EverydaySpy Podcast - Use These CIA Rules for Money, Power, and Control

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. So is Everyday Spy? Is this like a consulting company? Is it like a, are you working with top performers in the world to help them understand how to navigate people?

Or kind of explain Everyday Spy? Everyday Spy is an education platform. Our mission is spy education that breaks barriers for everyone willing to learn. As long as it doesn't violate my long-term secrecy agreement, me or any of my experts, because I have FBI experts, Navy SEAL experts. I have tech experts from NSA. I have DOD experts. As long as none of us violate our sworn secrecy oath to the federal government of the United States, everything else is on a table.

So we teach, educate people in those frameworks and skills, just like we talked about earlier. Ah, okay, okay. To help them break whatever barrier they have. And some people, the barrier they're trying to break is lose weight. Some people, the barrier they're trying to break is a better relationship with their kids or their spouse. Some people, the barrier they're trying to break is getting a promotion in their current job. other people, their barriers trying to get out of a job and get into entrepreneurialism. Some entrepreneurs are trying to go from 1 million to 2 million.

Some entrepreneurs are trying to go from 100 million to 500 million. We apply spy education to whatever their situation is to break through that barrier. So it's actually teaching those actionable frameworks. Ah, I didn't realize that. Exactly right. For some ways, I thought it was for business owners. It is for business owners. Yeah, exactly.

It applies to them. Correct. But it's just general spy tactics, what you've learned in the CIA, that's actionable, simplified frameworks. Yes, and I wouldn't even say that it's general spy tactics, because depending on what barrier is trying to be broken, we can get very specialized with our spy tactics. We have a high net worth client who runs a very successful centa-million dollar company

in an industry that is relatively new. Let's say the last 10 or 15 years, became a very hot industry. Because the industry is so hot, the competition between the players hasn't been heavily regulated. So there's a lot of cyber hacking and cyber attacks that happen back and forth, right? So in the world of espionage, cyber espionage is pretty niche. It's not like you're going to, I don't see a lot of value in creating a special report that I give away for free on YouTube about cyber hacking principles.

Yeah. But for this specific client, huge impact. Huge impact. So we are able to advise and then operationalize both defensive and operationalize, So both defensive and offensive cyber operations to support and defend his company against the attacks of his competitors. But because it's an unregulated market, we can also offensively attack his competition using cyber technology. It's more refined and advanced than theirs. So what is the CIA's perspective on Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a practical tool. Bitcoin is a practical tool. Shitbirds use it. Bad guys use it all over the world. And you have to understand that that's how the federal government sees it. So because Bitcoin is used to fund terrorist operations, human trafficking operations, weapons smuggling operations, I mean, Bitcoin people love to look past this, but the truth is all of the initial use cases for Bitcoin were all nefarious.

When all of your primary use cases were nefarious, you're not, I mean, that's what CIA believes. That's what the federal government believes. It's a nefarious tool. Do we still use it? Hell yes. because if you need to get a nefarious actor on your side, do you want to use real U.S. dollars? No.

They want to use fake money. Unregulated cryptocurrencies. Digital gold. That are basically only as valuable as the speculation around them. That's not something that federal governments rely on. It seems like there's a non-emotional relationship to it. Like they can acknowledge that what it's being used for and then use it for that if they justify the means for whatever they're trying to achieve.

the ends justify the means, it's economics, right? Yeah, yeah. Think about it. So let's say you're CIA, and you have a $1 trillion budget, okay? When you take down this drug smuggler, you arrest them, send them to Guantanamo Bay, and you seize all their assets.

Well, part of the assets you just seized are $15 million in cryptocurrency through Bitcoin, right? So now you have a trillion dollars in U.S. dollars and $15 million in Bitcoin dollars. You can't trade your first. 15 million Bitcoin to get US dollars because that's making a profit off of national security work and it just doesn't work that way, right? Oh, so you're interesting.

Now you're just $15 million as an organization. You're $15 million richer in your operational fund. So now, when it comes time to buy a Ukrainian tank that costs $11 million, if the Ukrainians will let you buy that tank in Bitcoin, are you going to spend part of your trillion dollar budget or are you going to spend part of your $15 million, your $15 million Bitcoin sees? You're going to spend that Bitcoin first. And now you've just protected U.S. tax dollars. Interesting. And that's how it goes. So now it's like, if you, on a smaller scale, if you haven't discovered your natural-born spy skills, then somebody else might be using

theirs against you. CIA teaches us that there are only three types of people in the world. Those who motivate, those who manipulate, and those who are being controlled by one of the other two. I created a three-minute CIA-style quiz to help you unlock your secret psychological advantage and identify your hidden blind spot. This test was developed to help you weaponize your natural-born gifts and use them to get ahead of 99% of people in power, wealth, and purpose. It was also designed to make sure that you can protect yourself against those who would use their skills against you.

All you have to do is click on the first link in the description below or scan the QR code on your screen to start your spy quiz now. discover your secret spy superpower and use it for good before somebody else uses their power against you. You get $500,000 in Bitcoin value from this interdiction operation and then you turn it over to the FBI who uses it for this child trafficking bust. And then DEA gains 50 million or 50,000 Bitcoin from this child trafficker or this drug trafficker and they hand it over to NSA who uses it to pay off an informant in. So to use a luchistan, whatever it Yes. Okay. So it's used objectively as a utility. Correct. Because we know that it has no value for the federal government. And we know that it's already, essentially, it's already blood money. So you got to keep it on the blood side of the... Would the same thing be like for drug money that's in USDA? Like is that still categories or is that still mesh in? Well, not just drug money that's USD, but any money that's seized that's USDA, if it's child trafficking dollars, if it's fraudulent business dollars, whatever else, it all comes back. Have you ever seen like, have you ever seen a situation?

where like a New York City police or Chicago police or whatever, they have a big raid. Yeah. And then they have a big press conference and on the table is like piles of cocaine and piles of dollars. Yeah, yeah. Well, the piles of cocaine gets sent to the incinerator. The piles of dollars can't be put into normal rotation. Yeah. So instead they're granted back to the police department for use in other police department

functions, whatever that might be. Like essentially it's a legal version of laundering money. can they use it to buy equipment or just oh okay so they can still use it to buy stuff okay cool because it's real US dollars it's real currency that's owned by the federal that's recognized by the federal government interesting okay cool so I always would wonder if just like if they acknowledge that bitcoin is like a super valuable asset and they were trying to like acquire okay cool it's an investment it's an investment vehicle it's all it is and what you can't do is leverage and you can't leverage your your government granted you can't take tax budget and use it

it to make an investment. You left like 10 years ago probably around there, right? And then did you have in mind that you would go start a business afterward? No, actually. When I left CIA, I didn't really know what I was going to do. I left for family reasons because I had my first child, my wife and I were both CIA officers. CIA basically put us, they had a conversation with us where they were like, hey, you're going to have to choose between being CIA officers or being parents. Not like they're going to get rid of our kid, but it's basically like, you're not going to be home because you're going to be operating or you are going to be home and you're not going to be operating. But they were like, this is the way it works. And this is the way it's always worked at CIA. Well, this is 2014. My wife and I

are both 34 years old with our first child and we want to have a second child. And we were just of the first generation that basically heard that offer. And we were kind of like, well, then fuck you guys. We're out. And like when we left in 2014, CIA had really never seen that before. People who leave mid-career because they started having a family was unfamiliar to them. The attrition rate prior to 2014 was like in the low 2%. It was like 1.8%, 1.6%. Very few people ever left CIA. And when they did leave, it was because they were retiring,

and then they went through what was called a revolving door. Retire on Friday, come back in on Monday as a contractor working for some big contract company. That was basically how people would retire. So they were not accustomed to mid-career successful professionals just leaving. What's the point of becoming a contractor? What's the difference? Like $60,000 a year?

You get paid more or less? You get paid a ton more. You get paid a ton more. Do you remember when Donald Trump, when he took office in 2016, for like two years after that he tried to start taking security clearances from anybody who wasn't in government? Do you remember that? Yeah. He was 100% right.

Because what happens is you don't make very much money in the federal government. And when I say you don't make very much money, what I mean is like a senior intelligence specialist or an SIS officer might be making maybe $210,000 a year after a 30 year career. Well, shit, dude. Like, you know how many 28-year-old salespeople are making $250,000 a year right now? Like, you know, me 20-year-olds that have made a million dollars a month sitting that seat? Exactly, exactly, right?

So after after a full year of servicing the government for 210,000 people, your greatest salary ever. You have the super high secrecy or you have the super high clearance. You have a huge network of peers at CIA, at FBI, at DOD and DIA, at NSA and abroad with the Israelis and with the French and with the Germans and with the British. Like you have this giant network. Well, a corporate for-profit company wants access to that network.

Your Booz Allen Hamilton's and your Raytheons and your khakis. Gotcha. I see what you mean. Okay. Right. So then they'll come in and they'll make offers to the retirees. And then the retiree will step out on Friday without being an employee for CIA anymore, sign on with khaki or sign on with Booz Allen Hamilton or Raytheon, sign a receipt to start getting a $370,000 salary. But all they're doing is they're essentially brokering introductions and contracts with whoever still inside the building.

It should absolutely be illegal. It should be totally outlawed. It's absolutely all the problems with abusing the federal system, but it's always been overlooked because the government in the national security sector sees it as an opportunity to capitalize on the best parts of business without having to get clearance from the people in the business. They've already granted clearance to the people on the inside. We're back to self-interest, huh?

So then I'm curious of other people, because you kill it on podcast. Thank you. So fascinating. And I'm trying not to ask the same question because I've watched probably like five of years before I even contacted you. But I am very curious if other people have tried to, other CIA agents have tried to copy your business because I'm assuming you're doing very well for yourself.

Yeah. We are in a blue market, like in a blue ocean market. It's been pretty awesome. To my knowledge, nobody has tried to mimic us yet. There's a couple of different reasons why. One, remember how we talked about taking that first step and build that head start. We also call it a moat in business terminology.

You build a moat around your castle. We have a pretty deep, big moat. So for someone to even try to... Just for how long you've been at the business? Right. But just like Apple, just like the iPhone, we're not, it's not guaranteed. Like there could be a competitor that comes in

and poaches some of our space. But just by virtue of the fact that I... You started earlier than anybody else with a message that nobody had ever heard before doing something in the spy education space, that no one's ever seen before, we've had this huge head start. And we're trying to maintain and keep that head start always, right? That's the mission of the company.

Everybody from me, through my president to all of my employees and staff, everybody knows like our job is to just keep pushing the ball forward to build that moat and keep that head start. Someday there will be a competitor who steps out and tries. It's going to happen. They'll be better looking than me. They'll speak better than me. They'll be smarter than me.

And they'll be more relevant because they will have gotten out. and they wouldn't, there won't be as old, right? They'll be younger, they'll be fresher, they'll be cooler. Good chance, they'll also find an investor.

Like our business is cash flow funded. We've never had outside investment. When a competitor comes out, all it's going to take is someone infusing five or seven million dollars into their company, and they're going to have the ability to buy all the media that we've earned. Right? So we've always got to be prepared for when that comes.

But so far that competition hasn't presented itself, so every single day we're building more remote, and getting more of a head start. So do you think that I see, because they hire very specific type of people, do you think that those people just naturally don't fall in line with entrepreneurship, or do you think they're like perfectly in line

with entrepreneurship and they just don't leave? I think they are perfectly in line with entrepreneurship and they believe the brainwashing that happens at CIA. It's like, this is almost like the concept of setting culture in a business. Kind of, yeah. Like you need to understand. I wonder, dang, that's so interesting.

So that's the same thing as hiring. Like they know exactly who to hire. So then they get the exact same culture setting that they know would work to get this essentially an employee. Yeah. That's what's so hard about communicating these techniques to business owners is that the reason CIA does so well is because it goes all the way back to hiring. They have a specific technique for hiring and then for training and then for cultivating training and building a community. We have this thing called the indoctrination circles. they're concentric circles that indoctrinate.

It's a whole methodology that CIA has, that we use all over the world that I teach to business owners. This is one of the things that I teach to like executives, right? How to create a systematic indoctrination cycle so that you can go from having just a brand new employee to having like a true blue believer in the why of the company, like the mission, the vision, and the objective of the company, right?

And their position and where they fit in that whole thing. because it's a process, but it's a fulsome process. It's not the kind of thing you can do in 48 hours. It's the kind of thing that you have to cultivate somebody over nine-ish months of their career to get them to that place. Your typical fucking entrepreneur is so focused on culture that they lose track of the core business. Like we're all trying to make our people happy.

Happy people are not a requirement to keep a business alive. Cash flow is a requirement. to keep a business alive. You can always take somebody who understands cash flow first and teach them a new culture. But what you cannot do is find somebody who puts culture first and train them to put cash flow first. You can't do that. So what ends up happening is a lot of good business owners find themselves wasting money and

wasting time on fucking shitty employees who are really part of the company because they believe in the culture. Well, they can believe in the culture all day long. if they don't believe in the core purpose and core product of the company, they're not going to generate the kind of wealth for the company that's required to scale the company, grow the company, and keep the company alive. Interesting. So are you teaching people to identify a certain type of personality type?

Yep. That's something we do all the time. What is the type? There's multiple, it depends on the job. It depends on the company, the role, the task board. It depends on a lot of different things. If you have a career or if you have a company where people need to be focused on cognitively challenging tasks where they have to work alone because they're working remotely or something like that,

and you need them to solve complex challenges. Now you're looking for somebody who's a certain personality type that's a mix of introvert, data-focused, and process-oriented. If you're dealing in a company that's more growth-oriented, and what you're trying to do is get people to think creatively about how to pitch and sell a product to a wider new audience with multiple types of variations. Now you want somebody who's more extroverted,

who thinks more intuitively about opportunities, and for somebody who's probably less on the process side and more on the experimental side. How would you find out someone intuitively looking for opportunities? Well, you would have to look at their personality profiles. So you'd have to put them through a personality battery. So some kind of personality test. It's not like a Myers-Brigg?

Myers-Briggs is the go-to test for the federal government. It's the most, it's the most, pragmatic of all the intelligence tests out there like your disc profile and your and your there's like dozens and dozens of these things now right there's all these different like personality testing tools Myers-Briggs has the longest history with the least variation in in factual responses or factual outcomes so that's why pragmatically going back to the whole idea of everything we do is practical. Myers-Briggs is the go-to solution for the federal government. Okay. I'm sure that's like a whole

world. That's a whole world. And all of the academic psychologists out there are pitching a fit and pissing at themselves right now, right? Because they're like, yeah, what about this? And what about this? And what about this? And I'm like, look, guys, whether you like it or not. Just put it in English. Yeah. Myers-Briggs. Four letters. Everybody speaks the same language. 80% done is good enough. Make it practical. Yep. Interesting. Well, Andrew, thank you so much, dude. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was, I was very nervous because I was super excited for it. And I had so many, like, actual questions that I'm interested in. But I think, I think we tied this up pretty nicely.

Great. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man. Dude. If anybody wants to find me, they can find me at Everydayspy.com. They can follow my podcast, the Everyday Spy podcast. You can find me on social media at Everyday Spy. And, I mean, this is what I live to do, man.

I live to teach people about how to take spy skills and spy education and use it to break a barrier, social barrier, personal barrier, professional barrier, entrepreneurial barrier, and teach that to them and share them so they can have success because the future isn't being created by the dipshits out there. Our future is literally being built and written by the people who can pull themselves out of the average and do something extraordinary.

So do you think that is what you're working towards, like helping people become aware? Like that's what you're at the end of the day? At the end of the day, I am working to help the 5%. Remember how we talked about the 80, 20, in the 80-20 minute-long interview that turns into 24 memorable minutes of which only five of them are really positive. That's 5% that that 20% of the 20% that's what I live for. That's the true calling for the company. Because if you take all 100% of the people who I'm going to touch,

80% of them won't like me because I'm former CIA. I'm brown. I'm male. There's a thousand reasons not to like me. I use bad words and I call people dipshits. Checking all the boxes. I don't need 80% to like me. I need 20% to hear and agree with what I'm saying. And then of that 20%, 80% are going to hear and agree and do dick all with it. You're going to keep fucking masturbating

and clipping their nails and doing nothing with their lives. But 20% of them will do something amazing. Right? So when it all boils down to it, it's five minutes of 120 minutes. It's like 500 people out of 25 million people. I don't care. that's what it's all about. It's all about changing those lives because those five minutes,

that 20% of 20%, which I think comes out to like 6% of people, that group is going to shape the future. Those are the people who are going to be the futures millionaires, the futures politicians, the futures leaders, the future generals, that's who that group is. Absolutely, I want to do everything I can to enable that group to shape the future because that's the future for my children. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.