EverydaySpy Podcast - How to Control Every Conversation Using THIS CIA Spy FRAMEWORK

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

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There's another exercise that we have at CIA called Windows and Doors. In a conversation, people will open windows, windows in conversation, which means I might ask you one thing or you might ask me something, and then in my response, I hint at something else. That's a window, right? You started this conversation by asking me, what season of my life am I in? That was a fantastic question to open windows and doors, because you don't know what the answer is, but you're going to choose

what you hear to decide where you go next. The same thing happens in a normal conversation, right? You can see windows and doors when they present themselves. When you are trying to cultivate perspective over somebody, you want to choose the windows and doors that you follow through in the conversation specifically to collect the kind of information that you want to gain that perspective. So if I'm trying to sell something to you, if I'm trying to sell something to you as an entrepreneur,

I'm going to follow the windows and doors that, open up in conversation that take me to understand better what limitations or challenges you're having as an entrepreneur. So if I'm trying to buy, if you're a car salesman, I'm a customer and I want to buy a car, what kind of questions would you start asking me to? I love this exercise because I actually just had to buy a car after we moved. And I was shocked at how horrible my car salesman was because he did not think this way, right? Why do people buy a car?

I'm, I have, I'm going to let you practice your personal. perspective on me. When I moved to Colorado Springs in May, why did I have to buy a car? Because you have kids. Nope. You have two kids. Oh, because you have to, well, you mentioned Colorado Springs, so I suggest, I recommend, I guess that's pretty pertinent to your answer, but you have to travel a lot around Colorado because it's quite, quite vast, isn't it? You need a mode of transportation. That's the only reason anybody buys a car. That's where you have to start,

because then you have to think, well, why are they here? If you're a Subaru dealership and somebody walks in, you already know that they've pre-qualified a number of things. They must be looking for a Subaru. They must be looking for a two-wheel car. They must be looking for an all-wheel car or else they wouldn't be here. So you can kind of make those assumptions

if you practice perspective when they walk in. And then when they walk in, that's when you find out, oh, they're apparent. So I'm looking for a mode of transportation that's also safe because I'm a parent. I have a family of four. So I'm looking for a mode of transportation that's safe for at least four people. If you practice a little bit of perspective,

you learn a lot more about the person that you're trying to close. So now I ended up buying a Nissan Pathfinder, a brand new Nissan Pathfinder. Not because my salesman was any good, but because I went to the Nissan dealership already wanting a brand new Pathfinder, just like you did. But I always go through this experience to see what's a salesperson going to do? Like, are they going to try to sell me something good? Are they going to try to sell me something wrong?

Are they going to understand my specific needs? Or am I going to have to coach them through this whole thing? My company gets hired to give sales training to high-performance sales teams. And what I'm shocked at is how often, even with a high-performing sales team, salespeople don't practice perspective and perception. What they practice is whatever script they're supposed to read. And they practice empirical numbers, and they practice the law of averages. And it's like, I need to make 100 calls to convert.

12%. That's what they practice. Instead of practicing something just a little bit more efficient, like changing your opening line to ask an open-ended question, just like you did. An open-ended question is a question that makes the person on the other side of the phone speak through the lens of their current reality. Do you know what? I've never said this before, but there's a question I ask every guest in the preamble. And I don't know if I asked you, but I ask 99% of guests when we sit down. And it's what's front of mind for you at the moment. And for me, the reason I ask that question is because

kind of what you said, because people come here. And I assume that there's something that happened when they woke up this morning or there's something that's bugging them that my research team wouldn't have been able to find on the internet, that they haven't yet said in an interview. And it's been so unbelievably amazing when you ask that question. And then there was one particular conversation I had, which was one of my favorite of all time,

where it was with Simon Sinek. And because I've spoken to Simon Sinek, three times on the podcast, I didn't have research. Like, we've talked about everything. So I sat down and I had to sit down and figure out where the conversation was going to go for the next three hours.

And so my opening question to him was really broad. It was, how are you and please give me the long answer? And you have to be honest. And he literally, for the first time ever in his life, went, do you know what? I'm feeling really lonely right now. And for him to say that,

a guy like that to say that was like, whoa. And if I had sat down with my, okay, today we're going to talk about management strategies. I totally would have missed one of my favorite conversations of all time. But you have to have a lot of trust in yourself. This is what I've come to learn as a podcaster. To be able to sit down without any questions written down here

and to ask a really open-ended question and then to try and follow them, like wherever they might take you? Well, what's interesting is that one of your superpowers as a podcaster is that you have a plan. But you don't always stick rigidly to your plan. You go wherever the guest takes you. You go where Simon Sinek takes you, right? I've taken you down this long path about living in a shed

that I'm sure was not on your agenda and I'm sure lost a good half of the people that we were talking to early on. But my point with all of that is just to say you practice what is called courage. And courage is a word that is definable and people don't often take the time to really define what courage is.

Courage is doing the thing that you're afraid of. That is courage. So going off script and asking a question, coming in unprepared for a podcast, those are things that cause you a little bit of fear, a little bit of anxiety. You're like, I don't know how this is going to turn out, but you do it anyways. One of the major differences between entrepreneurs and aspirational entrepreneurs is that entrepreneurs have the courage to try, and aspirational entrepreneurs are always talking about the day that they will have the courage to try.

Trust comes into this, right? Because part of the reason that I can sit down with someone for three hours and not necessarily have a... I've never had a question written down, but not even have an idea of where the conversation is going to go is because I have so many case studies that it's been fine in the past. And it's those case studies that have built up this sort of self-trust

that enables me to sit down and go, how are you? And then they go off about loneliness and we spend three hours talking about loneliness. But that comes from that initial trust, I think. I think trust is a good word. Like self-trust. Yeah, self-trust or confidence. Those are good words to use, but I would almost challenge that what you're really talking about is you're gambling on odds that you've learned are in your favor.

Right? It's kind of like when you think about a professional athlete. Professional athletes do some amazing movements. Sometimes they make the score and sometimes they don't. But what happens is when they make the score doing an amazing movement, that's what we all remember. When they miss the shot doing the amazing movement, nobody really. remembers that. Nobody remembers how many basketball shots Dennis Rodman didn't make, right? They just remember something else about Dennis Rodman. Arnold Schwarzenegger has his famous quote

where he made lots of movies. We all remember our favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But how many of his bad movies do you remember? Not many. And he knows that too. And that's one of the reasons that he said yes to so many movies was because he learned early on in his bodybuilding career, that nobody remembers when you lose, but they always remember when you win. So he had no problem making a bunch of movies because the one or two or three or 12 or 18 that became blockbusters were the ones that defined him,

even though he also did kindergarten cop. I mean, that's quite a good concept to hold in your mind if you're trying to weigh up any sort of risk in your life, like the risk of leaving the shed that we were talking about. Correct. You're taking a chance. You're taking a gamble. But here's the thing. We're conditioned in our shed. We're conditioned to gamble on the system.

Right? If you're going to roll the dice, at least roll the dice that the system gives you, right? Bet on the house, because the house is going to win. What we really learn as entrepreneurs is to gamble on ourselves. Like, bet on you. How many people take every dollar they earn and they invest it in a brokerage

that's managed by somebody else that is targeting an individual. percent return on investment. That's what they do with every dollar of their life. My mother-in-law just recently retired about three and a half or four weeks ago. She is, what do you have to be to retire? 69, I think. So she's 67 or 68 years old. She's worked her entire life. Her primary investment vehicles, I shit you not, are CDs. It's a device in the investment world where you basically put your money in for a certain amount of time and it guarantees you a certain yield. And that yield is usually very, very low.

But that was her preferred investment vehicle. So for the 69 years or the 50 years that she's been working, she's been investing in these low performance certificates of deposit CD. That is exactly the kind of thinking that was conditioned into her by the generation before her. That's where she learned about CDs at all. That's why she bought her first CD at 16 years old was because mom and dad told her to do that. So here it is 2024. she's retiring, and all of the money that she saved is basically in the certificates of

deposit, which is not a lot of money. Really? Yes. Because it doesn't grow. Whereas I invest in my company, and my return has been 300%. And entrepreneurs, even entrepreneurs who don't grow quickly, still see 12% return on investment, 15% return on investment, 20% return on investment, which outperforms anything in the market. But you still have these people who,

don't want to gamble on themselves because they're afraid that the House will win. Who can't be taught the things that you teach in terms of the CIA skills and everything you teach within everyday spy? There's a lot of people out there who right out of the gates

had a circle drawn around them that CIA is some kind of deep state conspiracy, kills Americans, sells children, steals drugs kind of organization. Are they wrong? Maybe there was a CIA that did that once.

But my point is, those people are never going to believe what I have to teach them. There are threads all over the internet about how I'm a fake and a phony and a fraudster. And there's even, there's, for every one of those threads, there are also threads that talk about how I'm a plant, how I'm still a CIA officer. I did read that in the comment section. Isn't that funny? Quite funny. So there's like, there's both sides. These are people who cannot, they'll never be open to learn.

They're not willing to learn. How do I know you're not still a CIA officer? Does it matter? No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter. If you can take the information and test the framework and get ahead, does it matter? Well, actually, maybe if the freight, okay, you're at the right point now. You said, test it myself.

Because you could be teaching me things that are going to just keep me trapped in the Matrix because, you know. But I don't want you trapped in the Matrix. But I don't know that. You could still be a CIA spy. I could be. But the key thing you said is that you're giving them to me. me to test for myself. So I get the results to check whether what you're teaching me is positive or negative, productive or not productive. Correct. And that's what really drives me. What drives me

is this vision of a future that's good for my children. And the future that's good for my children is a future where the United States is still the most powerful economy in the world, still the most powerful military in the world. And according to all reports, that is not what will happen by 2035. By 2035, we will be at parity with at least another country, most likely China. And as we reach parity, what that means is you reach equality. As you reach equality, your superpower status goes away. You are no longer a superpower. You are a near-peer power or a near-peer competitor. It's very different than being a superpower. Why does it matter? Because when there's competition, there's more uncertainty. There's more unpredictability. There's more danger. There's more risk. There's less

opportunity. Think about the starting quarterback for a football team. He's the starting quarterback. He is the person. He is the player that will start the game, that will have the football, and nobody questions it. There's a lot of opportunity there for that person. But as soon as they start to be unpredictable, as soon as there's a new star, a new quarterback that comes in and threatens the existing quarterback now, we don't really know who's going to start. And the team doesn't really know who's going to start. And then for all we know, the team is going to have two different quarterbacks that swap in and out throughout the entire game and the whole team performs worse because they don't know how to predict the quarterback because the new quarterback or the old quarterback

isn't the one that's always throwing the ball. So there's an uncertainty that comes as competition arises. It's why business owners want to be in a business of one. It's why there's such a thing as a blue ocean marketing strategy versus a red ocean marketing strategy. Because when you're in a blue ocean, when you have no competitors around you, your business will most likely thrive. You have room to make mistakes. You can learn slowly. But when you're in a highly competitive red ocean, you don't get any of those opportunities.

What does history tell us about how changing, the changing of the guard as it relates to world power, what the dangers might be for... the average person. It's a great question, and this is where I want to reemphasize my lack of altruism, right? Because- What does altruism mean for anyone that doesn't know? So altruism is this idea that you care about other people or that you care about a common good, right? I don't care about a common good. What- Do you care about other people?

I care about some other people. Your children. Correct. My family, my friends, the people that I think are making a difference, and that's just the way it is. Why will some people not be willing to learn what I teach them? Because they will disagree with my ethics and my morals about how I don't care about all people equally. Well, I just, I prefer, I like the fact that you're honest.

So I mean, that makes me trust you more. I appreciate that. So if you look at history, Rome was really good for Romans for a long, long time. The fall of Rome was bad for everybody. The transition was bad for everybody. out of World War II, right? When you were a Nazi and Nazi Germany, things were pretty good, right? But then when Nazi Germany fell, it was bad for a lot of people. There was a lot of war, there was a lot of death, there was a lot of starvation, multiple countries had been destroyed.

There was a war. There was a transition of power. Same thing happened to fall of Soviet Union. In that war, I was watching a documentary about it the other day. It was interesting because I watched both the sort of Soviet Union rush into Berlin, and America rushed into Berlin. They kind of, they both took different parts of Germany. And then once they'd taken down the Nazis, they kind of went to war with each other. Correct. Because they then were trying to figure out

who was in charge of Germany and how they were going to divvy up land. So there was another war, basically, like a civil war following the... And the same thing happened in China. The same thing happened as our Pacific forces kind of worked their way up through Japan. There became conflict in the East as well.

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