CIA taught me to have a lot of discipline around certain behaviors and to worry less about other behaviors. So, for example, I'm very disciplined about sleep and I'm very disciplined about exercise because those are areas that have huge impact on your cognitive functions, but I'm less interested in I'm less worried about diet. I'm less worried about uh social stress or social pressure. uh those are areas that actually don't have as much of an impact on your cognitive functions or on your long-term physical health. So, it's uh there it's been great because CIA gave me a f a foundation that's been really useful in everyday life as well as in corporate and business life uh that most average people don't get. So, they taught you how to sleep well, not how to eat well. Well, they told you that you must sleep well, but you don't necessarily have to eat well. That is so interesting. I think that's very controversial because there's so many like people talking about diet and like how to eat, but you're saying it's not that important. Correct. It's I mean in a hierarchy of priorities because here's the truth. CIA prioritizes everything because there are certain operations, certain missions, certain countries, certain threats that are a clear and present danger. And then there are others that are a long-term simmering or strategic danger. So when you have to dedicate money and time and lives right now, you're going to assign those to the highest priority threats. And then the lower priority threats you'll deal with a different day. That's how terrible things happen, but that's also how wonderful things happen. 911 happened because we depprioritize terrorism at a time when it shouldn't have been dep prioritized. CIA prioritizes everything. So there are different threats that are clear and present and then there are some threats that are more long-term and strategic. Uh and when you have limited time and money and people and resources like CIA does, you have to dedicate those resources to the top priority things. Essentially the things that will make the most impact in the least amount of time. And they take that same model and they apply it to how we think, how we train, how we take care of our bodies, our our mental health, our physical health. And one of those things that has a huge impact immediately is sleep. One of the things that has a less significant impact right away is diet. So if you can make your diet healthier, that's great. But you can't let yourself sacrifice sleep because sacrificing sleep reduces your ability to think, your ability to process, your ability to remember, your ability to engage and converse. All of those things are critical to the success of not only a spy but a career professional, a spouse, a business owner. Like without the ability to remember a conversation and think and process critically, you're kind of lost and you feel lost in the water, which is what in part feeds people's caffeine addiction because they trust caffeine to make up for lost sleep, which is a falsehood. That's so interesting. Now, I'm really curious. What does your sleep and everyday schedule look like? How do you organize, you know, based on these prioritize priorities? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I prioritize sleep at the top of my list. Meaning, I give myself no less than a 6 to 8 hour window of sleep every day. That doesn't always mean that I get six hours minimum of sleep because sometimes, you know, my children will wake up in the middle of the night. Sometimes I have a call late at night that that turns my brain on and I'll have a hard time shutting my brain off. But I give myself those eight hours of window in order to sleep. So sometimes that sleep is seven hours, sometimes that sleep is eight hours, sometimes it's eight and a half hours. I also do not wake up to an alarm. It's important to let your body decide when it wakes up so that uh you don't force yourself and you don't interrupt your circadian rhythm, which is something that unfortunately most people who work 9 to5 don't either a they don't have a choice or b they haven't created a lifestyle that allows them to wake up naturally. So they go to bed at midnight to a 5 a.m. alarm when in fact what your body really wants is to wake up naturally on its own to interrupt its own circadian rhythm when it comes to a natural completion. So for me, I get a full night's sleep. I do not wake myself up. I do not wake myself up with an alarm. I let myself wake up naturally. Uh and then the first thing I do is actually hydrate. Before I eat or drink anything, I drink water first. And I drink water first because water hydrates all of your internal systems. It hydrates your stomach. It immediately is processed by your intestines. It goes to your heart. It goes to your colon. It goes to your bladder. It goes to your brain. And all that hydration jumpst starts the body, but it takes about 15 minutes. So for people who wake up and don't drink water, instead they drink caffeine or they drink coffee. The thing that is actually waking them up isn't the caffeine, it's the water in the coffee. But then what the caffeine is doing is immediately conflicting or uh uh creating problems with their mental and their biological processes. Which is why people poop after they drink caffeine or why people get shaky after they drink caffeine. Because the caffeine is messing with your body when the actual benefits that you're getting are really primarily from the water. So you can actually skip the coffee, skip the tea, cut straight to water and get 80% of the same benefits that you're actually looking for. M do they teach you all of this as part of your training? They do. They teach you all of this because when you're an operator in the field, you don't have the luxuries of what we have here in America. You don't have fresh berries. You don't have fresh eggs. You don't have coffee. You don't have hot water. You don't even have clean water and all the places that you might operate. So instead, they have to create a process that you can follow every morning. No matter where you're deployed, whether you're in Africa, South America, Russia, China, Mongolia, Australia, Canada, France, anywhere you might be, you want to have some kind of consistent dietary, consistent morning process that you can rely on and you can do it every day. That makes a lot of sense. I want to know a bit more about, you know, how did you actually become a spy and what was like the recruitment and training process like? So, I kind of became a spy a little bit accidentally. I was trying to get out of the US Air Force. I was a military officer and I was trying to leave the Air Force and go into doing something more humanitarian. I was actually trying to apply to the Peace Corp because what I really wanted in my life was like a hippie chick that was going to be my girlfriend and a tent where we could have sweet sweet love making sessions and I wanted to save all the Nigerian like children and orphans from pain. Like that was that was my mission after I left the Air Force. But apparently in the process of signing up for the Peace Corps, CIA found my application and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, if you think you'll like that kind of job, we've got a job that you might also be interested in." And that's how I ended up being picked up by CIA. Now, I still had to go through an interview process, just like you said, and that interview process is really less about an interview and more about a series of tests, psychological tests, memory tests, critical thinking tests. We also go through a series of roleplay or scenario-based testing, which is when a panel of people say, "Hey, this is the situation. What do you do?" Or a specific person sits across the table from you and says, "Hey, we're going to do a role play. This is the situation. This is who I am. What are you going to do?" And we literally role play, act it out, and they'll assess your performance based on the role play. Because what they're really looking for is your critical thinking, your decision under pressure, uh, you know, do you do you comport yourself well under moments of hostility or moments of confusion or moments of high emotion, high stress. That's the process really to determine whether or not you ever truly get the interview. Only after they know that you've passed all the exams do you ever sit down with somebody who asks you what are you the most proud of and what have you done in your career that you are impressed with and what is your 10-year goal? Nobody talks to you about those things until after they know that you're worth talking to. Mhm. Are there certain things you're looking for in terms of like skills or talents or I don't know personality type? You know what I discovered about how CIA recruits, I didn't learn until later in my career. When I was first recruited, I think I was just too excited to be someone who's potentially going to be a CIA officer. Like every time I flew to Washington DC, every time I got to sit in on the interview, even when I was strapped to the polygraph machine, I was excited. I was like, "Oh my gosh, like this is like the movies. I get to do this. Who gets to do this?" I was just excited. It wasn't until after I became a middle ranking officer that I discovered what we were actually looking for. And the way CIA works is like this. It's a large ecosystem. There's multiple specialties. I mean, of course, there's linguists and of course there's case officers and of course there's analysts, but there's also disguise specialists and mission planners and finance people and budget people. So there's a large contingent of very different types of skills. CIA has mastered its hiring process so that it knows what types of personality traits and personality types are going to be the most successful for the longest period of time in each of those career fields. Because if you think about it, nobody lasts longer than 7 to 10 years really anymore. So CIA needs to know before they spend $150,000 training you, they need to know that you're going to make it longer than two or three years, right? So there's a great deal of of investment in psychological understanding and a great deal of investment in uh training and also Francesca frankly there's a lot of investment in brainwashing people who come in so that their ego and their values and their personal motivations are heavily tied to the job. So what one of the main things that they're looking for when people come into CIA is actually a history of childhood trauma because people who have childhood trauma are often seeking validation externally. So we become very loyal to the idea and opinions of others. Well CIA knows how to shape that trauma to make you very loyal to CIA to make you seek validation from CIA and your supervisors. And that's a great way of keeping people for a long period of time after you've put so much training and investment into them. That is extremely fascinating. I wouldn't have thought about this. That's so cool. What area of the CIA were you working in? So CIA has four primary different directorates. Uh those directorates are science and technology, analysis, logistics, and operations. Logistics is sometimes known as support. I was on the operations side. Uh specifically I was part of the National Clandestine Service, what was known as the NCS, which sometimes is also called the Directorate of Operations. It kind of has a two names at one time. Uh and that's how I got into the world of of clandestine field operations. And that was my specialty was in collecting clandestine secrets from foreign adversaries that could be used to keep America safe. Wow. Do you have a favorite mission from all the missions that you went on? Maybe one where you had to wear a disguise or something like that. I actually do, but my most favorite mission is one I can't share because it's still classified. But I do I do have a story that I don't think many people know about. Right. Uh I had an opportunity to uh to engage in an operation in Africa to support uh a a dem a a democratic movement against a coup attempt that was actually carried out by a radio DJ. So, if you can believe this, a radio DJ successfully executed a coup in a country in Africa. You can I mean, if anybody who's talented with Google can find this for themselves. And it was one of those operations where you sit back and you can't help but laugh. You can't help but laugh and be like, this is who gets to do this? who gets to who gets to travel to support democracy to fight for freedom against a coup attempt that's being led by a disc jockey, right? That's the kind of stuff that nobody ever thinks about. Yes, there are all the counterterrorism operations and there's the cool stuff that happens in the war zone and there's all the very dangerous um sexy mysterious stuff that you read about in spy books and watch on spy movies that happen all over the world. But never in a million years did I anticipate that I would be uh working in Africa against a DJ uh who was trying to destroy democracy. That's insane. And I think that speaks a lot about I guess some of the misconceptions or myths that Hollywood like promotes. What would you say you know are the biggest myths and what's reality? The biggest myth in Hollywood about CIA officers is that we are born special. Like there's something special about us. Like we have some kind of superpower. We're so smart that we learn five languages. We're so gifted that we can uh you know put on a disguise and speak with an accent and you know fire any kind of gun under the sun. Uh we know how to drive fast and shoot out the window, right? Those are those are things that are complete fabrications that are that are uh perpetuated by spy media. In reality, CIA officers are just very normal people. We are everyday people, but we are everyday people that have a specific skill that CIA thinks is needed at a specific moment. So for example, I was just a brown guy who studied Chinese who was in the Air Force at a time when what CIA was looking for was brown people with a high security clearance that they could use against terrorists right in 2007. So that's how I became interesting. But 1999 when there was no war on terror, CIA was very interested in Caucasian men and Caucasian women that could be used to fight Russia in a cold war that was extended. Right? The cold war that ended in with the fall of the Berlin Wall was really still the war that continued until 2001. So it's always different. Even now if you think about it with the conflicts in Iran and the conflicts in the Middle East, who do you think CIA is interested in? people who would pass as Muslim. CIA wants women because women can live and work and operate in parts of Muslim countries where men aren't even allowed. Right? So that's the kind of when when we had a war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of a sudden the top language was Pastton. When our primary threat was Russia, the top language was Russian. When our top threat becomes China, the top language in demand is going to be Chinese. So, it's not that there's these gifted superheroes that CIA goes and finds. CIA goes and finds normal people that are good at something and then CIA knows that because they're good at that one thing, they can be trained to be good at all the other things that they need to know. Mhm. That's so interesting. Freedom. So fresh