Life After the CIA and EverydaySpy

I'm not giving up. I am selling the building . The final season of FX is the Bear . The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either gonna be okay ? No, no or not . We are outgunned and we are out man, but we have each other . FX is the Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney plus. 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 cl osets 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 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 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 . 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 twenty four hours, right? How do you get from noon today till noon tomorrow? That's what we call a twenty four hour bag. So a twenty four 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 warm or cold wherever you're living, but you just need to survive twenty four hours. Hurricane, that sort of thing? Exactly. Okay. Well, hurricane is more like a three day bag, but okay. This is more like a tornado is impending and you have a way out. Or this is like, you know, somebody blew up your electrical station and you just need to not be in your house. Heat wave in Texas kind of stuff. Sure. Right? You just need twenty four hours to get from a safe place here to a safe place somewhere else. Twenty four hours is easy , right? It's a backpack. You can move a family of four in a single twenty four 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 seventy two hours for you to get to a safe haven, right? Because the idea with a bug out bag is always to get you from where you are to a safe haven. So if you can get to a safe haven in twenty four hours, you only need a twenty four hour bug out bag. If you need seventy two hours or up to seventy two hours to get to a safe haven, this is more like your hurricane, flood, etc , 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 twenty four hours while they bust you to another location. So you need seventy two 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 seventy two hours to protect yourself from the elements. You might have a raincoater or a poncho . So it's a little bit different than your twenty four hour bag. And then you have full on escape. Full on escape means you're leaving what you're you're leaving your property to relocate to another property for an undetermined period of time, right? So like master massive massive disasters 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 seventy two 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 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 seventy two 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 bug out bag? What is it simply Chinese Chinese economy just took over the US as the world power? We're 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 two , 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. An early date to check in, a middle 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. Yeah, 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 twenty thirty , we're leaving , not because we're waiting for some sort of tipping point , but because between twenty thirty and twenty thirty five 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 do next , right? That's fair. So that's the way to think of it. 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 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. And there are approximately eighteen 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 what authorities have been granted to you by the executive branch to assess entially 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 human. 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 humans . 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 could 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. 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 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? Yeah . Did the HR department speak the same language as the sales department? No. Yeah. 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. And that's exactly what happens in the IC. You have eighteen different groups, right? You've got the Air Force Office of Special Investigation speaking to FBI. They speak in Air Force, the FBI speaks in 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 intel from within their own organization. So they're prioritizing their own intel, deprioritizing their partner's intel, and it makes just an administrative challenge. Prior to World War one, my understanding is intelligence espionage type operations were wartime ramp ups and then ramp downs. World War one happens. World War two happens, especially nine eleven, 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 president for Pearl Harbor? Roosevelt. Yeah. Yeah. Warns Roosevelt. Roosevelt turns a blind eye he wanted American sentiment to be on the side of getting involved in this conflict. Nine eleven, 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 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 could describe it that way. And the fact that post World War one , post World War II, we've ramped up intelligence operations no matter whether 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 agencies, very conspiracy theory, or is it very necessary for a country like ours to have scaled to the point, just like a company to to I don't know, continue to trickle into 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 they're 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 outmaneuver 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 in just trying to survive by creating a competitive product. That is the same reason that you have seen less so since World War two and more so really since the Vietnam War . Why you've seen this increase in active peace time intelligence collection? Because intelligence does the same thing . We don't have to have a hot war with China . In 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 fifty 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 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. Make sense. Hey, it's Bill from the Bill Simmons podcast. FIFA World Cup twenty six . Listen up. Is the official beer sponsor of the FIFA World Cup twenty six? Mickel Baltra is giving away one million dollars worth of FIFA World Cup twenty six tickets and prizes. Enter now at Mickelovltra. com slash superior access slash FIFA World Cup twenty six Plato FeFWP twenty six, superior access, no purchase necessary. Hope you're residents new plus begins on december first, twenty twenty five ends, on july thirty first, twenty twenty six multiple periods visit www. global dot com dot SPIRACIC slash people six for free entry entry deadlines prize and details. Wrapping this up, I want to go into real quick your exit from the CIA. From what I understand, you left , I think everything about you is 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 that at some point your cover's 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 somebody allow the I didn't even understand that the plane is built in such a way so that trained entities can resolve the conflict. And if I jump up and try to help, I'm actually in the way. Right. Crazy stuff. Every day's fight. Go check it out. But are you forever indeedbt 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 to violating that secrecy agreement. Outside of that, we have no relationship with C IA . We are 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 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 my wife or my shoulder and said, Hey, we need you to come back and help us with something, would we consider that invitation? 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 sa fe. 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 offset 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 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 this stuff I say about Russia and Ukraine and all the stuff I say 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 be the first people to tell you like these people do not speak on our behalf. But it's all within 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 don't 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 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? Well , give me an idea of the range of what people can learn from the tactics that you learned in the CIA. If it sounds awful to have us teach people how to bed how to bed a partner, then I definitely don't want to talk about that. I 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 . So sex and spies is something that we absolutely teach. But we do teach 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 far Fmarm. The 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'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 perman ent part of your tool set instead of something temporary that you forget. I mean, how many times have you read a book, two hundred and fifty page book, and you made highlights, and you made notes and everything else, and then you never read there book? And you really only take one nugget away from a two hundred and fifty page book, right? Four hours of reading and you only remember one thing. That's the exact antithesis of what CIA wants. CIA wants people to learn two hundred and fifty nuggets out of two hundred fif andty pages. So that's the method that we used to make that happen . Freedom . So freedom some are still on . An Expedia Summer Sale makes it easy to book smart. It's your one place for flights, hotels, vacation rentals, cars and activities, so you can find a summer trip that fits your needs, and more importantly, your budget. Expedia is bringing the heat with their big summer sale with up to forty percent off select hotels and vacation rentals, plus great deals on packages, flights, and car rentals. 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