EverydaySpy Podcast - Ultimate CIA Survival Guide: Top Mistakes To Avoid

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

FREE TEST: Find Your Spy Superpower HERE - https://yt.everydayspy.com/spot_20260626 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor,

free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. You're right. Most people think about prepping. So they think about sheltering in place. Mistake number one that CIA teaches you is you never shelter in place. Never shelter in place. Because when you shelter in place, you force yourself into a position where you're relying on diminishing

resources. You never want to put yourself in a position where the food you eat, the water you drink, the shelter you live in is a diminishing resource because then there's a timeline. It can only last for so long. And especially in like an all-out disaster, there's nobody coming to help you. So sheltering in place, the idea of prepping your underground bunker or hardening your house or filling your drawer or your closets full of guns, that is a fundamental error that marketers don't understand, but true tier one operators do. You never let yourself shelter in one place. Instead, you keep yourself mobile because in motion, you carry the resources that you have and you can constantly collect new resources on the way.

right so consider it the difference between having a shelf full of ammunition for your nine millimeter handgun and then you sit in your house with all of your ammunition or you move and every time you come across a dead body or a killed cop you collect their nine millimeter ammunition you move on another mile you collect more and you collect what you need and you carry what you need so mobility is huge when it comes to actual survivability mobility and survivability is what we're taught not sheltering in place so that's the bonus answer uh tiers of bug out. Generally speaking, you have to consider the fact that bug out disasters are going to come in three flavors. There's survivability, immediate survivability, then there's sustainability, and then

there's escape. So when it comes to immediately survivability, you only need to survive 24 hours, right? How do you get from noon today till noon tomorrow? That's what we call a 24-hour bag. So a 24-hour bag is small, it's light, it's easy. You carry a couple of bottles of water, you carry a little bit of food, you carry a change in footwear, you carry a change in clothes, just in case it's warmer or cold wherever you're living. But you just need to survive 24 hours. Hurricane, that sort of thing. Exactly.

Okay. Well, Hurricane is more like a three-day bag. But this is more like a tornado is impending and you have a way out. Got it. Or this is like, you know, somebody blew up your electrical station and you just need to not be in your house. Heatwave and Texas kind of stuff. Sure. Right?

You just need 24 hours to get from a safe place here to a safe place somewhere else. 24 hours is easy. Yeah. Right? It's a backpack. You can move a family. family of four in a single 24-hour backpack if you wanted to. You just get on a plane in Tampa and get off the plane in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,

and you stay in a hotel, safe, bugged out. You're safe from harm. Then you have a three-day bag. A three-day bag is when you actually expect a disaster to occur and it will take up to 72 hours for you to get to a safe haven, right? Because the idea with a bugout bag is always to get you from where you are to a safe haven. So if you can get to a safe haven in 24 hours, you only need a 24-hour bugout bag. If you need 72 hours or up to 72 hours to get to a safe haven, this is more like your hurricane, flood, et cetera, et cetera.

Because most likely you're going to leave your home. You're going to get stuck in traffic. You're going to get moved to like a football stadium somewhere where they're going to take care of you for 24 hours while they bust you to another location. So you need 72 hours worth of gear. In that case, you're carrying a little bit more cash. You're carrying different types of clothes because you're carrying some clothes that you only sleep in versus some clothes that you wear during the day. you're going to be carrying things like sunscreen. You're going to be carrying things like sun protection, sunglasses,

because you need 72 hours to protect yourself from the elements. You might have a raincoat or a poncho. So it's a little bit different than your 24-hour bag. And then you have full-on escape. Full-on escape means you're leaving your property to relocate to another property for an undetermined period of time. Right. So like massive, massive disaster.

So like when Katrina came through, People lost everything. They had to evacuate like they were escaping. And there's kind of two methodologies there. You can escape with your 72-hour bag because you know that you have what you need to get you to where you're going. But then there's an element where if you want to do it properly,

you also have to have all of your key documentation, passports, birth certificates, you know, all of that other stuff. So we keep a fire safe. And inside of our fire safe is a fire safe bag so that whenever we have a true escape situation, we can grab a 72-hour bag and grab our important documents at the same time so that everything's mobile along with us. And then we know, as sad as it would be to lose our studio and our house and all of our artwork

and all of our children's memories, we're going to lose it. We can't fix that. But what we can do is keep the children and everybody else alive by relocating. The geopolitically, I guess, what is the tipping point that requires you to do, to leverage the long-term bugout bag? What is it simply Chinese Chinese economy just took over the U.S. The world power were out or is there something along the way that you're planning for, preparing for? This is the million dollar question, right?

And I feel like there's a lot that we can learn from what the Jews did and didn't do in World War II. Because too many people were waiting for a tipping point. And what I would say is don't wait for a tipping point. Set a date on a calendar. Even better, set three dates on a calendar. in early date to check in, a mid-date where you're kind of wondering whether or not you should do this, and then a final date where you're like, come hell or high water, we're doing it. Right? And that's kind of what we have on our calendar, too.

We are leaving the United States in five to seven years. Like, that's our deadline date. And I was telling you earlier how we're in a growth phase of our business where it's growing so rapidly that we're a little bit limited in what we can do. So our date actually changed because of the business opportunities that exist with our business. So now a big part of what we're working on now is growing our business in a way where we can manage it from abroad. Right. So we know that come 2030, we're leaving. Not because we're waiting for some sort of tipping point, but because between 2030 and 2035, there will be a tipping point.

And I would rather observe that tipping point from the stands rather than be on the field. Because then after whatever happens happens and the shakeup happens, then we can decide what we can. do next right that's fair so that's that's the way to think of it don't look at don't look for a tipping point look for a drop dead date and then set yourself a couple of check-in dates before that so that if you need to expedite or change your timeline you can and that's exactly what we're doing I love that I want to talk quickly about privacy for a minute here so CIA as a as a as an intelligence agency can you delineate it first from other agencies we hear about NSA FBI so on and so forth I

think there's yeah what is the what should be the delineation line between CIA and some of the other major intelligence agencies? So they're actually inside, so when you talk about the multiple intelligence agencies, what you're talking about is something called the intelligence community. Right.

And there are approximately 18 agencies within the intelligence community. Each one of those is delineated according to their purpose and what's known as their authorities. So purpose is pretty obvious, like what is the reason for your intelligence collection mission? What type of intelligence do you collect? And then there's the authorities,

which is, what? authorities have been granted to you by the executive branch to essentially violate certain levels of privacy to execute your intelligence mission. Inside of that intelligence community, CIA lives in the human intelligence space, what's known as humant. So CIA's mission is to collect information, to collect secrets, secret intelligence, from human sources in foreign countries that benefit national security here in the United States. So that's their mission. NSA is there for signals intelligence or sigant, right, different than CIA's humant. Signals intelligence means they're there to collect intelligence that can be gathered,

secrets that can be gathered, from signals in the atmosphere. So those could be radio transmissions, there can be encrypted fiber optic transmissions, they can be satellite communications. They're all signals, and they're supposed to collect them from there. You've got FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their job is to keep the homeland safe by investigating threats in the homeland. So domestic threats. That's foreign and domestic threats, but within the domestic homeland.

Okay. You got it? I do. So people have different missions in those different ways. The authorities that each is granted is where the privacy piece comes in, right? So CIA, for example, has no authority to collect against U.S. citizens. They can't do it. There's no authority that's been granted to them.

So if an American in Michigan radicalizes and joins ISIS through a war, an online server and becomes a sworn member of ISIS but retains their U.S. citizenship, CIA has no authority to collect on that person. FBI can because FBI's authority is to collect against any threat, foreign or domestic that exists in the homeland. So then does authority or ego prevent these organizations from communicating with one another? Ego and practice, right? And here's, we've got to keep in mind, like anybody who's ever worked for a company, you used to work for a big company, right? Did the HR department speak the same language as the sales department?

No. FBI doesn't speak the same language as CIA. So even if you have the head of HR and the head of sales are saying to their team, we have to coordinate, we have to communicate. The actual emails themselves don't make any sense to anybody. And when people come across something they don't understand, they just don't do it. Dismiss it, right? And that's exactly what happens in the IC.

You have 18 different groups, right? You've got the Air Force Office of Special Investigation speaking to FBI. They speak in Air Force. The FBI speaks and FBI speak. And then they both speak to NSA, who speaks in a third language altogether. And then all three of them speak to CIA that speaks in the third language altogether. Right. So then nobody's really speaking the same language.

Everybody's deprioritizing each other's intelligence reports because they just don't understand what they're saying. And in comparison to the intel that they're getting from each other, they're getting tons of from within their own organization. So they're prioritizing their own intel, de-prioritizing their partners' intel, and it makes just an administrative challenge. Prior to World War I, my understanding, is intelligence espionage-type operations

were wartime ramp-ups and then ramp downs. World War I happens, World War I happens, especially, 9-11, it launches conspiracy theories. Hey, Pearl Harbor, we turned a blind eye to. Winston Churchill warned, I forget the president, that's terrible. Who was the president for Pearl Harbor? President of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt. Yeah.

Yeah. Warrens Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Times of Blind Eye, he wanted American sentiment to be on the side of getting involved in this conflict. 9-11, similar sort of conspiracy theories are out there. So it raises the question.

Are we at a place today with the idea that, and you've said this, and this is so true, safety and privacy are competing, right? The more safety you have, the less privacy and vice versa.

So the idea that we have more and more intelligence agents, more and more intelligence agencies, more and more breaches, if you will, of privacy. Breaches, depending on who you are, I guess you can describe it that way. And the fact that post-World War I, post-World War I, post-World War II, we've ramped up intelligence operations, no matter whether we're peacetime or wartime and have accelerated that. Are we in a place where there is a, I don't know, there is a desire. by the elite class to control the populace, and that's why we have these intelligence

agency, very conspiracy theory, or is it very necessary for a country like ours to have scaled to the point, just like a company, to, I don't know, continue to trickle into the private lives of its citizens? So I think it's an interesting point that you bring up, and you're right, when it comes to chasing conspiracy theories, like there's no way that you can respond to conspiracy theories, because there are theories and they're conspiracies. So you can't ever satisfy a conspiracy theorist's theory. You just can't do it.

So we're not even going to try. But when it comes to what is the role of intelligence now, I would very much equate it to what's the role of business intelligence now. Why do companies invest in business intelligence? Why do companies invest in metrics? And why do companies invest in market research? Why are they doing that? They're doing that so they can keep ahead of their competitors.

Why are they trying to keep ahead of their competitors? Because they've learned, it's actually. cheaper to track what your competitor is doing and then out maneuver them in secret so that you always have your, you always protect your market share rather than be surprised by your competitor when they bring something new to market and then you have to invest all this money and just trying to survive by creating a competitive product. That is the same reason that you have seen less so since World War II and more so really since the Vietnam War, why you've seen this increase in active peacetime intelligence collection. Because intelligence does.

the same thing. We don't have to have a hot war with China. And a hot war with China might last what, four years, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of deaths potentially. We don't have to have a hot war. If we can spread out intelligence operations over 50 years and maneuver in such a way where essentially we have deterrence that keeps both sides from starting a hot conflict. That's the value of intelligence. So it costs a fraction of the amount of money. and it costs no lives or a small, small amount of lives to be able to maintain this, this wobbly kind of peace. But it keeps both countries in check with each other.

So business intelligence and covert intelligence kind of serve the same purpose. It's an investment against a future expense. Makes sense. Rapping this up, I want to go into into real quick your exit from the CIA, from, from what I understand, you left, I think everything. about you as fabricated by the CIA intentionally, right? You were still undercover. Undercover.

So resume, all of that, you get jobs based on a different identity, a different resume than your actual. And then at some point your covers lifted and you tell your boss about it, all that good stuff, right? I've seen all these stories. Are you to this day obligated for everything that you do? I mean, you teach, I've read you teaching about, you know, why you should sit on a plane

if somebody's being attacked and allow the, I didn't even understand that the plane is built in such a way that trained entities can resolve the conflict. And if I jump up and try to help, I'm actually in the way. Crazy stuff, everyday spot. Go check it out. But are you forever indebted or attached to the CIA for everything you do with your brand? Yes and no.

We are under a lifetime secrecy agreement to always protect classified methods and sources that both my wife and I worked with at CIA. So there is no room around that. It's a lifetime secrecy agreement. we can never publish, talk, or disclose clandestine sources and methods of intelligence collection that we participated in that, especially not, that might still be in use now. So to that, we are less indebted and more legally culpable too, violating that secrecy agreement. Outside of that, we have no relationship with CIA.

We're just free independent citizens. So everyday spy is just a company that I created, based on my knowledge, my experience, what I've learned in my time at CIA, to bring CIA best practices as I understand them, as I was trained in them, to the everyday person. That's the goal of our company, right? To give people the same unfair advantage in everyday life that CIA gave us as an unfair advantage in covert life. It's a really easy pass-through for us.

And it doesn't violate any of our secrecy agreement to CIA. That said, there's also an element of nationalism here where, CIA has no method. It's not like it's not like being a reserve military officer where the army can just call back their reservists. CIA doesn't work like that.

They don't have a reserve cadre. They can just call back to come back into service. They've never done that. They can't really do that. There's no legal method for them to do that. That said, they can always ask you to come back to service. So if CIA tapped on my wife or my shoulder and said, hey, we need you to come back and help us with

something? Would we consider that imitation? Absolutely. Because we love CIA. We've always loved CIA. We love their mission. We love their service. We love what they do to keep Americans safe. We believe in CIA, which is what makes so many people on the internet hate us, which is totally fine. But the truth is, if we were to be tapped on the shoulder, it would be a very difficult conversation, but CIA understands the power of difficult conversations. For us to say, hey, for every day we spend with you, we're losing X amount of money in business. So how do we off-send? set that. And if we're going to do something that helps you, how are you going to help us with what we're trying to do in the future? So it becomes, you know, a negotiation, a business negotiation.

There is no, there is no piece of this where CIA controls us now. There's no piece of this where CIA has to sanction what we say right now. Like all the stuff I say about Russia and Ukraine and all the stuff I say, you know, even against the Biden administration, all the stuff I say, you know, even against the Trump administration. None of that is sanctioned by CIA. And CIA would be the first people to tell you, like, these people do not speak on our behalf. half. But it's all within they were the agreements of the lifetime secrecy agreement that we signed and our own independent rights as First Amendment citizens of the United States. Everyday spy teaches, I think I didn't realize when I started really looking into what you do

how psychology is at the center of everything. I mean, you went through that breakdown of the brain. If people don't get the hint or clue by now, that like, wow, this is way deeper than just like James Bond shit. Right. Like you get it. into this deep. So give an idea for anybody listening. What are some of the things that I mentioned like airplane security. But I think there's, I don't know, betting a woman. There's so many different things that your teachings can do. That sounded awful, but you know what I'm saying. Give me an idea of the range of what people can learn from the tactics that you learn in the CIA. If it sounds awful to have us teach people how to bed a partner, then I definitely don't want to

talk about the sex. Bed women though. The Sex and Spies book that we have out there, which is all about how to bed both the woman that you're trying to bed and sometimes recognizing that the woman you're trying to bed is already your wife. Yeah. So sex and spies is something that we absolutely teach. But we do. We teach psychology as it applies to five different areas in your life, right? There's mindset, there's physical health, there's career and professional life, there's romance and love life, and there's personal security. So in each of those different pillars, we're teaching you the psychological tools that CIA gave us to exist in each of those five areas.

Right. So that's really the core of what makes us work. And it's all built around the same methodology that CIA trained us when they took us to what's known as the farm. The farm is CIA's training camp. It's also known as the field tradecraft course or FTC. It's in a classified location that Wikipedia knows about, but I can't disclose myself on a podcast.

Either way, that's that. That's the kind of the magic sauce of our business, is that we're teaching psychological principles that allow you to go through the process of education, training, and experience so that you can make these psychological tools a permanent part of your tool set instead of something temporary that you forget. I mean, how many times have you read a book, 250-page book, and you made highlights and you made notes and everything else, and then you never reread the book? And you really only take, like, one nugget away from a 250-page book, right?

Four hours of reading, and you only remember. number one thing. That's the exact antithesis of what CIA wants. CIA wants people to learn, you know, 250 nuggets out of 250 pages. So that's the method that we used to make that happen. Amazing. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair.cair, every style, every home.