Transcript of a short interview (James Laughlin with a CIA-experienced speaker) giving advice on maintaining clear thinking in high-pressure, volatile situations. The speaker emphasizes learning to tune out literal and figurative noise (notifications, messages, distractions) and focusing on immediate, controllable actions—skills honed through repeated CIA-style scenarios and personal practice.
From your time in the CIA, do you have any advice for thinking clearly on highly volatile or high pressure situations?
Yes. Learn how to tune out all the noise. And this comes with practice because there is literal and figurative noise that we're even just in a normal day by like day to day life we're bombarded with right all of the pinging of the emails and the WhatsApp and the slacks and the signals and the phone calls and you know, all of the sound stuff and what I have practiced doing and again the the CIA training it didn't train me to do it but I just somehow developed this ability through some of the scenarios we were doing, through some of the training we did again and again and again to zone out all of that stuff, all of the distractions, all of the like big flashy things happening in the distance and really what's in front of me, what am I going to do Again controlling controllables.
