this, I don't even know, like some super hot part of the world. Yeah, so the problem with that kind of boundary testing, because that's what you're talking about is like boundary testing. Yeah, boundary testing is that it's very costly. And it's in the world of intelligence, it's still a bureaucracy. It's still a government organization. So they can only do what they can justify.

They can only get the money that they can justify from Congress that they need for a priority. So some people will go and do, you know, exercises in the deserts in California or Nevada to prepare for what they're going to see when they go to the Middle East. But not everybody. for the for the vast majority the bell curve the middle of the bell curve of your intelligence officers they'll be taught the theory and they'll be taught the tactics and then when they go on deployment they'll usually have an element that's that's already there that will help them acclimate to the environment but that's it it's really only a few very specially trained officers that will be truly

boundary tested before they go in to carry out a high risk high reward kind of up Damn, so cool, dude. Holy cow. Amazing. Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level? This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow.