EverydaySpy Podcast - CIA Spy: "Most People Will LOSE Everything" - #1 Rule to Survive An Economic Collapse

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

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now streaming on Hulu on Disney Plus. Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. what can like the average person do to prepare themselves for the challenges or um i mean i guess the potential shortages of food or lack of safety uh supply chain disruptions are there things like practical practical things people can be thinking about or doing to to prepare themselves and protect themselves from whatever uncertainty is on the horizon yeah Everything that we need to be thinking about when it comes to protecting ourselves is really tied up with assets. Because if you recall, we started this conversation talking about how money is opportunity.

So if you want to have opportunity a year from now, 18 months from now, two years from now, when stuff just gets worse, right, when conflict between the U.S. and China gets even closer to the brink of armed conflict, when we're going through the transition of another nasty presidential race, when Ukraine is being decided one way or the other, not to mention like whatever happens everywhere else in the world right like Sudan is on fire right now you've got conflict all over the Congo right now you've got issues in Thailand right now like the whole world is having issues we're just having issues also so if you want to protect yourself and give yourself opportunities you really need to be looking at your asset pool if you own a business your business is an asset find a way to fine tune your business so it's generating more revenue reduce your costs, maximize your revenue, keep your profits in the actual bank account for the business,

reinvest it to make more money, find that positive ROI. Get yourself out of the system of slavery that we've been talking about where you're dependent on someone else giving you money. If you're already trapped in that system where you are working for a paycheck because you're a wage labor or whatever else, you have assets that you need to protect some other way. Whether that means you're putting cash in between your mattresses or whether that means you're investing in Bitcoin or some other crypto,

currency, find a way to protect your asset because it is the only thing you have right now. Where we're going, we're on the brink of loan default, right? If that happens, Social Security takes a drop, unemployment spikes, people get laid off, paychecks dry up. What are you going to do then, right? If you are going to spend your money, don't invest your money into garbage, which is what the consumer mindset wants you to invest in. Buy a new iPhone, buy another pair of shoes, buy a designer jacket. Don't buy garbage. Right now if you need, if you need to spend an asset, spend an asset doing something that will bring you some kind of return, right? Learn how to protect your money. Learn how to protect your family. I have a company that teaches people how to protect

their family, how to protect their business, how to protect themselves. I mean, you're going to be better off spending $27 with me than spending $27 on a new pair shoes, right? People are going to be better off investing their money into some kind of protected cryptocurrency that's outside of the reach of the central bank, then they're going to be putting money into another mutual fund. Yeah. Right? That's tied to an irresponsible banking system that may very well go default, right? Even treasuries.

This is what's crazy. Treasury insurance, which is unheard of, is at an all-time high right now. People are buying insurance to insure the five-year yield on their government bond. People don't trust the bond will actually consider. Right. Which is supposed to be the counterparty that never fails. Yes. It's insane. Like the way the world is going right now, you've got to look at your assets and realize they are your assets and they are limited. That is the true law of economics. Right? Economics is based on the law of scarcity. There is always a limited amount. There is never an unlimited amount. We've been talking all day about economics, the power of economics, the undeniable truth of economics. And that's what we're talking about right now. Your assets are scarce. And you are the only one. Who wants to protect them?

Everybody else wants to take them. Yeah, and so under those conditions, you also want assets that you can fully control, right? Again, bank accounts, we take them for granted because they tend to work here in the West, but if you ask the protesters in the Canadian truck convoy, like, well, those didn't work. Anybody who had money tied up with the three banks that just failed? Exactly, exactly. Bank failures. index funds, mutual funds, all of these things, they're counterparty laden. So if things do get really bad,

you can't necessarily depend on those things to materialize. So yeah, in those extreme conditions that we hopefully don't get into, but we have many, many times across human history, so I don't want to discount the possibility. You need assets you can fully control, right? Physical gold, physical Bitcoin, guns, currency, food, energy, tools, et cetera. Because you know who's not worried about the future? The wealthy. I mean, I'm not even that. I don't even fall under the level of wealth that my clients fall under.

And I'm not worried about the future. Like, that's because you've invested so much in yourself. Exactly. And you have too. I have a feeling you don't lose sleep worrying about your assets in the future because you know how they work. And you can. Oh, no. Thank God for Bitcoin.

I'm willing. But that's the thing that's so wild to me is like money buys you opportunity. And when I talk to when I talk to the ultra high net worth clients that I work with when I talk to senior executives and in Fortune 10 companies, they're eager for the future because they see the opportunity. Right. They see the opportunity that comes from chaos, lapse, panic, fear. Yeah. They see it. They know everybody else is going to panic. Human behavior is predictable and a strong prey on the week. Yeah. I forgot who said that the best time to invest is when there's blood in the streets. Brutal, but probably true. Um, what do you, okay, so obviously,

protecting assets, protecting money, very important to protect your opportunities. We go into this uncertain world. Speaking of money, like, to what extent do you think a theme we explore on the show a lot is the connection between money and mind? Like, we're often thinking through money when we calculate a price or negotiate a deal or we perform any type of economic planning. You know, we're thinking about going on a vacation or buying a business, whatever it may be. There seems to be this connection between money and our mind, like it's an extension of the human mind in a way, particularly through the pricing system. To what extent do you think government monopolization and control over money is used as a proxy for manipulating and controlling the minds of individuals?

So when it comes to considering matters of state, one of the things that, I often encourage people to think through is something called Hanlon's razor. You've heard of Occam's Razor, right? So Hanlon's Razor says never subscribe to conspiracy, that which can be explained through idiocy. Okay. Right? It's kind of an Occam's Razor in and of itself, right? Yeah.

So don't give credit to a complicated conspiracy if it's easier to give credit to someone just being stupid. Incompetence. Right. Incompetence. And the government, the federal government especially, is. As much as we all love to be Americans, we've seen the incompetence of government. It lends itself to incompetence. It's a perfect example of how a few very competent people manage a larger pool of incompetent

people. So I don't believe that the government is organized or efficient enough to actually be able to manipulate the thinking patterns of people. Not when I compare that instead to the fact that they're thinking very stupidly. They're thinking, we need to put more money into the economy. How do we put more money into the economy if people don't generate more money? We extend them lines of credit. We make it easier for them to borrow.

We print more money, right? Nobody's thinking five years down the road because no one's going to be in office for more than four years down there. Broken incentives. Exactly. So it's like, we just need to make people happy now so that they'll vote Republican or vote Democrat again for the next election cycle. So nobody's making the, nobody's invested long term. nobody's got skin in the game. Professional politicians, the thing they're working for is their political career. Right. Not the improvement of the American people. Right. That's, again,

the reason that rich landowners founded this country on the idea that politicians would be professionals that stepped out of their career and sacrificed as public servants for a short period. Their vision was never what we have now. Right. Trump was the closest thing that the world, that the United States has ever seen to what they actually wanted to, president to look like. A career professional who stepped out to become a political servant, right? And he wasn't a great fit either. But that was, that's how it's supposed to be. So yeah, I don't think that it's, I understand the concern, the conspiracy behind it, but just logically speaking, it's more likely that they're just not thinking things through. They're just trying to

stimulate an economy in any way that they can because they know that anything they break today, someone else has to clean up later. Right. That makes a lot of sense. We often consider incentives kind of be the ground stuff of human action, right? Like what's the old saying that no man is better than his incentives? So we all are constantly responding to incentives. And so when you frame politics that way, right, that they just have very short-term incentives. So they're willing to do whatever is necessary to get elected in this current cycle and defer all the costs and hide all the, the cost into onto the next guy basically.

It creates these conditions of incompetence basically. And then perhaps us as citizens, we're observing that, thinking, oh, there's some big conspiracy theory out there to make all this terrible, all these terrible things that are happening, but the reality is the incentives are just broken and we're observing the manifestation of discordant human action inside of an incentive system that's not properly structured. 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. Right. We're taught at the agency that there's a recipe for conspiracies.

Right? That the whole, when conspiracies, to see theories are born, there's a very predictable process that leads to them, right? And the process has four steps. The first step is there has to be something factual. Something actually has to happen, some fact. The second step is that in the tail of that fact, there's a gap of information, something that we don't know. And then the third step is we, in the face of that unknown information, we become suspicious, right? We become skeptical. Now, is, suspicion a bad thing? No. There's healthy suspicion. Suspicion is what keeps us alive. Suspicion

is supposed to work for us. But when you're following this step-by-step process of where a conspiracy theory comes from, what we become suspicious of is not the missing information. We become suspicious of why the information is missing. Right? So fact-based events, missing information, healthy suspicion, then it leads to this inherent flaw in the human brain where we have to close thought loops. Right. So when we don't have the information we need to close our loop, we create a store. We fill the void.

And especially with conspiracy theories, somebody, the first person to create a story that closes the loop, that becomes the story that other people adopt. Because it's easier to adopt an existing story than it is to come up with your own critical story. Right. Right. Your own critical thinking. So that process is what leads to conspiracy theories. That's why some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Yeah. Because it all, they're a very set pattern of events and it just so happens that sometimes the story is accurate for the missing information. Right. But in plenty of cases, it's not. Yeah. But that's where these things persist. And they fit very well into the human condition because we want a closed loop. We want everything to be packaged very nicely so that we can

start a conversation over a glass of wine and finish the conversation over a glass of wine. We don't want to walk away from the table with no answers. Yeah, man, I heard a great interview. I think it was Rick Rubin on the Huberman podcast. And he was articulating a similar point. It was like, as humans, we're always dealing with incomplete information, like radically incomplete. We just see one thing happen through our five senses and we see another thing happen through our five senses. then we close the gap with story.

It's like we have, you know, 0.1% of the total information and then we just fill in the gap with some narrative. And we need to do that. Like, we need to be able to deal with the complexities of the world. But it definitely seems to open us up to deception, either by others or even by ourselves, self-deception. Are there conspiracy theories, maybe just go through a few and see if you subscribe to them or not.

I mentioned one to you offline that a friend, I guess I won't name him, just a friend shared with me recently in Miami that he was operating under the assumption that nuclear weapons were actually much less devastating than we've been led to believe. And I think you had some views on that. Yeah, I don't know where that is coming from. So I worked with.

nuclear weapons. I was a nuclear missile officer for the Air Force until 2007 when I was recruited by CIA. So I'll be the first one to admit that the information I have is, you know, just under 20 years old. But when I was in charge of nuclear weapons, they were 100% as devastating as they had been promised to be. If anything, we had found a way to make their devastation even more efficient, right? Concentrate the fireball, change the altitude of the of the detonation, increase the number of warheads that are on a single delivery vehicle, right? Like, they're every bit as devastating as you expect them to be. We've just been spoiled because we haven't been testing them since the 1950s, I think.

Yeah. So because we created a treaty where we do not demonstrate the effectiveness of our nuclear weapons anymore, we essentially have two generations of people who have been born and have never actually seen a detonated nuclear device. So the devastation of those is confirmed through, if we're not saying, we're not seeing it, what is it, how do you confirm this? So there's a couple of different ways, right? So it's usually done through mathematical models. Okay. So when they, when an engineer, when a, when a nuclear weapons technician creates a weapon, they know what level of purity their uranium is

or their plutonium is. They know the size of that plutonium. They know the charge, the shape of the charge, they know the detonating device. You know, they know everything about the weapon. And they can use those to program into models how that weapon will perform based off of what they know about mathematical models previously proven true through our testing process. And that's how we do it here in the U.S. Russia does it very similarly. China does it very similarly. But then you also have the events in North Korea and sometimes in China as well where they still detonate underground. The treaty said that we would not detonate above ground. Oh, okay. So we've absolutely seen in our lifetime, detonations happen in underground testing facilities, right? What about the moon landing

in the 60s? Is that, did that actually happen or is that a conspiracy? I believe that is a empty conspiracy, right? Because were there some, are there some strange, almost unbelievable things that we were able to do in the 1960s? Yeah, there are. But we also know that we continue to explore space from that time forward. So either we happened to coordinate this perfect conspiracy, and then just in time we developed the real technology to send people into space and send satellites into space and start capturing pictures on the Hubble telescope, etc., etc.,

or we actually did land on the moon. Hmm. I also, it's just very interesting to me, especially when I hear conspiracies like liquid space or flat earth conspiracies. I've never heard of liquid space. Yeah, there is a conspiracy out there that space is not a vacuum. that space is actually a liquid and that we've been lied to because nobody's been to space because they know if they went to space they would drown right so there's there's some strange

interesting ideas out there but but it all falls into that same recipe that we were talking about right there's a gap of information yeah it's whether that gap of information is something that the government has kept from you or whether that gap of information is something where you've the information that's been given to you you just don't accept right and I feel like the space landing is a very good example of there's plenty of proof out there that we landed it in space. Right? There's moon rocks. There's there's footprints that have been taken in images from satellites. Like there's independent corroborative pieces of proof that have either all been constructed in a great grand conspiracy, which according to Hanlon's razor doesn't happen. Or they actually happened and you're just

rejecting the proof of what you've seen. Right? 9-11 and what was it building 7? Yeah. Right? Or even the cause of 9-11 being self-imposed, right? Like, these are conspiracies that I absolutely understand why they exist because they fit the recipe. Yeah. But the preponderance of evidence just doesn't hold up to Hanlon's razor. What about building seven though? It was six blocks away from the destruction, wasn't hit, and then it went down like controlled demolition. What's up with that? I have no idea. I don't know the answers. I don't know the answers. I don't know the answers. And what I've heard of some of the conspiracies involve CIA hidden buildings or hidden offices, and I don't know if that's true or not. I was part of operations that were heavily compartmented.

So if there was a CIA office in Building 7, it was heavily compartmented. Yeah. So it's not the kind of thing that is going to be available information for anyone to get. So I don't know the answer, but I also don't necessarily believe that the conspiracy is correct. Yeah. Is there some strange mystery around it? For me, yes. Is that mystery worth my time, effort, energy, and money?

Yeah, it definitely feels like we are wired to, like you said, we want to close a loop, I guess, is that feeling? It's like, well, what did happen? And it leaves that feeling of drawing in your attention. I am, I guess I will admit, I'm a bit skeptical on the moon landing, and that I saw the one video of the American flag actually waving on the moon. and that just, it's like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. The moon has no atmosphere, there's no wind, why is the flag waving? Did we put some mechanics in the flag that make it look like it's waving or something? I don't know.

That threw me for a bit of a loop with the moon landing. I mean, there's all sorts of that. When I think about the fact that we sense, I mean, I agree with you. A flag waving in space doesn't make a lot of sense. Unless it's liquid, I guess. But neither does the idea that we went from nothing to sending, three men in a shuttle, like in a capsule to the moon and back again where they walked on the surface, like that's fucking crazy.

Yeah. A little bit of flitter and a flag? Yes, that's weird. What the fuck? Nobody's questioning like how insanely, how much insane progress was made during the space race. Well, why haven't we done it since? Why? It's almost like we could never do it.

Then all of a sudden we did it. And then all of a sudden we never did it again. It's like, well, that's strange. Usually when humans start doing something, we keep doing it, right? Well, I would argue that we have done, like, we've sent more people into space. But not to the moon, right? Well, there's no economic benefit in the moon, right? Like, the economic benefit of sending people to the moon was essentially a benefit of winning

the space race. So it was just a flex, and then we were done flexing. Correct. Because there's nothing to mine on the moon. Right. So, I mean, the first astronaut in space to spacewalk was a cosmonaut. So the Russians beat us to that. The Russians beat us to getting a satellite in space.

Sputnik beat any American satellite, right? Well, after they launched a satellite, they didn't launch another one right away. They moved on to the next challenge. Once they had a cosmonaut to a spacewalk, they moved on to the next challenge. Look at Red Bull. Red Bull's a fantastic example of this. They do some crazy-ass shit, right? A dude jumps off of one airplane and lands in another airplane or whatever else it might be, right?

They do this crazy stuff, but they don't do it again. Yeah. Right? Because the profitability of it was just, doing it the first time. Right. Then they're on to the next thing to prove that they can keep pushing the boundaries. So it's a spectacle initially and then once you've done it, it's kind of a...

That's where the profitability comes from. Yeah. That's where the ROI is. Right. America is more powerful than Russia because we landed on the moon first. Just a flux. And then Russia gave it up once we did it because we won. Yeah.

Well, because they have lost anyone on the... They had lost a space race. Uh, that's a good question. I actually don't know if... I don't know if they...