EverydaySpy Podcast - This CIA Lesson Helped Me Break Out Of The Matrix

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

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They live in a world of perception, how they perceive the world around them. Most individuals, at least that's what we learn at CIA, individuals live with a frame of reference around themselves. They're the center of the movie. They're the star of the show. They're the center of the universe. That is an inherently human thing to do. Because humans in our evolutionary process and the pink matter that is our brains,

we're always worried about survival. We've never outgrown that. The technological development and the technological evolution of the world has happened exponentially faster than the human evolution of the world. So while you and I are sitting here in 2023, our brains work in essentially the same way as they worked in 1823. But the world around us is extremely different. We don't need to worry about survival anymore.

Now we're supposed to be worrying about how to thrive, how to meet our objectives, how to meet our goals. If you think about it, humans just 200 years ago, humans had to worry about how do I make it to the next day? How do I just survive? They were always focused on the here and now and how do I make it work today so I can live again tomorrow. You and I don't worry about how to make it through today.

Most people are thinking about what am I going to do this weekend? What am I going to do next week? When is my upcoming vacation? We don't worry about the here and now. But the brain is still wired to live first and foremost in this survival mindset, the survival process. So the pink matter that exists in your brain and mind and everybody around us is still very much focused on the self as the most important elements. And because of that, it views everything around the environment and around the individual through a little. lens of perception, what I perceive is real to me. To hell with what you perceive. What I perceive

is the truth. My stepdad used to lecture me about perception is reality. Perception is reality, Andrew. Perception is reality. And I disagreed with him from the time I was 12 years old. I was like, no, dad, reality is reality. If I perceive a car coming down the road and it is in line to hit me, if I perceive that it's not going to hit me, doesn't. make a difference, right? Reality is reality. What CIA taught me was a better way of explaining what reality actually is. And reality is that 98% of human beings are trapped in their own perception. So the 2% that live in the real world that have perspective, they are able to manipulate the perception of everybody else. Okay. So when you were in training, did you have to, like, are they

there like five bullet points or whatever that you begin to go okay people are they're in survival mode they're looking at the world through their own eyes they have fears like is is there a framework by which you begin to understand the other person yes uh there is it doesn't really boil down to five bullet points but it does boil down to essentially like a handful of short lectures right but walk me through it so here's here's how I imagine you I don't know if this is real or not. But the very first thing I wrote down when I started researching you was how the hell do you manage your own anxiety when you're in spy mode and you can't give yourself a way, but you have to figure something out about that person. So I imagine you walk up to them, whatever that, you know,

framework is, the rubric that you're determining who they are by. I imagine it kicks in right away. How do you start categorizing them when you first walk up? So when you first walk up to somebody, you've got to keep in mind that nobody is what they appear to be. Nobody. everybody. Every human being has three lives. It's what we're taught. Three lives. There's a public life, a secret life, and a private life, right? So the order is public life, private life, secret life. The public life is what we're all presenting to each other. It's what we want to appear as in public, right? You want to look cool and suave and handsome and you want to sound nice and you want to surround yourself with nice things because that's what you want

the public to perceive about you. It may not be real, but it doesn't have to be real. If they perceive it to be true, then you have won because you have just perceived, you have just manipulated their perception. That's why broke-ass high school and college kids will still wear a nice name brand stuff, so they don't, they don't look like they're broke-ass students, right? I was one of those students, so I remember. Then you've got your private life.

Now, your private life is what your closest confidants know about you. So what your wife might know about you, what your close friends know about you, what your parents know about you. So publicly, nobody knows my feet smell bad. Privately, my wife knows my feet smell bad, right? But I'm never going to make that part of my public persona because it goes against what I'm trying to display as an image. So here you've got these two lives. When you meet a stranger, they're presenting their public life. always most of your connections most of your friends unless they are in the private life they are all

in the public life your co-workers your customers these are all people who you are dealing with you're interacting with on a public life to public life level we haven't even talked about the secret life right the secret life is the life that you don't share with anyone it's that place where your darkest thoughts your biggest vulnerabilities it's where they live and convince you every day not to share them with your spouse, not to share them with your parents, the things that make you feel horrible about yourself, the things that you wonder if they're really true,

but you're afraid to even ask the question because what would they think? They, the public life, they, the private life. How would people judge me? We all have a secret life too. For some people, secret life is big. For some people, secret life is quite small. But you've got these three lives.

So when I approach somebody in spy mode or in business mode or in social mode. I know I'm dealing with a public life first. Are you trying to peel beneath that? Sometimes. In spy mode? I'm sorry. No, no, no, please.

This is so interesting to the average person you have no idea. Like, this is like movie shit. In spy mode, you have two objectives. Objective number one is to get into someone's private life as quickly as possible. Because if you're not, unless you're in someone's private life, you'll never get into their secret life.

objective number two once you're in private life is to become one of the few people that will ever penetrate their secret life and there's only one reason why you want to penetrate someone's secret life because once you're there you never leave once someone has trusted you with a secret life secret their their fealty to you their loyalty to you is beyond question forever because they believe that you have earned that right to their secret life. They believe that you two are inherently connected. Star-crossed lovers, soul matches. They rationalize it however they need to rationalize it.

But essentially, all they did is they just, in a moment of vulnerability, they let you into one of their deepest, darkest secrets. So they have been leveraged, like debt. They have been leveraged now. So their deepest darkest secret hinges on you keeping it a secret. And that is interpreted as loyalty. They interpret that as, this is the most trusted confidant,

this is my most trusted lieutenant, this person gets me, this person understands me, I need to be, I need to have, I need to do life with this person. So when you're a spy and you get into someone's secret life,

that means you get all the secrets. If they're a general in a nuclear program in a hostile country, you can just ask them a question, hey, who are your missiles pointed at? What's the temperature that you guys use or how often do you enrich your uranium? What's your primary source of uranium?

You can ask them anything because they don't even care about that. That's all stuff that they basically have in their private life. You're in their secret life. That stuff's yours. They'll just give it to you. The stuff they really care about is, I'm really not happy.

I'm trapped in this marriage that was arranged by my parents. And what I really like is this kinky thing with this whatever that's going to get me, you know, killed in my own country. But I can tell you about it. So how do you get into that mode? I'm guessing you have to understand something about them first. So you have to know what makes them tick.

You have to understand what's going to make them suspicious, what's going to trip them up. Are those like generally true? Or do you have to tailor them to that specific person? They, you come in to any operation against a human being. So human intelligence is called humant. human operations, human intelligence operations. Whenever you come into a humant operation, you're using a generalized dossier of the target set.

So if I know I'm talking to an Asian person who has traveled to Europe, maybe educated in Europe, their parents are well-to-do. They live in China, but they were born in Cambodia. You can kind of come up with a general sense of the person. Walk me through that, though. So are you thinking, okay, if you're born in Chinese culture it's more collective in nature, so you probably feel a tremendous sense of pressure from your family.

And so how do I leverage that? Or, no, you have a certain reaction to authority. And if I can position myself, like, are you thinking like that? You are exactly. That's exactly how you're thinking. So there's a couple things to keep in mind. So first is that there's three developmental stages to the human brain. There's three developmental stages to the human brain. There's from birth to seven years old. From birth to seven years old, we're all sponges. We don't differentiate between true and untrue information. There's just information, right? This is one of the reasons why my son, when he was four, just fell head over heels in love

with his grandpa. His grandpa's wrong pretty much all the time. He just lies. He tells stories that never happened. He just makes stuff up, right? Oh, the reason this is happening is because of that. And I'm like, no, that's not true at all. My four-year-old son doesn't care.

Or when he was four, he didn't care. But Babu, who he calls his grandpa Babu, Babu tells the best stories. So now my son is 10. He has left that first developmental stage. But because of those years spent with his grandfather, he is now predisposed to believe his grandfather. The second developmental stage happens from 7 to 13. In that period of time, you can start to differentiate true and untrue information. But you choose which information you want to give more value to.

So you're still absorbing it. You still retain it. but you might have a preference for one for one bit of information or the other, right? So now this is the place where it's like, yeah, I know I ate broccoli once and it wasn't terrible, but I don't really want to eat it anymore. Before that, you're just like,

if you give a four-year-old broccoli, they'll put it in their mouth. Prime presents perfect pairings. What pairs with Reacher on Prime? Reaching for a sparkling punch delivered with Prime. It's an unbelievable feeling when you're enjoying a punch. At the same time,

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Puberty lasts until you have. are 25 years old. That period of time cognitively is characterized by the fact that you resist some forms of information. So now you actually have the cognitive capacity to hear something and reject it and not even let it come into your brain at all. So 7 to 13, you hear it, you retain it whether you like it or not. Zero to 7, everything comes in.

13 to 25, you're actually rejecting information. So when we create a dossier on somebody, we're looking at those first 20, we're looking at those first 25 years. Where did they spend the first seven years? Oh, they spent it in China. Lots of stuff we can ask you. We can high probability assume a number of things because they spent the first seven years in China. Oh, they spent their first seven years in Alabama. They've spent their first seven years in New York, New York. They spent their first seven years in Canada. Lots of stuff you can pull from their foundation of how they were programmed. Seven to 13, they did this. Okay. So they were exposed in some places like Saudi Arabia, uh, North Korea, uh, Turkey.

Syria, you can assume that some pieces of information they were just never exposed to, right? They were predominantly exposed to one style of information. And if they were given other information, they may have absorbed or they would have absorbed it, but the chances are they were never exposed to it. And then you look at them from their puberty years, 13 to 25. Where were they? What were they doing? What college did they go to?

What high school did they go to? What countries were they in? Because now you know, well, what would they have? been exposed to, what would they have rejected based on their predisposition to these other formative years, and now you're talking to them in their 35 or 45. After 25, neuroplasticity is still a thing for the entirety of your life, meaning your brain can always learn something new. But your worldview has been set by 25. So unless something comes in and challenges your worldview and you give it permission to challenge your worldview, you're never going to change

the way you think after the age of 25. So we can largely assume that every person that we're talking to, especially at their government, engineer, super secret squirrel stuff, they probably haven't been challenging their worldview since the time that they were 25. So now we have these different levels

that we can use to make probabilistic assumptions about how they think and what they believe. When you have that dossier, that generalized dossier, then you can go into a more granular dossier, about what they drink, what they eat, who they hang out with, are they cheating on their spouse? How often do they use their phone? All the really nitty-gritty detail stuff to create a picture of how you want to talk to this person.

So that your first introductory line essentially predisposes them to want to talk to you for the entire conversation. And that's so interesting. So do you, did you take classes on like, okay, if you grew up in an American, large city, here are going to be, you know, some of the things you would have taken in by the time you're 13. Or if you grew up in the Middle East, then it's, you know, you're going to be probably Islamic culture here, like the main things you're going to need to know about somebody like that. So at CIA, it's organized according to disciplines. So they do a really good job of making sure that people are compartmentalized in terms of their skill sets

so that no one person can do everything. And they also capture the efficiency of scale. by having some people be really good at one skill. So they can essentially like an industrial revolution, what is it called, assembly line. So somebody says, we need to target nuclear engineers in Iran. And here is a list of, and then a different person, a different discipline,

says here's 12 nuclear engineers that travel outside of Iran that we think we can actually get in front of. And then they give those 12 to, an analyst team. And now your analytical targeters create that generalized dossier. And then that those analytical targeters give it to humant targets who create the nitty gritty dossier. Those human targeters then give it to actual field officers or case officers and say, here are the 12 people, here's everything we know about their background, here's everything we know about them

individually. Here's what we know about their pattern of life, where they hang out, what they like to order at their favorite restaurants, and what days of the week they're going to be in those restaurants. And then they give it to the field officer so the field officer can review the whole case and say, here's how I'm going to do this. Here's the day, the place, here's my opening line, here's where the conversation is going to go. We create our conversation map, a map of how we expect the conversation to go with all of the different breakoff points where it might go awry and how we bring it back together. And then we go and we execute. And we execute what's known as a bump or a cold introduction with a known target of interest. Recently, our company's softball team lost

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