EverydaySpy Podcast - How CIA Reframed My Mind to Become a Spy

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

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And here, the Mona Lisa gazed into Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers. Book an eye exam today. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists.

Contact your local Spec Savers for details. When you look at a pyramid dead on, you just think it's a triangle. It's not until you start to turn it that you realize there's so much more to it, right? It's a three-dimensional object. It's a pyramid. There's not three sides. There's 12 sides, right? It's a much more elaborate and complex thing.

And that's before you even like start to wonder how it's engineered. But what ends up happening is so many of us look at something, look at old things in our lives. And we just see the triangle because it's the same way we've always seen it. Until somebody comes up and holds it in front of your face and says, that's not a triangle. Like, here, just stand over where I'm standing and take a look. Right. It's a powerful thing to have someone help you reframe. The reason that people like you and I have success in business is because we're not only gifted

in what we've done with our own business, but we're able to help other people reframe what they're doing. and some people connect with others. I've had multiple people tell me the same thing. Sometimes I have to hear it five times before it clicks. Sometimes it clicks just because of the person it's coming from. Because they say it a certain way or they give me an example that's different, right? You have a talent of teaching people to reframe how they're thinking. I don't know if you acknowledge that or if you own that.

I sometimes still resist it when people tell me, Andy, you say things and sometimes I just get it after you say it. I don't take credit for that. They're the ones doing the work. But I have to at least acknowledge the fact that I need to keep talking. If I can help one person, then how many more people can I help? When you're trying to make friends with somebody or connect with somebody in the CIA, is charisma that sugar? Is that not a tool that you pull out of the toolbox?

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's something you pull out of the toolbox. And in large part, it's because charisma is lacking in so many people. Because for many, many people out there, charisma like sugar, is something they like to be around. But they themselves either lack the confidence or they lack the social experience or they lack the comfort to exercise their own charisma. So then what ends up happening is, especially in human operations and human intelligence operations, you go after a target to carve them out of their social realm, right?

Part of the way that you increase the loyalty between people is by cutting them out of whatever social context they have. You take away those options. But you do it in a way where they don't realize that's what's happening. And then what ends up, the byproduct of that is without other people to lean on, they just become closer to you. and as they become closer to you, then their own natural personality,

their own natural charisma starts to show. Right? And you want to see someone's charisma, ask them about their family. Ask pet owners about their pets. Ask parents about their kids. Ask people about their favorite show, their favorite book,

their favorite food. Boom. Their charisma comes out. Their smile gets easy. Their eyebrows go up, right? They just start to talk. And they'll talk, they'll say the most amazing.

amazing things that are truly charismatic, endearing, entertaining, humorous, because that's something that they know well and they're passionate about. But it takes proximity to make someone consistently charismatic unless they have the practice to turn it on or off like a light switch. So for us, we use it as sugar to carve them away from their existing friend groups, their networks, and then as they get closer, we use their charisma as almost like a a way of reinforcing that they're with the right person. Because what ends up happening is when somebody makes you feel good, you become loyal to that

person. Because you start to feel like that person is the reason you feel good. It's like sugar again. You see what I'm saying? It works the opposite way too. When you're around someone who doesn't make you feel good, you start to think they're the reason you don't feel good. That's why so many divorces happen.

But when you're around somebody who does make you feel good, or when somebody asks you questions or shows natural interest in you, that triggers dopamine in your, in your serenbrum. It triggers a dopamine rush. It makes you feel like you're special. It makes you feel like you're important. When you're not with that person, you don't get that rush. So then you come back to that person to get that rush again. And then boom, you've got an addiction, a connection, loyalty, whatever you want to call it. You've got power in that relationship. And would you say that the most important tool is making people feel accepted? Is acceptance the most important part of that?

Because everybody wants to be accepted and when you feel accepted, then you open up? Yeah, it's vulnerability. Vulnerability is the word that we use. That's the most important part of a human intelligence operation. finding where someone else is vulnerable and then being able to go into that space and have them be comfortable with you in their vulnerable space. There's three lives that all people have. We were already kind of touching on one of the lives earlier today in our conversation. We all have a public life.

We all have a private life. And we all have a secret life. In our public life, that's the life that we all put a lot of effort into showing everybody. Right? This is my public what I wear, how I do my hair. My Instagram. Yeah, right, that's my public life. What I talk about, what I show people, when I go down the street and I'm in a public setting. You're never posting your worst moment.

No, exactly right. You also never post like your bare foot when you have a blister on it, right? You don't ever show weakness in your public life. Now, your private life is a life that only a small circle knows, right? Like your fiance knows if your feet stink when you take off your shoes, but most of your employees don't, right? Some my closest friends know that I love 1950s musicals Most people out there except for the people who watch this will have no idea that I like 1950s era musicals You name a 1950s musical for me?

Yeah, so singing in the rain Top Hat, right? There's some fantastic musicals White Christmas these fantastic musicals in the 1950s my wife and I bonded over them that was our shared vulnerability that led us to get married. She was embarrassed and I was embarrassed and somehow it came up and I was like, you like 1950s musicals? And she was like, you like 1950s musicals? And then boom, we had a date and ended up making out all the way through a 1950s era musical. Nice. So you, you sometimes when you're walking around, like let's say you're making breakfast for your kids, you feel like just breaking into song. Not necessarily because I can't sing. If I break into a song. But it makes sense to you

that somebody would just be going through their day and then break into song. Because that's my problem with musicals. It's like all of a sudden I'm walking through the grocery store and then I'm dancing and singing. I can never make that suspension of belief. I don't necessarily watch them and think that they're real. I like them because the music is happy,

the storylines are happy, things are upbeat, right? The feelings are deep. And I'm not a big feeler. I don't have a lot of high and low feelings. I tend to have kind of a very whitewashed emotional existence myself. I have had low moments and I have had high moments, but they're years apart. So what I like about a musical is they take you on this journey through the music, right? So it's not because I believe that somebody's going to step outside after they got their first kiss in a pouring rainstorm,

and then they're going to dance and throw their umbrella around. I don't think that. But I do love that no matter what mood I'm in, if somebody turns on the song singing in the rain, it makes me smile. It makes my wife tap her foot. It makes my oldest son dance around in the living room. He recorded a video for me when he was like seven years old where he's singing the singing in the rain song. And he's acting it out with his little Superman umbrella. Just did it on his own.

I was traveling and he was like, Mommy, I want to do something for daddy. So she hit record and, you know, he did his rendition. But my point is, that's all private life stuff. Vulnerable. Vulnerable to a select few, right? Inside your private life, this is where you have your closest relationships. In your public life, you don't have a lot of close relationships. You might have friends, you might have acquaintances,

but there's still people that don't know that your feet stink and people that don't know what movies you watch when you're home alone. In your private life, you make really close, powerful friends. But you don't make spies. People don't tell you their deepest, darkest secrets It's just because they're friends with you in your private life. That happens inside of a secret life. We talked about shame earlier.

Your secret life is where you hide your shame. Your secret life is a thing that even the woman or the man that you take to bed every night doesn't really know what happens in your secret life. If there are other people in here, they are so trusted that they're like family. They're closer than family. They're like compatriots to you. If there's anybody even in there. when you want to turn someone into a traitor, you have to get into their secret life.

So what are the tools to move them from close group of friends to secret life? I'm going to guess one would be telling them something that you shouldn't tell them. Being vulnerable first, would that be one? So it all ties to vulnerability. Exactly right. And then there's different tools of vulnerability. You can share shame. You can share shame.

You can, by the time you've walked. somebody from public life to private life and you're starting to get close to secret life, you're also able to assess, meaning you're able to kind of read what they might have. Have you ever been friends with somebody who you thought might have been gay, but they didn't come out with it? That's one of those areas where you can be like, if you really want to dig into a secret life, for a long time, homosexuals had to keep that in their secret life, right? I've had friends. When I was in the Air Force Academy, that was at a time when it was still, don't ask, don't tell, and you could get kicked out if you were gay and all sorts of stuff. I had friends where I suspected they were homosexual.

And I knew that at any given moment, I had a close enough relationship that I could have gone up to them. And I could have been like, look, man, I wonder if you're just not into girls or you're into boys. And if you are, I still love you, man. You're my best friend. I just want you to be happy. If there's something I can do to make you happy, just tell me what that thing is.

And now if they admit to that, now you're... In their secret life. So then how do you... How do you do that with a target out in the field? Because everybody has a secret life. Everybody has shame. You just need to find what that shame is. For some people, that shame is the fact that they've had an affair.

For some people, that shame is the fact that they've stolen money. For some people, that shame is the fact that they're closet alcoholics. For some people, that shame is all sorts of different things, right? And it's not always things that you have to be shameful of. Some people are ashamed of the fact that they're not in love with their current spouse. That's not something to be ashamed of, but for them, they are. Maybe because of their religious background, maybe because of their parental upbringing, they're ashamed of it, right?

But if you can read a relationship, if you can read a person over weeks or months, watching them interact with their spouse, watching them interact in their private life and their public life, and then you come up and you think that you've got it right, If you dig into that vulnerability, right, and you say, hey, sometimes I don't like my wife, man. Like, I married her. I made a promise to a lot of people, but sometimes I really don't like her at all. And then they come back and they're like, man, I totally understand. Tell me more.

Right. And then you're breaking into that secret life. It's not because they should be ashamed. It's because they are ashamed. And if you can get, if you're. You can be vulnerable with somebody and help them feel less shameful, you're winning incredible loyalty from them. Because guess what?

There's only one other person in the whole world they can talk to about it now. You. And that's something that we carry to bed. If anybody's ever been in your secret life, you know exactly what I'm talking about. There's something that's heavy on your heart, you're like, there's only one person I can talk to about this. And then you think about them constantly. And when you get your chance to talk to them, it's like coming home again.

That is what we simulate to create, like that artificial relationship in espionage, is to get people to tell us those secrets. It's not healthy. I don't think for a second I'm trying to advocate that we should all do that, but that is what we do. Well, I mean, I do think that it is applicable to customer service and leadership in the sense. You know, I think one of the things that made me good early on is I was just, curious about people, I wasn't curious about the car. I could care less about the car. In fact, if they asked me about the car, I didn't know how to answer their questions, right? Because I wasn't a mechanic. And so for me, I was more curious like, oh, where are you headed today? Oh,

I go to work at Microsoft. Oh, what do you do over there? Like, and it was natural. It wasn't, I wasn't doing it for any other reason that that was just how I think. Like, I'm just genuinely I'm like, curious. So I think that that has many applications, but it crosses over to if you want to serve a customer base and the exchange of value isn't just money or you can actually, you'll get more money if that exchange of value has an element of real interest in the customer. Authenticity. Because otherwise you're just selling a commodity and then somebody else can sell that cheaper.

make it cheaper. And so I think it's very relevant in that sense. I agree with you. I'm gambling my entire family's financial legacy on my belief that the tools that we use in espionage are relevant in business. We've built a business that models it. We teach people how to use it. So I am completely with you. And your whole point about using it in customer service, using it in sales, using it inside a corporate structure just to move up the corporate ladder, right? Because if you can get into your boss's private life or your boss's secret life,

if you even understand the concept of working a human relationship to your benefit, now you're the first one on the docket for promotion. You're the first one on the docket for a raise. You're the first one on the docket for expanding business in the next county over or fixing a problem somewhere else in the country, right? because you are able to manage the relationship.

You're able to use vulnerability and authenticity and turn that into actual value. Yeah, and you said it earlier, but the stakes are higher. Right. One of the things that makes Jocco's first book, and I know he co-wrote it with somebody else, but his first book so great is when you're reading that book, there's leadership lessons in there,

but you're like, hey, if Jocko makes a mistake, people die. If I make a mistake, we have to have a meeting. You know what I mean? And so there's an authenticity to that. And then there's also, you know, it's iron sharpening iron in the sense that these tools have to work. Where in business, you know, everybody isn't always motivated by an outcome. Sometimes they're motivated by just protecting their, same in politics, right? They'd rather protect their territory than actually make a difference.

So, yeah, that's special. And it applies. So let's take that a step further. The thing that I have learned and kind of figured out is that one of the biggest hindrances to connecting with people or leading people is judgment. And there's a, I've heard people say the saying, if you judge, lose in a sense. And that has to be true for what you're doing, right? You don't, you don't want to judge.

You just want to understand. True. Right. And how do you practice not judging? And maybe you have a skill set where you never really were, uh, judgey. But I can tell you that is not the case for me. I think. And then the, the other part of that, I guess, is judging and its relationship to patterns and

scripts in a sense that like if I go see a doctor and he's dressed in in Miami Dolphin hot shorts and a tank top that, that's, that's, It's not a doctor. I need a guy in a coat with a stethoscope, right? Right. And so, and in a sense, part of the reason why you were successful in the CIA is because you fit into a certain thing. And then people, they weren't challenged or they weren't judging you.

You weren't sticking out. Right? In that way. And so a lot of times we will, if somebody's insecure, so they come off really strong. we will meet their their aggression with aggression instead of trying to understand it for what it is. If somebody has trauma, we will address the outcome of that trauma, but not the actual cause of the trauma. We're not usually looking at the cause of why this person in front of me is acting this way.

We just go right at the symptom. Right. And that's the judgment, I guess. Yeah. So when you talk about judgment, this is a super rich topic to talk about, right? What a judgment is is it's a conclusion. So let's move from the word judgment, move into the word conclusion, because that's what we're doing when we judge. We're reaching a conclusion based on limited information.

This person is in Miami Dolphins hot shorts and they're not wearing a stethoscope. I have concluded they're not a real doctor. Right? That's essentially what we're doing. And then I get a little dopamine. Because, yeah, you feel like you want. I feel powerful, right? Right? So.

And in a sense, you get addicted to conclusions. Sort of, but what ends up how, what you're not realizing or what some people don't realize is that you're falling into a pattern of human survivalist behavior. Remember we talked about being cavemen? Cavemen wanted to go outside of their cave, look around, and in the distance, they see a boulder with fur on it. So then they're like, that's a saber-toothed tiger. I'm staying in my cave, right?

It's a survival instinct. Those snap judgments, those snap conclusions are a tool that are outdated. We used to need them to keep ourselves alive. We don't need them anymore. But we have evolved technologically and socially faster than we have evolved biologically. So now we have these judgments and snap judgments and conclusions

working against us. So what CIA trains us to do is something called assessment. Assessment is essentially a never-conclusive loop of information gathering. Right? So you sit with somebody and you're taking on all the same information, but you're not reaching any conclusions. This person's talking aggressively. This person seems angry. Like, their body language is this, their verbal language is this, their tonality is this, their word choice is whatever it might be. This is all assessment data. So instead of reaching the conclusion that they're insecure and pompous, or reaching the conclusion

that they're a jerk and I need to defend myself, instead, we just continue looking for more information, right? You seem really upset about this, can you tell me why? What about this makes you so frustrated, right? Because now people are going to give more information. The game in intelligence is a game of information superiority. You've heard of air superiority, littoral or maritime superiority, ground superiority. Weapons superiority, strategic superiority.

This is information superiority. The person with the most information wins the battlefield. So we keep ourselves from reaching conclusions by creating constant assessments. Now, what you learn today and what you assess the situation to be today can be totally different tomorrow. Because between today and tomorrow, new information has arrived. You see what I'm saying? So when you give yourself the space to make constant assessments,

you're constantly collecting information, the secondary effect of that is the other person never feels judged. Right? Which then they give you more information. They give you more information, and they have a positive experience with you, which makes them want to be around you,

which creates loyalty to you, right? Just like we talked about earlier. Because everybody else they're talking to, guess what everybody else is doing? Judging them and making them feel judged, right? The superpower to judgment is twofold. One, when you don't judge, the person you're not judging naturally becomes more comfortable around you and they build more trust in you.

The second thing is that's the superpower is you know that they don't get that anywhere else. Everybody else in their life is judging them. Their own freaking mother is judging them. Their own dad is judging them. You're the only person that's giving them permission to just be themselves and you're showing natural interest and curiosity in them. It's why you dominated in your job earlier when you were saying, that you just had a natural curiosity about people.

I bet that included people who walked in angry and people who walked in happy. You were still naturally curious. It's hard for people to resist. Yeah, and I think I was even more curious when you asked somebody like, hey, where are you headed today? I don't know. They wouldn't tell you. It was even more fun.

Like, you know, and those people end up being the ones that won't shut up in the end, right? No, it's great stuff. Awesome, man. That was a great conversation. Thank you. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $26 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca.