Julian Dorey Podcast - #330 - Soft Blackmail, Epstein, Palantir Military Targeting & Pentagon Contagion | Ken Klippenstein

Starting point is 00:00:00 When did it start to click for you where you're like, oh, this shit is nothing like what I thought. People don't understand how this really works. The entirety of the system. People at the very top, they don't want transparency. Look at the meltdown on the part of the JFK stuff being declassified half a century later. If you're going to do that about this, how can I believe anything that you say? Did you go through those doctors? Some of them, yes.

Starting point is 00:00:19 What'd you think? Story after story, they refused to publish documents that they're in possession of. The other one would be the Mangione manifesto. Clearly huge public interest in it. And again, it's just, no, we can't talk about this. This. You see this all the time. In the case of Epstein, there was something extraordinary in the Justice Department review that the Trump administration did that hardly got any attention, which was that he had a thousand victims. What had been alleged by prosecutors before that was like two dozen or so. I'm like, wait a second, that's a big jump. So how much they get away with? I want to see what can I know about it. So I would say the most dystopian thing I saw was that. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. Yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Yeah. I mean, you've got to be a self-starter, which I am, and I assume you are, because I see other people. Do you have this experience? They go, what do I do? It's like, what do you mean? You can do whatever you want. And that's the beauty of it. And they're just like, tell me what to do.

Starting point is 00:01:21 We're living in the best time ever for that, too, because, like, and you're honestly, like, one of the first guys in a lot of ways. you're a part of that first generation, I should say, that came up where it's like, yo, social media is established here. And now this is where people can actually then use that as an outlet to get news reporting out and actually cover the stories. And you don't have to have your credential from the Washington Post to go to places and pick shit up. You can use the tools in front of you. Exactly. People are so blackpilled, the people that are critical of media. And that's something I don't agree with them about. Obviously, I hate the times and everything else too. But like, there's so much possibility now. People are way too pessimistic, in my opinion. Now, when you say pessimistic, are you saying pessimistic about its future because of what, yeah, I guess the institution is done to itself or they're pessimistic about the fact that, you know, the resource war has kind of been lost because these places that used to have the access now don't have the ivory tower around that. No, just the idea that there's nothing you can do about the New York Times' dominance and they have all this access and they have all this control and they set the agenda. There's nothing we can do about it. It's like set the agenda. look at their posts. You could go on TikTok

Starting point is 00:02:29 and find something that's just burying them in numbers. And that could easily be political content or newsworthy content. It's just that people haven't done it in my view.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Now, did you always want to be a journalist when you were growing up? No. And I would have been mortified if you had told me as a kid that I'm going to end up being a journalist because I just saw the ones on TV

Starting point is 00:02:46 and I was like, all those boring guys in suits that don't really say anything. That seems like a horrifying life. I didn't realize there was like different kinds, you know, or you could make your own kind? So you went from one to be a firefighter

Starting point is 00:02:56 journalist at some point i'm trying to think i probably wanted to be something really impractical like a novelist like when i was a kid just like a fiction writer because i was just like yeah it just read stuff and it was like whoa words can like shape how people think about things how they perceive the world you can change things based on it just based on what we're reading in school or whatever and um uh you know i grew up and i did actually do some fiction early on and i realized and it just felt sort of felt a little self-indulgent because just all this awful stuff going on so i thought okay i'm already writing what can I do more pertinent to the what I see is like the horrible political situation what years are we talking I graduated 2010 it was the middle of like the free fall of

Starting point is 00:03:34 the economy right and I had the economics professors who had all these very glib answers for everything suddenly be like I don't know what's happening and I'm just like the elites seem pretty discredited at this point maybe we should do something about getting a new leadership so that would have been right at like the burgeoning of like the Occupy Wall Street movement and exactly it's interesting you put that together because that was exactly exactly what I fed into when I started seeing this stuff. And I'd always perceive that, like, you know, things are unfair, obviously. If you don't think that, I don't have much hope for you.

Starting point is 00:04:03 You know what I mean? And most everyone does outside of Washington. I think that it's unfair. So, you know, I saw that and I thought, well, what can, you know, I like writing. What can I do relevant to that? And journalism is saying like the obvious thing. Oh, yeah. And then Snowden came out, Glenn Greenwald, who I'm friends with now, reporting on it.

Starting point is 00:04:21 And just seeing the effect that putting out primary source documents can have. because no one can ignore it at that point. If you look at the reporting at the time, people knew about the NSA programs and stuff. You could piece this together if you read carefully enough, but they didn't have that primary source documentation to just shove it in their face and be like, look at these things.

Starting point is 00:04:37 Wait, they knew about it, though? Yeah. I mean, they had whistleblowers like Bill Binney and Thomas Drake come out prior to it. And you could, if you read very carefully, like Inspector General's reports, things like that, you could kind of get a sense, but it wasn't all laid out for people to just like that.

Starting point is 00:04:51 Meaning they didn't know, like, the existence of the heartbeat thing, or that Snowden actually was able to put a name on. Yeah, I mean in broad strokes, they know about mass technology changing so there being some kind of a mass collection system. It's very interesting to me that a lot of that stuff came in the wake of the financial crisis because I do believe everything is downstream from economics. It's just if you look at human history, that seems to be what it is.

Starting point is 00:05:15 But, you know, we had this crazy 2000 to 2010 period that kind of kicks off with 9-11, culminates with the financial crisis and then the ashes that form of that you get the people like Snowden coming out saying hey all this shit that you thought was like kumbaya coming together even that was like the good stuff of the early 2000s it was actually bullshit it was anti-constitutional totalitarian your favorite politicians were all a part of it it was this giant cover up and now you kick that off and it's not like you could see this coming but then that opens up the door for like the outsider like trump to come in and these movements to start that I think totally I mean I don't think everyone knows it changed everything

Starting point is 00:05:56 about our country politically yes known as my exact same age I was just looking this up recently I read his memoir and I was struck by how much he looked at the system just sort of collapsing around him the post 9-11 system where basically we took the entirety of our economic system and reoriented it towards national security and haven't gone back by the way even though al-Qaeda is no longer the focus that it was ISIS is no longer the focus that it once was and I had roughly the same reaction. I mean, I wasn't in the intelligence community, so I couldn't have the reaction that Stone had, but I was like, man, I should probably do something about this. And that's how I got into journalism. Now, how did you, like, at the very beginning, you were totally independent,

Starting point is 00:06:34 like doing things on your own? What were you doing? Yeah, I remember my first, I remember my first story. I saw, I read about FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act, the idea that you could request basically any government document and, you know, pursuant to a number of exemptions and things and games that they play, you can, at least in principle, get back records. I thought that was the coolest thing. And it's something that's unique in a lot of ways the United States. Not that there aren't other open record statutes in other countries, but it's the most kind of like radical in the, in the U.S. legally. And so in how it's implemented. And so I remember the torture report had just come out detailing the Bush administration's legal justification for torture or enhanced

Starting point is 00:07:12 interrogation, as they would call it. And nice fancy name. Yeah. I filed that FOIA. I remember the attorney that was responsible for it, John Yu was his name. I remember, oh, he was a professor at Cal Berkeley, because I had a friend that went to Berkeley and mentioned that at some point. And I thought, that's a public institution. I could probably FOIA that. So I foiled, I sent a FOIA request to his office email and found out that he was dodging interviews from media. He didn't want to go on and defend his own program at the time. Oh, you could FOIA that because they received funding from the government. Exactly. Whoa. And that was like my first thing. And then once I got that, I was like, it's on. I want to do more of this. So wait, you email the guy, he had been ducking all these interviews, and then you're like, hey, you are supposed to follow the FOIA laws, so give me this information. Basically. So you FOIA the, it's like a records custodian at the institution. You can just ask for anyone, because it's like, you know, it's a dot EDU associated with the public institution. And so I got his, I think it was his secretary's messages. No, it was his message personally. He was like, yeah, I'd rather not do that interview. It was like CNN or something like that. I just thought that's funny. It's like, dude, you're not going to defend your signature program here? Like, what gives? And so I put that out and that no one cared that I was a nobody then because the document was there and they could go and look at it and read the email and be like, yeah, why is this guy dodging? this stuff. Did you put that out like on Twitter or something? Yeah, I just tweet. I did a story on it because I for some small blog, um, but I tweeted it and that's how people saw it. Yeah. So how were you making money? Like you'd go to some of these blogs and say I got a story, just pay me per story kind of. Yeah, it was all extremely like ad hoc. I would just be like, hey, check this out. Like, don't you

Starting point is 00:08:44 want this? And I found that, you know, I didn't have any connections. I, uh, you know, I'm not exactly a social butterfly. So I wasn't at the parties that a lot of other, uh, reporters are to make these connections but what I realized was none of that mattered if you had the goods and you have something and the editor sees it and it's a primary source document that there's no question about its feracity they get excited about that and I get excited about it too so that was sort of the beginning yeah you were telling me off camera right before and we didn't go into detail how nowadays like especially with how old school journalism school is it hasn't changed in a lot of ways over the past decades like they're teaching a lot of bad habits there in your opinion whereas you had to teach yourself

Starting point is 00:09:21 and come out and make yourself a journalist, and you think that that helped you do your job a lot better? Why do you say that? What's the juxtaposition there? Oh, totally. I have so many younger reporters coming to me for advice, people that are in journalism school or recently graduated. When I see what they were taught,

Starting point is 00:09:37 I see a system that's almost like one of those mosquitoes in, like, Jurassic Park, just like frozen in amber from like a trillion years ago. It's kind of like, you can see how this advice would have been useful, like, pre-internet or even the beginning of the internet, but how just inadequate it is to the times. And so my just jerry rigging my system to figure out how to find things wasn't informed by any of these sort of, it's like when they teach you in school, the scientific method. And you talk to a national scientist, none of it works that way.

Starting point is 00:10:06 You know, like you're not going through these four steps or whatever. You more use common sense. And so that's what I use as a process to find these things. You'll find a lot of, I get so many reporters in my DMs asking me for help with FOIA. You know, I always try to oblige, but it's like, they don't teach this stuff. Like, that's an important skill to be able to understand. And, you know, what they do teach is kind of the equivalent of the scientific method, but for journalism, the journalism method. And it's like, again, that was something that might have been more pertinent before.

Starting point is 00:10:36 And even then, I still don't think it would have been very useful because everything's moving so fast. Things are changing so quickly. The way that people communicate, the way that readers consume information, the places that information lives. I mean, if you look at the intelligence community, they're having to update how they collect things um yeah they just released an open source intelligence strategy for the first time ever i think last year and it details it's basically they've got to collect information from all of the different social media buckets that exist and that didn't exist three years ago i mean there's blue sky twitter facebook uh instagram i mean it goes on and on so they're they're responding to it uh fairly

Starting point is 00:11:10 quickly and on the other hand the media is like completely out to lunch and they're it's it's a shame because the national security state is running circles around the media because they can't keep up with them in this respect. Have you ever read two articles from the same event and felt like they were from completely different planets? With today's fragmented media landscape, it's getting harder to know what's real, what's biased, and what's just noise. That's where ground news comes in. I started using ground news a couple years ago because I wanted more transparency in my news consumption. They don't eliminate bias. They just help you see it. Ground news brings together reporting from across the entire political spectrum so you can actually compare headlines and coverage. It's an

Starting point is 00:11:48 antidote to information overload, sensationalism, and algorithm-driven echo chambers. Using ground news, you're going to get to see how many sources are covering a story, how differently it's being framed, and which side of the spectrum may be ignoring it altogether. And that's where their blind spot feature comes in. This is where you're going to see the stories that one side of the aisle isn't seeing. You'll see bias ratings, factuality scores, and even ownership information, where you can find out who funds the outlets reporting the story. I was looking through ground news the other day on the Putin,

Starting point is 00:12:18 Trump summit up in Alaska and it was amazing how much different the headlines of the same exact event were and what the breakdowns were but this is what ground news allows you to see how the same videos and images can be manipulated to drive political narratives so go to ground dot news slash julian for a better way to stay informed you can subscribe now to get 40% off the vantage plan by using this QR code on my screen and you can also use my link down in the description below ground dot news slash julian once again get 40% off the vantage plan by using this QR code or my link down below something really changed though in the sense that obviously everyone has you know everyone's a human being you're going to have your natural biases there are things that in some ways can't be

Starting point is 00:13:02 controlled but we used to live in in a world where you could at least just get the information and it's more of a golden era kind of thing where there were three channels and you know newspapers and that's kind of it. So the downside is that means there is some protection around what can actually go out. Now it's a free for all. But with that free for all, we've seen a lot of people double down on, you know, saying, well, because I have this position, this credential, therefore my opinion matters more. And they let their their personal opinions leak into their reporting all the time. You know, how do you avoid that? Because I mean, you're still a human being like you have your personal opinions especially when you're covering you know controversial political

Starting point is 00:13:46 issues and stuff like that yeah as i've gotten older i realize that my opinions don't really matter i almost don't care what i think about something i want to see what can i know about it and obviously you know what i go around and look for is going to be informed by what i think but i've had so many stories where i expected to go this direction it goes in a completely other one that i'm just kind of learned to be agnostic when you go about something you can see that something important but you might not understand how it's important or where the story is going to take you. So you really just have to have fidelity

Starting point is 00:14:17 to where the facts lead you, which sounds simple, but sometimes they lead you in uncomfortable directions. I mean, I did a story recently about, you know, Pete Heggseth and the firing of all of these senior staffers. And, you know, I started interviewing former military people, legal experts on chain of command. And what I realized was whatever you think about

Starting point is 00:14:40 Hegeseth, and I've been quite critical of him in the past, he's the civilian elected leadership, and to the extent that he's disempowered with all these firings and removals, that empowers the brass, the unelected military brass. And that's not a great thing. You want to have strong civilian leadership, even if you don't agree with him. And so that was a point I made in the story. And then certain people responded to saying, oh, you're pro Pete Hegset or whatever. It's like, no, I'm talking about civilian leadership of the armed forces, which is a separate issue i could kind of see how they would get confused about it but again following those facts that sometimes takes you places a you don't expect and b people don't want to hear yeah i mean i think i've seen

Starting point is 00:15:18 over the past several years just observing you on twitter you have a very entertaining twitter by the way observing you on there you piss everyone on yes which i like that means that means you are landing on things and at least trying to pursue where the truth may be it's when people are constantly retweeted and and you know i guess like glorified by one side of the political spectrum and they're reporting on stuff. I'm like, well, they're probably a commentator, not a journalist, you know, so I can imagine that's got to be a tough spot to be because you're also, you know, you got to sell subscriptions to your substack. You got to make a living and things like that. And the reality is the easy way to do it would just be to pick aside and fucking go 10,000 miles an hour into it. And you

Starting point is 00:16:03 don't do that. And I think that's commendable. Thank you. Yeah, it's hard because the way, um, these ideological niches are really rewarded where you're consistently serving up the same type of ideas and people can know what to expect and almost like it's almost like a baby food where it's pre-chewed up and you don't even have to your body will digest it easily because there's not going to be this foreign anybody in it that's like whoa what was this idea um but you know i made a decision when i started this thing and i left the mainstream outlets that you know i came up um during kind of in the middle of my career that um we'll come back to that okay that um that's not what I want to do because even though the money is easier

Starting point is 00:16:40 and even though, you know, life is more stable. Serving the same thing forever is a really boring life completely aside from the like moral questions. Serving the same thing forever. Yeah. Just like saying the same ideological thing for a certain type of group and what they want to hear.

Starting point is 00:16:57 You know what I mean? Like that's definitely a more stable life but it's just so boring and you know, completely aside from it being wrong and that's not the point of getting it. What I understand about media is if you want to make money you go into finance you don't go in media you're going to media because of you know you're pissed off about something right i hope that's why i did and so it's like

Starting point is 00:17:17 well if i'm just serving up the same plate every day irrespective of what the truth is then why did i get into this thing right so that's sort of my reasoning yeah so you were you were in that you were completely on your own starting this off kind of getting your way figuring it out and then i believe the first place you were was the young turks right that's right yeah so that's more they or actually know a place called reader supported news i don't know what very obscure small um website how'd you end up there uh that was i'm trying to remember i was doing the freelance stuff that i was telling you about and he noticed one of those things one of these foia dispatches that i had and he's like i like i like i like you're on you're on the team yeah so you end up there how long were you there um i think like

Starting point is 00:18:00 two or three years oh wow so now for like five minutes yeah exactly and then when did you end up with young turks um so that would have been yeah immediately after that and that was the youtube channel and again these are like very weird and like i wouldn't say the young turks is obscure but it's not like um it's not NBC yeah exactly right and in retrospect um that was really beneficial because again they gave me a lot of space to define what my job was going to be because i was going to be the bloodhound investigator guy and i don't really have the on-screen res and it's just kind of how i am so they were like all right well he can do something else and i just did what i have always done and it worked really well because a lot of people on um on on on on social media they tend to be really good communicators

Starting point is 00:18:42 but they don't always do the investigations you know yeah now it's so fascinating to me to look at this because it feels like some things feel like it was 30 years ago and three months ago at the same time yeah but when you look at how like strange the spectrum is now with you know left and right agreeing on certain issues and then completely disagreeing on other issues, you kind of look at what Jank and all the guys at Young Turks were, you could run tape of them in 2016, 2017, 2018, like kind of when you were there. And the people that would instantly be making a reaction video saying, fuck these people are now some of the same people who on certain things are like, you know, they make a good point. And it's so weird to look at because it's

Starting point is 00:19:26 almost like at least the first term with Trump, you kind of had, you knew who was in what bucket or whatever. But now everyone's a goddamn expert on so many different buckets that it's like everything feels foggy out there. So did you see any of that happening back then? Or is this more of a phenomenon of like what kind of came out of the Biden administration? Well, I think what happened during the first Trump administration was there was a denialism on the part of kind of elite media about that he was even elected because there was this whole you can go look me up i didn't touch any of the russia gate stuff not because i didn't think that there wasn't no not one because i didn't think that it was going to end up showing what a lot of the commentators and media outlets were

Starting point is 00:20:08 saying it was which the general thrust of it was the election was somehow illegitimate because of what happened i don't deny for a second that the russians were involved in information operations hacks things like that completely agree with all that where i didn't think was reasonable to go was to take that and say oh therefore the Russians stole the election right I don't think that's true yeah and so for that reason you thought that early yeah totally I mean again never denied that that they hacked these files that they wanted to have an effect but what I understand about the information landscape and I think really anybody who spends a lot of time on social media is you couldn't control something if you wanted to it's just a free-for-all you know and you can try and you can see corporation

Starting point is 00:20:46 on there all the time trying to manipulate the the direction in which things go and like having you know modest success and i'm not saying that you know that they that they can't um exercise some sort of influence over what's happening but to swing an election determinatively i mean i lived in wisconsin at the time and i knew people all over that were going to vote for him and i wasn't surprised when he won and then i have my friends in places where you know there maybe isn't that ideological um variegation that were shocked and what the fuck yeah totally and i get that response but it was like i wasn't surprised in the sense of um that people were going to to vote that way because I saw and lived around those people. That's one of the problems with

Starting point is 00:21:25 media, I think, is it's so concentrated in D.C. Coastal. Los Angeles. Yes, exactly. Not even just coastal, but like New York and D.C. in particular. I agree. And look, I've lived, I'm from Jersey. I've been in this area my whole life, right? Like, I don't know. There's a limitation to what I can know about the Iowa farmer and everything. But if you just, like, reached outside your box a little bit as an outsider. Even just recognizing that you don't know something. That's such a big advantage. Yeah, I mean, you could see it. You could see where that was coming from. And I've always said this. It's like the two candidates who really made the dent in 2016, and probably should have been the two candidates that were running against each other, were Bernie and Trump, right?

Starting point is 00:22:07 And so Bernie got railroaded. We know that whole story. But like, yes, they had very different solutions, very different solutions politically. They were very different on a lot of things. But when they were sticking their fingers on the pulse of the problem totally they were both right there and they understood people and to me they were the manifestation of the occupy wall street movement and the tea party movement and it's like in some ways yes it's shocking to see like you know the funny brooklyn dude you know going like this and told everyone that they're going to get their job or you know the crazy billionaire guy from the apprentice as the manifestation but the fact that if you just read their messages or listened to what they were saying,

Starting point is 00:22:51 the fact that that surprised people in D.C. in New York, I'm still, to this day, I'm like, how did that, how did that, I know you don't live in those areas and everything, but how does that shock you? Don't you have internal polling? Couldn't you see this five years ago, you know? Right. It speaks to the information echo chamber that they live in, which is really frightening. I mean, I spent a number of years in Washington before moving back to Wisconsin.

Starting point is 00:23:14 And something I was struck by repeatedly was how much these guys really believe out of touch stuff and they don't like i remember one time um during 2024 my wife and i went to a bar with some uh political world friends i work in capital hill and um one of them said oh you know there's no way that trump nice guy who's like i would think of his you know more in touch with things than most people in washington he says oh trump there's no way trump's going to win and then my wife was really surprised i was surprised we said well why's that he says well he's facing an indictment nobody's going to want to vote for a felon and and my wife is just like you could see her turn to face like but i'm just like i don't know about that it may you know what the really sad thing was

Starting point is 00:23:53 they made them relatable totally they're like they made him the underdog yeah after he'd already been president took the words out of my mouth it's like i always said this january six obviously has a lot of things that had been re-litigated since then and issues i think with the investigations and what they did to some people but like the day was a bad look like he should he should have known like some shit could go down that day there's a lot of people in that town that don't like them like that part i never felt bad for him about because i'm like dude what were you doing like just figure this out later you can come back in four years and try to run again but anyway that happens all they had to do in my opinion was just step back like this totally just

Starting point is 00:24:31 like totally just go like this and then starting on january 8th 2021 first they cancel them off the internet then they decide to bring all these weird charges against them that make no sense. Then, you know, they indict him in state court. That makes no sense. Then, you know, they find him guilty. They make him a convicted felon. And people are like, yo, he's doing the same shit he does some of us on Main Street. They're doing the same shit to him. And then the guy almost gets killed. And people are like, yo, it's like this arc happened. It's like on the CDs with the explicit lyrics. That's what they slapped on them. And everybody's like, whoa, who's this guy that I'm supposed to listen to? You know, yeah, he got banned. You're not allowed to listen

Starting point is 00:25:12 do them to anybody who's been a kid knows, don't tell kids, don't listen to this thing, because they're going to listen to that thing. When I saw people on black Twitter being like, yo, this is the first black president, I was like, oh, it's a rap. Like, this guy's going to win. I love the, yeah, the edits of his, of his mugshot.

Starting point is 00:25:28 Oh, dude, it's an album cover. Yeah. It was incredible. And then, like, they have them, like, walking out normally and they slow moat into, like, many men and it's like, this is the fault to those people in D.C. in New York. They did this. Yes, you know, but like what do you, you were living through reporting in the four years when Biden was there. And it's like it was, it was very obvious that he was not totally all there and everything.

Starting point is 00:25:54 How do you as a journalist deal with, you know, looking at the obvious here and apparently have an half the country that just doesn't want to see it? Yeah, that was something that I wrote about early on and got a lot of angry reactions, which I expected. But, but it's interesting to me that the people that. hit it from a partisan like if you look at this from a partisan perspective the people that hit it actually didn't do the democrats any favors at all because they ended up foreclosing on any possibility of a serious primary and cause them to lose and those are feeded as like oh they're the you know democrat favorites like everybody loves these guys it's like what they they forced you to lose you know right so anyways i i i try to talk about this stuff and something that's frustrating in in

Starting point is 00:26:37 reporting is if you sound like something someone else is saying people will tend to be like oh you're you know your questioning your question is cognitive fitness didn't i see fox news do that so you must be a right winger and they do that thing and it's just like isn't there a way you can just express something without it getting jammed into this one side or other sort of thing yeah and i think i think one thing that amplifies that and this is on every issue in every direction it's not one way or the other you will see massive bot campaigns make sure that things are simplified down into one bucket like ken clippenstein equals fox news right Ken Klippenstein equals CNN, if you're getting enough clicks on whatever it is you're reporting.

Starting point is 00:27:17 But that's crazy because there was like this massive shift that happened where suddenly like some of the elite donors, in this case on the left side, were like, oh, yeah, no, it turns out he is gone in summer of 2020. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. All of Washington discovered it the day after the debate after the rest of us had seen how many clips of this guy, you know, wandering around and just just listen to him. speak he couldn't get a sentence out this was common sense stuff yeah and then i couldn't believe the amount of um just straight up gaslighting because you would play a clip from him from the obama when he was vice president and obama completely and they and the cynicism of invoking the the stutter um when you could do uh clips of him from just 10 years ago and he didn't have any there was nothing no of it

Starting point is 00:28:04 yeah yeah i actually so i caddy at wilmington country club for years and apologies to people have heard the story on the podcast at a ton. But, you know, he's a member there. So when he was vice president, sometimes he would come back and play. And I remember summer 2014 was the last time I was near him. I never caddied for him, never got to talk to him or anything. But it was a Saturday.

Starting point is 00:28:27 And when I was coming out of the caddy shack, I could see all the Secret Service carts. So I'm like, okay, he's here. And so I get down to the practice tea, which is like this long practice tea. And then, you know, I'm behind the guy I'm caddying for. and then suddenly, you know, you can hear him coming up. And he's like, hey, Jim, how's your ass? Hey, Bill.

Starting point is 00:28:45 Like, he's busting balls, whatever. The guy was like 70 years old or 71 years old. He gets right up to the tee fucking stripes at 245. Stripes at 250. Hey, Bill, what's happening? Stripes it. And I'm looking at him. I'm like, you know, it was kind of yoked a little bit.

Starting point is 00:28:59 I was like, oh, wow. This guy's like kind of old. Maybe he'll run for president. And then I remember it wasn't even a full five. That was like July or August 2014. It wasn't even a full five years later. he announced he was running in i think march 2019 in philly and i heard him talk and i'm like he had to have like brain aneurism or something i'm like that's a different like that's a totally

Starting point is 00:29:20 different person yeah and he's had um he's had health issues what was interesting was the way in which the media tried to recond after the debate they were like oh and that was the day we all discovered because there was no way to know before and i if you look at the polling the majority of the democrats in their own party didn't want him to run for real election going to back a year at least. So this had been known. And there's just this whole false history now that the elites tried to ram down everyone's throat of that, oh, you know, it's not that we were either asleep at the wheel or actively hiding it. It's that nobody knew about it until the debate. And that's what happened. And yeah, it's just this false history that they've tried to, because

Starting point is 00:29:59 that's not what the polling had consistently showed before that. Now I'm a little bit of a cynic, to be honest with you about this stuff. Like, I'm not sure any president ever fully runs the country because there's a lot of machinery that happens behind them that they're not read in on because people can control that information and they were there before they got there and everything it was just on another level with Biden because of his cognition kind of reminiscent of like Reagan in his second term I guess you if you will but like do you think that looking back on it it was as simple as the people that were appointed to unelected jobs around him are the people who ran the country or do you think it was like the bureaucracy

Starting point is 00:30:39 running it, you know, I don't know if you want to go this broad, but like the Pentagon was running the country or something like that. Like, what are your thoughts? Well, if you want to talk about national security state bureaucracy, I think that they run things to a greater degree than most people would like to accept in general. And that, I think that I find that really disturbing. I mean, even just the examples we were talking about, the Russia investigation, the response to January 6th, you know, the national security state just kind of kicks in and goes into this sort of autopilot mode where they start running things to an extent that the um that the i don't want to say that the president couldn't do something about it but realistically like you're saying the president is

Starting point is 00:31:18 one person how much is you going to be able to oversee and when they're do uh national security state has perfected this sort of passive aggressive system of slow rolling decisions they don't want to do of of putting the president in difficult positions so like when the president goes to say decide some sort of kinetic response to Iran. He can't just say, I want this. They have to have a menu of options that he can pick from several, you know, two or three different ones. So one thing that they like to do is they'll say, okay, here's the extreme one, here's the middle one, here's the lower tier one. And then they know that he'll probably pick the middle one. That's just just one random example. Is it a McDonald's menu for Trump? Yeah. And so they're so good at

Starting point is 00:31:58 kind of foreclosing on the options that the president has to begin with to kind of, I don't don't want to say that they have total control because that's not true. And the president has responsibility to stand up to that. But yeah, they've perfected these methods. I mean, and then we end up in countries for decades and decades and things that nobody wants, but the president isn't able to disentangle himself from. So that's sort of a long-winded answer. But yes, I think the bureaucracy is very powerful on something that doesn't get attention to media because everything is so celebrity obsessed. What did Trump say? What did Melania say? What did the vice president say there you see almost no reporting about these massive institutions that represent the majority

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Starting point is 00:33:52 Link in description below and use promo code Julian. Upgrade your sleep with Ghostbed, makers of the coolest beds in the world. yeah there's there's a great story this guy stephen kinser told on my buddy danny jones's podcast it's like four or five years ago so stephen kinser was a long time journalist that new york times was a bureau chief in a lot of different places he's one of the guys i think who was like breaking the mk ultra story or like who really dug into that but he was talking to danny about after carter left office he had known jimmy carter a little bit he happened to be the bureau chief maybe down in like South America as a whole for New York Times. So maybe a year after Carter left office, something like that. He was coming down for a visit. So I think his name's Stephen Kinser. Can we check that, Joe, Stephen Kinser, Danny Jones?

Starting point is 00:34:41 It would have been like four or five years ago. I just want to make sure I'm getting it right. But, you know, he hits up like through an emissary or whatever hits up Carter and says, hey, you know, let's get a drink. So he gets a drink with Jimmy Carter. And they're sitting there talking. And after a while, it is? Okay.

Starting point is 00:34:56 So after a while, he's like, all right, you know, fuck it. Let me ask him. It's been a year. I'll ask him about this. So he's like, you know, what's it like becoming president? And Jimmy Carson, oh, my God, dude, it's fucking insane, yada, yada, yada. He's like, well, what'd you do? Like, when you first got in there, what's your first order of business to, like, learn how to do this job that's impossible? And he goes, well, I called every living president and invited them in separately for a meeting to get advice. And so Kinzer's like, all right, fuck it, I'm going to ask him.

Starting point is 00:35:27 Who gave the best advice? And Carter smiled and said Nixon. And, and, Ankins was like, all right, why did Nixon give the best advice? And he goes, well, you know, he walked in there and he said, all this shit that they fight about, the domestic stuff, the health care, the fucking taxes. It's 5% one direction or another. Congress controls it. You can't do shit about it. It's all bullshit.

Starting point is 00:35:48 The foreign policy, though, that's what they don't see. And that's where you got the power. And I think about that all the time because it gets truer and true every time I notice something. like presidents can do something with a pen behind closed doors with the pentagon or some of these joint chiefs of staff and stuff and you know a little drone strike here in yemen and people are like where the fuck is yemen you know and then they don't realize the reverberations of what something like that means and then it affects them at home in a way they can't see 10 years later they are so good at okay so the debate now about um the military in mexico look at how it's discussed they say there will be no invasion there will be no military invasion but that so that's so that's about title 10 like formal military authority that doesn't title 10 yeah so that's like the legal code for like former formal you know like you internationally recognized combatants what that doesn't cover is intelligence operations special operations and so you see this all the time when they say there are no boots in Ukraine what that doesn't cover is j-sock units is people seconded to the CIA which we have in

Starting point is 00:36:52 there in fairly significant number and we have in I'm sure going in and out of Mexico Mexico too I don't know oh yeah you know like for intelligence collection at the very least so so when they say no military they're saying no Marines like regular guys like yeah of course they're not going to do take the uniform off yeah exactly just put them under the CIA put them in a task force and suddenly they're not boots on the ground anymore it's like with Ukraine you know there's a dude land in like a fucking C-130 or whatever it is right now walking off the back with a bunch of small bills cash or large bills cash I should say handing in a bag and oh yeah that's seals delta yeah targeting support i mean they're maybe not shooting at them but everything

Starting point is 00:37:32 short of that for sure it's so strange how the world that we live in is really just about semantics totally everything is so postmodern now you can't just say what it is anymore because it's this whole legal game of um oh actually technically that's not uh pursuant to you know rule 5 734 it doesn't count as this it's like okay well but the basic picture that ordinary people hear when they say no invasion they think that means nothing they don't they're not thinking this legal stuff that the that the administration is doing when did this click for you like when you know you're a green kid coming out at first like making whatever stories you can go and like covering something obviously enjoying it and it seems like you really do enjoy your job now too

Starting point is 00:38:13 which is great but you know a lot more so when did it start to click for you was there like one story or one moment along the way besides snowden where you're like oh this shit is nothing like what I thought. People don't understand how this really works. I mean, there was no one moment, but if I had to point to, like, an inflection point, it'd be my editor, who himself is a veteran of a lot of these newsrooms. He used to be Seymour Hershey's researcher for a number of years. Oh, wow. He worked at the Times, the L.A. Times, the Po, I mean, everywhere. This guy was like, he reported, his big scandal was he reported on the nuclear facilities that I think NATO had in Europe during the Reagan administration, and they tried to, they tried to prosecute him for it.

Starting point is 00:38:54 I don't know anything. What happened? I don't know anything about that. Yeah, so he doesn't promote himself at all. He's just, like, loves the reporting. Who is his guy? William Arkin, that's my editor here. And so he had a lot of experience that I did.

Starting point is 00:39:06 And crucially, had an insight into pre-9-11. And so he could tell me stuff that is, like, unique to this time. I don't know if you ever had the experience where it's like pre-internet time. I'm barely old enough to just foggly remember it. Right. But if you talk to people, it's like, oh, yeah, people used to be way more in touch. And it's kind of like, I'm trying to imagine that. And I can't really, you know.

Starting point is 00:39:25 And so having somebody who's seen the administration's come and go, who's seen the approaches change over time, has helped so much to inform. That's another big loss that you see in journalism is, as the revenues have dwindled, for reasons I think are largely the fault of media. I'm not defending them. But part of that is that it just becomes this kind of pit-stop career where people will do it for a few years when they're young,

Starting point is 00:39:48 and then they go on to become, you know, crisis affairs response for some big corporation or something. It's lost a lot of that experience that could, that would tell somebody, hey, all this post-9-11 shit is bad because it used to be this. And I don't even have a concept of really what it was before that beyond what I can read. So to hear someone and have somebody that has that perspective is really beneficial. Yeah, that guy's, he's lives through the wars. That's, that's cool to have that. He was the first to report that above top secret plans to invade Iraq.

Starting point is 00:40:22 and it was code named Polo Stap. And it launched the biggest, this was 2000, it would have been 2002, and it launched the biggest leak investigation, I think, in U.S. history at Rumsfeld's past. So this guy has, like, huge stuff. And here's the thing. He doesn't ever promote himself

Starting point is 00:40:38 because he doesn't care. What was, I mean, that's great, obviously. So he's in it for the love of the game. I love that. Yeah, that's great. But like what was, you have that pulled up already, Joe? It looks like he's got it.

Starting point is 00:40:49 And we can see it over here. This is what you're talking about, top secret Polo Stap? reported that. Yep, above top secret. I think it was a special access program, if I remember, right? So what was, what, what had, do you remember what happened here? I mean, I can try to read some of it, but. Yeah, so basically, the Bush administration was not being honest about what was going to happen. And, you know, he being in, yeah, no way. And so he was actually able to, you know, get the actual name of the program. And they had created, I think, a special compartment for planning this thing and kept it fairly small.

Starting point is 00:41:17 and I think he was wrote about it for the LA Times of the time so he just he broke that and it's just like it just goes to show the fact that the rest of the media didn't report that I mean he himself was former military intelligence has a lot of perspective from both inside and outside that informs what he does and crucially he's critical of these institutions in a way that I think a lot of you know press likes to think they're critical but since they rely on them for sourcing so much you have a audience capture of the sort that's kind of similar to social media where people end up having to say things that they know their audience wants to hear in that same fashion the media has to not say things that their sources don't necessarily want to hear because they don't lose their sources and he's always been willing to burn bridges well that's actually that's a huge point right there and i know you've run into this before it's like you know the access journalism becomes a drug because people are like oh my god i i do it took fucking six years to develop this amazing source at you know government place x and if i do this story i'm going to lose them forever and lose access to the fucking 10 people that they connected me to and so it's easy for me to sit at home and be like well of course you should just report the story as is and then i remember i'm like well these are people too they got you know kids to send to college and whatever and they will explicitly say that in like candid conversation you know i mean this is their livelihood if if you've um you know you really sleep in the bed that you make for yourself and if you were this access person that's what you're

Starting point is 00:42:49 worth to these companies yeah i've had my friend joby work on the podcast a few times i don't know if you ever seen his work before not familiar so he's a long time washington post guy two-time pulitzer winner he wrote the book black flags in 2015 oh yeah i know this is yeah yeah which is like the explanation book on isis and what that whole thing was but he's very candid about that aspect of things when i talk with them which i really appreciate he's like the best example is uh you know you'll have guys come to you and say hey if you report the story people are going to die you know you did a great job you got your finger on the polls but if you report this x y and z are going to die and it's bloods on your hands and then he's like we then have to go into

Starting point is 00:43:37 a conference room me and two editors and decide if they're lying to us or if they're not and you know do we send it and i don't envy that position because on the one hand you're a bootlicker if you decide to crush the story and then you find out it's bullshit either way people are going to paint it that way and then on the other hand it's like you know you're reported and then you know maybe 70 people get blown up somewhere like you got to sleep that night and think about that but it's your it's your job because they're supposed to be a bigger picture you know it gets very very weird yeah and try living in washington where you have friends that are you're going to lose if you say something a certain way i mean i was very careful and proscribed not to develop friendships with

Starting point is 00:44:20 people because i knew that that would happen but i see a lot of younger people that don't know better and they become friends with these guys and so there's yeah there's all these different forms kind of i call it soft blackmail where um it's not just uh you you mentioned one your your your career viability your ability to make money but i just as often maybe even more just see it as like well, I don't want to make my friend's life a headache. And I kind of get that. And so the solution to that is not to become friends with the things that you need to cover. And unfortunately, no one, they're not going to teach you that in journalism school. Right. Now, how many years again were you in D.C.? About four years, I think. So how would you do that? I mean, that's

Starting point is 00:44:58 impressive. Because it's, listen, it's really hard to talk with someone, you know, 40 times for one story over a year-long period and you know in that time have a drink with them hear about their family talk about yours have this human interaction and not and like be able to keep up that wall while maintaining their trust how did you do that so I approach sources differently on the one hand there tends to be a really big premium placed on senior source high-level sources like four star generals three-star generals to give you an example I reported on a bunch of documents that were leaked to me about it's the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles.

Starting point is 00:45:38 And the reason I was able to do that before the Times and all the other outlets did and report that it was called, what was it, Operation X-Calibre, which I thought was a funny kind of ND kind of name. And I remember reporting that and thinking, how did no other media? Because everyone's looking at this thing

Starting point is 00:45:52 that's like of political importance, federal government, you know, imposing into a state, like what do we think about this? And obviously the whole media was interested in it. And I remember thinking, how did I get that? And I realized, you know, I talked to my editor about it. He says, it's because you talk to the mid-level guys. I was actually talking to the guardsmen.

Starting point is 00:46:08 Many reporters are sort of trained to think, okay, you've got to talk to the two-star general or the three-star general. It's like this perspective that high up means better insight, and it's just not true. It's like saying that Jeff Bezos knows more about a fulfillment center than some guy working in it. Like, okay, he might know more about, like,

Starting point is 00:46:27 leadership stuff, but he's not on the ground by doing it, you know? Also, if you're just going to have to say, like, according to an anonymous source or a source close to the situation, And in some ways, what's the difference? Because it's just about does this person have access to the user? Well, an editor would be like, well, this is just some guy. Like, how do we know that he's, there's so much anxiety and fear about, like, you know,

Starting point is 00:46:46 if you're a three-star generally, you're basically a politician. And you have to know how to interact with other leadership elements and things. And so editors will see that and they'll kind of heave a sigh of relief that it's like, okay, this is some big fancy guy who knows the Washington game. He's not going to get out of her skis and something. And I don't really think that's true. I think they'll avoid political embarrassment. That doesn't mean that they won't get something.

Starting point is 00:47:05 wrong but but unfortunately media that's how a lot of editors think is how do we not get laughed at by the new york times or whatever it is you know how were you doing as like a renegade journalist not trained through traditional journalist school and all that when you were at the beginning and especially like when you got that first gig what was that place called again reader supported news leaders supported news yeah okay so when you got that did they have a little bit of that editorial process in the sense that okay i got the story here's my four sources obviously it's anonymous but between us like here's who they are here's how i think they have access like did you did you get to learn that on the fly it was a pretty unglamorous job and this that's a lot of the work

Starting point is 00:47:46 was just aggregative kind of stuff so like the to the extent that i did investigative stuff it was kind of on your own time which like i really like doing it so i would do it regardless um if you're listening you saw the pay me but uh so so because of that it was just kind of like a lot on my own and um in retrospect that was really nice because then you could build you could sort of test things to see what works experiment in a way that i think if i had somebody that micromanaged me more i probably wouldn't have been able to do that right but if you're doing it at the end it's less micromanagement right the way i understand i've never been in these rooms but the way i understand is like you know maybe at the new york times or something like that you got to constantly

Starting point is 00:48:25 throughout working on a story like check you know almost get the corporate check of approval at each step but this sounds like it was more like you were doing something yeah no it's much less structured than yeah because they just had so little money now did that you went to the young turks after that which is more of like kind of renegade youtube yeah and that was their investigative unit so they again just kind of let me do my freedom because i wasn't a YouTuber now what was it like though at the intercept because the intercept is started by gleng greenwald and some other people who came at least from the mainstream world have kind of those journalistic standards was that like a big culture change for you huge this was this was

Starting point is 00:49:01 like the first corporate environment that I was in literally the first meeting that we attended and I quickly learned to hate the meetings hard stop at five yeah the first the first thing was like some consultant talking about it was so bizarre it was like talking about like psych the psychoanalytic reasons to not be on social media or something I was like what is this it was bizarre and it was like and I start talking to other corporate friends you're like oh yeah these dumb ass consultants it sounds like you got a certain flavor of it but that's what exists in all big companies I had never had a job at kind of a big fancy place before. So I was kind of like, am I crazy to maybe I don't get it? Like, and then slowly I realized, no, you're not crazy. You're just not someone that tolerates

Starting point is 00:49:40 bureaucracy very well. But yeah, like you're saying that place was largely staff, but the former editor-in-chief went on to work for the Washington Post. Many of them came from major institutions. So I guess because of Glenn Greenwald's presence, I had hoped that it would be more like, you know, pirate ship kind of thing. You knew Glenn before that? Yes, we were friendly before that. got it and there were definitely people there doing cool work but there were other people that you know were much more in the mainstream and so i sort of found myself somewhere that i guess the retrospect it wasn't really me yeah what made you go there was it glen himself or um yeah and the snowing disclosures i mean i mentioned earlier that the whole reason i got into this stuff was like you know occupy was going on the collapse of the financial institution with that any credibility that i think the intelligentsia had um and then the stone disclosures just seeing wow Primary source documents put out into the world can really change that. Like, they have to deal with that. They can't tell you to shut up.

Starting point is 00:50:36 They have to say, what is this document about? And they have to address it. So, yeah, I really respected that. Because they were the only place that public, and there was all this hand-wringing about it. And we can talk about this now, but it's like, the media's really lost its nerve. And story after story, they refused to publish documents that they're in possession of. We mentioned the J.D. Vance dossier earlier. They just pass on things, sometimes without even explanation.

Starting point is 00:50:58 Another one would be the Mangione manifesto. There's just increasingly this. You released that too, right? Yeah. And I couldn't believe that they didn't publish this. It was basically all the major outlets had it, clearly huge public interest in it. And again, it's not about do you publish or not. It's how do you report it responsibly.

Starting point is 00:51:15 There's a way in which you can write it that doesn't glorify murder, that doesn't, you know, in the case of the Vantzacier, that doesn't obscure the Iranian government's sponsorship of the hack that got those documents. You can inform people about all those things and provide context about all of that, but there's never a debate about it. It's just, no, we can't talk about this. It's very paternalistic because it's like you can't trust people to read this stuff because they're just automata that are going to, you know, it's like the Manchurian candidate. They just hear the code word. They're going to snap into attention. And it's like, no, that's not how people are. Right.

Starting point is 00:51:49 Now, let's go back to that, actually, for a minute, because that was in the buildup to the election in 24, right? Yes. This was maybe August, September, something like that. so you found out that they weren't going to release this you had your hands on it how did you get your hands on it through the actual leak from the iranians online so i don't so i speak kind of critically of a lot of the mainstream institutions but i'm friends with a lot of people at them there are cool people at these places so i don't want to say there's no good work happening in a lot of them there's there's weirdos like me that find themselves in there and they're trying to cause cause trouble and so i start talking to some of them and they're all just like yeah we can't do this because of blah blah and i later found out they themselves got visits or communications with the fbbs telling them, hey, this is a foreign influence thing. So there was a quiet thing going on in the background of a lot of these media institutions where, I mean, I guess the FBI would probably say, we're just warning them about the risk. But fuck that. They're clearly trying to get them not to talk about it. Wait a minute. So the FBI was going to people in the media and saying, don't leak this because the Iranians leaked it. Yeah. In one case, I think Reuters reported that even. What did this dossier even say? I don't even remember. All it was was open source research that the Trump campaign did into J.D. Van. Van. Van. when they were considering whether or not to make it the vice president. And it was the list of their perceived liabilities.

Starting point is 00:53:03 All of it was, the reason I was comfortable publishing it, I wouldn't publish something like the Steele dossier, for instance. Right. Because I don't want to just put out rumors that nobody knows if it's true. It's not right, even if it's about someone very powerful. It's just a bunch of BS, you know? So it's like, I might talk about it

Starting point is 00:53:17 or say there's a thing going around. But in this case, it was an easy call because it's like all of this stuff are his publicly verifiable positions. I just went down the list. He said everything that they said. So it made sense. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:28 it's just all factual there's no risk of defamation there's no innuendo so to me it was an easy call i couldn't understand um why the rest of press did and in fact reporters i knew at these outlets couldn't understand it either they were like this is really weird because in 2016 we had the hacked um clinton emails and i support publishing those things as long as you explain where it comes from and let people come to their own decisions i don't see this as any different from that so i don't understand why it was a big to do that's wild though because like you just said 2016 you have the whole clinton thing 2020 you have the hunter biden thing where we know also the FBI and intelligence got involved and was like don't don't talk about this and now 2024 shoes

Starting point is 00:54:08 kind of on the other foot where it's something where they think oh maybe if you saw the liabilities this could hurt the trump ticket and they get involved which i don't care what side is you don't get involved like you that's not your job it's not what they're supposed to be a separation in the fourth of state but they get involved again it's like they're going to do this over and over and over and here's the thing There's so many parties. I'll just give an example. All these declassified records on the Russia gate thing that Trump has released.

Starting point is 00:54:33 Something nobody, I'll break some news here. Something no one seems to have noticed in it was it describes how, I think, in 2012, there was a Chinese influence operation trying to support, trying to support Obama's reelection. That doesn't mean that the election was illegitimate or anything like that. But what it shows is that parties are always trying to push things in different directions. And so to only talk about one, at the exclusion of all the other, others is going to lead to panic in pandemonium about the out and cause people that really is what

Starting point is 00:55:02 risks people questioning the legitimacy of the election because it's first of all that's not true that there's only one party that right is interfering in these things and to the extent that they're all doing it they kind of counteract each other and so I just I wish there wasn't as much just panic about these things because this is just the reality of the world in which we live and again no one party can control it's too much going on you know you make a great point it's easy to hide a big lie behind the truth and a truth is we have the number one GDP in the world every country in the world friendly and not friendly all air quotes there is interested in the outcomes of whatever everybody we're doing it the Israelis are doing it the russians

Starting point is 00:55:47 are doing it the russians are doing it and to only talk about one that's really dangerous because you're going to make everyone think okay whatever that state wants wow that's unfair and there's being a someone's pushing the scales down to not talk about the other hands i just listed pushing a scale in another direction that's right and sometimes that's what it feels like to me and i try i try to like go where evidence is as best i can i'm just some guy in an armchair so it's not like i have inside access i definitely have a lot less than you do but you know whenever i see something being pushed where it's just they try to simplify it all under one thing i'm like okay yeah well that's definitely not the truth. So what's the thing that is the truth? Like there's another thing. I don't

Starting point is 00:56:28 know where the there is, but it's there somewhere. And yet everyone will coalesce, including the people who are fighting back against it, they'll coalesce around the one thing and push it. You'll have the people that are pushing the story, then the people on the other side of them push it against them for pushing the story. And it's like, it's like everyone just run over here and play. We're going to totally. Yeah, we'll focus over here. Again, it's a question of context. I'm not saying don't talk about foreign influence. I'm saying provide the context to understand that it's this free for all where everyone's trying to leverage everything and get what they want. And that's just how it is. And there's so much hysteria right now. And it's a real threat, I think, to just

Starting point is 00:57:03 the principle, not just the principle of free speech, because when you start saying, well, actually, there's illegitimate forms of speech because it's a foreign, it's a devious foreign actor or whatever, then that makes people open to the idea that, okay, well, maybe we need to limit certain kinds. What I wish they would look at, look at when the Democrats try to influence public opinion on something and say hey look at this candidate don't you want him how well does that work very often it doesn't work particularly well unless you're trump on the republican side it didn't work particularly well for any of them either and they're you know let's look at jeb bush for instance tens of millions of dollars put into this guy to try to influence your opinion

Starting point is 00:57:37 and those are americans writing for their own cultural milieu to try to influence them how good do you think some russian guy a g r u officer is going to be or some try like it's not let's put this in proportion you know like our corporations are trying to shape thought in the u.s all the time around advertising marketing and their impact is limited how effective do you think a much smaller campaign run by foreigners is going to be much it's going to be much weaker yeah i think you have to worry way more about like infrastructure concerns and things like that like oh could another country shut down our power grids or or like the national security threats because to your point you have all different interests operating at the same time around the

Starting point is 00:58:19 world. So I don't want to make it overly simple. It doesn't work this way perfectly, but a lot of it cancels itself out. You have one government that's really trying to do some. Another government is trying to do another thing. It's all underground. And like this bot campaign versus that bot campaign, you know, it's going to land where it lands. It really bespeaks the contempt that I think that like elite quarters have for ordinary people where they think that they're just automata repeating stuff they heard. And if you ever talk to a person, you will hear all kinds of different ideas and you realize people are way more complex than they're giving credit for yes yeah and and also you know this is where it gets simple though too not to make the opposite point of view but like

Starting point is 00:59:00 you have to understand the people a lot of people vote on the one two or three things that are really important to them and that has to do with their environment and where they're from and usually most importantly like what's best for their family in some way something that's personal to them it doesn't make them a simpleton or something like that It's just human nature. So people can't comprehend that someone would vote for this thing because they support that when in reality the person you're talking to is voting for this other person because there's something completely different from that that actually affects their life. Yeah, I think of my mom who was a Bernie person and then she was a Trump person. Now she's not a Trump person.

Starting point is 00:59:39 And it's like if you were to say that in Washington, they would look at you like, what? How can this right wing and its left wing? But it's to the point you're saying she wants change like big change and she's very dissatisfied with this. And so to me, it's common sense that these cases exist, but the fact that that can't be understood in the Beltway shows how out of touch they are. Yeah. And the Bernie thing in 2016, you could see that. Like the maybe the more like college urbanite Bernie types when it got to the election, they didn't vote for Trump. They just sat out or some of them held their nose and voted for Hillary. But you had in places like Wisconsin and some of these other places where Bernie also was like reaching a lot of people. there were people who were more just with the populism who were like well fucking i'll vote for trump it's better and right than what we got totally i remember so in wisconsin i remember at the time uh this is forgotten history it's so central to it i remember the the two or three weeks before

Starting point is 01:00:33 the election when i was writing for re-disported news in 2016 2016 um obama was growing on talking about the trans pacific partnership which was like the updated nafta extremely profoundly unpopular in those rust belt states because they saw their jobs leave the last time that they did a trade deal like that and he was going around talking about it during the election. I think Hillary Clinton was too. I can't remember exactly. But I remember thinking this is not going to go over well and that is a huge

Starting point is 01:00:59 component of what happened that is just not even appreciated it at all. I don't see hardly any discussion of it. Instead it's all of these cultural markers, there's culture war kind of things. And it's like, well, that's at least part of it and I see that in Wisconsin. You can only imagine all the other complexions of

Starting point is 01:01:15 a figure like Trump that just get lost to the to this kind of simplified narrative for sure for sure i mean whether or not you think he's honest about it or not there's certainly a debate to be had there you know he could just be totally like think the least of these people but you know go in and fake it or whatever right you that's what you have to give them like even if you don't like him it's like well at least he went in there and fake it you put on the hard hat totally he spoke to these people like he went to the coal miners and he's like clean coal i love it you know and it's like these people it's not even like like they had been told run along they didn't even get that courtesy there were just people in

Starting point is 01:01:53 offices on the coast just going oh yeah that those people figure it out totally they didn't even talk well he shows up for things i remember he got booed by the libertarians libertarian caucus uh during the election in 2016 no this was in 2024 okay and i remember a lot of people laughing about that it was like a funny like incident or whatever but but it turned out that later they ended up voting for him they ended up endorsing him trump and that was a good example and at I look at some of the Democrats, and a point I've made, I just, I have an app that shows me all the TV appearances that different politicians are making. And so I look at it. You have an app that shows that? Yeah, it's great. It's called Snap. It's called Snapstream. You can just keyword search

Starting point is 01:02:31 anything on basically all the major television channels. Everyone go down like that. Really useful. And so I'm able to get like an idea of how much different parties are going. And Democrats, they just don't go on a lot of these shows. They don't do very much media. Like you saw Trump go. I mean, And the, like, really high-profile example of this was Joe Rogan and Harris not going on that. And you can debate, okay, should she have, shouldn't you have? But it's clearly the case that someone like Trump is willing to roll the dice more on, like, weird. And certainly J.D. Vance. He went on really obscure podcasts and things when he was running for Senate.

Starting point is 01:03:05 And so it's like, I don't know why that is, but it's something that's going to have to change about the Democratic Party if they want to be viable is just take, I mean, the media is completely changed. It's not even just television anymore. They won't go on these YouTube channels either or podcasts to a great extent. They can't control it. And that's the thing. Remember the Republicans in like 2012? They had the autopsy or whatever after. I remember that.

Starting point is 01:03:31 They didn't learn anything. They learned nothing. They just weren't as good at like controlling the outcome as the DNC. I always said like the DNC was great at corruption. The RNC was just better at stupidity. And so Hurricane Trump comes in and it's like, what the fuck do we do and it's like he's in some ways he solved that problem for them because then he was able to bring in that generation of people who just i guess like say it like

Starting point is 01:03:57 it is more so they're willing to go in these places and not worry about every little word they say it's like something really strange happened with the democrats where like look at good traditional liberal policies they're like are a world that i come from and like some of them maybe they'll still adhere to. But then there were just these crazy ideas that they'd set the bar so low that someone like Trump could come in day one, like as president the second time around, and like 20 minutes in declare a victory. And it is a victory where he's like, there are biologically two genders.

Starting point is 01:04:31 Here's an executive order. And people are like, yeah. It's like that that's how crazy we got where you had to adhere to like watching every little word and like going farther and farther down these weird ideological. like traps that it then set up all these politicians for failures because if they did go into independent places who aren't even conservative but are just like some common sense stuff where they're like you know why are we giving hormones to 10 year olds they're not allowed to give a good answer on that i remember it's just so weird to go back like you're saying historically it wasn't the case

Starting point is 01:05:06 that there was a party that was averse to not controlled media um and this is a completely artificial and new thing that it's strange it's like we pretend it hasn't happened or something like um what's an example like um buddhajid's to his credit goes on fox news for instance and it i think it's pretty effective and i don't understand why you don't see more of um that kind of thing but for we got to talk about his appearance yesterday by the way but yeah exactly well that's a good idea we'll bookmark that but keep going but um yeah it's like this idea that you can just i mean Biden was sort of an extreme example of just like the basement strategy not going on doing anything right like literally like what do you expect guys like you got to go and address people but there's no

Starting point is 01:05:53 attempt to to you know you see this on immigration for instance once trump came in i noticed a lot of democrats stopped talking about immigration because they perceived okay so there's a strong support for whatever and you're seeing support drop in a lot of ways because of how it's being executed and so what they don't understand is you can mold opinion based on going and talking to people in explaining things, debating things. Maybe they change your mind on something. And instead, they treat opinion as something that's written in stone, which is really a shame

Starting point is 01:06:21 because it's not true. It hasn't been a true historical. If you want to look at like the civil rights movement, someone like Martin Luther King, we don't understand this today, but he started out very unpopular. You can look at polling at the time. And then obviously now he's basically like an American, like, saint figure.

Starting point is 01:06:36 And that happened by changing people's minds and going and talking to people that you might really strongly disagree with. And who maybe they're even really wrong about something, but still having the time and respect to try to meet them. And being able to like do it in a conversational manner, the thing that if I was putting my Democratic strategist had on, the thing that right after the election I was, and I was saying this on podcast, that I would have been as if I were a Democratic strategist, I would have been like, yeah, we got to get rid of this, is when people were going like these strategists were going on TV saying the Republicans, invested in the independent media and we got to invest in our own joe rogan it's like bro you you had your own joe rogan that's the point no one invested in him like this it's independent you can't throw money at the problem you have to throw good ideas at the problem and i this is where i get

Starting point is 01:07:31 so cynical ken because i'm like this is why i believe it's a one party system you know it's it's two facets first is historical every president since world war two truman i i'm Eisenhower. Kennedy, they whacked him, kept Johnson in there, you know, Nixon. Nixon, they got him out of there, kept Ford in there, and then Carter, Reagan. Reagan buys four more years for his intel buddy, H.W. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, it goes left right, left right over and over again. We just play this trick in our minds that, like, the culture shifts. It shifts back and forth based on where power is. And then the second thing is, you look at where the Democrats were in this last cycle. If in 2020, they had just done this said all right we're not going to let just like random criminals come across the border we're going to stop with all this woke shit we're going to stop telling people to trans their kids we're going to stop with telling people whether or not they can get the vaccine and we're going to stop supporting endless wars and we're not going to email Twitter and tell them to censor stuff those are six things that if they did that the whole country or a lot of the country would have voted

Starting point is 01:08:36 for it's right there those aren't like extreme ideas but they wouldn't do it which tells me it's like the game is rigged. Well, I think that when I look at the political system, one thing that makes me feel better about it is that when you see the decisions that are made, that's like half the country or less than half the country voting. And to the extent that more people get involved, that's when you see someone like Obama or someone like JFK or somebody. I mean, Trump was even an example of motivating people to vote who don't ordinarily

Starting point is 01:09:06 vote. And it's when you see those moments that interesting things that you didn't think were possible. I mean, we just saw the Mamdani election, and however you feel about him, everyone said, this isn't possible. And then, boom, suddenly it's possible. And everyone pretended like, oh, yeah, actually, I was, you know, I thought it could happen all along. It's like, no, you did. The entirety of the Punditocracy was saying that something like this could never happen in a million years.

Starting point is 01:09:25 So the possible, I don't think, is ever what not just the establishment says it is, but really anybody. You can't really know what's going to happen if you can turn people out that don't, that don't normally participate in the process. But it's the same age-old thing, too. It's the point you've been making. He went and talked to people. He went and talked to people who flipped Trump, like in New York City and didn't say, hey, how could you vote for that guy? He said, why'd you vote for that guy? I'm just curious.

Starting point is 01:09:51 And like, regardless of what you think of them, like, listen, I would much prefer a traditional Democratic or Republican than like socialist and fascists, right? And we're talking about a socialist here. But it's like he at least made the effort to go talk to those people. And then you got Andrew Cuomo, you know, getting bust around with private security just to, you know, go give a speech in some place that. no one's listening to it's like what the fuck do you think is going to happen right right and so i think you can it's easy to get depressed at some of the outcomes um but those aren't i don't think those are the public ratifying like oh you know we love kamala harris or we really wanted quomo it's kind of like there was no mom donnie then right yeah or there was no somebody that was going to go and make a

Starting point is 01:10:32 case to the to the general public so i think no excitement if you will yeah there's no yeah people have to participate and get involved i mean i see this strikingly in journalism. The kinds of people that are just freaks and consume huge amounts of news often are the likeliest ones who are going to want a sort of partisan picture of what's going on. And it's the people that are less engaged that can make a more interesting audience that let you piss them off, that let you say things that they weren't expecting, that let you challenge them. And so the goal there too is to try to get people involved who don't usually participate in the system. Yeah, which when you look at like voter turnout at the national elections every four years,

Starting point is 01:11:09 what are the numbers it's like 55% or 60% for president yeah and then like state and local it's oh it's way low yeah but even for president which everyone talks about online all the time we're still way that like there's a large portion of the population it's just like yeah fuck it that's so interesting to me that in that in these times that's still how it is but i think that part of that's an indictment on the system itself because i think a lot of that 40 or 45 percent whatever it is you know they a lot of them do know like basics of what's going on and they probably do have some opinions on it but they're like these people left me behind so long ago what the fuck the difference is it going to make yeah that's sad yeah you know it's like america's supposed to

Starting point is 01:11:52 kind of stand for the leader of the free world and so we're supposed i i understand like you're going to have corruption you're going to have things like that but like it seems like it's gotten to a point where there's no one to turn to. And you've been reporting on it a lot. But like the thing that I think is really shifting culture right now for people is the Epstein story. Because they're just trying to bury this thing now. And it's the same like, you know, Trump had a base that was interested in this story. And the left was interested in the story too.

Starting point is 01:12:23 But like his base was pushing it all the time because of Bill Clinton and all that. Yeah. So funny to see both sides try to be like, this actually makes the other side look bad. It's like, dude, this makes everyone in power. look terrible what are you talking about now what do you think that was what do you think upstein was um in what sense do you mean do you think he was an intel app do you think he was well so we need to be i i want to see more nuance in how this is discussed because there's tiers of access for type of person so like at the very top there you know people throw around the word asset that's a

Starting point is 01:12:56 certain word um there's much more informal relationship which can just be because i know because i'm the beneficiary of this kind of relationship where you go and you talk to Intel people and they tell you things and you're not necessarily a confidential human source or you haven't signed a paper or anything but there's an exchange going on where they ask you things about the world you ask them things about their world

Starting point is 01:13:14 and you talk about stuff do I think that Epstein had that absolutely oh sorry that's my phone oh you're good you're good no you're good don't worry about there's people hitting you up for stories you want to throw them on a speaker see what they have to say tell them no one's listening it's just you and me

Starting point is 01:13:32 we're good to go we'll see we'll see what happens behind the scenes it's a little it's like a video leak you know what I mean live on the show

Starting point is 01:13:42 okay so there was something extraordinary in the Justice Department review that the Trump administration did that hardly got any attention which was that you know the kind of mainstream response to it was

Starting point is 01:13:53 oh I found that there was nothing here and it was just a big conspiracy theory ha ha jokes on them because they believe this thing but if you read it closely you could pull it up it says he had a thousand victims and what had been alleged by prosecutors before that was like two dozen

Starting point is 01:14:08 or so so that's a yeah totally personal victims uh i don't remember exactly how they worded it but i think so and so that was a huge change of the number that they alleged before and i just read the document and i'm like wait a second that's a big jump so um how did you know who were these people like what uh there how is there nothing else actionable in this case given that you've only prosecuted two people in relation to it. None of the Johns have any kind of like exposure here. And so I was trying to raise some of these questions. And I remember I went on a show and it was a little bit uncomfortable because I feel like they expected there to be two sides. It's a conspiracy side. And then the way they framed it was like, or you're the crazy conspiracy person.

Starting point is 01:14:47 It's like, well, there's a third position, which is, you know, just looking at what this review itself found. And it's not just Pam Bondi. You have to have an entire slew of subordinates pulling these things together, looking at this stuff. And so if that wasn't true, someone would have said at this point, the media would have been like, well, we talked to the people in the review and this was overstated or whatever, because they've reported a lot critically on what happened. Nobody's dispute at that point, but nobody seems much interested in what exactly it means. So who are those thousand people?

Starting point is 01:15:16 And that's like industrial scale abuse, right, to have that many victims. And then, so to your question earlier about, was he an Intel asset? that I would guess, to me, it's inconceivable that there wasn't some kind of interaction between him because he's traveling. I'll give you an example, that CIA has something in it called the National Resources Division.

Starting point is 01:15:38 And their whole job, they process probably hundreds or thousands of people that travel overseas, that come back from a country of interest to the United States, Russia, for example, or, you know, wherever. And CIA, sort of informally, just asks them some questions. So, what did you see here?

Starting point is 01:15:53 Were there, you know, say you travel to Ukraine or somewhere proximate to it, what do you see there? Were there Russians? Did it seem like they were separatists here? This is a huge collection platform for the CIA. And the way that they target these people are people that travel overseas and might have seen something. Well, somebody like Epstein was friends with heads of state, traveled to Saudi Arabia, said he was friends with MBS, all these things.

Starting point is 01:16:14 Not to have been asked that at some point in his years of gallivanting around the world, like things, it's inconceivable to me. So at least that kind of association, I think, probably existed. But then to say, you know, was he an asset, that formalizes it. The American intelligence community is much less comfortable with existing in a sort of gray space of these relationships as some other services like Russian services, for example. And so they want to formalize things. If you're going to be an asset, you're going to be an asset. You have to sign this agreement and here are the expectations, here are other things. so I would guess that they would be too risk averse to do that but that's just a guess I don't really know anything about about it but yeah there are these tears and that's how I think it should be discussed is like how up the how far up this ladder did he climb over the course of his you know whatever he was doing and I mean he knew all of these heads of state who are explicitly the targets of our collection whether it's signals intelligence human intelligence so for there not to be some kind of association is very very

Starting point is 01:17:19 hard for me to believe yeah i've talked about it before but tarapel mary did a couple amazing podcasts back in 2020-ish somewhere in there one was like called maxwells the other one was called epstein she would go around with virginia robert shuffray who's now deceased but that was a major source for her and like they would record some of the people who were around it on would agree to be recorded on you know audio and and run through this it was like a documentary style and the thing that I just can't wrap my head around is they got the they got his housekeeper I think his name was Juan Carlos to go on record and this is the guy who was like watching his New York house and then sometimes this is the guy from the black book is that well he's probably in it

Starting point is 01:18:03 but he was the guy who managed his New York apartment and then or townhouse and then I think you would travel with them to other places and it's like I think it was episode two of that Epstein series when when they did that but you know it's tough to listen to because you can tell the guy's weighing so many different things because he would turn a blind eye to stuff and tell himself things weren't happening but now he knows they were and like there's tremendous guilt it's strange but he talks about how Epstein like in around 1992 just suddenly he's like listen I was helping him out I worked for him a little bit he was a wealthy guy but he wasn't crazy wealthy and then something happened in 92 and he's like he got crazy wealthy

Starting point is 01:18:46 Like he did. That's when he started looking at the jet, you know, suddenly had the townhouse, was building a place in, in West Palm. He's like, you know, I didn't think anything of it. I was figuring he's doing a good job of his job. But like, to me, when I see things like that, that's not natural. Like something, there's money that changes hands there. We know he was on all these weird trust with Leslie Wexner. It's like, well, why is he on that? What are they doing? You know? And so why do you think now there's been this enormous change where you got like Pam Bondi bragging about the stuff she's got on her desk for months. And then suddenly they're like, oh, yeah, no, nothing to see here. In fact, Obama invented this Democrats, Democrats. Like, what is this? I wonder if they actually believe that, oh, this stuff only indicts the other side. And then they look at it. It's like, uh, actually that wasn't true.

Starting point is 01:19:37 And they're just realizing it late. Like, that's another thing about Washington. The extent to which they really believe their own bullshit. Like you come into it thinking it's going to be like, um you know house a cards kind of thing but like you start talking to these guys and it's like there's a naivete that's almost shocking where they really believe their own sides um propaganda you think they believe it or they're great actors i mean there's different types of people in the system but i very often saw real believers in a way that was even scarier because a true

Starting point is 01:20:07 believer you can't it's hard to argue again it's almost a religious adherence in a way that a cynic will pursue their own interest and so if you can create an incentive structure that that um would be better, they'll respond to it. You can't appeal that way to somebody that actually believes it. Do you think we'll ever know even a modicum of the truth on Jeffrey Epstein? Well, in some ways I see this is a populist victory because Trump, you know, this is kind of the first high profile example where he just said, no, this whole thing is fake and it's just the Democrats, blah, blah, blah. And his own base, to their credit, was like, no, you said that you were going to do this. Now you've got to do it.

Starting point is 01:20:42 And there have been, you know, he's clearly feeling the heat. There's been some things in the way of, I mean, it looks like they're moving close, you know, Congress is making things awkward for them with this subpoena stuff that they're pursuing with Bill Clinton, for example. What's that? I think they just subpoenaed. If I read right, I think they just subpoenaed Bill Clinton to respond to a series of questions. Congress thing. I think so, yeah. So these are real concessions that happen when people stand up and get involved in something. Yeah, look at that. Trump and Clinton about to be the bloods and cribs holding the fucking thing together going that's really extraordinary people did that this wasn't Trump this wasn't the Democrats this was people saying no we you said you were going to do this now you have to do it can

Starting point is 01:21:26 scroll down trail what was that Ken I think there's just impression that you know like oh the intelligence community's run amok there's nothing we can do and um Congress if it wants to do something can unfortunately doesn't want to but if the public gets angry enough and forces them to do so as you've seen here they can well we're going to see how much the internal party political pressure matters anymore with say for example like this trump on massey thing that's going on yeah we're like Thomas Massey is also one of the guys who's like hey I want to look at this and Trump's like fuck you I'm going to create a super pack against you and there now that you know the internet can share

Starting point is 01:22:07 this information there's a lot of people who probably fervently voted for Trump who were like grassroots donating to Thomas Massey right now who's just a little representative in comparison so some of the culture shift of like people being aware of the pawns on the table and you know once in a while a pawn that might actually say something that's like oh we want to keep that guy there it's very different than it was in 1995 totally someone like this could just be silenced and never heard from it totally i just did a story several weeks ago about how i think the title was like party control collapses what you're seeing is party discipline in, I think, a really healthy way, is starting to disintegrate. Polling shows that the majority of self-identified Democrats not just would like new leadership

Starting point is 01:22:51 of the party. They want to kick out all of the ones that are at the top of their party. And in the case of Trump, we're seeing a sort of mirror image of that in this Epstein case. And I wonder if Epstein is sort of symptomatic of a deeper discontent, where they're like, you have to deliver on what you said. And here's a very clear example where we can talk about it. and it's something everyone understands and we can, you know, push on it. But I wonder if there's something deeper there, which is the same thing that's

Starting point is 01:23:16 happening with the Democrats, feeling is the stuff isn't being delivered on that they thought would be when they voted for him. So I think on both sides, and then we were just talking about Mum Donnie. Nobody in the party leadership wanted that. Are you kidding? They would have picked a Republican over him. And so the base very clearly was like, no, we're going to pick someone different. And so you're seeing this on both sides.

Starting point is 01:23:37 I think it's a really positive development. because the leadership of the party says run everything into the ground they shouldn't be in charge of things anymore people should get to what they want and they're increasingly realizing i know you know just because this guy has all these fancy degrees and and you know they've lived in beltway it doesn't i actually know better than him and that's really good i think what about though when those people whether it be a mom donnie at trump whoever it is that the people vote in because they're raging against the system go in and become the system because i mean let's just call it what it is we had a two-week period there where Trump bombed Iran to risk another war happening

Starting point is 01:24:17 covered up the Epstein files funded Ukraine with the freshest round of funding they had in a year and up the national debt by three to five trillion over the next 10 years these are all directly against totally things he ran on totally and he's the upside well that's what I'm saying about Epstein I think it's symptomatic of everything that you just mentioned and that this is what happens to be here now and it's something that we can talk about but I think the polling pretty clear that on all those questions, there's a lot of dissension within the Trump's own base and within the country at large. What happens when they become the establishment? I mean, I think Trump always was the establishment, at least since he was, I mean, since he was president, at least. I mean, how can a former president not be the establishment in some sense? You know, there's different factions. Oh, you're saying this time around? Right. Exactly. But like you were saying before, they did him a real favor by turning him into public enemy number one with this whole. you know, all the lawfare that was done. And so they gave him this outsider status that I don't think was really true and really

Starting point is 01:25:16 deserved, but for, but, you know, the consequence of all that was, was him enjoying that reputation. And now the bill has come to pay due and deliver on this, you know, outsider thing that he's image that he's cultivated. And to the extent that he's failed at it, people are really angry and they should be. And I'm just sitting here thinking, okay, well, what's going to happen? It almost feels like pre, I get a very strong kind of like, You've mentioned Occupy Wall Street before. It feels like the moment before that,

Starting point is 01:25:43 and I'm wondering what it's going to be. And I feel like we keep going through, you know, the public response to Luigi Mangione, Mamdani, Epstein. You're seeing people repeatedly say, you know, fuck you. I'm not listening to the people in Washington, even the ones on my side.

Starting point is 01:25:58 I want something different. And so it keeps bubbling up. And the question is, what will that culminate in? Because I think we haven't quite seen the climax yet. I agree with you 100%. i think there is something you know if you and i could predict it perfectly i'm sure neither of us would be sitting here right now but there are some good candidates and one that i look at

Starting point is 01:26:21 that if you just look at the polling numbers it's like this is really interesting is what's going on in the gaza war right now because if you look at the people forget congress you look at the people this is you want to talk about that bloods and crips thing again this is something the left and right is very united on like what we're seeing here about appears to be a form of genocide at this point. There's starvation going on. Yes, there is certainly propaganda from Hamas. You have to build that in, but like, not all of it.

Starting point is 01:26:50 And we see our, we'll see our politicians who are paid by APAC and other organizations that are friendly to Israel come up and say the same exact lines, tweet that we can pull up the screenshots of them all tweeting the same exact thing. They look like when they get asked a question about it, they look like they're in a hostage video. Like there's someone behind them with a gun or something. It's bizarre. G.C. Slotkin was unreal. Just insane. And also, if you look at the polling now, very recently, you know, something like 80 or 90% of Democrats are opposed to the war, that's, you would be hard-pressed to find anything that there's that much agreement. I think the polling's wrong. I think it's probably 99% of it. Totally.

Starting point is 01:27:30 Yeah. And so you see the entirety of the party, like, voters, which is supposed to be the point of political parties, is responding to what people want. And then the actual party in Congress, the exact opposite of that, 90% of the party supports or isn't opposed to the war in any meaningful sense. And it's just like that cannot persist, you know, where there's a complete consensus on something on the part of the country. And then leadership is the reverse. And they're like, they're elected to support what their constituents. Right.

Starting point is 01:28:02 They're representatives. That's what they're supposed to do. Who was that guy, I don't know his name, but it was in Wisconsin, I think. there was a there was a representative who was doing like his his local meeting or whatever i guess while they're on what's it called like recess or whatever what was this guy's name seal or seal or something like that he's from your state i don't know damn it what do you think yeah can we go to twitter joe wisconsin rep israel and there's like a minute 30 video of this guy just getting murked at his look yeah that's it that's it pull that pull that bad boy up he's just getting

Starting point is 01:28:40 killed at his local meeting and this guy's been funded to the tune of 131,000 dollars by apac and he just goes right to the listen Israel is a right to defend itself and it's like bro oh the people that are like booing yeah watch this this is great this is what i mean about the disconnect you're talking about this in video form Can you have my heart? Do you have my heart? Wow. I want to have you addressed the question that was shouted about the starving children and God.

Starting point is 01:29:20 He doesn't even believe in the word he said. Look at his body language. You believe in genocide? You believe in genocide? I am so disappointed in how you represent us. I don't think you, you're the right fit for us anymore. You just don't relate to most of the places anymore, and you got to know when it's stepped out.

Starting point is 01:29:57 I think it's not. I mean, that was like, you see it and there's this thing. you talked about it like a hostage video, there is this look of admitted defeat on their face before they deliver the preconceived robotic line they've been told to deliver every time, whatever it is, whatever the greatest hits are, Israel has a right to defend itself, listen, we've got to think about this two-state solution, whatever it might be. And you see the body, you see him disintegrate right away, it goes, listen. Israel has a right to defend it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just lay it on. Yeah, I know. I know. It's like, what is that, bro? It's a system that can't last. It's not going to, I mean, we're already seeing it fall apart. This is what Mandani was about.

Starting point is 01:30:43 I don't think, and I don't even think it's just about Israel Gaza, although, of course, people care about that. It's about the fact that in Mamdani's case, he said the thing that lots of people think that nobody else could say. And what does that say about that figure? That his power derives somewhere different than the rest of the political system does. And that is something that people are interested in. irrespective of what your politics are yeah and that's what drew people to trump at the beginning

Starting point is 01:31:09 when he was first in 2015 he's like i don't take any funding and then he got like became the nominee he's like fuck i got take some funding but before then it was fun because he could really say whatever no one else could say any of those things yeah exactly it's like i think about that dave chapelle stand up from s&l a few years ago where he's like this motherfucker said i'm in the room with those people like he walked out of the room that all you know the giant club that you're not in said, I'm doing it with them. And people are like, that's gangster. That's literally what it was. Yeah. But then it changes. I don't know. This, this could be the thing, though, because there's just something about like, like that Nixon line I told you

Starting point is 01:31:51 earlier, where it's like foreign policy. That's where you got the power. This is a place now that has everyone's looking at it. And it's like a perfect storm because people can relate it back to the United States because APEC is not under FARA and because we're seeing things like them try to pass laws that say you can't say anything bad about Israel, you're going to get fucking deported. So people see it here. Yeah. And not just that. I'm seeing interesting strains where, you know, figures I would not have expected to say this like Marjorie Taylor Green, when I'm saying they have free health care. Why are we funding all this stuff? You know, why does there need to be billions of dollars in aid going there? And it's like, I don't,

Starting point is 01:32:32 It's hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with that in the mainstream of America. If I would have told you a year ago that Jamal Bowman and Marjorie Taylor Green were spitting some of the same lines. I saw an interview of Tucker Carlson with Marjorie Taylor Green and they're talking about Mum Donnie and they basically disagree with everything. But they give him his due and they say, you know, he made a good point about not about how he would stay here in New York to respond to things. I mean, that was bizarre. It was like, Israel, Israel, Israel. It's like, this is a municipal election. And it seemed like a, it's a scene from like a dystopia movie or something.

Starting point is 01:33:11 That's exactly. It felt like a fake scene in a movie or something. Yeah. Where they're showing the politicians on TV and they pick like the worst actors possible. You're like, that's not real. Yeah, yeah. That's where Joe and I, that was like two weeks, a week before the election that went viral. And that's when people started paying attention.

Starting point is 01:33:27 Joe and I were looking at each other like, oh, this is a rap. This guy's got it. Yeah, I had the exact interaction. Yeah. it's like all you got to do at the end is I'm mom Donnie and I approve this message and you're good America first

Starting point is 01:33:39 Yeah yeah They literally said that on the on the Tucker Carlson show Yeah Yeah and that's you know It's just getting strange because this is where you get Like I was alluding to earlier This is where you get all these weird alliances

Starting point is 01:33:53 happening where people are feeling the same way On one issue and to me it's like You know You've already decimated Gaza. I don't understand why this is so hard. Just do a fucking ceasefire. Put your people on the

Starting point is 01:34:09 border, you know? It's so late in the game. Like, what is left? Like 10% of the country now that they're talking about? I mean, the extent to which

Starting point is 01:34:23 they keep getting all these warnings. And if they had just listened, instead of crying about for example, the Mangione shooting, the public outpouring of rage against these health care corporations. The media's response was to kind of wag

Starting point is 01:34:39 the finger and say, hey, you know, this man has a family, blah, blah, blah. Yes, of course. Of course murder is wrong. But don't you think it says something that people are responding this way? Ordinary people, regular nice people are saying things like this. There's deep pain here and they don't listen to it and they keep not listening to it because things

Starting point is 01:34:55 like that keep happening. Yeah, you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's something there separate from you know you don't have to glorify or support what the kid did no one should be gunned down in the street like that's not what we do that's not what we're supposed to do in a civilized society but like how do people to your point how do people get there and there's not there aren't enough asking these questions but then cynically dude it's like well those are the same companies that fund all the campaigns of the people who would

Starting point is 01:35:26 be responsible for asking those questions so are they ever really going to get asked I mean, if you look at the outpouring of support for just, I mean, it was a bizarre week when the shooting happened. Because I remember I saw all these people just posting their personal stories about having health care claims denied and things. And so they weren't able to stop that. And I think if this all comes down to this climax that I'm talking about, what is all of this going to culminate in? And I don't think we really know yet. that will be that will determine if the establishment is able to maintain control do you view this is like a kind of as a how do i want to say this in the worst case scenario the types of cultural

Starting point is 01:36:14 gathering storms whether you mix like what's happening with luigi or what's happening with Israel or what's happening with Congress. All these different things coming together in the worst case scenario, it's a gathering storm of like end of empire type events. Well, you know, if you look at the, I always love saying this. If you look at the Greek basis for the word apocalypse, it means rebirth. And so creative destruction. There's a destruction which can be ugly, but there's also the possibility of creations.

Starting point is 01:36:41 I mean, new growing where the thing had been destroyed. And so I think it's really, I always try to drive home the point. it's up to us what we decide to do with this moment it can go either direction it can be very ugly it can be constructive it can be a mix of both as it often is uh it depends what the people who you know the establishment in the elites are going to respond how they always do which is to try to hold on to everything and keep it the same the variable that might look different is what is the public who doesn't have a stake in that system which is like most people what are they going to do i don't know I got a picture of Walter Cronkite up there in the corner. I think about this a lot because he was like the goat of the game and just reported the news and all that and kind of invented it in a lot of ways. But, you know, he did something in the 70s

Starting point is 01:37:36 that I actually think was amazing, which is he realized how wrong things were when he went on the ground in Vietnam. And so he began to inject a little bit of not even necessarily opinion but like really reporting on the facts of that and driving it home to the American people like we're sending our guys to die over here for what the whole thing and I think about it a lot because it's like it also inadvertently created the slippery slope to where then opinion starts working its way more and more and more and more into journalism so all that being said

Starting point is 01:38:12 when you are looking at the chessboard the way you just looked at it with how things are how do you you know how do you check your I asked you about your bias like a little bit earlier like the human being but to come back to it like how do you check your opinion at the door when there's so many storm clouds around all the time and you know you're going to be able to see some things that the average person doesn't even have the time to see because there's so many layers to it you know what I mean yeah I would say nothing helps like talking to the people in the trenches because I can't tell you how many times I have read as much as I can find about something and in our internet age that's kind of everyone's first instinct is what can I what can I find about something

Starting point is 01:38:50 versus talking to somebody I'll give you an example when I was doing stories on Amazon fulfillment centers in 2020 about the pandemic I was struck by how many people said I want to try to unionize now I want to try to demand better working conditions because clearly they don't care about us and I might literally die so what difference does it make at this point what do I have to lose and I was really struck by that because I didn't see that in the coverage at all you sort of saw a lot of sad stories about what was happening but you didn't see um this response to it and the kind of energy that was building up to to to push this kind of a um response and i only could have gotten that by literally just

Starting point is 01:39:29 messaging people calling them saying hey i'm just curious for perspective i'm not looking for a certain sound bite neither way just whatever you and just give them the floor or whatever and that was the theme that i heard i would have i wouldn't have found that anywhere at least the beginning of the pandemic and then i go and i start reading about the history of pandemics and they often have a kind of paradoxical thing where obviously there's a tragedy of a lot of people dying, but that it tends to empower labor because the people that have died that not only gives people a motivation to be like, wow, I'm on this earth for a limited period of time and really think about mortality in a way that especially today is unusual, but it also just makes their labor

Starting point is 01:40:06 more valuable because there's fewer of them. And that really struck me just from talking to these guys. I wouldn't realize that had I not done that. What did you find in Explore? the Amazon fulfillment centers because I mean we all take it for granted I'll be the first guy to tell you I get my shit right to my door yeah me too service is unbelievable but obviously there's some weird ways that sausage is made yeah it's just that there's this underclass that you could find any number of interviews of Jeff Bezos of the senior executive and I'm sure they have their own you know perspective insights but nobody had really talked to these guys and just hearing the day-to-day was very different than the kind

Starting point is 01:40:44 of popular imagination. And many of them wanted to have, it's not like they wanted to have Amazon not exist, but they wanted to have a system that could work better, I thought, for both themselves and like the entirety of the system. That's what I was struck by, was it's not this black and white thing. It's like, how do we work together to create something that is beneficial to the whole? Because everything gets cast as like this existential battle or whatever. And that wasn't, it wasn't really what I heard. What I heard was a lot of people that, um, were, going to school at the same time that they're there and kind of like the military honestly you you know you if you watch a bunch of movies you'll have a certain attitude but and you talk to the

Starting point is 01:41:23 kids there some of the most critical people about the military they've ever talked to are people in the military like enlistees people in the nCO world um they just go off and it's like again another thing that you wouldn't have expected how do you not picked up the phone or went out and just talk to people in the rank and file yeah exactly we're seeing it on the ground well what are i mean i've heard some dystopian stories i i imagine some of them are certainly true but like in the amazon fulfillment centers what what's is there like a lot of truth that the cameras will follow people around and some people i've heard stories like people wear diapers on the job so they don't have to go to the bathroom otherwise they're going to get canned or

Starting point is 01:42:04 something like that yeah so i got a bunch of leaked stuff about the the the not having time for bathroom breaks problem. What I found that really surprised me was that they had systematized this. Management was aware of it to the point that they had policies in place and I would say the most dystopian thing I saw was that there wasn't a serious change towards giving them more bathroom breaks or at least

Starting point is 01:42:28 at the time that I was writing. This was like in the height of all that stuff when it first started getting reported a lot. But that there were punishments for if you had like people were urinating in bottles and hiding them in their car and if those bottles got found you would get in trouble and it's like um shouldn't there be something for where they don't have to do that but no you just get punished if you get caught doing it that's crazy yeah they had like formal directives an entire system around punishments related to this so clearly

Starting point is 01:42:57 management was not only aware of it but they had a whole system for how to deal with it and none of it as far as i could tell was constructive it was just this punishment like it was kind of don't let people know about it yeah and that's why there were i think this it was around here actually in new york there was there were the guys like trying to unionize it and they did the walkouts and stuff and like i get it like if that's what you're setting up and you know you know i guess they're paying them like 15 bucks an hour and stuff like that well the problem is so the employees make 15 dollars an hour but but some huge percentage are actually contractors and that's many of these so they've created a contractor system where they don't actually enjoy the benefits of a formal

Starting point is 01:43:36 oh wow that's like the majority of their employees yeah so they don't really have workers rights exactly yeah and that's a that was a big complaint that a lot of them that's how they get around dystopia okay i had another story um about uh they they created some system of like i think they were paying people to run amazon accounts i don't know if you remember at the time they had like little boxes in their like emojis in their twitter bios no like i work for amazon and they were given these like robotic lines to be like i can't believe you're skeptical of amazon it's a great place to work i love it here and it was like an army of these guys that they had hired and I had leaked to me like the the the records like telling them like

Starting point is 01:44:16 and they were like oh and maybe we're going to have a comedic like uh personality that's going to it's going to be edgy and they had this whole plan for how to react to this instead of just making their not be pee bottles to just have all of these kind of like an army of influence amazon influencers basically they probably hired slave labor in the philippines to do it too didn't even give u.s jobs to that one jesus christ now what about now whenever it hits you wherever you are grab an oh henry bar to satisfy your hunger with its delicious combination of big crunchy salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating swing by a gas station and get an oh henry today but also i mean not for

Starting point is 01:45:09 nothing and you see this i'm not just picking on one guy you see this at a lot of places whether it be mainstream media outlets or you know places that disseminate information it's always follow the money like a guy like jeff bezos owns the washington post you know i think carlos slim maybe that's not true anymore but he owned like the new york times or something like that so you have these very powerful people who you know it's not like they have their finger on every story or whatever but just like the general consensus of where some things are going to go you like leave it in their hands to control that when it's supposed to be this it's supposed to be a system of just informational gathering and reporting and now you've injected rich people into it yeah it's funny you say that that was the like precipitating event that caused me to leave the intercept i did a story about um an amazon or a bezos foundation grant of like it was something like I think it was like $10 million that went to

Starting point is 01:46:12 former Admiral William McRaven and Evil Angoria and so I was just And Eva Longoria? Yes, the actress Can we pull this up? This is insane, this is real. Ken Clippenstein, Even Longoria. And Ken Clippenstein, Eva Longoria.

Starting point is 01:46:32 I just saw this. I'm like, these guys don't have enough money? You can't think of anyone to give a charity grant to that would make better use of it than William McRaven. Yeah. And so... That's a great title, bro. The story The Intercept tried to kill.

Starting point is 01:46:48 That was right after you left, right? Yep. And so this is the precipitating thing. So the general counsel at our company at the Intercept said, oh, you know, you're criticizing a billionaire for a donation that's kind of similar to the billionaire that funds our media. outlet i mean he's saying this to my editor at the time not to me and who was that billionaire

Starting point is 01:47:08 sorry who was that billionaire fun and intercept again um uh what's his name um pierre omidyar so it's like a billionaire philanthropist that gave money he sounds like a rich guy yeah exactly so so and it's like well uh i mean i can't help that it sounds like it like that doesn't make it not a story and so they didn't want to run you know he complained about that and it was just like i can't be somewhere who's not going to let me write I mean, The Intercept was founded on this kind of counter-national security thing. It's a story about William McRaven, who one of the co-founders, Jeremy Schaill, wrote a great book about Dirty Wars, his role in the Special Operations Command. And to not be able to write about that at the very same place that was founded by that, it was just like this, it wasn't in the first problem, but it was like by far the war.

Starting point is 01:47:55 It was just like, I can't believe in this anymore. Straw and broke the camel's back. Yeah, exactly. How long before this had Glenn Greenwald left? Um, maybe like a year or two prior, I think. Did you talk to Glenn, like, when he was leaving or deciding to leave? Yeah, we've been friendly the whole time. Yeah, what, what, what was his logic there?

Starting point is 01:48:16 Because he co-founded this place. Yeah. I mean, I think he was very hurt by it because he, there's this impression. It's like, oh, everyone's leaving. It's like, some New York Times reporter was like, you know, these guys are making money by leaving and going independent or whatever. It's like, do you realize, like, how destabilizing it is to, like, not have a steady paycheck and like have no idea what's going to happen it's like people don't do this stuff

Starting point is 01:48:39 unless you really feel like you have no choice Glenn really try to make it work and um you know my sense both in his public remarks and talking to him is that um he wanted it to work and it just didn't and it's like you get to the it's kind of like a divorce it's like do you know how bad things have to get for for somebody to that doesn't usually happen i think there's this impression that it's like oh somebody saw dollar signs and they can go and make a much money on their own it's like it's much easier to just stay in a thing that works you know then go off and as you as I'm sure you know running something is a headache there's so much administrative stuff that's unrelated to the like actually you know the direct work that caused you to want to get into it that people don't make that jump um for better or worse until it's like they really have to and that's kind of how I felt at that point yes you waited it out a while but you also knew the other side too you had done every a lot of things that definitely helped there wasn't that fear factor of like oh what will it be like can i actually do it because i knew that i did do freelancing for a period of time and then i was better known at that point so it was much easier i have a lot of sympathy for people

Starting point is 01:49:43 that find themselves in tough you know situate and i was saying before like a lot of these corporate outlets they have good people who maybe don't want to make that jump because of what we're talking about now are these the years you were living in dc by the way yeah when you were with the interstate exactly yeah it was at the dc bureau oh and i mean so what four or five years there something something like that yeah and those were crazy four or five years you were there too my god it's a nuts time it was there for january 6th and i remember the choppers flying overhead and just it was crazy yeah yeah you're like in the long haul that's probably such a good move for you because you can say you've been in it and you've seen it that's the thing you're not just talking from the outside

Starting point is 01:50:26 exactly and you know the thing is some of it was i had to remove the mystique Because I remember when I was younger, being in Wisconsin, I'm kind of like, man, I'm really missing out on all this stuff, all these great sources. And you go there and you realize there's some things that are useful. But so much of it, I'll give you an example. One time I did a story on site of what is it called. There was a U.S. military base in Jordan along the border of Syria where three service members were killed at the beginning of last year. I think it was. And I think it was called, I think it was the, oh gosh, what was it? I can't remember the name of the base. Joe will get it. He's got it. Yeah, Tower 22. Tower 22. Yeah, and it had never been disclosed that the base was there.

Starting point is 01:51:06 First we're hearing about it is that guys die, which is enraging because it's like we don't even and it doesn't need to be, like the existence of it doesn't need to be secret. Like maybe you don't have to talk about the weapon systems and stuff, but come on, we should know what are, this is basic stuff about our foreign policy. We have a base in an allied country

Starting point is 01:51:21 that we're not even allowed to know about. So I was very frustrated about that. And so I go and invest, I end up doing a story interviewing people that had worked there and finding out that the suicide drone that had killed these three people, they didn't have anti-air in place even. And so I hear this, and I'm thinking,

Starting point is 01:51:36 you're right next to these Iranian proxies, and you don't have an anti-drone technology after all this money that we've spent on this. I couldn't believe. And so I go, and naturally, it just sounds too insane to be true, so I'm going, trying to check with other people to verify it. You always want to go to, like,

Starting point is 01:51:51 you want to give the other side a chance to be like, knock it down so that you know it's true. So I go to the Pentagon, a Pentagon spokesperson starts talking to me, he says, and I said, look, don't you have a, like, what's it called, an itemized list or an inventory of what material you have there so that you can say, here's what we have, here's what we don't have, he goes, here's a crazy thing. I don't actually know what we have there. And I said, what? He says, the Pentagon is a mess. It's like this huge sprawling institution. I should have known this, because this is always been, this is my point. I mean, they were missing two trillion the day before 9-11. Exactly, right? Yeah, this is probably weeks before the, you know, every year they have their, their budget that they're supposed to go through. And they fail the audit, literally, they've never passed an audit. Nothing to see here, bro. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:38 So I'm thinking, is this guy bullshading me? Because he's a spokesperson. So I go start calling on very well-connected general. He says to me, he says, yeah, we don't actually, like, we don't have a clear, like, we might have an idea of some things, maybe even a lot of things, but we don't know everything. It's like all these buckets of information, and it's mismanaged. And this is a far-flung base that's not going to be as staffed up and formalized as like, you know, U-com or something. So it ends up being true. And I report it.

Starting point is 01:53:05 And then afterwards, the Washington Post, I think they verified that afterwards, corroborated it. But it was just this learning experience, like, wow, the movies where it's just Jason Boyn, you pull up the computer and you look and they've got access to everything. It's like they've got a lot of stuff. But that doesn't mean that it's all communicating with each other and that it's coordinated and that there's any kind of organization. Yeah, that's a pattern. I mean, you've probably picked on it fucking 50 million times more than I have just because you've covered stories for so many years. But even like in me just doing episodes here with a handful of people here and there

Starting point is 01:53:37 who had access to the Pentagon or something like that, the theme that they all come away with as to why it works, and I'm also going to double entendre this and say this is why it doesn't work, is compartmentalization. So like, even the Secretary of Defense, he don't even know fucking 90% of the shit this is the problem of secrecy it doesn't just hurt the public it hurts the government

Starting point is 01:53:58 too because they can't communicate with each other and you see this again and 9-11 is like the most high profile example of it but every time something goes wrong it's like some group wasn't communicating with some other you know faction within government so this is the point I was trying to make transparency would help the bureaucracy

Starting point is 01:54:14 as well as the public and it's really crazy that that point is not made publicly because it's certainly appreciated in private they just can't say it they can't say it yeah i mean people at the very top they don't want um transparency for a variety of reasons but at the rank and file that's well understood that you know fbi has its own i mean the number of duplicative um roles that these agencies have a counter disinformation you know presence within the csa agency

Starting point is 01:54:47 in department of homeland security in d o d in cia i mean all this and and human let's say confidential human sources um border patrol has its own fbi has its own d ia has its own cia has its own and nary the three shall meet they don't communicate they uh they they they they all have their own standards and things for how they handle it um does it need to have 16 000 different systems like that i mean none of this stuff is even discussed because of the secrecy around at all there's parts of it that i in in conducting an investigation that i understand right like if you have some crazy source or whatever you you don't want sure any cooks in the kitchen but then it's a slippery slope to that then being used as like the blanket excuse for anything that's

Starting point is 01:55:34 like well we'll have too many cooks in the kitchen if we get this piece of information or that information and like and there's ways you can talk about it right you minimize the specifics but then can give people general information which is just refuse to do right now if you're going to steal man it i don't know if i'm using that term correctly there but bear with me here and like look at it from the perspective of the people who want total secrecy and this is also the danger to it too they look at like our quote-unquote enemies like look at china or something like that and they're like well they're fucking

Starting point is 01:56:05 communists they not only do they not share anything they kill anyone who says the wrong thing like you know we have to play on the same level as them when at least when it comes to our personal information you know our people don't need to know about that But then it gets dangerous because instantly somewhere that gets into some sort of constitutional violation or something that literally makes you the thing that you hate. It's this very weird catch-22 that they play with. And I, you know, I don't have the right answer for all of them. But like, to your point, there has to be some level of like, all right, we can actually tell people this.

Starting point is 01:56:42 Maybe not the day it happens, but, you know, tell them two months later and we'll deal with it. Look at the meltdown on the part of the, I see about the JFK stuff being declassified half a century later and they're still complaining about sources and methods. It's like, guys, if you're going to do that about this, how can I believe anything that you say? Did you go through those docs? Some of them, yes. What did you think? There's historical significance to us.

Starting point is 01:57:09 This is our story. This is American history. And to be denied stuff about this is just outrageous, completely aside. from the JFK question. I mean, I was laughing at one of the parts of it, where they were talking about, what was it? They said that there was suspicions on the part of France about the CIA's presence there

Starting point is 01:57:33 when there was a coup attempt against DeGal in like the 60s. And they said that people could see when people were in the CIA because the lights would turn on in the building and you would see the lights. I was just laughing. It's like, these are the great genius

Starting point is 01:57:46 is at work that don't have some system in place to make it so lights don't go on at 2 a.m. Because apparently that caused this whole nationalist like panic because the lights go on at like 2 a.m. in the middle of the coup attempt or whatever. And so this was revealed in the document and that's the thing. And all these things you can see, okay, was there a sources and methods reason or were you just embarrassed by this and you don't want people to know about it? Because it sure looks like the latter to me. But why, that's to your point though, why are you embarrassed about something that some guy did who's dead?

Starting point is 01:58:16 that's the other thing you know what i mean yeah totally well that's the other thing is like to the extent that embarrassment matters at all it's like yeah this everyone's dead that was involved in this so it's like it shows you how far how much they get away with because they settle into this move like well they're going to let us do this so we can do this and it's like that's how you behave when you get everything you want yeah you know what i mean i mean from what i saw it didn't i was glad we at least got something like i'll give credit where it's due we got some documents we've never gotten before all right cool but it doesn't you know it those dog i think there was like 80 000 pages or something like that it didn't seem to give like a smoking gun or paint the exact picture of like this is really

Starting point is 01:58:58 who planned in this is how it happened so we have really good sourcing to be able to say reasonably these are probably the people in the united states government and wanted this guy dead maybe they used help from these guys in cuba or these guys in the mob whatever but that's how it went down but we don't have that like distinctive information and unfortunately the other side to that that i do see that's beyond like sources and methods of like protecting some individuals is that if you admit it is the united states government that people in your government which the average person is just going to define as the government right one thing people in your government were complicit in the death of a sitting united states president even if that's 60 years ago it creates a

Starting point is 01:59:41 an existential crisis for them because people are going to be like, well, if these organizations did that, we should just get rid of them now. And it's like, that's a, I'll admit, that's a tough spot to be in. Yeah, I wonder how much thought is even going into it, because so much of the secrecy response is just reflexive at this point. I'll give you an example. I talked to somebody who used to work in the FOIA office of the records office of the FBI, where they respond to people, you know, requesting declassified records. They're like fucking Clippinsteins on the line again. Damn it. No, I was on a lot. list they had a list called um high volume um high volume team for people that filed too many requests

Starting point is 02:00:18 and what i thought was funny about that was hvt is a term in the national security world that stands for high value target so it's freaked out to find out that i was on this list that's a catch 22 for you so anyways they and i found out that they had they had written on the wall i don't know still but at the time it said when in doubt black it out the idea being just redacted there's no downside to it If they wrote that on the wall? Literally, yeah. Come on. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:00:42 On a white board? That's how seriously they take it. No, it was just like a piece of paper on the wall, just like trying to inform people like, hey, if there's an edge case, just don't put it out there. Wow. Yeah. I think that was reported. Can we pull that up? That's wild.

Starting point is 02:01:00 Like, that's one of those things like you're the office manager you walk in. God damn it. The fuck put it on the wall. What's understood doesn't need to be explained. But they get their way. I mean, the only way that, the only oversight for FOIA, and I've done this, is if you take them to federal court, and that's a long and protracted. You've done a lot of, like, litigation. Yep.

Starting point is 02:01:25 That's got to cost you a lot of money. Fortunately, I have a wonderful public defender who does this just, like, for the love of the game. Wow. Shout out love of the game. Yeah, Beth Borden. Shout out Beth Borden. Thank you for all your show. Shout out, Beth.

Starting point is 02:01:40 There are many, many lawyers that do things pro bono, and this is something that she does. But are you involved in any actively right now? Oh, yeah. Are you allowed to talk about anything? Like three or four? I don't even remember some of them because they've been in litigation for so long.

Starting point is 02:01:56 I mean, this stuff takes, that's a downside. People think, oh, just take it to court. And that's really the only redress that you have, so I do it, but this is like a year, this takes like four or five years in many cases, yeah. Are you, now how, so you're going straight. Obviously, this is in national courts. It's not in state courts.

Starting point is 02:02:14 Yeah. But, like, is this in D.C. every time or? This is just in Florida where my attorney is based. Okay. So they do, so they do it wherever the attorney's based. Yes, exactly. And in many cases, the Justice Department people are like, what is FOIA? Like, I've never done a FOIA case before.

Starting point is 02:02:30 Wait, really? Yeah. There it is. Oh, my God. It's government-wide? I didn't know that. I thought it was just FBI. The phrase, when in doubt, black it out, is.

Starting point is 02:02:39 a colloquial expression often used in the context of government document redaction, suggesting that if there's any uncertainty about whether information should be released, it's safer to withhold it by blacking it out. The practice reflects a tendency towards overclassification and caution in government transparency efforts. Look at that. The National Security Archive, that's with George Washington University, if I remember right. They have documented cases where they adhere to this. crazy wow yeah and so the process of litigation you don't just say okay you're supposed to give me this record then they go they say oh do you want to have the next 9-11 on your hands like

Starting point is 02:03:22 that's right so then so then you go back and forth and you fight with them it's really like a street fight because you're like that blacked out part that doesn't need to be there and then the judge goes okay doesn't need to be there and then they go here's why it needs to be there and so you kind of negotiate to some mediated thing yeah it's an endless process so and And it's four or five years for some of them sometimes. Oh, yeah. It can be even longer. Are you getting like, are you doing depositions on this all the time?

Starting point is 02:03:46 No, fortunately, it's kind of like more of a custodial process. So it's less, it's, I haven't had to do that. But yeah, there's, and then you get rolling documents and they'll produce things. Maybe it'll be like 800 pages a month or something. That's kind of like the going. That's a number that I've seen for several different requests. But yeah, it's like its own thing that you have to maintain and keep up with. and check in on.

Starting point is 02:04:11 Jesus Christ. I mean, it's also, do you think there's some sort of weird human, I don't know, draw towards wanting to know things other people don't? And that's part of why they protect it. It's like, nah, this is just for us. That's my draw for doing national security.

Starting point is 02:04:31 I mean, I don't have you picked it up, but I don't like elites very much. And what I see in national security is the most concentrated form. of just that elite attitude of we get to know and you don't get to know um and so then i want to know yeah and then you see these guys there's there's two turnstiles that happen when they walk out of these agencies and places right one turnstile takes them just to some private contracting company where they hand them a lanyard and they walk back in the same door the next day and they

Starting point is 02:05:00 get a test there very interesting and now they just get paid fucking 40 times as much and then the other turnstile sends them to insert news media outlet here where they can go in and say no no no you guys have this all wrong yeah there was a news outlet i think it i want to say was cnn that actually had an nypd office in cnn i'm not making this up come on can you pull that up this is an insane story they had an nypd office in cnn i think so yeah and so to give you a sense of the what did i call before soft blackmail that exists like because you want their stuff and so you've got to write at a certain way. CNN has a New York bureau where John J. Miller, the chief law enforcement intelligence analyst, is based. Miller previously, well, that's not the, hmm, can we get, let's just edit that

Starting point is 02:05:50 to CNN and, oh yeah, no, that's exactly what I want to put. Fuck. So, all right. And they, they've had reporters who themselves were like the senior communications director of CNN, or of the, of these agencies go and work. Literally. The comms guy. Yeah. My editor had worked at NBC with, I think, the person who's currently the CIA spokesperson. It's ridiculous. And it's so many different agencies that they have this. It's just hard not to think it's like running cover. They don't even have to because they have all the stuff done informally, you know? Yeah. They're right there. You know?

Starting point is 02:06:32 Well, not to mention, they have a, I'll give you another example. The FBI has, it's confidential human source um program they have different categories that they list this is all in like public government records um and so they have a section for uh media sources why would you have a section for media sources well the go-toes yeah and i did a story a few weeks ago on um some documented cases of reporters who served as confidential human sources to the fbi i it's really concerned because then it's like well are they protecting sources is the government know what these outlets i mean one of the documents i think described how the government knew a story was going to come out that hadn't even come out yet yeah and so they were preparing their own comm strategy

Starting point is 02:07:18 to be able to respond to it it's like well how the hell do they know that i think it would be so interesting to get you in here with the fed and not like john kiriaku and someone who's like you know no i have everything i have friends because there are people in government that are good and care about this stuff and also don't like it that's been the biggest want to get you in here with a guy who might defend it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I would love that. A debate? Yeah, one of those. Like, get fucking boost amante in here, just like gargle the government's balls or something that can and see what happens. That'd be funny as shit.

Starting point is 02:07:49 Because like, but you know what? This is a good example because... Look at that. Privileged or media source. Nobody talks about it. What am I looking at that? That's a category for the confidential human sources. Oh, just the actual document. Yeah. And this is from the Justice Department, right? Yes. so no conspiracy theories it's right there yeah right and I remember if I think if I remember

Starting point is 02:08:13 it also says lawyers so people's lawyers could be informing on them to the government high level government or union source yeah doesn't it say attorney somewhere can we I'm not sure which stuff next attorneys oh that's gonna be too many yes yeah I know they have clergy also they have a section for clergy come on yeah And I think they have one... Like we found you with a little boy, and I'll give us the information. We'll keep you out.

Starting point is 02:08:40 It might not be that document. There's different ones that itemize them. And they have one for physicians, doctors. And it's just like, shouldn't there be rules against this stuff? Your lawyer are supposed to work for you. Like, it can't, they can't be informing again, right? Physicians, it's HIPAA.

Starting point is 02:08:55 Right. Or just like what? It gets, yeah. This is where... There's different CHS guy then. You ever see those, they're not. bend diagrams the like circle charts where it has the arrow from one to another and it goes like back in the full circle where it goes opposite opposite opposite opposite back to the beginning it's like

Starting point is 02:09:16 that's what this is with the constitution like break everyone's constitutional rights protect the constitution support the constitution constitution and keep going my friend calls it the human centipede the human so i'm going to use that that's good that's so good human centipy was ahead of its time that movie I never saw it actually I just saw the memes you know I don't want to say I'd recommend it it seems like one of those it's kind of like idiocry kind of thing where it's like

Starting point is 02:09:47 a little too real it's like snakes on a plane that just went a little bit insane you know what are we looking at Joe here the the CHS guidelines but I'm just laughing at how redacted it is yep wait the CHS guidelines? Yeah, so this was under FOIA. There should be a leaked.

Starting point is 02:10:07 Oh, confidential human source. I think there's a... Oh, they whited this one out, so you can't say they blacked it out. This is a Matt Cox special, white out. That's what they do. I think it looks less sinister if it's like whited, you know? Look at that. It's a nice, like, Steve Jobs would approve.

Starting point is 02:10:23 Simple, open, white space page. Look at that. The whole page is wiped out. This is my life. Oh, my God. do you ever like you obviously got to have a real love of the game to go through minutia because that's what you're doing it's more from a nucia it's more contempt and like really hating the guy responsible for that and being like i'm not going to let this

Starting point is 02:10:45 fucker get away with this you know i mean someone's got to do it that's the that's the that's a lot of the motive but like the i mean these are exhaust this is not like this is not like reading a nice novel or some or nice nice journalism these are fucking you know linda at accounting wrote this out. My editor likes to say, going up against National Security State, it's like a Tyrannosaurus wrecks. It can rip you asunder, but it's got a brain the size of a P.

Starting point is 02:11:12 So in this case, with these, there will be court litigation. Maybe they forget to redact something in that. There will be another document referencing that one that maybe has a reference to it. It's really hard, and they're fairly incompetent at preventing it from tumbling out

Starting point is 02:11:27 into the digital ether. Digital exhaust is so omnipresent. now that for them to catch every reference in every document and not screw up it's like it's almost like law enforcement says they have to keep you know um they only have to screw up once right and that's that's how this stuff is and now everything is online so you can find stuff instantaneously and so i'm always just hunting for that what is that one thing they forgot to remove because they have to communicate with other age you know local law enforcement they have to convey things to them one game i like to play is ask for the same type of record

Starting point is 02:12:01 But ask for the federal record that was provided to a state and local law enforcement agency because they're going to have a less sophisticated FOIA system. Oh, find the holes in the ship. Exactly. Gotcha. So you know if you can deal with the people in D.C., you call, like, fucking Scott in Gloucester County. You're good. Exactly.

Starting point is 02:12:20 So, yeah, I'm just, I'm your friend, pal. Yeah. Or they worked a case in Idaho, and they sent something to the Idaho Fusion Center. The Idaho Fusion Center? Yeah, so every state has something called a Fusion Center since 9-11. they establish these things that are supposed to coordinate between state, local, and then the federal government. And so the federal government will surge intelligence to them.

Starting point is 02:12:39 They'll share intelligence with the federal government. These fusion centers can be a great way to find out about what the federal agencies are doing because being state institutions, even though they coordinate with the federal ones, they share intelligence, but they don't have the same, how do you say, like just stuff guarding that information. It's easier to get. I mean, my inkling when I hear something like that and tell me if I'm totally off base here

Starting point is 02:13:06 would be that there's probably a lot of information going up from the states to federal and not a lot, like the shit's going down from federal to the states. No, it's definitely both. You think it's both? Yeah, it's definitely both. Because the federal agencies are supposed to be like,

Starting point is 02:13:20 they want to make themselves relevant so they're like, hey, we've got this warning, this threat assessment is relevant to you. I mean, if you talk to any cop, they'll be like, oh, yeah, that's the paperwork that I never read that's the email that you never open because it's useless but it's just some practice that the government does until it's not yeah until like those yeah exactly yeah right like the like January 6th I think there was a report the FBI field office in Virginia had

Starting point is 02:13:44 where just nobody read it was like yeah I'm sorry we didn't read it and they had a warning about it you know I mean it's just it's like anybody it's it's like any other job where it's just like there's all this junk you have your boss yelling you don't really look at it you know yeah I mean even when you look at the buildup to 9-11 when you studied that and you correctly mentioned that earlier, it's like it was the worst communication ever, especially between CIA and FBI

Starting point is 02:14:07 and sharing any information, but it's like you know, there were a handful of people who were like, hey, we might have a little issue here. And everyone else was like, yeah, okay, whatever. In virtually every case there's people like that being like, please, we need to do something. And then senior executives are just like,

Starting point is 02:14:23 not my problem. And then the day after they're like all hands on deck let's go or the second after it's just i mean it's human nature well this is a huge part of the secrecy which is that they have it's yes sources and methods is a thing and that's something you know you don't want to get an asset killed or something um but they also don't want stuff coming out so that you can have a uh forensics trail to say hey you knew about this or you should have known about this why don't you do something about it right so i just wish there was a little more skepticism in teasing those two things out. For sure. Real quick, I just gotta go to the bathroom. Yeah, yeah. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. Yeah, we were just talking about John Kyriaku. He's, honestly, I don't know that I've ever had a dude in here who can just seamlessly cook on the most visual, insane story out of nowhere, and then switch it out of nowhere to something completely unrelated, and it just works. Like, as a guest, he's, he's something else. But his life story's insane.

Starting point is 02:15:22 He's a great example of how the CIA is different than what you would think from watching movies, which would have you think that there are these very athletic, kind of like, not saying John's not athletic necessarily, but he's kind of a nerd. And he's like very well-educated, very well-read. And a lot of CIA are like that, not just the analytic side, but particularly them. They hire a lot of people out of Ph.G. programs. They literally have a system in place at the universities to spot them and try to recruit them. which is quite fascinating. People that feel a certain way about that.

Starting point is 02:15:55 That's, I mean, that is how John got recruited. It was a G.W. It was a psychiatry professor. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It was like straight out of a movie. He told the story in episode 249 when he was here. But, you know, it was like straight out of a movie where the guy goes, you're interesting.

Starting point is 02:16:14 All right, take this number. You're going to show up at this building. And then he shows up at the building, knocks on the door. They take him up to a floor. Knocks on another door. It's like inconspicuous. and then boom, suddenly it's like, oh, I'm in the lair. And you don't even know what you're getting into.

Starting point is 02:16:27 But there's something, I don't know, when you hear these guys talk about it, there's something that's like, it's very seductive how they get recruited because they're like, ooh, this is like a little club. No one's in. I can be in it, you know? And then it worked out the way it worked out for him, I guess. But you were just telling me off air, you're working on a Palantir story. I love this.

Starting point is 02:16:48 What do we got? Yeah, it's a very important company for a number of reasons. One is that its stock is just stratosphericically rising since the Trump administration in particular, but it's been doing well in general. And one reason for that is that AI is central to what they do. And a big part of a big protection of our civil liberties over the last several decades has been the fact that it's just not feasible for these national security agencies to actually go through all of these huge quantities of data. that they collect, but now with artificial intelligence, that's no longer going to be true. They can have things that instantaneously go through the stuff that's collected. In addition to that, what my story is going to focus on is how Palantir is deployed in

Starting point is 02:17:37 targeting, military targeting, so where before you would have had to have human, what's called targeting analysts saying, okay, this qualifies for blah, blah, we can hit this, this and this um now they can do it close to instantaneously and they they have been gaza's kind of the big uh experiment uh zone for it seems like they're not doing a great job they're just leveling the whole fucking place they can create these kill chains instantly where before there would have been an entire system that that would have had to take place it it gets scary when you start talking about people in general, which obviously would include, you know, women and children as like a target or something like that. You know? And, and when I hear Alex Karp, the CEO, Palantir talk,

Starting point is 02:18:32 it, look, I don't know the guy, but he doesn't talk in a way that makes, that makes it seem like he has a pulse. I mean, the company's called Palantir. I presume they read the novel. I Lord of the Rings, which is in reference to. And if they did, they would know that those are not portrayed in a very good way in the book. How did you get into this latest story? Palantir? Just looking at their stock and being shocked at how, yeah. But then also, the intelligence community released its first strategy for AI recently.

Starting point is 02:19:07 And so this is going to become the backbone of their approach to the, you know, just flood of data that they've been drowning. in, you know, since the dawn of the information age, and for the first time, they'll be able to get their head above the water and make sense of it, which I think is worrying. Yeah. I wonder how far ahead a lot of these things have been and how much it's already affected us without us knowing and, like, the game is far beyond what we even think, because, I mean, I've had enough people in here who are, like, around the situation. situation to reasonably think that something like DARPA could be 30, 40 years ahead of us.

Starting point is 02:19:51 So it's like, are we just watching the simulation that was designed 20 years ago just play out and we don't even know we're a part of it? Well, we don't know about the classified systems that get deployed. But I think that part of how science works is it depends so much on free association and openness that I think it's, they definitely keep secrets, but it's hard to do so. That's why they create these things like special access programs to be able to. high technology. Yeah, it's this level of secrecy that's above top secret really tightly guarded. And it's supposed to be used in particular for technology. And the reason they need this extraordinary system is because it's really hard to keep a secret. Scientists talk, the way that things get made. It's really hard to do that in the in the shadows. And so I would guess that things are ahead, but probably not so probably not as much as you might think. And that's why it's important that we do. something about this AI thing. I mean, the way in which it's being deployed with almost no debate, in the case of the Department of Homeland Security, they have something called the AI Corps, just like the Peace Corps, going around, finding applications of this for ICE, for Customs and Border Protection,

Starting point is 02:21:01 for Coast Guard, so on and so forth. They call it the Corps? Yeah, they literally called the AI Corps. This was created several months ago, I think, maybe last year during the Biden administration. And so they are revamping everything about the intelligence community right now. and you hardly hear any of it. Joe, you got something up on this, actually, I see right here? What do we got? Yeah. DHS launches first of its kind initiative to hire 50 artificial intelligence experts in 2024 today.

Starting point is 02:21:30 Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and chief information officer and chief artificial intelligence officer, Eric Heisen announced the department's first ever hiring sprint to recruit 50 artificial intelligence technology experts in 2024, the new DHS AI corps. there it is, is modeled after the U.S. Digital Service building teams that will help better leverage this new technology responsibly across strategic areas of the Homeland Security Enterprise, including efforts to counter fentanyl, combat child, sexual exploitation, and abuse, deliver immigration services, secure travel, fortify, and critical infrastructure and enhance our cybersecurity. Again, all that sounds great, but like what is that going to slip to you being able to use?

Starting point is 02:22:14 Are you going to see people saying something you don't like politically and be able to deploy drones and know everything about them and then use that against them? Yeah, we don't know because they don't tell us what they're doing. I mean, it could be any number of good things, like you said, but you can imagine a lot of other applications for, you know, in the case of Homeland Security, the child agencies include TSA, Customs and Border Protection, ICE, Coast Guard, Secret Service. I mean, all kinds of things that touch on Americans' day-to-day life. And we don't know what they're doing because they don't say. Yeah. And it's happening everywhere. Did you see recently the Pentagon just, I'm not making this up.

Starting point is 02:22:52 I think they gave a AI executive from some big company. Maybe it was Palantir itself. They made him a lieutenant colonel just by like hiring him. Can you pull this up? I can't remember the details of it. But it's one of the most crazy stories is just by hiring him. Yeah. So that they could leverage whatever the knowledge base is to try to.

Starting point is 02:23:11 This is like the biggest shift that's happening. happening right now and yes the US Army recently commissioned four prominent AI execs into the rank of the lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve this happened around June 2025 the executives are Shyam Sanker Andrew Bosworth look at that Palantier meta open AI I mean God these are the same people that you saw during Trump's we were just talking about this off off screen during Trump's inauguration all of these tech CEOs it looked like they were inaugurating the president and that is like the perfect symbol of exactly what's happening

Starting point is 02:23:42 The intelligence community just recently put out a strategy for prioritizing coordination with private corporations. And they've described in their strategy documents how corporations are these tech companies are basically the new nation state. They're as powerful as nation states now. And so they're increasingly farming out a lot of their responsibilities to these companies. So for people that care about civil liberties that care about freedom, you know, opposing what the government does is going to look a lot different in the 21st century than it's in the 20th century. than it did in the 20th century because so much of this is carried out by these private actors i remember the first time andy boostamante sat in with me he simplified something for me that you know there's things he says i totally disagree with but then there's some stuff he says

Starting point is 02:24:27 about how the world is viewed that it's like oh my god how did i never duh and one of those things is he's like the only thing that matters is GDP was your output that's where the power is it's what runs the world so when you look at these companies i forget offhand what it was maybe we can google it joe but like apple for example i did a story making exactly the point you're making and i just listed gdps of nations with companies and it's really striking yeah let me see i think the story is um gosh what is it type in ken clippenstein uh yeah GDP yeah that's the story this is it big brother become yeah there should be a picture somewhere in there you got some good titles bro you got some good so there's a strategy so this was an intelligence community

Starting point is 02:25:08 directive that they put out at the beginning of the year describing how the intelligence community has to work with quote non-state entities that's kind of code for corporations and it talks about it's really interesting they say that they can actually take risks that can result in embarrassment and like in pursuit of this goal like it's really unusual language that you don't typically see and then you had a ranking list down here too right let's see the let's see that this is yeah yeah you're making my point for me perfectly here we go Top 10 U.S. corporations by market cap, top 10 countries by GDP. So one in one, we got...

Starting point is 02:25:44 Other than the superpowers, it's like completely comparable, yeah. So Apple at $3.8 trillion would be fifth in the world behind Germany and ahead of India, which has how many billion, like one point something billion people live in there? That is fucking nuts. So this is the new nation state. And this is only just, if you look at their value, this is a new phenomenon, you know? Like corporations have been powerful, but not this powerful. That's, and look, I mean, you got to say it, too.

Starting point is 02:26:11 Like, you got Tesla there at number seven, $1.3 trillion. And I'm not even blaming Elon for this, but just, unfortunately, we live in a world where how things look matters. That's just the truth. And when you got a guy who's like the richest dude in the country who's in charge of the seventh biggest U.S. corporation by market cap, there's always going to be something undercutting whatever good work he may want to do however you define that because of who he is

Starting point is 02:26:45 you know and now we have and it's not let's not single him out we have a lot of people these different companies that you just pointed out who like take on these roles and it's like well what do they really want what are they getting what is Sam Altman getting out of setting up like an AI program with the United States government totally totally and in the case of Tesla

Starting point is 02:27:03 I mean so people think of the cars but you know I talked to some of at the office of the director of national intelligence who was telling me I asked them I said what what does this mean this phrase non-state entity and you know they basically explained to me there was in many cases code for big corporation I said so what would an example be of where you want a corporation the example that I was given was Starlink in Ukraine the US government was like these guys are better than what we have please help us and so the government is kind of supplicating itself before these you know mega billionaires asking them to do things you know know one of the first conversations i had one of the first sources i had in the intelligence world it was fbi agent who i was asking like oh you know i want to know what can you guys do kind of thing he says you know who we're really jealous of it's not what we can do it's what google can do we would love to be able to have what they have and that totally changed you were saying before what were some moments that that you know gave you a sense of how this stuff really works that was

Starting point is 02:27:58 one big one was how powerful and um how incisive the information that corporations have is um i mean it's not what the 1950s look like at all it's a complete shift no it's not i mean you know we all know that famous is in our tweet about the military industrial complex which is a different time that now still relates to today but this is like that on steroids because it involves our footprints everywhere like people myself all of us everyone listening we every time we take out our phone and we click something we are given away information whether we like it intelligence community can buy that on the open market on the open market they that's what I saying before they have their first ever open source intelligence strategy part of that is to be able

Starting point is 02:28:44 to access what's called commercially um uh I came over with commercial information and so basically they have these data brokers that sell all this stuff there's essentially no oversight uh very little in the way of laws to protect against it so not only is the US government buying it all these foreign governments are buying it too and there's nothing to prevent that And they're incentivized to the shareholders to sell at the business model. This isn't like a kind of minor thing. Information is the backbone of the entire, like a huge part of the Silicon Valley. I think about this often because like the system is set up to turn in on itself, right?

Starting point is 02:29:28 So there's a beauty to free markets and capitalism, I would argue it's the best system of all of them. it doesn't mean it's perfect and one of the downsides is especially with public companies which are going to be the largest is they got to report shit every three months so the top five people there better make something work or crunch some numbers or figure out how to get business through the door so they don't lose their job because there's nowhere to go except be fired and then that mentality is top down to the entire company and the rank and file and so we look at things and we will just call something evil that's being done and maybe the act itself is but the incentive structure has been set up in a way that people who i mean sometimes people actually are

Starting point is 02:30:14 evil by the way but like most of the time it's like no it's the incentive structure has set up people to make decisions that they don't realize have insane reverberating effects on all of us yeah it's a really important point and it's like i was saying with the media before i distinguish between media is institutions and then the individuals within them because very often a lot of my critiques that I was making about media earlier over a few drinks you talk to people and they basically agree with you a lot of people in these institutions they just either feel powerless to do anything about it or in some cases they're just not aware because these are such sprawling I mean in the case of government agencies in the case of companies or corporations I mean they become bigger than

Starting point is 02:30:54 some of their parts and it's kind of like we're living under this colossus that is so big it's hard to even grok what it is that they're doing, much less be able to respond to it and reform it and make sure that there's some kind of sane oversight in place. Well, you also, we were talking about the turnstile going out to defense companies was the example I was using 15 minutes ago, but like, let's be honest here, that turnstile exists probably even heavier to companies like this. You know, guys can leave the government where they're making $106,000 a year. And with all the information they have after a 15-year career there, go right over to Google and now on top of that they also have their old buddies at their old

Starting point is 02:31:35 job we want to contact them about things and take their little something something and it creates this unholy alliance that i mean we've seen this play out you've reported on it too you know with censorship concerns and stuff like that yeah totally um in the case of the social media companies coordinating with communicating with government about material that they consider to be um disinformation I mean, they formalized it to the point that they have, like, automated systems in place to respond to certain things. Like AI systems? I don't know if it's AI, but it must be because, just to give you an example, when I did the story on the Vance dossier, that was taken down by Facebook, Instagram, and it was all instantaneous. It was like there was no, there couldn't have been any time.

Starting point is 02:32:24 So it's like there's something in place where I actually talk to somebody about this. They have some kind of a kill switch in place for certain kinds of, you know, if it's deemed like national security or whatever. They did end up reinstating it after a day or two, but they took all of it down. And, you know, to some extent, we're living in the shadow of 2016. And these companies are like, well, we don't want to get dragged in front of Congress again and yelled at. So they've adopted. And that's part of the problem with yelling at them is like, you know, they're going to respond and say,

Starting point is 02:32:52 okay, well, I don't want to deal with this stuff. Like, let's just defer to whatever the government wants. I wonder if some of that is like if some of that is also like the human makeup for the Hunter Biden stuff where they're like, well, we fucked that one up. So, just Ken guys reporting some on the same people. So let's just under the rug.

Starting point is 02:33:16 I think so, yeah. And it wasn't even bad. Like, we already laid it out earlier. It wasn't even like it was, like, bad. But maybe it could have been construed as bad. Right. Totally. I mean, everything they're doing is in the context.

Starting point is 02:33:28 you know they have a saying generals always fight the last war so they're thinking what was the last crisis and how do we prevent the last one from happening again this time even if it's different yeah i you're you're making a great point here i've i've talked to so many people who make this who i feel like are in in good positions to speak on this kind of stuff who make this point to me where they're like dude everyone always talks about you know the politics of some of these places and stuff like that not saying that doesn't exist yes there's certainly pieces of that but at the end of the day the guys at the top are businessmen and women right and so they got to make decisions for the business and to your point none of them want to be dragged in front of congress on november 10th insert year here after by the party that lost to be grilled about why it's their fault that the other party won and so they're going to do whatever they can in c y a society cover your ass to make sure that that that doesn't doesn't happen. And what's inevitably going to happen in that case, as we have seen play out in all of the last three elections at the very least, is some sort of mistake pertaining to free speech being interrupted and actual things that then, whether it's your dossier, whether it's Hunter Biden thing, whether it's WikiLeat, whatever it is, something that actually perhaps affects the outcome of an election.

Starting point is 02:34:50 Totally. And that's not always weighed because it's just all this hysterical coverage about, oh, they didn't take this down. They didn't take that down. It's like, well, consider. the counterfactual, that they're proactively going out and taking all these things down, isn't their concern that they do the wrong thing? And clearly we see that they have done so. Strange times, Ben. It's crazy that we're only, what, like

Starting point is 02:35:12 seven, eight months? I know, right? Yeah. Jesus Christ. To think about that the end of a president's administration is when they really push forward the legacy making stuff. Like, what do we have to look forward to here? especially when there's no election that he's got to win, you know, do you think we're going

Starting point is 02:35:33 to see some return to the normal corrupt way of doing business? No. In 28, you don't. I think Mamdani blew that up, I mean, if there was any question about it. I mean, you know, I was compared to physics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. That discontent is still going to be there even if Trump is not. And it's going to inhabit another body.

Starting point is 02:35:54 It'll find someone else to represent it, I think. because it's not going to just unless the grievances are addressed which I think I'm safe to assume the elites will not do that they will remain and they will take another form now mom Donnie's he is he is a canary in the coal mine for sure I agree with you I think that's a great point it's still it's a big job but it's still mayor in New York it's not like he was running for Senate or president or something like that do you think that part of the culture change mantle moving forward is going to be the injection of I don't know, some sort of celebrity type people gravitating towards like those top roles and that's who we're choosing from because these are the people that have eyeballs online. I don't think we can predict it any more than I could have predicted that Trump was going to become president in 2016. And I was someone who thought he would win. How early did you think that? Only the year of because I didn't really think of the guy much. I just thought of him as like, oh yeah, that's the guy from the apprentice or whatever.

Starting point is 02:36:57 Like, he had given indications of political, you know, ambitions, but I never could have predicted that. And so my honest guess is that the Democratic nominee, I bet we don't know who it is right now. I bet we couldn't guess if I was given, like, 10 names. I bet you it's going to, it might be someone like Stephen Smith who talks about politics isn't from the system, but comments on it and inhabits this sort of, you know, a position that roughly Trump did in 2015, where he's angry and talks about things. But it's kind of seen as, basically, I don't laugh stuff off. like media seems happy to do yeah where they'll go Steven Smith you've seen some of this polling right I mean he polls above like you know some of the top Democrats it's not to say that he would win but I'm saying that there's clearly interested in an outsider at this point

Starting point is 02:37:41 which by definition means that we won't know the person's name at least in a political context first they laugh then they yell then they drink exactly over and over again they're gonna they're gonna find a way to make the same mistakes and whether it's with him or someone else it does feel like the way our world works now everything is about attention and influence and you know

Starting point is 02:38:05 there is a facade that's now down of like the politicians the politicians that get attention now are the ones that at least try to play the game like a Trump plays you know be ridiculous on social media getting into fucking Twitter Wars with this guy or that guy you see Gavin Newsom he had a post that sounded just like

Starting point is 02:38:22 Trump he did it's like they're picking up on this thing just yesterday I think It was, like, in all caps, and it was, like, very unlike Gavin Newsom. Honestly, we're laughing about it. He is so fucking. Gavin Newsom is the most shameless motherfucker of all time. I, I half-like respect it, man. You got to watch yourself.

Starting point is 02:38:38 He might come on the show. Yeah. I could see him asking you. Yeah, I've had a firm no politicians rule, and I've adhered to it for 330-some episodes. So I think we'll keep it that way for a while. You got something, Joe? It's like some all-caps thing. Yep, there it is.

Starting point is 02:38:59 Donald Trump, if you do not stand down, we will be forced to lead an effort to redraw maps in California to offset the rigging of maps in red states. But if the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will do the same. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So this is our future. To answer your question, when Trump leaves office,

Starting point is 02:39:23 everyone else will just become Trump. Yeah Did you see the behind the scenes video That shows how he does this Trump? Yeah I've read about how apparently he has like He workshops ideas with people

Starting point is 02:39:39 And they type them up or something right Yeah so there's I don't know there's a video What the fuck was it called? His campaign did like a six part behind the scenes thing At the tail end Like around from the assassination time Last year until

Starting point is 02:39:52 The end Can you? search Trump tweeting documentary and there's like a scene

Starting point is 02:40:04 that shows it and he's just like sitting there while they're doing the some sort of like democratic debate

Starting point is 02:40:12 or something like that and he's like Obama doesn't know and there's just some girl like typing away anything

Starting point is 02:40:21 period he did Nothing for this country. It's just fucking... I'm sure a lot of people out there have seen it, but... I haven't seen it. And then, like, you have, like, Tulsi Gabbard sitting in the room, and she, like, goes, ooh, add in this part.

Starting point is 02:40:39 And he said, oh, that's good. Yeah, add that. And it's like, this is not good for me. It's like the writer's room and, like, a comedy show. That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm like, this is, like, the writer's room. We're dealing with the consequences. oh my god it's it's what you got to laugh the thing is if people like it more than the democrats

Starting point is 02:41:01 which is like a chat cheap yes you know those are your choices the writer's room or chetchy or chachy oh it's so funny yeah i think that was it joe i think i think you had it that was it yes this is it yeah yeah can we pull this up yeah behind the scenes glimpse on how trump posted on social media during harris dnc speech that's what it was here we go Do we have volume? I'm sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 02:41:35 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Is she great? Thank you so very much. Thank you, everyone. It's like a bad S&L skit.

Starting point is 02:41:52 Thank you. Thank you. I've never much to be 35. She's traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist. How many people are watching? Can we tell how many, Dan? How many people are watching? She's talking about how great San Francisco was before she destroyed it.

Starting point is 02:42:13 A lot of inflation and crime. He's not proposing a single policy. Not one policy. Our's biography won't lower your prices at the grocery store. Or at the phone. Out there are putting veterans out of the street. 33,000 homeless veterans. I got you, okay, say these are the things of which he complains.

Starting point is 02:42:39 The things of what she complains. This is how he does it. Wow. Donald Trump is an unserious man. Oh. Oh. But the consequences. It's great, right, right?

Starting point is 02:42:53 these prosecutions were all started by her and Biden against their political opponents me get that out right away now get that right right sorry that's you get the idea they're just they're just working material so they just want to feed like directly into his brain now

Starting point is 02:43:15 and there's no mediated you know maybe Elon Nura linked him in the first six months or something so he can just be like NERLinks in it out no this goes to your point about social media and people wanting stuff you know everything is everything is mediated now there's no private life anymore it's like we're yeah it's like the streamer president basically right that's exactly right that's that's where the culture is now you know people just want to like sit there and have updates all the time on things that technically on a minute to minute aren't affecting

Starting point is 02:43:48 the most important things in their life but it's the pure truman show entertainment of it i feel that in my job. I mean, you're under pressure to produce stuff like every day and say something about everything that happens. And sometimes this is something I editor's been really good on. It's just like, well, if you don't have somebody to say, let's not say something. But that's not rewarded. The opposite is rewarded. I'm not jealous of where you have to sit on that because in what you do, you have to be reporting on stories all the time, which means you have to be putting out information, which means also to get eyeballs on that, you have to be actively going through, things on Twitter. It doesn't mean you have to be ridiculous or anything like that. But like you're

Starting point is 02:44:27 required to be active all the time on there. Whereas like my rule of thumb is 99.99% of the tweets I type out people never see because it doesn't even go to drafts. It goes five, four, three, delete. I like them because I like your tweets because there's such a like palate cleanse from everything else. It's just, yeah. Yeah. It's like so unlike all the other stuff that I follow up. But I'm not required to give my thought. Like, No, that's what's refreshing about it. You clearly don't give a shit about, like, the, everyone else is, like, carefully packaging it to be blah, blah, blah. No, I'm just like, you know, if I'm feeling like Ben Franklin's that gang, so that's, that's kind of where I'm at.

Starting point is 02:45:07 But, yeah, I mean, what do you make of the Trump-E-Line breakup? I mean, that still is pretty fresh. Can't say I was surprised at all, but shit got a little reality TV there for a minute, if you know what I mean? Yeah, it reminds me. when he had, um, Trump had, um, Zelensky in the White House. And he goes, he goes, wasn't it? That was great television, wasn't it?

Starting point is 02:45:30 Unbelievable. Unreal. Yeah. So, um, I don't know. It was kind of, the breakup that we all expected was going to happen, right? Like two volatile personalities. But I wrote a story on this thinking, wondering, you know, who's going to, who will end up on top? And my prediction was not Trump, is that'll be Elon for the reasons that we were

Starting point is 02:45:50 describing before, how powerful these corporations are. becoming and you're seeing him now reorient and talk about how he's going to fund democratic candidates and it's going to completely change the equation in the next election and so I'm very curious to see if I'm correct but these didn't used to be questions even just 20 years ago like what is the CEO going to do and we've all just adapted to this new reality which is strange should someone have that much power these questions haven't even been asked much less you know debated what do you think Elon Musk do you think do you think he's trying to do things actually for the right reason,

Starting point is 02:46:28 or do you think it's a wolf and sheep's clothing? Well, nobody does things for one reason. There's always a variety. One of them is money, power. Another might be power. Another might be interest in technology. So I see him as a mixed figure. He reminds me a lot of Trump in a number of ways.

Starting point is 02:46:46 Maybe a younger version of Trump in the sense that there's a lot that I don't like about him, but I can understand why people, when he says stuff like go to Mars, I can see why that appeals to people because it's this kind of like thinking big that you just don't see. And in politics, so much of, he's like, oh, we're going to have a 2% rebate on this thing. And it's just all piecemeal. And then to have someone come in like Trump and do stuff that, a lot of stuff I personally don't agree with, but like it's very clear what it is. And it's thinking, it's thinking big of, again, stuff that I don't necessarily agree with,

Starting point is 02:47:26 but it's thinking big and clear in bold-faced letters, you know. And so I think that's his appeal. And when it's a response to this weasily, like we were talking about before, politicians that don't want to answer the question about Israel or whatever it is, and they just punch through the wall and I just like, love it or leave it. It's like, I can understand why that appeals to a certain type of person. Because it's, you don't just look at him. You have to look at what is this happening?

Starting point is 02:47:53 in the context of. That's right. Because it's not just Trump, it's what is Trump a response to? And it's not until you look at that context that you understand why they are, what they are. And in Elon's case, it's like, you know, how did you make all this money? From what I've read about him, he would look at the, for SpaceX, for example, he would look at the production of the rockets and say, oh, why do we need this? They'd be like, oh, I guess we don't.

Starting point is 02:48:14 Like, rip that out, get rid of that. And it's like, so, so, you know, like you had these incumbent companies like Lockheed Martin that had an easy way. didn't really care if you had all this extra stuff because we're going to get the contract anyways so i mean that's just a sitting duck for someone like musk to come in and shake things up and that's basically what trump did so i see them similar in that way do you think i'll come back to elan in a second but do you think that doge even though it i guess like ended at the end there and then there was this breakup do you think that some of that worked and actually left a mark

Starting point is 02:48:50 or it's more symbolic than anything and just points out the obvious in the room, which is that we have a problem. No, it seems symbolic. And I think Musk himself has said that it wasn't, I think he's reflected on it said that it wasn't effective or I think he's complained that he was undercut.

Starting point is 02:49:06 And to the extent that Trump allowed to happen, it seems like it was sort of like this, hey, look at all this waste where we're, I mean, but then you look at the Pentagon budget, it's going to be a trillion dollars. It's the biggest one we've ever had. So it's like, well, how does that fit? It doesn't.

Starting point is 02:49:18 But so, you know, it's, seems like Trump sort of let it go on as a is a sort of theatrical demonstration of oh look how much we're doing about um cost but sure even musk himself seems pretty negative about it at this point yeah i wonder how much of that is also tied to like the bad taste in his mouth with how things ended versus like what they were actually able to do but it does feel like even the most one most powerful guys in the country who help fund you know the guy who won office you're going up against such a big machine with so many tentacles you don't even know where the tentacles are are like cynically i don't know how he even finds some of these things when you know we don't even

Starting point is 02:49:56 know what the budget is it's it's a black budget for a reason it's like could it could be 35 trillion could be 10 trillion who the fuck knows well forget about classified i mean obviously that's a problem we don't even know the unclassified uh expenditures i mean you can look at legislation and see that it says this and that but in any sort of itemized way to see like what does it mean it's really hard to find that stuff out i mean i as a reporter i have to look at there's inspector general reports there's the government accountability office there's different things that you can find um you know bits and pieces but um even just as an example another learning experience i had as a reporter was calling somebody saying hey this office

Starting point is 02:50:32 what's that about they're like i didn't even know that office existed from somebody who works in an adjacent office so i can't stress enough how much people don't even realize what's in there and there's no there's no such thing as a government just there should be something that says here are the agencies and here's a flow chart i mean they do have that for like the top line stuff a directory yeah exactly and they don't and they don't have it for everything yeah i mean that's what foia is this stuff i mean there's two approaches one is you have to go and request it and hope that they send it to you another one is that they would proactively release it it's crazy that they don't proactively release a lot of this stuff yeah yeah i mean it just gets a little it gets weird when you think about also

Starting point is 02:51:12 where people sit and how like we talked about semantics earlier the whole USA thing it's like you can dress something up as this part of the government but in reality it's you know there's like I don't know what it's called but like you know when people can put the hands in the machine and move around like that you know there's hands going in the machine and it's from another part of the government oh yeah it's not tied you can't find that in a directory to your point you know so if there's something good to come out of it you know maybe we we at least have confirmation that that is the way things works and

Starting point is 02:51:47 how people can be suspicious of you know certain organizations within government that claim to be doing this and it's like eh you're doing that probably not yeah USAID is a good example of that because you know to the extent that it does things that help people which I'm sure that it does that's good but how much do we know about this thing and you know so much of it is opaque and to the extent that I've read oversight reports on it a lot of money you spend on administrative costs. And of course, it's about the advancement of U.S. geopolitical aims, which isn't necessarily bad.

Starting point is 02:52:21 But that's different in character than, you know, just helping people. Right. And so, you know, I think there's just effort to try to say, oh, you're against helping people. And it's like, well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. So to the extent that people, you involve people in it to get them to question things, I think that's good. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:52:35 And rather than just have this all be decisions that are made in Washington that, that is never really discussed. Elon also came in at a time where people were extremely concerned like came into political process I should say at a time where people were very concerned about free speech and things that were happening on platforms and I believe when he was literally like taken over Twitter that's when you were reporting on some of the stuff with Homeland Security that was the one with with Lee Fang you were doing right back then so what did you guys find there the Homeland Security was trying to do? vis-a-vis some of these companies to, like, censored disinformation? Yeah, so they had kind of modes of communication set up. Subsequently, I found out even gaming companies do with a lot of these national security entities in which they could communicate with them

Starting point is 02:53:29 about threats of foreign influence operations. And the thing is, it kept growing. It was, like, sprawling. At first, it's something narrow, like, you know, Russian disinformation, maybe Ukraine. And then it starts to spread to health disinformation around COVID. And it was kind of like, well, what are, okay, first of all, they're not really talking about it. Second of all, what are going to be the guardrails in place?

Starting point is 02:53:53 Like at what point, like, there's an endless amount of like falsehoods if that's what you're looking at. I mean, I don't understand, I don't like the word disinformation because it's kind of like, it's sort of a paranoid word. It assumes that somebody's spreading something that's false on purpose. I think we all know people that just believe wrong things because they just believe wrong things. You don't have to assume that. they're trying to operate some deception or something but but so that was kind of the focus of it and and then once we reported on it um it was kind of crazy because it was like department of home on security is doing it FBI is doing it um uh DOD has its own thing and so it's like this huge

Starting point is 02:54:30 thing that they're popping up like daisies ever they created something called the foreign malign influence center foreign malign influence center yeah and that was in 2024 I think where it was create at the level of the Office of Director of National Intelligence. So this was like a really senior level position as opposed to like the lower level efforts that had been going on before. And I started reading about it. I was like, what's the point of this? And it hadn't been reported. I think, yeah, I was the first

Starting point is 02:54:52 to report it. And I say that because I'm sort of sad that it's like something that important didn't get any coverage. Because not only is it another agency, it turns out they had created so many of these kind of disinformation agencies that they needed the formal and influence center to coordinate with all of them. Because it was getting to be such a mess with all of the different agencies doing duplicative and overlapping things so that gives you a sense of the breadth of what was happening and again prior to my story there had not been a single thing written

Starting point is 02:55:19 about this intelligence community that i mean got enough money was spent on it but also to the point just this massive machine that had been developed sounds like they read 1984 this took the wrong takeaway right there well i mean the the thing that people have to accept and it sucks And we said this, I mean, at least, I know a lot of people who were saying this. I was saying this a few years ago when he went to take over. It's like, free speech is painful. You're going to get some bad shit. I mean, you and I can both open up Twitter every day and be like, woo.

Starting point is 02:55:54 Yeah, this is. It's ugly. It's very ugly. Freedom comes at a price. But exactly. The alternative is historically worse every time. Totally. And I always have to remind myself of that because sometimes I'm like, can't they just.

Starting point is 02:56:07 No, I get it. I feel that too. do that you got to let them that they're crazy you got to let good speech win and that's that's the world we're living in but it's helpful when guys like you were also finding some of these things and bringing it to the people to be like yo this is a real concern and here's how they're doing it and you should know about it and it gives us all an understanding of what's happening out there so i appreciate your work in in kind of getting that out to the people also doing it from a position like you were at the intercept at the time but now you have your own substack and

Starting point is 02:56:39 you're back completely on your own just reporting on everything and it's it's great stuff so people should go hit the link in description thanks man yes they should i second that but ken we're going to have to do this again sometime man i really enjoyed this conversation it was a lot of fun thanks for having me all right everyone join ken substack if you want all the information on all the stories that he gave today and i mean like i said you're covering literally everything there so you'll get your full news fix as well from another great independent perspective thanks man all right everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like

Starting point is 02:57:17 button on the video they're both a huge huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links are in my description below

Julian Dorey Podcast - #330 - Soft Blackmail, Epstein, Palantir Military Targeting & Pentagon Contagion | Ken Klippenstein

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