EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Spy: Give me 20 minutes and I'll delete your fear of failure

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

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When people think of spies doing espionage overseas, wearing disguises and all these kinds of things, it does make you think they must be exceptionally good at dealing with fear. Because a lot of people would be too nervous or too anxious or whatever to not like crack under that kind of pressure. If you're meeting the guy that has the nuclear codes for Iran or whatever, and you've been working for nine months to meet this person. You know, you've got to have a good handle on your own anxiety and your own fear. Do the CIA target people that are good at that, or do they train that, or is it both? It's both. It's a great question. It's both.

CIA wants people that carry a certain level of anxiety. Because when you carry anxiety, you're naturally paranoid, which means you have heightened observational skills. Most people who suffer from anxiety feel like they're inadequate in some way. In reality, they are hyper-adequate. They are more than adequate. Anxiety is a superpower through the eyes of the CIA. I would take somebody with anxiety any day over somebody without anxiety because anxiety keeps you alive.

Anxiety keeps you sharp. Anxiety keeps you learning. It keeps you attentive. It's a good thing. But to your second point, you are also trained. You are trained to understand how fear works. And to oversimplify it, your brain has two hemispheres, right? A left brain and a right brain.

Your left brain is your logical brain. Your right brain is your emotional brain. because you have two different hemispheres and they operate on a on two different bases right one is based in logic one is based in emotions they actually operate and they process at different speeds your logical brain processes much slower than your emotional brain which is why it takes you an instant before you're scared but it takes you maybe minutes hours weeks before you're convinced so what ends up happening is fear in an untrained person going back to our conversation about trained versus untrained. In an untrained person, fear is an emotion that's processed by the emotional brain very quickly. So then they react instinctively to their fear. That's where a lot of people who suffer from anxiety get held back. When you can train someone to understand that the same thing that makes them emotionally scared is also being processed by their logical brain. Your brain is actually going through the process of determining how scared

really need to be. If you can just slow down the emotional brain and train the rational brain to work a little bit faster, your whole relationship with fear completely changes. How do they train you to slow down your emotional brain so that you don't react? That's a big part of the reason why you have a controlled training environment that lasts for multiple months. Because what they do is they inoculate you. It's called stress inoculation. They inoculate you with scenarios designed specifically to trigger your emotional response. Even though you have been trained to not trust your emotional response, they inoculate you so that over and over again you have to go through the process of, I feel fear, I have to not accept it. I feel doubt. I have to reject it. I feel like I'm being

watched. I have to reject it. I have to give my rational brain a chance to catch up so that I can get objective facts about the scenario. And there are some people who don't do it well. There are some people who never inoculate themselves against fear, so then they end up getting cut from the farm. So for the average Joe that's listening to this now, or Jenny, the average Jenny, that's listening to this now, and they live a life that's held them back because of their fear. You know, they don't take the risk. They don't raise their hand to do the presentation. They don't lean into uncertainty.

Based on your training in the CIA, what would you suggest that they should do to get over that fear? So they need to inoculate themselves as well. Anoculate means... Enoculate means expose yourself in controlled ways to fear. Very similar to the way you inoculate against COVID or you inoculate against the flu. You expose yourself to a strain that's weakened so that your body can gain some sort of familiarity with it. You do the same thing with fear. So if you're afraid to give that presentation, you're not ever going to change the fact that you're afraid to give a presentation.

but you will be able to change something that you're less afraid of. So if you're afraid of going to the gym, if you're afraid of eating at a certain restaurant down the street, if you're afraid of stepping out of your front door, if you're afraid of asking your friend their opinion about whether or not you're overweight, find something small where you are less afraid of this than you are of this other thing,

and inoculate yourself with this. Like, lean into the small, fears. The fears that you already know are kind of irrational and simple. And if you can overcome those, what will happen is you will start to gain momentum. And the thing that you do to inoculate yourself is to know up front. You know you're going to have an emotional reaction. You already know it. It's the thing that you're afraid of. You can predict that. So you already know. I'm going to ask my buddy, Steve, if he thinks that I'm overweight. I'm terrified to ask him. He's either going to say yes or no, or he's going to take some cop-out answer and ask me what I think. But I already know

that it's going to feel uncomfortable. But he's my buddy. It's low risk. Let's see how it had. Let's see what it goes, right? So you go and you ask the question, you put yourself in the face of fear, you're still going to have the heart palpitations, the cold sweats, your emotional brain's going to take off and all your physiology is going to let loose. But then Steve is going to tell you his answer and it's over. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, that wasn't nearly as bad. as I thought it was going to be. And then when you do the same thing with your friend Jenny and the same thing with your friend Bruce

and the same thing with your friend Robert, by the time Robert tells you his answer, your body's not reacting the same way as it did when you talk to Steve. Small inoculations are training your emotional brain to slow down and training your rational brain to speed up. So then you move on to the next most scary thing without going to the scariest of things.

You know, I was thinking about that as you were talking and I was thinking, gosh, I think a lot of people know that. I think they know that the way to get better at speaking on stage is to go and speak on stage, but they're still held back by, you know, oh, God, if I do that, I'm going to mess up, and then people are going to think I'm this, that, and the other, and then I'll never X, Y, Z. Right. So you can say that to someone, but getting them to take that first step seems to be the impossibility.

And here's where the former CIA officer in me comes out. Because if you're too afraid to do that, good. I don't want you to do it because you being unable to do it gives me the advantage the person who's listening to this who says to themselves, I'm scared but I'll do it anyways that's the person who deserves the opportunity

to change their life. The person who's listening to this that says I'm too scared to do that, good. I need you to stay exactly where you are because in our world the flat out truth is our world needs cogs. Our world needs people who are trapped in the consumer cycle.

We need those people because the people who are trapped in that consumer cycle, the people who are prisoners to their fear are the people who run the economy. It's the people who are willing to break that cycle and capitalize on the fears that you can't overcome. Those are the people who actually provide you the service that you need because you can't do it by yourself. So I want to encourage the people who are willing to. to take the scary step.

And I also want to discourage the people who already know that they're too afraid. We need both. You met your wife while you were an undercover CIA operative. Yeah, it was a... 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. I am still to this day very thankful that she is a poor judge of character.

In 2014, you leave the CIA, age 34 years old. You both resigned together? We both resigned together. Why? It was mostly my idea. My wife had a stellar career. we had a one-year-old child at the time. And we were at a point in our career coming off of very successful operations together

right before that where we were both kind of middle management. And that middle management lifestyle meant that we're spending 12 to 16 hours a day on the job, just like most people. But the difference is when you're spending 16 hours a day on the job, it means that you're in a skiff somewhere. You can't take your work home. You can't work from home. So you're literally absent from the house.

So trying to coordinate two 16-hour schedules along with a one-year-old, when neither of us signed up to be that kind of parent, we both wanted to be the kind of parent that was present for our children. And instead, we're giving our child to some daycare center and paying extra overage fees to have that daycare center keep the baby for 12 hours a day. It's a sucky situation. So for family reasons, more so than for career reasons, we both decided, hey, let's double down on family.

and let's see if we can't start all over again. Are you going to leave America in 2030? I'm going to try and leave America in 2027. I read that summer. Why are you going to try and leave America in 2027? So I think the United States is going through a very difficult time right now, and I think most people understand that. We are a young country, no matter how much we think that we are the best in the world,

we are actually going through the early part of our adolescence as a nation. And you can see it playing out every day in the headlines. You can see it in our role in geopolitical events. You can see that we are, we're suffering in terms of trying to identify ourselves. We don't know, do we want to be a real democracy? Do we want to be kind of a partial democracy? Do we want to treat everybody as equal? Do we not want to treat everybody as equal?

We're struggling in the same way that you and I did through middle school, right? My children mean the world to me. And what I want to do is give them a life where they have the choice to do anything they want to do. Unfortunately, I don't believe our country for the next five to ten years is going to be the kind of country that allows children of today to choose and be whatever they want to be. I think our country has some growing up of its own to do before we really offer people equal access to opportunities. So for me, if I was my 11-year-old son, when I turned 15 or 16 years old, and I start to really care about something, I would like to be in a place where I can explore that thing. I don't think that's going to be in the United States. I think that's going to be in the Middle East.

I think that's going to be in Latin America, where he will have all the advantages of the world outside of the United States. What do you think about what's going on at the moment with geopolitics as it relates to like, China and the U.S., there's a bit of a power struggle going on and there has been, but a lot of people forecast that China is eventually going to overtake, or maybe it already has, the U.S. as the sort of global economic force. Are you preparing for that? Do you think it's going to happen? I think that there's two realistic outcomes and there's one less realistic outcome.

The most realistic outcome is that the United States and China continue to compete and reach parity, equality with each other. That's the most realistic outcome. Maybe the United States remains 10% bigger. Maybe China gets 2% bigger economically. But they approach parity. They approach equality. I don't want to live in the United States when it loses so much status that another country reaches economic parity. Think about that for a second. The world is accustomed to one superpower. Once there are two superpowers, everything changes. There's two massive languages, and you're going to have to choose which language you speak. There's two currencies.

Which currency are you going to save your money in? There's competing priorities. There's competing politics. There's equally massive, sophisticated militaries. When you are in one of those two countries, at the moment that they reach parity, you are in the most dangerous position because the number one target for China will be the United States. the number one target for the United States will be China. Right now, there's not parity, there's not equality.

So the United States has to worry about everybody. And China doesn't really have to worry about many people at all. But as that equality gets closer and closer, there's more and more threat. Think about it in business terms. When you're the industry leader in your business, Google. You don't have to worry about much. You have to worry about all the little guys, but nobody's really a direct threat. But as soon as somebody else rises to meet you, you have to worry about it.

The leader used to be Yahoo, right? Yahoo had to see what it's like to lose and gain parity with Google only to then be eclipsed, right? So most probable outcome, we reach parity. Second, most probable outcome is that China does supersede us by small amounts, right? 5% GDP, 10% GDP. And the United States has to regain its momentum to try to gain back the edge. So now you have this, cycle back and forth, right? Where for five years, China is the leading GDP. For five years, the United States is the leading GDP. And you have this waffling back and forth, which makes you even less secure than if you were in direct parity. But that's a scary place to be as well. You still have to lose all the influence to get there. And when you're there, you never know how long it's going to last. Do you think we're already engaged in a form of World War III? Yeah, absolutely. I think World War III is already happening. I think World War III is not what people think it was going to be. I think people were afraid that World War III was somehow going to

look like another World War II. Instead, World War III is a war of proxy nations. It's a war, it's a war where smaller third world countries are competing against each other, and they're being funded by larger countries that are actually in conflict with one another. Ukraine and Russia. U.S. is funding Ukraine. Russia is obviously taken care of itself, but the real conflict in Ukraine isn't about Ukraine. It's about the West versus Russia. Same thing is going to happen with Taiwan and China. When the time comes that China makes its biggest move on Taiwan, it's already made the small moves on Taiwan. When it makes its largest move on Taiwan, it's going to become a question of China versus the West and whoever supports Taiwan.

So going back to where we started then, the average Joe. The average Joe is listening to this conversation now. What they really want is to make their life better and whatever subjective measure that they consider better to be. They want to start that business. they want to launch that project. They want to get outside of this sort of emotional prison that they live in where their life is dominated by perception, what they think, their own sort of confines of their identity. What is the sort of closing argument and closing advice you give to that average

Joe to liberate themselves so that they can pursue whatever they want to pursue? So the most important thing is to take action. That is the most, even if it's the wrong action, if you take the wrong step, if you take the first step in the wrong direction, The difference between you and the person who doesn't take a step at all is the world. You have to take the first step. You have to take some kind of action. Just by taking action, you show that you're not trapped by fear.

You show that you're willing to challenge your own perception of the world and try to gain some perspective. It doesn't matter what that action is. I don't care whether you read a book, whether you buy a program, whether you sell your first prototype. take some kind of action because nine out of every 10 people are not going to take any action. You already have an advantage just by trying. And so few people understand that. They think there's some kind of advantage in waiting. There isn't.

The longer you wait, all you're really doing is giving the other nine people a chance to be the first one to take a step. If you take the first step, you beat the competition right out of the gates. And you know this as well as I do. even if your first three or four steps are fumbles and trips and you fall on your face, by the time you stand up, you're four steps away from the rest of the competition. And you've learned a lot in those first four steps. So my suggestion is take action.

Take action using the skills that we talked about today. Take action using the skills that you've talked about on some other podcast. Just take action. Identity. We talked about how the CIA kind of rewrite your identity a little bit so that, you know, it gives you some sort of cover. But one of the things that stops us taking action is our own identity. What have you come to learn and what do you think now about the role of identity,

how it gets in our way and how we can liberate ourselves from it? The worst person to determine who you are is oftentimes you, because you see it all. You live in your own secret life. The rest of the world sees your public life, even if your public life is accidental, the world sees you differently than you see yourself. So when you look at yourself, it's like looking through a magnifying glass. You see every whart.

You see every crevice. You see everything wrong because you have the magnifying glass. The rest of the world, not only do they not have a magnifying glass, but they're standing 10 feet away from you. So they see something very different than what you see. So a lot of times, whatever you think about yourself is actually inaccurate when you apply it against the test of perspective. Because what other people see and what other people see.

and what other people think of you, you are usually very wrong from what they think. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. Now, the question that's been left for you in the diary of a CEO is very, very interesting. What is something you used to strongly believe

that you have fundamentally changed your mind on? I used to believe that people could be equal. And fundamentally now, I know that people will never be equal. Because equality is not really the thing that we're after. What we're secretly after that we don't want to admit to is we're always after being better, having more, being in a better position than everyone else. So we will constantly strive to take advantage of secrets,

to take advantage of opportunities, to find an edge that we do not share with other people. But publicly we will say that we wish there was more equality and that we want there to be more equality when secretly we don't. I used to be one of those people that wanted everything to be equal. And now I am one of those people who is very happy in a world.

where things are not equal. Why? Because I see through the noise. I understand that what we want isn't what we actually say. So these politicians that are saying, you know, maybe on the left that are saying, you know, we want equality, we want everyone to be equal. You think they're bullshitting.

Absolutely. That's not what they want. What do they want? What they want is more of the current status quo, which is to have conflict with the opposite side, And what they also want on top of that is to be in a position where the masses trust the politician to be in control over more aspects of the population's life.