Epic Real Estate Investing - EX-CIA OFFICER: Americans Have No Idea What's ACTUALLY Happening to Them | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou reveals what's really happening behind the scenes in America — and why most people have no idea. John was the first CIA officer to publicly confirm that the agency used waterboarding, and he went to prison for it. Now he's exposing the surveillance state, government overreach, and the erosion of civil liberties that affects every American homeowner and taxpayer. In this episode: The intelligence operations you're not supposed to know about How government agencies are quietly expanding their power What the average American can do to protect themselves Why speaking truth to power cost him everything — and why he'd do it again 🔔 Subscribe for more interviews that challenge the mainstream narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've just got money sitting in home equity or in an IRA or, you know, you've been investing in stocks for the last 30 years and you've got a nice nest egg built up, they're not going to pay any attention to you at all unless you start buying, well, I can tell you exactly. And look, the United States government has built a computer facility in the Utah desert so massive. It can store every phone call, every text message, and every email sent or received by every single American for the next 500 years. And the man who confirmed that, a 14-year CIA veteran, who captured one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives, just sat in that chair right over there and told me things about your money, your home, and your privacy that I genuinely was not prepared to hear.

So this former CIA operative, former Capitol Hill staffer, he's the only CIA officer who went to prison in connection with the agency's torture program, not for doing the torturing, for telling the public it was happening. And I didn't bring him on today to retell his story. He's done that brilliantly with Rogan, with Tucker, with Diary of a CEO.

What I wanted to know is the stuff that keeps people like you and I up at night, what does the government actually know about our money? And what point does your home equity or your retirement account put you on someone's radar? And if the government decides you're a problem, is there anything that actually protects you? And his answer is not in the realm of what you were thinking. He told me there are four specific purchases, completely legal, that immediately trigger government attention.

and one of them is something you do regularly. He told me about a former deputy attorney general of the United States whose family made one small financial move 20 years ago and is still paying fines for it today. And he told me what happened to his own finances after he blew the whistle. Before he was ever convicted of a single crime, it'll blow your mind. But here's where the conversation took a turn that I really wasn't expecting. I asked him about the digital dollar.

This is a part of the conversation that should genuinely concern all of us. And we also got into the petrol dollar. And then I asked him this, what's the biggest financial lie Americans are being told right now? And his answer was so simple and so obvious that I can't believe I've never heard anyone frame it that way before. And then we also got into UFOs, the Vegas shooting, Operation Mockingbird, and what happens when the CIA gets your name and has 10 minutes with the keyboard?

And the one financial move the government does not want you making right now. This is one of the most important conversations, if not the most important I've ever had on this show. So let's get into it. This is the epic real estate podcast. Contrarian takes on money, housing, and policy without the guru nonsense. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. All right. So please help me welcome to the show, Mr. John Kiracow. John, welcome to the epic real estate show. Thank you. Good to see you.

Yeah, likewise. I've become a really huge fan recently since hearing you for the first time on the Joe Rogan podcast. You're such a cool and interesting guy, and the fact that you replied to my email and accepted to be here. Just confirms everything amazing that I thought about you. So thank you. It's my pleasure. It really is. I've watched a lot of your interviews getting ready for this.

And there were moments where I literally paused and was like, did he just say that out loud? And you talk about this stuff like such a real person, not the press release version. And I respect the hell out of that. It's so refreshing. So just my first question as we get out the gate or just about the rules of engagement. Is there a line you won't cross or at this? point is everything fair game? Well, I bound to my CIA secrecy agreements until the day I die. So if something is what the CIA calls currently and properly classified, I can't talk about it. And what that

means in general terms is sources and methods, that is the names of sources specifically, liaison relationships, not supposed to talk about specific operations that you've done with foreign countries, and anything having to do with NSA. I mean, the government didn't even admit that NSA existed until 1976. So those are kind of the three. People ask me a lot how I'm able to talk about what I'm able to talk about. And the answer has several components to it. One, the CIA has an organization within it called the Publications Review Board. So if I write something, a book, an article, a letter to the editor, whatever, I have to send it to the Publications Review Board for clearance. Ninety-eight percent of the time, they'll just clear it. Sometimes they'll redact stuff.

Sometimes they'll redact so much that a book, it took me nine months to write, took 22 months to clear. We also have a mandatory declassification law in this country. So once something is 30 or 35 years old, it automatically becomes declassified unless there's a compelling and legal reason to keep it classified. And again, that is sources and methods, liais on relationships or anything having to do with NSA. Or if the operation is still ongoing and still producing intelligence. Otherwise, you know, I've been out of the CIA for 21 years. I don't have access to classified information. But I can read a newspaper like any American and do my own analysis.

And they can't classify that. Got it. Super. That's kind of where I come from as far as I read a lot. And I do as best I can to connect the dots. But there's a few dots that I always have to kind of make assumptions or just make my own, put my own logic together. But hopefully we can connect some of those dots today. All right?

Look forward to it. Perfect. Me too. So I know on your podcast, you always say, answer the Q&A part. That's the favorite. Yeah, I like the Q&A's very much. Very good. So I'm going to give you a chance to do your favorite thing today. I've got a bunch of questions here. Some for the audience. Some are a little self-serving, purely selfish. And one is actually from my 14-year-old boy, all right? Great. Yep. And I got them written down here so I don't forget any of them.

Great. Okay, so here we go. John, you spent 14 years inside the CA. You've seen how the government actually operates, not the press release version. When you hear people say the system is rigged, What do you know that they don't? There are several different systems within the government that I believe are rigged. I mean, let's look at electoral politics just to start things off. In 1972, George McGovern, who was a liberal Democratic senator from South Dakota, became the Democratic nominee for president. The DNC hated that because they knew that poor George McGovern,

while he was, according to Robert Kennedy Sr., the most decent man in the U.S. Senate, he couldn't win a national election. And indeed, he lost 49 of the 50 states. And so what the Democratic National Committee did after that historic up until that point loss was they created the system of superdelegates. So almost every senior level elected official in America, who's a Democrat, is a super delegate. Every congressman, every senator, every governor, every lieutenant governor, every state party, you know, leader, whatever. And there are something like 1,530-something superdelegates. So there are delegates who are unelected.

But their vote for the nominee counts as much as an elected delegates vote for the nominee. So that is how Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton 60 to 40 in the Wyoming caucus, and Hillary wins literally every single delegate. That is how Bernie Sanders wallops Hillary Clinton in the West Virginia primary, and Hillary Clinton wins every single delegate because the deck is stacked. And the Democratic National Committee doesn't give a who, they don't give a shit who you want to be the nominee. the backroom cigar-smoking party bigwigs, they're going to choose the nominee for the Democratic Party.

Thank God the Republicans don't have a system of superdelegates. So that's number one in electoral politics. In terms of foreign policy, this is another thing. And it's not just foreign policy as it's created at the White House or implemented at the State Department. It's as it's overseen and authorized and appropriated on Capitol Hill. Nobody is as well organized as APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They've been lobbying for 75 years, and they're really, really good at it.

They also are very, very well funded. And so they don't just lobby at the top levels, you know, the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives. They lobby at the state level, governors, state senators, state legislators, you know, delegates or whatever they call themselves state by state. And they're just better organized than everybody else. So we've gotten to the point where in many foreign policy areas, the question that's not asked is what's the right thing to do or what's in the best interest necessarily of the United States. The question that we would often ask ourselves on Capitol Hill when I was there was, what's APEC say about this?

And APEC has somebody designated for literally every single office. And so it's clear what APEC's position is. It's whatever, whoever happens to be the Israeli prime minister in any given year wants it to be. And so the fix is in there where, you know, on the one hand, I say this all the time. We like to think that we're a shining city on a hill, as Ronald Reagan famously said in his 1984 state of the union address, where we're this shining beacon of hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties. And that's just simply not true. We're just not.

We can say we are all we want. but we're not because we don't even control our own foreign policy. You know, it was a few years ago. I'm in my 50s. Never had a political bone on my body, and I think COVID kind of brought it out of me. They're all forced to stay in our house and watch how everyone performs on TV.

And I became interested. I started to learn a lot more. I'd go more into history and everything. And I kind of came to the realization. Now, I love my country. I was in the United States Marine Corps. There's no place in the world. I'd rather live.

But I really came to the realization. Like, maybe we're not the good guys. You know, in some cases, we're actually not. I hate to say that because I went to work for the CIA because I believed in every bone in my body that we were the good guys. Every bone in my body. I was so proud to go overseas and serve. I've been to 72 countries.

It was very happy to do it. Put my life on the line. Two time. There were two, let me rephrase that. There were twice attempts to assassinate me, once in Greece, once in the Middle East, and I didn't care. I was happy to do it. But then, you know, you start questioning your leaders. Like, why are they doing that?

That's not in America's interest. Or why are we doing this? Or, listen, as far as torture goes, we have a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of 1946 that specifically bans torture exactly to the letter the techniques that we used, the secret prisons, and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and other places. Number one, banned by federal law. Number two, not only were we the signatories, original signatories, to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which as a treaty has the force of law in the United States. We wrote it and then just pretended that it didn't exist. Number three, in 1946, we executed Japanese soldiers

who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. That was a death penalty offense to waterboard somebody. January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The day that picture ran, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and sentenced to 20 years in Fort Leavenworth. So how is it a death penalty offense in 1946? It was worthy of 20 years at hard labor in 1968, and then in 2002, no problem. We can do it because we're the good guys. So, yeah, you have to, you have to question the decision-making process in government. This is how I'm raising my son, is that you've got to question everything. And then I always

followed up, especially the stuff you believe to be true. That's right. And I think of both sides did that a little bit more often. It would be a lot more peace in the world, certainly in the United States. I mean, I remember when the, you know, I grew up in. Reagan was always my favorite president until I started seeing movies being released and looking about the Iran-Contra whole thing. And meanwhile, his wife is just say no to drugs campaign. And then Obama, who I just always thought, I voted for him the first time. And I thought he was this big pacifist and everything. And all of a sudden, he was the, what do you call it? The drone in chief, right? Yeah, he was. He was the droner in chief. Yep.

Killed 10 times more people than George W. Bush did with drones. Exactly. So you're confirming what I've said. scene. And then during COVID, I thought the governments were just absolutely evil during that whole thing. And it just kind of turned my whole life upside down as it did everybody. And we're still recovering, still licking wounds over here. And I get really bitter to learn that so much of it was just a big fat lie. You get that a lot. But where else are you going to live, right? Right. Right. No, I still love my country and I cry when I hear the national anthem and the older the more I cry. Yep. I'm with you. I'm with you. I feel the same way. But it makes me want to

grab these guys and, you know, punch him in the face and say, what are you doing in my country? Exactly. I think that's why I'm so drawn to you, John, as I feel of an authentic, intellectual honesty with you. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. I try my best. I really do. It comes through.

It sometimes leads to death threats. Well, that's probably when you know you're doing it right, right? Okay. I was just complaining to a friend of mine that I go on a podcast and I'm talking to this Indian podcaster and I criticized Pakistan. I didn't even criticize Pakistan. What I said was in a conventional war, India would win, right? They have six times more people than Pakistan does. The death threats. I can't even clear them out of my inbox fast enough. And then I got a death threat the other day from Iraq because I'm apparently single-handedly responsible for the deaths of two million Muslims.

And even some Greek guy, listen, I'm Greek-American, proudly Greek-American. I go to Greece all the time, several times a year. And this guy says that I have betrayed the sword and the sheath of my ancestors, and the Spartans would have cut my head off if I were living in Spartan times. And it's like, go back to your Communist Party and complain to somebody else because I'm not going to listen. Although I wasn't that friendly in my response. I was actually quite vile in my response. As you probably should have been.

Perfect. All right, question number two. Wait a minute. Was that first one from your 14-year-old? No, not yet. I was going to say, that was a brilliant question. Oh, yeah, no, you'll know when it comes. So most people think the CIA is about foreign spies and terrorists, but how involved is the intelligence community in tracking American citizens' financial activity, their bank accounts,

their home equity, their retirement savings? That is illegal. I'm not saying the CIA is not doing it. I'm saying it's illegal for the CIA to do it. We don't really know what the CIA is doing because they don't report to us. That is something that the FBI, the Treasury Department, a handful of other entities might be doing, mostly FBI and Treasury. At the same time, Matt, there's so much information out there, just out there in the air, that it's going to fall into the hands of the CIA, right? If the CIA and NSA are intercepting literally every electronic communication in the world and it's being fed into these giant.

create computers in the Utah desert, which we know is happening, then even if a human being doesn't look at the information directly, it is being captured. And so we just sort of have to take the CIA's word for it that they're not spying on our financial transactions. We have to take the CIA's word for it that they're not looking at crypto purchases, for example. But do we trust them? I don't know. Yeah, that's why you're here. Yeah. It's a tough one. I will say that, you know, people think that it's illegal for the CIA to operate on U.S. soil. That's not exactly true. Since the mid-1980s, the CIA has had something called the National Resources Division. So they have CIA officers in dozens and dozens of American cities, right? But their job is to

speak with American business executives who have done business in what are called denied areas. Like, say, you're an American businessman and you're doing business in whatever, Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea. I mean, that's not legal, but you get the idea. The CIA is going to want to go to your office and have a cup of coffee and debrief you on your visit. Would you see? Who'd you talk to? Would they say? Did you notice anything unusual about them? You know, that kind of thing. 99.9% of executives say yes, because they're patriots. And the CIA is calling, saying, your country needs you. You say, come on over and have a cup of coffee. Okay. That's, that's perfectly legal for the CIA to do. Operationally, the CIA can never have primacy in an operation

on U.S. soil. It has to be the FBI, which is a component of the very deep and visceral hatred that the CIA and the FBI have for one another. You know, if there's somebody, let's say I'm stationed in the United States as a CIA officer, and I see there's a, I'm just going to make this up, there's a Venezuelan general that happens to be here. Maybe he's working on a PhD someplace. I can't target him for recruitment. The FBI has to target him for recruitment. And if he were to go back to Venezuela, then the FBI would turn him over to the CIA and a CIA officer would handle him. But they're very, very turf conscious as to who controls what and who answers to whom. Got it. So maybe that kind of answers this question. I'll ask it anyway. And if it's just,

there might be some redundancy there. But if someone watching this, say, say they got 500 grand in their home equity, they got 200 grand in their retirement accounts, is that person on any anyone's radar? At what point does the government start paying attention to a person's wealth? Or do they? They generally wouldn't until the person starts to do something with their wealth. If you've just got money sitting in home equity or in an IRA or you've been investing in stocks for the last 30 years and you've got a nice nest egg built up, they're not going to pay any attention to you at all unless you start buying, well, I can tell you exactly, unless you start buying fine art, race horses, cryptocurrency or real estate for cash, then everybody's going to be interested.

Those are the flags, kind of insinuates some sort of money laundering. Money laundering. Got it. All right. Well, I'll take the horses off my list. You know, I have a very close friend. He's also one of my attorneys. And he's a former deputy attorney general of the United States. And his second wife fancied herself a kind of high society horse connoisseur. And so she started buying horse horses, race horse. from like, you know, a breeder in Dubai, a breeder in Kentucky. And that immediately put them on the IRS's radar. This was almost 20 years ago.

And he's still not done paying the fines. What were the fines from? I didn't get, I didn't get it. Not reporting, not reporting cash transactions. Oh, got it. Wow. Interesting. I had a guy here as actually a client.

And he wrote a whole book about his deep rabbit hole. He went down with the IRS. And he's like, I forget the actual details. But like, here we are 16 years late. And he was like, he was still dealing with it. And he was like, and you hear his whole story. And again, I don't remember the details. But it was like, that's it?

That's all you did? And he says, that was all I did. Oh, listen. When I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program, which I did in 2007, I was audited for the first time in my life in 2007, again in 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. And finally they decided, ah, he's broke. He's not doing anything anyway. And then they finally walked away.

But I don't mean, you know, they sent me a letter saying, hey, you know, where's your receipt for this. I meant hauled into the office. I had to have an attorney sitting next to me, going through all of my stuff every single year for eight years. It was awful. Yeah, like I said, I've heard your story so many times now and I'm just like, I can't even imagine. And gosh, I don't know if I would have done what you did, but in retrospect, I'm really glad I did. The price has been high. It's been terrible. But I'm glad I did. I do it again. Somebody's got to stand up to these guys. Yeah. No, you're totally right. You're totally right. And gosh, I mean, I'm grateful that you did. That's why you're here. That's why I'm

by it. Thank you. The petro dollar, oil price and U.S. dollars, has been the backbone of America since the 1970s, our power. What have you seen or heard about with what the CIA does to countries that try to sell oil in other currency? Well, that's happened a couple of times in the last few years. About a year and a half ago, Kuwait sold China a shipload of oil and took payment in yuan rather than in dollars. And the Treasury Department flipped its lid. We demarched the shit out of the Kuwaitis. And they find, finally promised us, we'll never do it again. It was a mistake. We're sorry. Forgive us. That's easy because Kuwait's an ally and we have fantastic diplomatic relations with Kuwait. Venezuela, on the other hand, talked to the Chinese years ago, well, not years ago, 10 years ago, into building a refinery in the Caribbean where they could refine their really dirty high sulfur Venezuelan oil. It's the dirtiest heaviest oil in the world. And you need a specialized refinery. to clean it. You have to inject it with, you know, tons and tons of chemicals. Well, until 10 years ago, those refineries only existed on the Texas Gulf Coast. So we were refining literally all of Venezuela's oil

until we decided to put sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry and we put all of our Texas refineries out of business, at least the ones that were handling Venezuelan oil. The Chinese came in and said, no problem. We'll build a new refinery. We'll put it in the Turks and Caicos Islands. And they did. And it's not quite ready yet. But in the meantime, Venezuela started shipping its oil. directly to China and to India. The Indians have been paying in dollars. The Chinese have been paying in Yuan. But now Venezuela is not a problem for us anymore, right? The president is sitting in the dock in New York City. Dulce Rodriguez, the new president, has told the White House that she'll do anything they want her to do. The president had a meeting with all of the American oil

company executives a week ago in which he said he's going to divide up the Venezuelan oil equally, which of course is illegal, but we're doing it anyway. And so we don't have to worry about the Venezuelans taking you on. Well, that takes me right into my next question because we've had when Saddam Hussein switched to euros and Gaddafi went, uh, wanted a gold-backed African currency and both are no longer with us. Is that a coincidence? Is that a, is there a playbook for what happens when leaders threaten dollar dominance? You know, I'll give you the easy answer for Saddam. It's like, no. Yeah, it was a coincidence. That wasn't, I mean, there were so many heavy international sanctions on Saddam. He wasn't selling anything to anybody if it, unless it was on the, on the gray market.

Gaddafi's another issue. I think that it did play a role in Gaddafi's overthrow. Because Gaddafi did literally everything we told him to do. We said you have to give up your nuclear energy program. Done. Give enough. The deputy director of the CIA, Steve Kappas, flew to BAT, uh, Tripoli. When I was still there, I was the executive assistant.

And he told Gaddafi, you have to give up your chemical weapons and you have to give up your biological weapons. And he said, done. I give them up. He turned everything over to us. And we overthrew him anyway. So I think that it wasn't the weapons of mass destruction. His weapons programs were nascent, and they weren't really a threat to anybody.

I think what it was was that he was an outcast in the Middle East for so long among the Arabs. The other Arab leaders all hated to that because he was seen as a nut, but the African leaders loved him. And so he decided in the 1990s to turn away from the Middle East and to focus solely on Africa. And one of the things that he was pushing was a gold-backed or oil-backed unified currency for Africa like the Europeans have with the euro. And I think that was unacceptable for a lot of countries. Does Bricks have traction? Not yet, but it's something that bears watching. And I'll tell you, I think that even at this early stage, they shot themselves in the foot.

It's probably a temporary setback. But, you know, Brick stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China. Powerhouses all economically. That's something that I would worry about if I were an American Treasury Secretary, right? I would worry about these enormous economies banding together. But then they lit in the Iranians, the South Africa. the Argentines, the South Koreans. I mean, half of those countries are friends of ours.

So what's the goal? And there's no much dissension amongst those. Oh, my God. They can't agree even on which language to speak to each other in when they have their summits. Right. And so I heard just recently, I have a friend at the World Bank. I said, what do you make of this idea of a unified bricks currency?

Because this kind of scares the hell out of me as an American. If we want the dollar to remain the international de facto currency, this scares me. And he's like, no, don't be scared. They can't even agree on the agenda items in their meetings, let alone a unified currency. He said a unified currency is 50 years away. And that's if all of a sudden they become, you know, good at what they do. He said, don't worry about it. That was actually the conclusion I'd come to.

I've done two videos on. I've done one that was pro bricks, that this is why it's going to happen. And I did another one after I got all the feedback in the comments. I was like, well, let me do some more research. I was like, yeah, this is not going to happen. No. It's kind of what I left believing. But, you know, in 50 years, we probably won't be here.

That's right. We'll be on some other category M planet, as they used to say in Star Trek. For sure. Well, to continue on the dollar, with the digital dollar, could the government theoretically freeze your account, limit what you can buy or penalize you for wrong purchases all without a court order? Yes. And I think that's what we should all really be afraid of. Like, right now, you know, it takes a court order and they can what's called debanking.

you so, you know, you can't, your checking account is closed, and then you've got to find, like, some credit union that might be willing to do business with you. It's a pain in the ass, but you can still survive. With an electronic currency, what are you going to do? Call a toll-free number and ask them to, you know, unfreeze your electronic assets? Come on. We're all screwed if that happens. When I was arrested, I handled it proudly, you know? It's like, yeah, I blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program. I'm proud of it. Oh, you're going to prosecute me? I'll take it. I'll hire are the best lawyers I can buy, I can afford, and I'll take it. Let's fight. What I didn't expect, what I didn't expect was for USAA to cancel my homeowners insurance and my auto insurance. I didn't

expect Bank of America to close my bank account and send me a check and say, we don't do business with criminals, right? Which is what they did. My life insurance was canceled. Thank you very much, AIG. And so I hadn't even been convicted of any crime. And already, I can't do business with companies that I've been doing business with for 40 years. Well, with a digital currency, it's only going to make it easier for them and worse for us. Yeah. I don't know if this is true or not. I heard this. This is the part that scares me about the digital currency. I heard China actually puts a time limit on your money. Have you heard of that? No, I hadn't heard that. To keep the economy going, you had to spend it before it expired. That sounds like a very Chinese thing to do.

It does. I'll tell you, I went to China a year ago for the first time. And I had a lot of trouble using a credit card. And, you know, for a minute, I thought, oh, well, this must just not be a credit card-based economy. It must be cash-based. And I was like, what? No, of course it can't be cash-based. It's just too many people.

And I saw these signs everywhere where shopkeepers were advertising that they accept the octopus card. So finally, I asked this shopkeeper, what is this octopus card that I see signs for in the windows of every store? And he said, yeah, that's the Chinese credit card. You have Visa and MasterCard, we have the Octopus card. I said, why don't you guys just use MasterCard and Visa like everybody else does? And he said, because every MasterCard and Visa transaction goes through New York, which means

it's liable for sanctions. The octopus card goes through Shanghai, and you can't touch it. And I thought, you know what? We sanctioned ourselves right out of the top dog spot, where we forced countries to create the octopus card, to create bricks, you know, to rely on the Euro. we force them because we use sanctions too much. Anytime somebody pisses us off, sanctions. No questions asked.

Unintended consequences. That's exactly what it is. For the homeowners watching this, John, someone with a paid off house, maybe some rentals retirement account, what legal structures actually protects you if the government decides you're a problem? Is there anything that you could have done

that you could have protected yourself financially? A friend of mine who's a banker told me that I could have protected myself by opening a primary account on the Isle of Man, right, which is a little island in between the UK and Ireland. And then as I needed to live, I need money for groceries or taxes or a car, I would just transfer what I needed from my account in the Isle of Man. But if I had had an account in the Isle of Man, it would not have been liable for sanctions or debanking or freezing or anything else. The government couldn't have gotten to it. I wish I had known that, you know, 15 years ago.

What country governs that island? It is, it belongs to the UK, but it's an international banking free zone. Yeah, like Liechtenstein, for example. I never heard of this one. Yeah, the Isle of Man, not to be confused with the Isle of Lucy from, this is Spinal Tap. No, I'm kidding. And another thing, and I learned this just recently, Wyoming is the only state in America where you can open up an LLC and not have to use your name. Yep.

I wish I'd known that, too. I did know that. We do that as a part of our ass. asset protection. Yeah. That's exactly what I've done. It's interesting. I think it's the reason all the credit cards are in Delaware. Delaware. Exactly. There's no, what they call it, usury laws there. That's it. Yep. See how they get you? Every time. Every time. In 1933, FDR confiscated Americans' gold. Yes. Could that happen again? And from an intelligence perspective, how would the government even know who has gold, silver? Right. I hate to say anything's possible. FDR did confiscate Americans.

And the price of gold was fixed for a very long time. My co-host on my podcast, Ted Raw, and I were talking about this yesterday, where when we were little kids and Richard Nixon was president, gold was $35 an ounce, period. It was stuck there, fixed there. You couldn't charge a dollar more, a dollar less. It was $35. And then he lifted the $35 hold. And it floated with the market. Well, now it's what, $5,600 last week before settling back to about $5,000? That's an awful lot of money. I think it is more likely, rather than to have Americans gold confiscated, I think it is more likely that President Trump would value the government's gold, not at $35 an ounce, which it's still valued at, but at market, the market rate, which would

essentially just do away with the national debt, I'm told. Yeah, it's about, well, I did a video on that exact topic, I don't know, about a year ago when it was like at $3,500. Yeah. And it was like a wash at that point. Wow. Wow. Okay. If the gold is still there. Well, see, and that's another question. So on my podcast last week, I had a guy who's the CEO of American Alternative Assets, which is a gold broker. And I asked him that. I said, is the gold actually there? Nobody's really seen it.

And then Elon Musk said, you know, as soon as Trump entered the White House and Elon was going to be the, you know, Doge guy, whatever, he was going to go to Fort Knox and he was going to live stream it. So Americans could see that there was gold. And then he never did. And when he was a lot of it. asked about it. He said, well, you know, it's very high security, very sophisticated, high tech. I didn't want to show the special spin locks on the doors and the, you know, come on, man. All you have to do is don't turn the camera on until you're right there in front of the gold and say, here's the gold. It's actually here. That's all you had to do. It's pretty amazing. It's like, you know, if you get pulled over by the cops and they say, let's look in the trunk. If you ain't got any of the trunk, you're just like, okay, right?

Yeah. But if you won't open the trunk, that makes the cops want to see what's in there more. That's right. Yep. If you were advising someone to hedge against dollar collapse or government overreach, would you trust a bank, a brokerage, gold and a safe, or something else entirely? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it would be a combination of things. Nobody should have all their money in gold. You'd be a fool.

But you might want to put 10 or 15% in gold. I like the euro a lot. I think the euro is far more stable than the United States thought it was going to be when it was first implemented, you know, EU-wide. in whatever 2000, I guess it was, or 1999. But yeah, I like gold. I like the euro. I like even emerging market stocks, especially when it comes to places like India or Mexico or Argentina.

I guess the key is you have to diversify. But diversifying things that aren't going to be shocked when the dollar drops. The dollar's down 10% just in the past year. This year, yeah. Yeah, I said earlier, I go to Greece all the time. And Greece uses the euro, of course. And, you know, one time I go and I'm rich and I go 10 months later, I'm like, what the heck happened to prices here?

Well, the prices have a budge. It's at the dollar drop. Yeah. And is it an accident or is it strategy? You know, that's really the $64,000 question. My educated guess, based on the fact that I was, you know, 20 years in government, I'd say it's strategy. It's interesting.

I mean, or it's a cover that they've lost control of it. Yes. It could be that as well. It could be that. That's right. All right, you've seen the surveillance state from the inside. If an American homeowner wanted to legally disappear from public records, protect their home, their assets, their family from being easily found. Is that even possible anymore?

It's funny that you ask. I'm the author of a book called The CIA Insider's Guide to Disappearing and Living Off the Grid. Shut up. It's right here on my shelf, right behind me. Oh, gosh. All right. I'm getting it. Now, this is one of those areas where things change quickly.

This book came out in 2022. It's already a little bit outdated. It's very, very hard to live off the grid. Like, you really have to work at it. If you don't want to, you know, go living in the woods of Western North Carolina, which I'm assuming, you know, most people don't want to do, you know, living off the land. You got to do things like, no internet, no cell phone, pay cash for all your stuff. You know, if you have a cell phone, buy a disposable, you know, switch out to SIM cards,

that kind of thing. But you're also probably talking about either not owning real estate or owning real estate through a trust, but a trust that's protected by levels of other trusts may be originating in the Isle of Man. Yeah, and owned by an LLC in Wyoming. And owned by an LLC in Wyoming. And, you know, there was a show on HBO, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago called True Blood, right? It was a bunch of vampires. And there was one episode where this woman who's not a vampire, she lost her house. And it was her grandmother's house. her grandmother had left it to her, and she lost it. So she was able to scratch together enough money to try it by it, to try to buy it back. And she couldn't figure out who owned it because it was LLC on top of LLC, on top of LLC, and it's in the Cayman Islands, and then it's at the Isle of Man, and then it's in Liechtenstein, and it's back to the Cayman Islands again.

It turned out it was owned by this vampire who was a thousand years old, and he had the time to, you know, set up these different LLCs. That's what you would have to do in order to truly protect yourself from the government. If you wanted to make sure that the government had no idea what you own, make it as complicated as possible. And you have to incorporate overseas entities in that. You have to incorporate holdings in areas where the government, where the U.S. government just has no jurisdiction. The U.S. government just can't call up the bank of the, you know, Isle of Man and say, hey, we need for you to fax over all the records on John Kariaku. No, that's not how it works. You don't have authority here.

That's a little comforting. Yeah. For all of the original 13 family believers. What do they call that? The families, the original 13th family. the... Illuminati. Thank you. Oh, oh. I was thinking it's up to do

with the five families in New York. Oh, yeah, I know. Before them. Yeah, the Illumini. Right, right. The Rothschilds and... Right, exactly.

And the Rockefellers and their friends. What's the one thing you know about how the government tracks ordinary Americans that would shock people watching this? By the time mainstream media reports the truth, it's already too late.

That's why we built the Shadow Capital Brief. To decode money, housing, and policy before everyone else. Subscribe today, shadowcapitalbrief.com. All right, back to the show. What's the one thing you know about how the government tracks ordinary Americans that would shock people watching this? Well, I'll come back to something I said a few minutes ago. First of all, it is illegal for NSA to spy on America. Illegal. Black and white law. It's even a part of NSA's charter that it may not spy on America. And in fact, about 50% of what NSA does is to spy on Americans. The rules went out the window on 9-11, and the pendulum has never swung back. So around 2004, NSA bought a

gigantic tract of land in the central Utah desert, and they began to build, and it's done now, it was completed a year or two ago. They began to build the largest computer memory facility on earth, to the point where the former head of NSA bragged that they now have enough storage base to save every phone call, every text message, and every email sent or received by every American for the next 500 years. That is shocking and sickening to me. And we would not have known that had Ed Snowden not told us. That was top secret. And Ed Snowden told us, the government is spying on us. And all they have to say is 9-11, national security. Yeah. And they call it the Patriot Act. Yeah. Who wouldn't back that? That's right. Yep. You went to prison for telling

the truth. You lost years of your life. Looking back, and you've already said this, was it worth it? And what would you say that I guess we could rephrase the question this way? And what would you say to someone who sees something wrong but is a fool to speak up? Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question. First of all, yeah, 100% I would do it again. The only thing I would do differently is the advice that I'm going to give you now. Hire an attorney before you blow the whistle. Don't open your mouth until your attorney is sitting in the chair next to you. I made the mistake of whistle and then hiring an attorney. So I was constantly reactive. You don't want to be reactive. You want to be proactive. Yeah. So do it with good sound legal advice. Good advice. That's a great

answer. For the person watching this who feels like the system is closing in on them, rising taxes, inflation eating their savings, the government tracking everything. What's the one piece of a device you'd give them to protect their family? Wow. I mean, there really isn't just one piece of advice. That's a tough one, man. You got three steps that you're take first? You know, one thing I think we all should be doing is instead of bitching to each other and, you know, John yelling about the loss of our civil liberties on podcasts, we need to be riding our elected officials. They work for us. We decide to put them into office. So they have to be responsive to us. And if we don't like what the government's doing, we need to ride these elected officials to make sure that they vote the way

we want them to vote. I've worked on Capitol Hill both on the House side and on the Senate side. House side as a junior staffer, the Senate side, as one of the four senior most staff members on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And if there was one thing I learned, it's that they're all responsive to communications from constituents. All of them, all of them, because nobody bothers to send an email or write a letter. So a letter to your senator actually can move the needle? Surprisingly, yes, it can, yes. Interesting. I would have never guessed that. Well, you know, there's a lot of stuff, too.

Like, for example, when I was on the house side, I worked for a guy named Joe Coulter, Congressman Joe Coulter. Sorry, let me fix this. Joe is a good guy from the western part of Pennsylvania, my hometown area. And, you know, we would get letters like, dear Congressman Coulter, please co-sponsor the National Save the Bald Eagle Act. We never heard of the National Save the Bald Eagle Act. So I would call the pages or the clerk's office and say, can you send a page with a copy of the National Save the Bald Eagle Act. And then they would send a, you know, some 16-year-old kid would come with the physical,

now it's all computerized, of course, but with the physical bill. And I'd read it. And I'd say, it looks good to me. And I'd give it to the legislative director and he'd say, okay, we'll co-sponsor. Just like that. Well, there are hundreds of bills that are sponsored every single day in Congress. You can't keep them all straight. So if a constituent writes and says, I want you to do this, nine times out of ten, we're going to do it.

It's worth taking the time. All right. I'll give you another example. another example. I mentioned several times already that I'm a proud Greek American. And so I'm on a bunch of Greek listservs and mailing lists and stuff. And I got an email the other day, an automated email saying that the Pentagon has decided to lift its objection to the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. I don't want Turkey to have F-35s, not until they get out of Cyprus, which they've been occupying since July of 1974. So I wrote a letter to both my senators and my congressman. And I said, please support a continuing ban on the sale of F-35 fighter

jets to Turkey because, you know, Turkey's done this, that, and the other thing. And all three of them wrote back and said, you know, thank you for your concern. We will continue to support a ban on F-35s to Turkey. Oh, good, done. Nice. Yeah. It's as easy as that sometimes. That's great. So you got a response. Yeah. I would think that would just go into a big giant void. Yeah. And I think that's what most Americans think. But in fact, you know, you're not going to hear from the congressman or the senator himself. You're going to hear from some junior or mid-level staff member, but they keep very closely, you know, cultivated statistics on who's saying what about what in their email traffic. And so if it's not just, you know, John saying don't sell F-35s, it's, you know, 1,200 Greeks from

around the state, then by God, they're not going to sell F-35s. And I get what you're saying. totally believe your experience, but there seems like there's so much exterior events going on that would contradict that. Well, on some of these big issues, you're right, you're right about that. On some of these big issues, like, for example, a friend of mine wrote to her congressman and said, you know, please support cutting off aid to Israel and giving the aid to Palestinian famine relief. And then the congressman writes back, like, yeah, nice try. I'm thinking more like domestically, really. I think there's the more flagrant examples. I mean, look, no further than just the state of California where I was born and raised. I was fifth generation

from California. You know, it just seems everything that they do policy-wise is bad for the state. I mean, just with the mass exodus of people. And now he's chasing out of billionaires. I'm just like, what are you going? Two congressional districts worth of people moved out of California. Two congressional districts. It's incredible. Yeah. I was said that, you know, if it doesn't get votes or it doesn't make money, it doesn't get done. So it certainly seems like it could be driving away of vote. So there seems there would be much. flowing in somewhere from the decisions they're making. Yeah, somebody's making money at some point.

You know, that's $6 a gallon of gas, that money's going somewhere. And so is the homeless fund. I paid $247.9 today in Virginia. Thank God. You're in Virginia? Oh, yeah. I can't imagine paying. Wait, you didn't leave far, did you?

You didn't move far? No, no, not. And I live literally walking distance from the CIA. I figured I'm not letting them force me out. If they don't like me living nearby, then they can leave. That's great. I would have never imagined that. I would have never guessed that. Let's see. Getting close to the finish line here, John, thank you for your grace. You bet. So what's the one financial move the government does not want Americans to make right now? I would guess that the government is not

at all keen on Americans investing in foreign companies, foreign funds, or foreign real estate, because they get nothing from it, except maybe a couple of dollars in, you know, at tax time. But the growth in the stock, the growth in equity, and the real estate doesn't help the U.S. government in any way. And I think what the government really wants, it wants everybody to just buy bonds, right? Because they can continue to finance these out-of-control budgets. They can continue to pay the interest on the national debt, which is more and more and more every single year. And we're coming very rapidly to a tipping point. But if you're investing your money overseas, Uncle Sam gets none of it. Makes all the sense in the world. Makes more sense than I thought the answer I was going to get. That was like, that was the

obvious one on the surface level. What's the biggest financial lie Americans are being told right now? That we can have guns and butter. Yeah. Remember when you were a kid and you were in school? We were taught for the first time in fifth grade about the federal budget, how our elected officials have to make a choice between guns and butter. Butter being, you know, an infrastructure bill, an education bill, that kind of thing.

And guns being the military budget. We can't have guns and butter. We can't. We can't afford it. We have a one and a half trillion dollar defense budget. Well, it's not, it's almost one and a half trillion. Anyway, my point is, it's bigger than the next eight largest countries combined. That is untenable.

I travel the world constantly. I'm traveling. And I see other countries with better airports, with better hospitals, with better interstate highway systems, with better, you know, bridges, with national train systems that actually get you places at 350 miles an hour. Why don't we have that? Well, we don't have it because we're spending all of our money on weapons systems. Why do we have to be the policemen of the world? How come the Chinese get to have all these things? You know, I'd love to be able to go from New York to Chicago in three hours, you know, but we can't because we spend it all on the military.

Or waste. There's a lot there. Yeah, you can say that again. I think about the, you know, again, I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I've been hearing about the bullet train since I was in elementary school, I think. Yeah. What about the hyperloop? Yeah. Elon Musk came in and said, well, we're going to make this vacuum tube that's going to stretch from Los Angeles to San Francisco. You'll be able to get there in an hour going like 400 miles an hour on this magnetic thing through this giant tube.

The government won't do it, he said, so I'll do it. And then he's like, nah, too expensive. Never mind. I'm out here in Vegas. It's interesting to see his boring company work. Oh. That's a wild. Yeah. I'll tell you a funny story before we leave. As a hobby, I like to write television pilot scripts. And I've had some success humbly. I've sold eight of them. And it got me to the point where I have an agent, I have a manager, I have an entertainment

attorney. I even have my sad card. And I had an idea for a news-based show that I wanted to pitch. Good friend of mine at the time says, wait a minute, wait a minute. Before you go out to L.A. and pitch it, he said, my best friend from high school was just named the president of NBC News. Why don't we call him and we'll pitch it to him. And if NBC's not interested, then we can go out to L.A.

and, you know, pitch it to the other networks. I said, great. His friend's name was Ben. So we called Ben and he says, well, as it turns out, I'm going to be in Washington. This is in 2009, early 2009. I'm going to be in Washington for a big fundraiser at the White House. So why don't we meet at the Hay Adams Hotel across the street from the White House in the bar down the basement?

And as soon as I finish the dinner, I'll just walk across the street and we can talk about your idea. Said, great. We're supposed to meet at nine. He calls at nine. He says he's running 15 minutes late. And do we mind if he brings a friend? So, no, don't mind it all. The more the merrier. So he comes at 915 with this guy and Ben and my friend Rich or hugging each other. Oh, my God, I haven't seen you since we graduated from high school. Oh my God. Rich says, this is my friend John. I said, hi, Ben, nice to meet you. Ben says, this is my friend Elon. I said, hi, Alon, nice to meet you. The four of us sit down at this table. So they're talking about which girl they banged in high school and remember this teacher, whatever happened to that teacher. I'm just sitting

there, like bored. I want to pitch my show. So I said to the other guy. I said, so, Ilan, what do you do for a living? And he goes, oh, I have this passion for technology. And I made this company called PayPal. And then I sold it for like a billion dollars. And then I took that money and I bought another company called Tesla. And then I have another company called SpaceX. And we're going to go to Mars. And we're going to colonize Mars. And we're going to put a big bubble. And there's going to be oxygen to the bubble. not everybody's going to make it, but they're going to be pioneers, they're going to be like the pilgrims, and I go, wait a minute, wait a minute, are you Elon Musk? And he goes, yeah, I said the Thomas Edison of our time. He goes, I don't know, I guess so. But anyway, we're going to go to Mars, and there's going to be this big bubble,

and there's going to be oxygen in the bubble, and we're going to farm on Mars. And I sat there like this for the rest of the night, never pitched my show. He never stopped talking for the rest of the night. And afterwards, they left, and I said, I can't believe I met Elon Musk and that he's a nut. It's a good story. It's a good story. What does the intelligence community know about the next financial crisis? They're not telling us. You know, I'm not sure that the intelligence community as a community knows much of anything.

Only because the CIA and the other intelligence services, we have 18 intelligence agencies in the U.S. government. Most countries have one or two. We have 18. They really don't follow that kind of thing. They'll follow economic trends in foreign countries, especially enemy countries. They're very interested in that. You know, they'll do things like to crash the Iraqi economy, we just dumped plain loads of fake Iraqi dinars, like literally plain loads.

Just let it out the window just to flood the economy and crash it. Is that their currency? Yeah. Okay, so we dumped counterfeit their currency there? Counterfeit, yeah, currency. I didn't know what it was called. Yeah, the dinar. But in terms of, you know, long-term economic analysis and planning, they don't really do that.

That's much more at the Treasury Department. Is it? They would be, yeah. Okay. So I've had this thought since I was a kid. Long before I understood what government even was, and I didn't even know, I probably still don't know what government is. But I always had this feeling that the president isn't really the person running things.

And I couldn't shake it. I thought that my whole life. Now I'm in my 50s. And I've watched someone like a Donald Trump, who's probably the loudest, most fearless person to ever hold that office, at least from the outside looking in. Yeah. And even he has moments where I sense he's pulling a punch. Like something made him stop.

So I just have to ask someone who's actually been on the inside of the machine. Is the president really in charge or is there something above that chair? No, no, there's nothing above it. I understand the premise of the questions you're asking about, you know, we always hear about Bilderberg and the Illuminati and the what's it called the Shangri-La conference. And there are a half a dozen of these take place around the world. No, the president really is just one of three, right, in government. It's the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.

And they are co-equal branches of government. So while this president is probably the most powerful president that we've had in recent American history, he still is, his policies are able to be, are liable to be overturned or halted by the other co-equal branches of government. And I'll add to that my ex, by court order, I'm not allowed to talk about my ex, but I will say, Somebody to whom I was once very close. Sure. Actually participates in these, you know, Bilderberg and Davos and Shangri-La and all these things. I was very excited the first time she went because I wanted to hear all the inside scoop.

And she said, you know, except for like, you know, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Soros and Tony Blair standing around talking about, you know, bond prices, all anybody else wanted to do at all of these conferences was sell weapons. These conferences are all about weapons sales. She said she was colossally disappointed. Yeah. There is no... Yeah, there is no puppet master pulling the strings.

Yeah. It's all about weapons. Speaking of the president being overturned, what do you think happens, let's say domestically and then foreign, if the Supreme Court does overturn the sanctions? Oh, the Supreme Court's going to overturn the sanctions. Right. I've heard that the Constitution is crystal clear that Congress imposes sanctions.

Well, he's using... much of that as leverage for all the accomplishments he's had in his first year. Well, you got to give him credit because look what he did. Just today, he announced a deal with India for 18 percent tariffs. Wait, did we think tariffs? I meant tariffs. I didn't mean saying. Yeah. No, in my head, it registered as tariffs. Yeah. So he's not allowed to impose 50 percent, 100 percent on India or in any other country. He threatened it. And he said, let the Congress sue me, and before the Supreme Court could hear the suit, the Indians agreed to 18%. So now we're all happy. Everything with India is done.

European Union, same thing. We've pretty much come to an agreement with all of them, done. By the time the court hears the case and he's slapped down, it's not going to matter because he's already won. He's already succeeded. He did exactly what he set out to do. And what he set out to do was to frighten other countries into coming to the table and negotiating an agreement that benefits the United States. So it doesn't unravel? It won't unravel. For most of these countries, the point is moot now, because we've got an agreement. Okay, that gives me a little comfort. Yeah. I was thought it was going to break into all out chaos and right back to where we start again. Okay, rapid fire and then we'll be all done. Okay, Johnny? Sounds good. All right. So,

the government went from there are no UFOs to holding congressional hearings about them in two years. What's actually going on? Is this disclosure or is this distraction? I can't rapid fire this one. I have to, Of course there are UFOs. That's not to say that they're little green men from outer space, but of course there are UFOs. Many of us have seen them. I saw one with my dad. My dad, the elementary school principal of 44 years that everybody in town loves and

loved and respected. So I saw something that flew in such a way that it defied the laws of gravity, the laws of physics. Nothing can fly like that at these fantastic speeds and then just come to a stop and then glow in orange and then take off in another direction. I don't know what the heck of that was. Never saw one again. My uncle used to own a restaurant here in Alexandria, Virginia. We used to come down and visit every summer. And because the restaurant was right by the Pentagon, they would get a lot of pilots. Every single one of those pilots, every single one of them would talk about the UFOs

that they saw. And some of them would see them come straight up out of the ocean off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia. Like, what is that? What are they doing down? there. So I always believed that there was something. Right. So are they spoofinging us this information? I think that they are because I think they're afraid of panicking people. And I think that what leaked from the Pentagon in September of last year, you know, where off the coast of Yemen, one of our, one of our F-18s fired at one, fired a sidewinder missile at it, and it bounced off. And the thing just turned. Yeah, my God's like, how do you explain that? You can't explain that. So people weren't panicked by it. And I think that, I think now that the government understands there's not going to be

panic, we're going to see more and more, whether through official releases or through whistleblowers. Because that video that you and I saw in September, that video was leaked. It was not released by the Pentagon. Wow. That was real. Oh, yeah. And no one even cares. No, nobody cares. It was such a big deal when I was a kid. Oh, my God, yes. I'll tell you what, for years after I saw that thing, I would always look out for another one. Always. And I never saw anything else again. Everyone's got their face and their phones. No one's looking up anymore.

Yeah. All right. This is from my son. My 14-year-old will never forgive me if I don't ask. Has the CIA ever investigated Bigfoot, even as a side project? No, that's a fun question. No. And I'll tell you why.

It's because I'm going to quote the deputy director of the CIA for whom I was an assistant. He said the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets so that the president can make the best inform. policy. It's as simple as that. And Bigfoot is not in those boundaries. You're telling me. No. I'd love to see a Bigfoot. I mean, God knows they're spotted in like 48 states. Right. I'll let him down easy tonight. This is one that I have been here in Vegas.

October 1st, 2017, 60 people dead. Yeah. Largest mass shooting in American history. Yes, indeed. And then silence. No motive, no follow up. The story just vanished. We don't even know what, yeah, what the motive was. Why did the guy do it? Right. What does that tell you when someone? something that big disappears that fast. That tells me that this is something that the FBI doesn't want us to know about. Something happened.

Something was up, whether it was foreign involvement or it was a paid attack or whatever it was. They worked so hard to make it go away that it's led me to believe, here we are, eight and a half years later, and we're never going to know what happened. I have friends, close friends, who were at that concert. And they swear, to this day, we were just talking about this maybe a month, go. They swear that shots were coming from different directions. It wasn't just from the hotel window. But for whatever reason, federal law enforcement does not want us to know what happened. They don't. Operation Mockingbird. Yeah. The CIA planning stories in American newsrooms. That was in the

60s and the 70s. Is there a modern version of that running right now? Oh, sure, but it's not even a formal operation. A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine, Jason Leopold, who's an investigative journalist for Bloomberg, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA. Jason was called by George W. Bush as Pentagon spokesman, Jason was called a FOIA terrorist because he's filed more Freedom of Information Act requests than anybody else in the world. And he always gets the information. He's the one who broke the Hillary Clinton email just because he asked for every email, you know, sent or received by Hillary Clinton. So anyway, Jason was bored a couple of Christmases ago. And so he filed a Freedom of Information Act with the CIA for all communications between the CIA's Office of Public

Affairs and every, every journalist. You know, they'll tell you, you have to to wait 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, until they finally get to it. No, the law says they have 60 days to respond. So he filed a lawsuit. He won. They had to pay his legal fees, which happens every single time he files a FOIA request. What he found were several interesting things. One was that Ken Delanian, who is the chief national security correspondent for NBC News, was sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before he sent them to his own editor. What is that? Wow. He also found that there was a young, hungry, independent journalist who actually broke a serious story.

He sent the story to the CIA for comment. He said, I'm publishing this tomorrow. Do you have any comment? The CIA wrote back and said, so help us, God. If you publish this story, we will never speak to you again. We will never pass any information to you again. And you will never be invited to the Christmas party ever again. And he killed his own story.

So you don't need to recruit. journalists, especially when almost every paper in America has zeroed out its investigative journalism budget. You know, only, only really the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times have real investigative journalists anymore. So if they're going to police themselves and they're going to censor themselves and they're just going to gist whatever the CIA passes them and put their name on the byline, you don't need Operation Mockingbird or Operation Mockingbird anymore.

Yeah, so with, there was the thing during, I don't know, a few years ago where they, it was a meme going around where they had like a multi-camera thing of all these different newscasters all reading the same words. Did you get that? The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming. Some media have been true without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of media use their platforms to switch their own. Owned personal bias and agenda to control. Exactly what people think. And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. Yeah, that was Sinclair Broadcasting.

Okay. Where does that come from? Is that a government thing? No, no, no, no. Right thing? No. Sinclair is one of three or four right-wing companies that has bought up something like 84% of the American media.

And so they want a consistently conservative, consistently right-wing line out there. Right-wing? Right wing. Okay. I remember that message being very left wing, but... No, no, no. It wasn't.

They're broadcasting. No. And so what they do is instead of having stations do their own reporting, they do it at Sinclair and send it out and say, read it. And that's it. Wow. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

That's a corporate-driven message. It's corporate. Entirely corporate. Yeah. In 1975, the church committee revealed the CIA had a dark gun that could cause a heart attack and leave no trace. Mm-hmm. That was 50 years.

ago. What do they have? Yes. Oh, see, that's one of those things. No can do. Did I stumble on one? Right? Yeah, can't talk about that. All right.

Home stretch. I'm so bored with the Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. I don't feel like asking that question. If I gave you my name in 10 minutes, what would the CIA find out about me legally that would make me uncomfortable? Oh, they would have access to everything. I mean, just about everything in your life.

Every person you've ever spoken to or emailed or called or texted. I mean, what, uh, are you calling? an abortion clinic? Are you calling a secret boyfriend or girlfriend? What kind of porn do you like? I mean, 10 minutes, that's a lifetime. They can do everything. Yeah. In 14 years at the CIA, what's the one thing you saw or learned that you still think about at night? How many of my friends and colleagues were cold-blooded murderers? These are guys, you know, our kids played together. Our wives were friends. And they were perfectly happy just to go out and blow somebody's brains out and then come home and play with their kids. I really thought that statement was going to end with

How many of your friends were murdered? Two. But you said how many of your friends? Murderers. Yeah. Amazing. Somebody posted on Facebook the other day. Oh, my God.

A friend of mine from high school got arrested for murder. I can't believe I know a murderer. And I said, try working at the CIA for 14 years. Amazing. Mind blown. Again, you get to see a side of the world that most of us will never see. Yeah. Last question, John, you get to talk a lot on our show, or excuse me, on your show as a guest on others.

What's one subject you wish you got to talk about more? I love to talk about Greece. Nobody really cares. It's a very niche area. But, you know, I read the Greek papers every day. Most of my relatives still live in Greece. I've become a Greek dual citizen, Greek-U-S dual citizen. I go there two, three times a year. There's just so much to talk about. It's such a beautiful place and so fascinating and nobody really cares. Well, it's on my bucket list, John. I'd also like to talk about baseball, football, and fine art. Who's your pick for the Super Bowl? Who's your pick for the Super Bowl? You know, I hate to say it.

I really hate to say it, but it's got to be New England. I mean, I really hope that Seattle wins, but I think New England's going to win. All right. How about you? Oh, I'm a Rams fan, and I hate both. Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah, I was really pulling for the Rams.

Yeah. Yeah. We get so close so often. Yeah. I hate that I care so much. I know. And then you're disappointed at times so much. That's how I am as a Steelers fan.

Yeah. Well, John, I told you I was going to make you do your favorite thing and you delivered. So thank you. I can't thank you enough. Thank you. Thanks for being generous with your time. Everybody goes to subscribe to John's channel, Deep Focus. And John, genuinely, I hope you do get that part and you deserve it, buddy. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Good to see you. This podcast is a part of the C Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.