EverydaySpy Podcast - Day 3 | How THIS CIA TACTIC Made My Marriage LAST!

Episode Date: March 18, 2025

Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/4bx6Whz Nobody ever talks about how much marriage sucks. You hear all the great things about being married your whole life, and then you get a cold dose of reality on your own. And even though it gets harder, it also gets better. The parallels between marriage and a CIA operation are pretty powerful, when you see them for what they are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there's one thing I wish somebody would have told me earlier, it's how much marriage sucks. Because marriage really does suck. It's hard. It's hard. It's shockingly lonely. It's frustrating. It's exhausting. It's difficult. It's never the same from day to day. Marriage is challenging. It's like the marathon that somehow keeps going uphill. At least that's been my experience. And frankly, speaking, that's been the experience of most of the people I've met. And the people I've met who bailed out of their first marriage and moved on with their life, only to then get married a second time, oftentimes joke that they didn't learn their lesson the first time around and that even the second time around marriage sucks. Now, that's not me being, you know, just negative about marriage. Marriage has lots of good things, too. But what I was never told was how many bad things there I was always told about the good things.

I was always told that it's powerful to have someone who loves you and supports you and encourages you and somebody who's there for you when you're sick and somebody who's there for you when you like when you need a hug or when you need a shoulder to cry on. All those things are true and all those things were communicated to me. It was all the bad things that were never communicated to me. So my wife and I, we have been married for 14 years. We'll be celebrating 15 years this year in 2025. and it's been challenging.

And you know, what's interesting is that marriage seems to grow through phases. When you first get married, it's kind of like celebrating your engagement. It's like you pat yourself on the back like you did something challenging. Oh, we did it. We spent a few years dating and then we spent a year or more engaged. And now we got married. We did it. We're so good at this thing called commitment.

And you celebrate that for a little while. And then you start to find your way into being comfortable because nobody can really break up easily once you sign a marriage certificate. You can still go your separate ways, but it becomes administratively difficult, whereas it's very easy to administer a breakup pre-engagement and pre-marriage. And then after that sort of celebratory we did it phase, there comes this period where things just normalize. They become fairly predictable. And there's a comfort in that predictability. For a few years, you do your job, your spouse does their job, you talk about whether you want to grow your family, you take vacations, you save your money, you spend your money.

It's all very comfortable and predictable because it's just the two of you. And neither of you has really grown or changed or faced challenge much more than what you had when you were engaged. The first real significant turning point in marriage happens when you find out that you're pregnant. And anybody out there who has children or who has had children knows that you become a parent the day you find out that you're pregnant. Not the day the baby is delivered. The day you find out you're pregnant because everything changes.

All of your worries change. All of your concerns change. And that was certainly the case for me and my wife when we found out that we were pregnant and we were still serving actively at CIA. We were actually deployed overseas at the time. And I'll never forget, we had this beautiful condo. in a foreign city and my wife suspected that she might be pregnant, but she never mentioned it to me. So she went and got a pregnancy test in a foreign grocery store.

So she didn't even know for sure if she was buying the right kind of test. And then she couldn't really read the instructions because the instructions were in a foreign language. But she came back and she took the test and the test was positive. And she doubted the test right away. She actually doubted whether or not the test was correct. She doubted whether she administered the test correctly. And then she doubted whether or not the actual tool,

testing tool itself was even correct because it was foreign made. So she went back to the store and she bought like five more and she came back and she just kept peeing on sticks and peeing on sticks and peeing on sticks. And it was like a weekend. And I could tell that she was very focused on some activity in the bathroom. Now for me, I was still in the phase of our marriage where everything was normal. So I was like, oh, it's a Saturday. And maybe she's just got something going on that I don't really want to ask about because when you're in a normal marriage before kids and your spouse is in the bathroom a lot, you just don't want to ask questions. But then she came out of the bathroom with tears in her eyes. And when she came out with tears in her eyes, she was holding a stick. And I saw

the stick and I saw the little pink line and I knew right away what it meant. Now, for me, I didn't doubt it for a second. It was a stick. It was obviously a pregnancy test. It was obviously pink. We're having a baby. It didn't occur to me at all that the stick might be wrong. It didn't occur to me at all that maybe somehow she had peed on the stick wrong. And it certainly didn't occur to me that because it was foreign made, it might be a faulty test. I was ecstatic and I was very confused why she was crying. And then she explained to me in that moment that everything was going to be different. And I realized now, looking back on that day, that she was already mourning the fact that our early marriage

was never going to be something that we had ever again, that from that day forward, everything was going to be different. We didn't know if it would be better or worse, but we knew for sure that it would be different. And my wife is someone who deals with anxiety. She's someone who struggles with depression. And change is something that upsets her and scares her.

Well, our oldest is 12 years old now, and our youngest is 7 years old now. And for sure, everything has changed. And marriage is a, absolute bear, an incredible challenge day in and day out. But what I find is that in any 24-hour period, even though 10 of those hours are actually very difficult to be married, there's still two hours or so where it's really, really quite nice. And the benefits and the comfort and the security of marriage far outweighs the frustrations. And what I find is that as everybody gets

older, our kids and ourselves, we find more hours to be secure and comforted and less hours of conflict. So it really makes me positive and optimistic about one day having whole days of joy being married to my wife as we sit on two rocking chairs overlooking some lake or some forest somewhere in the future when everyone else has forgotten that we exist except, hopefully, our two kids. So I say all of that because CIA taught us to pray on people's fears. It's a major tool of manipulation and a critical tool when it comes to collecting intelligence. You have to understand what people are lacking. You have to understand what people are missing, what they are yearning for, what they are hungry for. And oftentimes, the thing that people are yearning and

hungry and and desperate for isn't the future. It's actually the past. They want to get back to something. Get back to a time with no responsibility. Get back to a time when they felt loved. Get back to a time when they were first newlyweds instead of being where they are now. And even though people talk through a lens of wanting something in the future, oftentimes what they're really saying is they want their future to look more like the past because in many ways, people feel fear the unknown. It's a natural thing to fear, but some people have a very acute fear of the unknown. And when they don't know how to process that fear, it makes them very desperate and it makes them willing to do dangerous and frankly terrible things to other people to themselves, to their

country. And that is exactly where CIA has the opportunity to collect intelligence from foreign assets because those foreign assets are yearning for something, yearning for a freedom that they once had, yearning for a power that they've read about but they've never seen. They want something and CIA knows how to promise them that they will get it and somehow never deliver. And that lesson from CIA is amplified all over the place in social media, in marketing, in the books that you read and the TV shows that you watch. We live in a world that likes to promise us things that we will never have because it understands that many of us are hungry and desperate and eager for the things that we will never get again for things of the past hoping that they will come back again

in the future now as sad and manipulative and powerful as this idea might sound it's not fullproof it's not guaranteed in fact the majority of CIA operations actually never succeed for everybody we try to manipulate out of every 10 there's only maybe two or three that we success compromised. The other seven find some way to avoid being compromised. Some of them just stop talking to us. Some of them come out and say no. Some of them even turn themselves in to their own local law enforcement and end up going to jail for treason on their own. It's pretty incredible. But what I'm saying there is that you don't have to be discouraged by the fact that people around you are trying to manipulate you. All you have to do is recognize that while the unknown is still ahead of you,

there is still a lot of good there too. All you have to do is understand that while the future is full of unknowns, many of those unknowns are going to be very pleasant. They're going to be new changes that you like. They're going to be good news stories more so than bad news stories. And if you really do take the time to think back on your past, you will find that there were plenty of things about your past that you didn't like. Yes, it was easy to be in college because you didn't have any responsibilities and you weren't

married. But you still had to go to class and you were still broke all of the time. And for some of you, you were probably hung over most of the time. That didn't feel good. Whereas now you have extra spending money. You have a positive career and you have a future where you can continue to earn money and you continue to grow. So you can see that believing that the past is somehow better than the current day. And believing that the past could ever be better than the future is actually objectively false. and it's exactly in that objective space that CIA tries to focus all of its intelligence officers so that we can't be compromised the same way that we compromise others. Now, anybody who's been reading in the headlines in the last three or four years has seen

there have been a lot of compromises in the national security structure. There have been people who have spied for China, people who have spied for Russia, people who have spied for Israel and Iran. So again, you can see that the power of that manipulation is effective. But again, for every one or two people that successfully spied, against the United States, there are dozens that do not because they can lean on this courage, on this belief, on this foundation that the future is better. So as I look at my marriage moving forward, and I look at my role as a father moving forward, and I look at my role as an entrepreneur moving

forward, I know that I can be optimistic. I know that I can look forward to something, because even though there will always be bad things, there will be good things too. And facing the unknown just means that I don't know what those good things are. And the same thing, thing is true for you. Thank you so much for joining me on this spy journal conversation. And if you want to know what it's like to live life through the eyes of a spy, make sure you click on the link in the description below. We'll see you next time.