Julian Dorey Podcast - #356 - CIA Spy on Nuclear War, Vault 7 Tech, Mossad in Iran & Death Rituals | John Kiriakou

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) HOLLOW SOCKS: For a limited time Hollow Socks is having a Buy 3, Get 3 Free Sale. Head to Hollowsocks.com today to check it out. . #Hollow Sockspod 2) AMENTARA: Go to https://www.amentara.com/go/julian and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ John Kiriakou is a former CIA spy who was the agency's chief of counterterrorism in the Middle East prior to being prosecuted by the DOJ. JOHN's LINKS: All of John's uncensored content is available exclusively here: https://rebrand.ly/juliandorey YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@realjohnkiriakou X: https://x.com/JohnKiriakou IG: https://www.instagram.com/realjohnkiriakou/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 — Intro 02:25 — John’s Pardon? Iran Troops, Greater Tunb, Middle East Complexity, Israel Intelligence 15:30 — Intelligence, Cell Phone Tracking, B0mbing Iran, Obama v Netanyahu, South African Nukes 26:41 — The “Peace Deal” Ceasefire, Israeli Gov, Palestine, Kuwait 1990, Black September, Egypt 40:15 — Abraham Accords, MBS, King Abdullah II, Gaza, Palestinian-Israeli Future 52:08 — Christian Zionists, Evangelical Influence, Gaza Christians, Rising U.S. Anti-Semitism 01:00:50 — Tucker Issue, Israeli Schools & Antisemitism, Psy-Op Claims 01:09:52 — Rise of NF, Bot Campaigns on X, John’s Prison Years, John's Cemetery Guide 01:21:44 — Unofficial Graveyards, Saving the Declaration of Independence, Wonder Bread Origins 01:32:39 — Overseas Cemeteries, D3ath Rituals in Greece, Iran Pushed Into a Nuclear Corner 01:45:55 — French Espionage Kerfuffle, Elite French Intelligence, Post-9/11 Serial-Killer Mentality 01:54:40 — French Intel & MI6, Princess Diana’s D3ath, Nuclear Protocols, Soylent Green 02:07:14 — The Omega Man, John Meets Charlton Heston 02:09:04 — John Brennan, Forum Shopping in Courts, Biden Should’ve Pardoned Trump 02:21:34 — Attempted CIA Coup, Congress, Independent Thinkers, Saikat Chakrabarti 02:32:28 — People Jump to Conclusions, India vs Pakistan, Human Nature & Power 02:38:39 — Next-Level Operators After 9/11, Ethical Collapse, High-Level CIA Performance Pre-9/11 02:51:32 — Vault 7, CIA Remote Car Hacks, Smart TV Mics, Parallel Ops with NSA, Black Budget 02:57:38 — In-Q-Tel, Palantir, Civil Liberties Concerns, Classified Drone Base, Karp & Thiel, Abraxis 03:10:18 — Finding Money, Elon’s Shift, “Make Your Own Way,” John’s Kids Not Bound by His Past CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 356 - John Kiriakou Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We were talking about nuclear war. I think it's something that we do have to fear. It's very complicated, as you said. Listen, every president, from when I joined the CIA, the Israelis asked us to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. And every single president said no. Our position was that that would be the start of World War III. The reason, though, that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said,

if you don't bomb Iran, they had never threatened that before. It's the most extreme right-wing government in the history of Israel. Another thing too. I have a friend. He was my first boss at the CIA. In his retirement, he writes books about these little niche foreign policy issues. I couldn't put the book down. And it's not just Gaza. It's Libya, Yemen, and Iran and Iraq. It could be a disaster. I could see the Israelis using one on Iran, the Indians and Pakistanis using them against each other. Two questions. How realistic is that? And two, what is the aftermath of that book like? It's frightening. So. Calentire themselves. Yeah. I mean, that's a whole nother level. What kinds of the things right now are you most concerned about. I worry about the violation of our civil liberties. It is against the law to spy on Americans, period.

And that's practically all they do, where they had to build this new facility out in Utah that can hold every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years. And now Palantir is a trillion dollar company that makes most of its money contracting with the CIA. How about this? The metadata from your communications is for sale.

Mike Yagley, he bought a bunch of data in North Carolina and tracked a bunch of phones leaving Fort Bragg, go across to Syria for five days, realized they were special forces for some undercover operation they were doing. And he went to the government and showed them and he said, I did this in my bedroom. What do you think China's doing?

So espionage work in the United States. We'll talk about that. Yeah. 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 help. Thank you. Johnny K. Superstar, you get bigger and bigger every time you come back here. I was pumping gas yesterday and two guys at different pumps. Ask me for selfies.

You love that. That's awesome. I do. Where is it though? I haven't... Is it under there? I haven't found it yet. Steve, have you seen it? What's that? Your pardoned. John, where you're pardoned? Yeah. Oh, man. Where the fuck is your pardoned? Oh, man. I've been waiting. I've been looking at Daryl Strawberry got pardoned for three decades ago the other day.

Daryl Strawberry. The finance guy hurts because he didn't even apply for a pardon. And he said on the radio the other day, he's never met Donald Trump. Yeah, Donald Trump said he has no idea who the guy is. It's like the auto pen all over again. Donnie! Donnie, baby! Pardon!

Let's go! I will say I have very strong, deep support in the Trump administration for a pardon. and I don't want to say too much but like everybody who I have asked to help me has helped me and I know that I was told that my file

is literally on the pardon attorney's desk so I just have to hope for the best we gotta take his little finger there and fucking sign that paper yeah let's go I don't care for it's I don't care who is whatever it is that gets it through gets the document you deserve it thank you I think it's

It's awesome to see you finally getting like the widespread recognition you deserve for a long time. Well, you know, in great part, I have you to thank for that. I mentioned to you two years ago. Was it two years ago? No, it's about a year and a half ago that in short order, I did your podcast, Dalton Fisher, and Danny Jones. One right after the other over the course of maybe two months. and for whatever reason the three of you together talking about these issues just allowed me to hit the YouTube algorithm sweet spot well that's great to hear and like I think I think what was good

is you had a couple years there going on Danny Joe on Danny Jones's show where I think you did a few episodes before you did Dalton's and line with with Danny yes you got to go through not just your full story, but then show your foreign policy chops now and how you look at the world. And I think people got to see a nuanced view in you because when you just hear this story, you're like, okay, obviously he's pissed off at CIA or whatever. But then you hear you like talk about things and talk through issues and the complexity of these things and your ability to be purely analytical rather than, you know, injecting in some of your old, annoying, you know, people that obviously did some horrible things to you that could bias your opinion like you do an amazing job of just saying

well here's a here's b here's c here's d that's why it's e and i like that a lot about you thank you you know when i was still in the uh director of intelligence the analytic uh directorate of the cia i was i was asked to mentor this new hire young woman fantastically smart she had gone to like dartmouth no no no her brother went to dartmouth she went to uva very very bright Right. So they assigned her to work on just kind of an entry-level account. It was the United Arab Emirates. Like learn the politics and the economics and then, you know, you can write something, whatever. So one day, Iran sent like five troops to this little uninhabited island in the Persian Gulf called Greater Tunb, T-U-N-B. It's even hard to say. There's greater tomb and lesser-tunb. Is that where the Shah used to vacation? No, no, there's nothing there. A couple of goats.

Literally, that's it. That's all that's on this island. So they moved into the tomb. There are the tombs. That doesn't even look real. I know. It's terrible. And so we're talking about it in the morning meeting that the Iranians invaded greater

tomb and they're occupying. It's like, like I said, five guys just got off the raft and, okay, they put the Iranian flag. So afterwards, after the meeting, we went back to our cubicles and we were talking about it. And I said, the Iranians never going to leave this island. She said, why not? It's, you know, with relations with the UAE, they have so much to lose. I said, but that's the thing. Their relations are with Dubai.

The tombs are owned by Sharja. And the Dubaians don't care if the Sharjans lose a couple of square feet of sand. it doesn't make any difference because their relationship with the Iranians is so strong economically that they're willing just to overlook it later in the afternoon she came back from wherever she had gone and she said I resigned and I was like what why would you do that she was great and she said after we talked about the tombs she said I realized I'll never know the Middle East like you do. And so I just quit. And she became a real estate agent. She quit because you were so smart. She quit because she was like too much detail. Too much detail. I don't want to learn it.

I don't care to learn it. Nobody's going to give a shit about it. She quit. I felt so bad. I really did. I hope she found happiness in real estate. I hope so too. Right? Yeah. I mean, that is the thing, though when you look at even just one part of the world and i say just one part of the world middle east is a big part but like that particular segment of the world the number of moving pieces there and the smallest little things like isn't it unbelievable that we don't have i mean obviously we've had a terrible war going on in gaza that maybe is ending now we'll talk about that in a few minutes but isn't it crazy that we don't have like literal bombs going off every day there when you consider just how tenuous every relationship is you're absolutely right and it's not just gaza it it's Libya it's

Sudan South Sudan Yemen I mean it could it could happen pretty much anywhere besides Syria and Iran and Iraq and Lebanon and it could be it could be a disaster yeah and it's not quite a disaster maybe with the exception of of Gaza and the the Sudan's well the last time I had you here was back in February. So this is before the whole attack on Iran and what seemed to die down after that. But I don't know. Some of that feels like a little bit of eerie silence. I hope I'm wrong about that. What is the standing there? Obviously, most of the Iranian population doesn't support their current leadership. But you had Israel who clearly once regime changed, they pulled us into it to basically like bomb forda the nuclear sites and luckily like nothing kind of happened after that

and it's been pretty quiet since but am i missing something there is is there more of that story at this there's there's more um it's very complicated as you said a second ago the whole region is the the iranian government has practiced a policy called strategic patience that's what they've described it as in the iranian media strategic patience. And that's manifested itself in a couple of different ways. When the Israelis first attacked, the Iranian response was to not strike back. And then the Israelis attacked a second time. And the Iranian response was to send drones. Drones move very slowly. And so the Iranians actually warned the Israelis in advance. We're sending drones.

Um, almost all of them were shot down. Something like seven got through, which is a learning experience because it shows that the iron dome's not perfect. Even against slow motion drones. Then the Israelis, uh, you know, killed essentially the entire Iranian military leadership, just took them all out. You know how they did that? Very precise, by the time. Very, very precise. They didn't miss.

Not that they even needed to be precise, because the Israeli policy is, if they want to kill you and you're in an apartment block, they'll take the entire city block out and kill 2,000 people if they think they can get you. That's a policy they have? That's a policy. And that's why Hezbollah, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. It will again in six months. An attitude, I just want to be clear, is it like an attitude that their military has to say, fuck it, we're going to do whatever we want? No, it's higher than the military. No, it's from the Israeli political leadership.

Wow. Yeah. So what they did is there are hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees in Iran, right? They'll never get Iranian citizenship. And because they don't have paperwork, they're not entitled to free medical, to food, aid, welfare, nothing. and they're desperate. Well, those are the guys that the Israelis recruited.

It's like, we want you to stand on this corner. And every time you see this general drive by, make a note of it, and then transmit it back to us. Here's $100. They recruited thousands of these guys. How would they, could you walk me through some common tactics and ways that they would recruit someone like that?

Where are they meeting them? How are they meeting them? Sure. This is an easy recruitment that any, you know, brand new case officer can do. It's essentially a cold pitch. But you're cold pitching someone who's so desperate that they'll do anything. There's no love of Iran among these Afghans because the Iranians haven't given them anything. There's no hatred of Israel because maybe these guys don't even know it's the Israelis that are asking them to work. They could be saying, oh, we're from the Mujahideen

Halk, M.E.K. Or we're from Iraq or we're from, you know, Pakistan or whatever. They don't have to say, Israeli intelligence officers. Might some of these spies who are Israeli intelligence officers, to be clear, not be Native Israelis? Oh, I would suspect that almost none of them are Native Israelis. Meaning they're not undercover trying to pose like Ellie Cohen did as another. Correct. Okay.

Correct. These are probably Iranians who have been recruited by the Israelis overseas, or what would be even better for the Israelis is if they are Iranian Jews who may be emigrated. and can be sent back. Those of you who watch my show know I love walking through New York. I never take the Uber. I don't even like taking the subway. So one day last year, when it was snowing a little bit out there,

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That's hollowsox.com for 50% off your order. After your purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about that. If you love me, you're going to tell them that I sent you. Interesting. Okay, so they would get a lot of these guys easy approaches, like the street type taskers, easy approaches because they got nothing going for them. And then what they end up getting is, you know, jobs in these general's houses as a tea wala, a tea boy, or... That can mean a few things. Sweep the floor, and oftentimes it does mean a few things.

Sweep the floors, wash the car, whatever. then you get the general's cell phone number. Well, we know that the Israelis targeted each individual's cell phone number. So they could track it as it's moving around town and fire rockets directly at whoever happens to be holding the cell phone. So the Iranian government then said, as a new policy, no generals and no nuclear scientists can carry cell phones. So you know what the Israelis did?

Because the Israelis ended up killing them all. What they do? They realized that the Iranians never told the bodyguards that they can't carry cell phones. Somewhere Mike Yagley's just hitting the table right now. God damn it. I will say the one thing that I was really, really worried would lead to something terrible was when we decided to bomb Iran at the Israelis behest. Yeah.

Now, why would we do that, John? Well, there's a good reason why we would do it. Before it was done, I would have thought it was insanity. After it's been done, I think I've come to the conclusion that, all right, that wasn't so bad after all. Really? So, yeah. Listen, every president, from when I joined the CIA, George H.W. Bush had just become president. The Israelis asked us to bomb Iran.

Every single president, no matter who the prime minister of Israel happens to be, you got to bomb Iran, you got to bomb Iran. You got to bomb Iran. And every single president said, no, we're not bombing Iran. I remember a couple of times when Obama, was it Obama? Obama and Netanyahu got into shouting matches. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that we didn't have an understanding or an appreciation of what an existential threat Iran was. or a nuclear Iran was, you got to bomb Iran, you got to bomb Iran. We would never bomb Iran because our position was that that would be the start of World War III. Because if we bomb Iran and maybe, you know, weakened the hold that the government has on the country, then the Chinese may have to come in or the Russians may have to come in.

That was going to be my next question. Did this just prove that this situation, seeing as we did bomb sites there and nothing happened? And did this prove that the Chinese and the Russians actually don't really give a shit about Iran, or is that a little premature to say? Maybe just a little premature, but I would say, as things stand right now, yeah, that's the initial conclusion we can draw. The reason, though, I'm told, that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said, for the first time, if you don't bomb Iran to take out these deep bunkers, we're going to use nuclear weapons. and they had never threatened that before. And so Trump said, bombing Iran might actually save us from the start of World War III if it keeps the Israelis from using nuclear weapons.

So according to your source, the Israelis told the President of the United States that if he did not use the United States military power to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran, Israel acting on its own would use nuclear weapons. Yeah. Do you see why there's a problem with that statement, John? Yeah. Because they've never fucking admitted that they've had them. That's right. So you're telling me that they just admitted to the president of the United States that they have

nuclear weapons and we still do not have them in the IAEA treaty. I mean, if Israeli nuclear whistleblowers are to be believed, yeah, they've had them, they started working on them in the 50s. They got them around the late 60s or the early 70s. Look at, look at Mordecai Vanunu. You know, he wasn't charged for treason for nothing. That's a guy they hid in Rome with the honey. pot yeah yeah 86 no he friended me on facebook i i rejected the friend request that's not what i

asked i know but he was he 86 no no no no no not 86 i think they got him in 19 oh in 86 yeah they got him in 86 that's right he friend requested you on facebook yeah and i was like yeah no thank you I have enough problems in my life. Yeah. Anyway, I was on, I was on Pierce Morgan show a couple of months ago, and I'm on with a retired Mossad general, Danny. I alone. I alone.

Thank you. So, Alan Dershowitz was on. Oh, God. And I just can't help myself sometimes when Alan Dershowitz and I are in the same room. I just can't help it. He's just such, on the one hand, he's a very kind and generous man. On the other hand, when it comes to Israel, he's irrational.

How so? There's literally nothing that the Israelis can do that's wrong. Nothing. And he won't let you get a word out. If he thinks that you might possibly criticize Israel, he's going to interrupt you until you just give up and move on. So I'm arguing, I'm arguing with him. about whether or not Israel spies on the United States.

Of course they spy on the United States. They're prolific in their espionage work in the United States, especially as it relates to American defense contractors, right? And Pierce finally interrupts Dershowitz and asks General Ayalon if it's true that that, that the Israeli spy on the United States. And he just laughed. Oh, he goes like that.

And he says, my position is whatever the prime minister's position is. Okay, well, thank you for confirming that Israel spies on the United States. It's the same thing with the nuclear program. Pierce came right out and asked him, does Israel have nuclear weapons? And what do he say? And he said, well, the prime minister hasn't confirmed that there are nuclear weapons. So I'm just going to go with what the prime minister says. But breaking news, you just reported here today based on your source that not only has the prime minister confirmed it, he confirmed it to the president of our country.

One other thing, too. I have a friend. He was my first boss at the CIA. He's a really, really great guy. He retired years ago. John Brennan. No. He's not a really great guy. No. We'll talk about that. Yeah. So in his retirement, he writes books about these little niche. foreign policy issues that you might say, well, who gives a shit about that? And then you read the book and you can't put it down. Like U.S. Indian relations during the Kennedy administration. I couldn't put the book down or some obscure little window in the 70s of U.S. Saudi relations, stuff like that. So anyway, he told me that like we all do, he sent his book into the CIA's Publications Review Board for clearance before he.

sent it to the publisher and he said that in all the books he's written he's written at least a half a dozen they only took out three words Israeli nuclear program and I said why it's it's not up to us to protect the fact that there's an Israeli nuclear program we didn't classify any Israeli nuclear program that was improperly classified And he said, yeah, I knew it. But then I thought, ah, it's easier just to just to take it out. I don't have any problem. I mean, if it were to me, nobody in the world would have nukes.

But seeing as that's not the case, I don't have any problem with them having nukes. I have a problem with the fact that every country around the world who even might have nukes has to admit to it and register. And they don't. And then they've been on deliberation treaty afterwards. Yeah. And it's like, it's insulting to hear that. And you see the same reaction that you just described over and over again. Anytime a spokesperson of Israel is being asked about it,

I mean, they sweat like a whore in church when you ask them about nuclear weapons. They all know. Yeah. But they're like, yeah, no, we don't have them. It's like, yeah. They all are compelled to play this silly game. Yeah.

It's like what? Exactly. But it's been 50, it's been almost 60 years. And there are credible reports that when the apartheid regime fell in South Africa, They had nukes, and they gave them to the Israelis. Like, why aren't we talking about that? They gave them?

Uh-huh. I don't know anything about this. Yeah. So, can we Google that? Oh, that's been around for decades. South African nuclear program, Israel, something like that. Interesting. Mm-hmm.

I mean, there was a period in the 70s when Argentina and Brazil were going at it, and they were both starting to develop nukes, and then they both backed off. can you imagine damn all right deep scout it so israel in south africa had a secret defense and nuclear cooperation particularly after the 1975 israel south africa agreement while israel reportedly provided south africa with technology knowledge and equipment to help with its armaments needs there is no conclusive evidence of significant assistance in developing south africa's nuclear devices however documents from 2010 suggest israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to Africa. And then there's like a lot below here as or to South Africa. There's a lot

below here. So this is like, this is going for. The Vela incident. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A 1979 satellite detected a double flash of light, which is why they believe do have been a nuclear explosion. A joint South African Israeli test. So at the least what it would appear is that there was some cooperation on development or at least working with the materials, which also would signify that you have. them. I mean, and remember at the time, the regime in South Africa was staunchly pro-Israel, especially in the United Nations. It was one of the few countries that Israel could routinely count on. That's interesting. So back then, in the 70s and 80s, you're saying, yeah. This whole peace deal that just went down, which is tenuous. It's not a peace deal. It's not a peace deal. It's not a peace deal.

it's it's just a ceasefire it doesn't address a single one of the core issues not a single one you know stop shooting is not a peace deal yeah do you see like i'm rooting for it i'm rooting for so and obviously there's been some now like they're fighting over what dead bodies look like when they got like fucking exchange and all that and there's there's been some funny business going on on both sides but but But like I said, I'm rooting for a ceasefire to continue. Me too. And I will commend, even if I don't like the leadership of both sides, which I don't, I will commend the people for at least trying to do that. See, that's exactly my position. Right? Yeah.

Do you have faith that something like this could be sustainable, though? Not with the current Israeli government in place. No, it's the most extreme right-wing government in the history of Israel, to the point where the minister of finance, who oddly... Smotrich. Yes, Motritch. Oddly also has jurisdiction over the West Bank. And Idemar Ben-Gavir, the minister of, which is title now, National Security, I guess it is.

They both have felony convictions for anti-Muslims hate crimes. Felony convictions for hate crimes, not for, you know, failing to fill out an internet form or something like that, like we have here. and they're in charge of the Palestinians. So as long as those guys are in place, there's no possible way that there can be a lasting peace. And listen, the bottom line, too, is there's going to have to be an independent Palestine. There just has to be because the current situation is untenable. The Israeli press has been talking a lot over the last several weeks,

maybe over the last month about an idea where Israel would technically continue to own Gaza, but the day-to-day life of Gaza would be administered by Saudi Arabia, which would also then invest in things like an electrical grid, water desalination plants, a port. Yeah, and it would have to be disarmed. There would have to be no Palestinian military. Great. right it's a great idea and i've said a couple of times in podcasts in 1991 i was on my very first overseas tour in saudi arabia brand new um cia officer and i was working for an ambassador who really became legendary chas freeman he went on to be ambassador to china and assistant secretary of defense the guy is brilliant um he he floated the idea

with the Saudis, what if we were to ask you to build a port and an airport and a water desalination plant and an electrical grid? And they said, yeah, we would do it in Gaza. And then we went to the Israelis and the Israelis said absolutely never. That was 1991. And before October 7th, they only had but five hours of water every day. Then the Israelis would shut it off. They would have a few hours of electricity, then the Israelis would shut it off. The situation's untenable because another October 7th is going to happen if there's not a sort of a pressure release valve, you know? What was it Martin Luther King said? Never underestimate a man's desire to be free. Yeah. Well, they've got to concede something. I've actually never thought about not what you just

said but like an idea i'm getting from that and i'm just thinking about this live and out loud so this might be the dumbest thing i've ever said or it could be like something that's worth kicking around what obviously Palestinians and and saudi arabians are are different it's sure there are different groups of people yeah but they're both a part of the arab population if you will correct what if like a two-state solution involved Stein becoming a part of Saudi Arabia? My, off the top of my head, my guess is the Saudis would find that workable and the Israelis wouldn't.

But the Saudis and Israelis are starting to get somewhat along now. Yes, but we should also not underestimate the Israelis' desire for a biblical greater Israel. Yes. And to give away land is not in the Israeli playbook. And that's the problem here. Because like you saw the day after the ceasefire, Hamas started executing people in the streets because they're a terrorist group. And that's what they do. They're evil and they're going to do stuff like that. They exist because there's a vacuum in a place that's not allowed to have a military, not allowed to have a state run government, not allowed to economically vie for itself. It's locked basically on all four borders. We've gone through that in nauseam before you and I on podcast. What do you expect? there to be. Exactly. Exactly right. And it's even more complicated than that. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. We put together one of the greatest, albeit temporary military alliances since the Second World War. And we went to the Palestinians and said,

you better be on the right side of this thing. Right. We also said the same thing. At the time, The United Nations Security Council happened to include Cuba and Yemen as two of the states. So we weren't sure what they were going to do, which way they were going to vote. It didn't matter because they didn't have veto power anyway. But we wanted as united an international front as we could come up with. Did you know that one in eight Americans are currently prescribed anti-anxiety medications? It is a quiet epidemic that is sweeping the West right now. And people who start on these medications have a very hard time quitting.

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www.amantara.com slash go slash Julian. That link is in my description below. When you check out, make sure you use code JD22 for 22% off your order. That's www.amantara.com slash go slash Julian. Code J.D. 22, Mushlove. And we went to the Palestinians all the way to the top to Yasser Arafat and said, you better be on the right side of this. And they jumped in with Saddam Hussein.

The thing is, is half the population of Kuwait was Palestinian. And Bahrain and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia was half the population was Yemeni. And so when Arafat took a position, well first Saudi Arabia expelled literally every Yemeni I flew into Yemen as that was happening in in very early it was like February or March of 1991 I flew from Jetta and as you're coming into Sana I mean for 15 minutes before you get to the airport all you could see were people living in cardboard boxes or tin, you know, lean-toes and shanties, they had expelled half the

population of Yemen back into Yemen where there was no food and no water, no work in the first place. I was in Kuwait, I've mentioned before. On Liberation Day, we went in with the Marines. And a senior Kuwaiti prince told me, and I reported it at the embassy team meeting, the ambassador. I still remember the ambassador just shaking his head like, oh my God. The senior Kuwaiti prince told me in a year, there will be no Palestinians in Kuwait, none. What was his reasoning? They had sided with the Iraqis. They were all traitors and they had to pay for it. So the problem with that is the Palestinians are the middle class of the Middle East. They're the professors, the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the public school teachers. They're the ones

that make the economy run. You want Palestinians. They're all educated. You want them in your country until their leadership turns on you. And so they started replacing them with Filipinos and ties and Pakistanis. Lots of Egyptians, because the Egyptians are well educated too.

So you have lots of Egyptian engineers, all the pilots at Gulf Air, for example, Kuwait Airways were all Egyptians after that. And the Palestinians were, left out on their ears. Where do you go? You can't go back to your country because you have no country. So what do you do? It was the stupidest decision that Yasser Arafat ever made in his life. Like this was an easy win, you know? That's what I'm saying. These are the types of leaders that they've had over the last 75 plus years who are these upstart black hand organizations

not run by the best people at all. You know? And like, that's a thing. Like when the Israel Elis will say, like, oh, Yasser Arafat was a terrorist. You could disagree with them. They have a case there. Sure. And so was Menachem Begin. Yeah. And you can move on from that and win the Nobel Peace Prize for what that's worth.

I'm sorry. Two other issues that make this more complicated. Egypt. Okay. The Palestinians desperately want the Rafa border crossing open. Okay. The Egyptians are not going to open the Rafa border crossing. They're just not.

Why? Because it'll result in a flood of Palestinians leaving Gaza and entering Egypt. And the Egyptians can barely feed their own people or provide work for their own people. They're like 120 million Egyptians and what they're going to have to worry about another two million Palestinians and feed and clothe and employ them, they can't do it. They just can't do it. The other one is Jordan. Most people now are too young to remember that in 19,

1968, the Jordanian military was literally fighting the Palestinians on the steps of the palace as Black September, the Palestinian group, was trying to murder King Hussein and his family and take over Jordan and make it Palestine. Well, they have long memories in Jordan. Yeah, half the population is Palestinian because they're the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of 1948 refugees. So is half the royal couple. And so is half the royal couple.

Absolutely true. But the thing is, they'll never be fully Jordanian. In fact, Jordanians have, you know, carry a green passport. And if you're Palestinian born in Jordan, you carry a black passport. So you don't even get first class rights. So it's very complicated. Like people say the right things. Governments in the Middle East say the right things about Palestinians.

But when it comes time to put their money where the mouths are, not a whole lot gets done. So putting Jordan aside for a second because there's another layer there that maybe we can come back to that you and I've talked about before. One argument that the Israelis have made over the years that I think really does have some weight to it is that a lot of the Middle East and the Arab countries don't really give a shit about the Palestinians. they're just a useful, you know, tool of propaganda to be able to say, oh, look what the Israelis are doing, but they don't really care about the people. And I would argue even today, even after the last two years and what we've seen, in some cases, I think they're right about that. I think so too. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Abraham Accords have been so popular and so well received around the Middle East. Just in the last week, Kazakhstan, of all places, joined the Abraham Accords. to include Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates,

you know, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan. I may be missing one or two. And the crown jewel is gonna be Saudi Arabia. And I think eventually Saudi Arabia joins as well. Because the bottom line is it'll be good for the Saudi economy. And they don't really care about the Palestinians so terribly much. There's been, obviously, MBS is where it starts and ends with the book and Saudi Arabia. 100%.

But there's been some. messaging from the extended royal family when they talk publicly about Israel, Palestine. There's some who are clearly supporting Israel and others who are like, no, we need to figure out Gaza here what they're doing the Palestinians is wrong. Remember that the king's title is not just king, Malik. It is king and custodian of the two holy mosques. So he has to have pristine Islamic credentials as well. None of them do. I mean, King Fahed took it on the chin for, you know, coming here when Reagan was president

and, you know, there were pictures from the Associated Press of him toasting Reagan with a glass of wine. I'm not supposed to drink wine. They were ready to overthrow the government. They were so upset. But MBS is a unique case. He's not afraid to kill people who he thinks are going to stand in his way, including people named al-saud.

And, well, I'll tell you, Julian, I went to Saudi Arabia in 2020, one or two. I went to cover Biden's trip there. Oh, you were covering it. Yeah, I was there in 2022, I think it was the summer of 2022. And I hadn't been back to Saudi Arabia since, like 1996. Right? So it had been a long time since I'd been in Saudi Arabia. And I didn't recognize the place. Women driving. I was like, oh my God. Windows down, music blasting, their movie theaters. I'm like, what happened? And here I've been yelling about the Saudis being, you know, from the Stone Age. And it's just not true under MBS. His murderous, you know, Jekyll and Hyde personality aside. Yeah. When he said he was going to bring Saudi Arabia into the 21st century, he meant it. He did.

And it happened quickly. You know, I remember bowling. When I was living there in 91, I went bowling at the Hilton, right? It was a group of us from the embassy. There was a two-lane bowling alley on the roof of the Hilton. And they had to put a big curtain in between us. It was a curtain that was hanging from the ceiling. So the men bowled on one side and the women bowled on the other side.

And we could hear each other, but we were forbidden from seeing each other. Like your own women. Yeah, from the embassy. Because, you know, if men and women bowl together, the next thing you know, they're going to be having sex in the bowling lane. Wouldn't want that. Of course. Wouldn't want that. So I say, hey, look, you know, they're moving up to the modern day.

Yeah, now it's like, you know, they're blasting Tupac from the car and women driving. They're hanging out of the window. Woo! It's like, I remember standing at the window of my hotel like I was in the twilight. So they get to relive the 90s, too, while they're getting their pop culture? Seriously. Good time to be alive. Good for them.

Wow. Do you... Going over the whole Middle East, though, maybe we should go back to Jordan for a sec just because I said I put a pin in that. You and I have talked about this before, but like the Jordanian king, who I actually kind of like, he's very, very interesting guy. Yeah, he's the right leader for that country. When you look at his foreign policy predictions over the last.

25 years. I mean, people should just listen to that guy. Like, he's almost never wrong. Oh, I would go so far as to say of everybody in the region or everybody who studies the region, no one knows as much as King Abdullah. I think you have a good argument there. I mean, he's, he's, it's a guy who never wanted the job. He's been Western educated as well. Never expected to get the job. Never expected to get his dad was dying and said, it's going to be you, not the other son. He was like, what? No, no, it was it was the king's brother that was the crown prince and they had he was getting skipped over and it was going to be the oldest son that was going to get it and then he said no i'm going to give it to the second son no no he's he's the oldest he is yeah okay yeah uh the brother got a little too big for his britches

the king hussein had cancer yeah and his death was a slow one and he was universally loved my wife cried when he died we were stationed in athens at the time The second wife? My first wife. First wife. Yeah. He was universally loved. And his death was a slow one.

And so as he was approaching death, the crown prince decided, I'm going to start making some preliminary changes. I'm going to make this change and that change. I'm going to restaff the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And King Hussein's like, whoa, I'm not even dead yet. We're not going to do this. You're fired. My son, Abdullah, is going to be the crown prince.

And Abdullah's like, what? Yeah. I never wanted to be crown prince. Yeah. Next thing you know, he's crown prince. And then his dad dies a couple months later. Yeah. Now, he, I've talked about this before with you, but he was asked at some conference in the weeks after October 7th, 2023, among many questions, he was being obviously asked about the conflict that was going on and what this looked like and all that.

But then he, of course, was asked, will you accept Palestinian refugees? And he said, I'm glad you asked that question and I will not, not because I don't want them, not because I don't like them. My wife is Palestinian. That's not the issue here. If I do accept them, though, I will give Israel exactly what they want. They will be able to ethnically cleanse the whole area. They'll go to countries like mine. And the problem will be taken care of. And I then fast forwarded and saw a press conference with him and Trump in the Oval Office. when Trump got back in here where Trump's talking about sending some Palestinians in there and you just see the king sitting there like, God damn. Yep, not going to happen.

It's just not. And you know, if Donald Trump's idea to develop Gaza and make it better than Monte Carlo, which is what he said, go with God. The Palestinians could use the influx of cash.

Sure. Make it better than Monte Carlo. I think that would be a wonderful wonderful thing. I don't think he has them in mind running it though. No. He doesn't. No, he never did. He never did. And that's like, you know, that's the thing. You talk about it as the obvious point that like you got to be able to give people a state. There has been so much hatred built up on both sides over all these years since, you know, Israel began to exist and all that, that the unfortunate reality to me is that if you were actually as a world going to commit to a two-state solution,

you would need to accept the fact that you're going to have what's called the bloody generation, which means, all right, let's say tomorrow I put it in a two-state solution. For the next 20 to 25 years, I'm going to have all the young blood of people who grew up hating each other, wanting to kill each other, and completely disagreeing with this solution. And every time there's some sort of attack from one side or the other, instead of being like well nope can't do a two-state solution war someone attacked the other one and that's it you have to be able to say no we're going to keep the two-state solution and it's not going to be war which goes against everybody's going to have to guarantee it they'll have to guarantee peace how possible

is that even remotely possible it's possible i suppose i mean pretty much anything can be negotiated if if the two sides are serious enough about it let me let me give you a an example of why I think what you said just now can be overcome. I was having, I was having lunch one day with a Greek diplomat at this outdoor cafe in D.C. And some guy comes up and he says, hey, you know, Aphrodite or whatever name, I think her name was Aphrodite. How are you? She gets up, oh, Ouzgun, how are you? And I was like, Ouzgun, that's a Turkish name. She gets up and kisses this guy on both cheeks. And he introduces himself.

I say hi, shake his hand. And he walks away. And I asked her, what the fuck was that all about? You kiss a Turk. And she said, only you Greek Americans have that position on the Turks. We have to live with them. And after all these centuries of fighting,

we just decided it's better to be nice. Interesting. And I've noticed that, I mean, leader to leader, sure, there are problems, right? or intelligence service to intelligence service, even military to military sometimes. But on the people-to-people level, they really don't have any problems.

That's interesting. Some of my buddies in Greece, though, I'm thinking about this. They all did serve in the military, though. Yeah, mine too. In fact, I took my son to Greece in January. We're at my cousin's house. We're from the island of Rhodes,

which is considered a border island, because, I mean, you can hear the Turks playing their music at night. how close it is. And we're in, we're in a house, my cousin Chris's house that's been in my family for 175 years. So he, he's the recipient of the house. So we're sitting in there and I kind of look past him and I said, Chris, is that a machine gun? And he said, yeah. I said, why do you have a machine gun? How do you have a machine gun? And he says, John. I'm former special forces.

You see how close these Turks are to us? They could swim here by the time I get to the gun. He said, we have to protect ourselves somehow. That is one thing. So that aside, you know, on the mainland, they don't really care so much. That's good. Yeah, it's good.

That's a long way of saying the Palestinians and the Israelis can get there someday. And, you know, people say all the time, too, that there can't be an independent. in Palestine. It's just never going to happen. I went to school with this kid. Remus Pescurius. I still remember his name. Shout out to Remus Pescurius. What a name. Yeah, he's Lithuanian. And we went to GW together and he used to, he was a militant Lithuanian. He used to say, someday Lithuania will be free. And we were like, dude, you have to get past this free Lithuania thing. The Soviets are never going to allow Lithuania to be free. And like six years later. Yeah. There's

a free Lithuania. So you never know. You know, when an issue is ripe, there's nothing you can do to stop it. I like your optimism. I hope that's the case. I think in this particular situation, because you also have religion in the middle of it. See, this is a very important beef that I have. I hope you'll let me vent for a minute. Oh, you can do whatever you want, John. One of the biggest problems that we have in this entire Israel-Palestine situation is the problem of Christian Zionists, most of whom are American evangelical Christians. Palestine used to be 10% Christian. It's now more like 2% or 3% Christian. And most of those Christians have moved to the United States. Well, evangelical support.

for the Israeli government has resulted in an ethnic cleansing and the destruction of Christian communities in in historic Palestine. So what side are you on? Are you trying to save Christianity or are you trying to destroy Christianity because you're destroying it right now? And listen, and I'm going to take a lot of shit in your comment section for saying this. But listen, if your religion was created in somebody's basement in the 1800s, I don't want to hear your position on Israel and Palestine. I don't find it valid. Yeah, I think that there's been people overlooking things.

And I think that the saddest part of this whole struggle is that in society we seem to have an inability to separate people from their governments just at the simplest level. I mean, you've spelled it out before. You're like, Netanyahu's government wins with fucking 27% of the vote. It's all the Orthodox Jews over there. Yeah, exactly. You know, there was a borderline. They were very close to civil war in the summer before October 7th, which is quite interesting timing, by the way, where Netanyahu sees control the judiciary.

Five weeks before. They were read. People were in the streets. We were seeing, we were seeing demonstrations, especially in Tel Aviv. and Haifa that were unprecedented right in scale he was this close to being overthrown and having to call new elections that's the thing john it's like we've on every angle of this we've sacrificed humanity right we've watched thousands of people be killed and we fight about it over tweets let's call it what it is yeah i'm guilty i mean i don't fight a lot on twitter but like i'm watching these tweets too

so I'm guilty of it just like everyone else. And we also generalize all the people involved. And these are such, this is such a nuanced situation when it comes to the people involved and who it is. And like you've now seen, you know, I have so many Jewish friends in America who don't fuck with what Israel is doing at all. And yet they get dragged into this.

Yes, that's like, you know. That's true. It leads to anti-Semitism. Yeah. I was having lunch in New York. I'm going to say the weather was nice. So it must have been like May or June sitting with a buddy of mine at an outside cafe. And he happens to be Jewish.

He's not Zionist or fist in the air. He just happens to be Jewish. So we're talking about this about October 7th and the war, about Israel's response to October 7th. And he said, as a Jew, I really fear that Israel's heavy hand is going to. to result in increases in anti-Semitism, especially in the United States. Well, there were these two women sitting next to us, both in their 80s, they told us later.

And one of them finally said, excuse me, but I couldn't help it overhear your conversation. The one said, we're both Jewish too, and we have the same fears. We are seeing an increase in anti-Semitism, especially in New York, but it's because of the Israeli government's actions. Otherwise, most people wouldn't pay any

attention to what's going on in in Israel wouldn't care and and that wouldn't register with them that's what's so like sometimes it feels like society is just being manipulated to break at all times I've I've for a long time had this quote I'm sure someone else came up with it at some point I've just never cared to Google it but you know at least it sounded smart the first time I said it a divided society is a compliant society and when you can divide people on one or two really emotional issues you know four or five years ago it was covid and yeah fucking right vaccine and now it's israel palestine you can distract from everything else that you don't want them to know about or you don't want them to focus on and it's like you know i talk with people who are very

hardcore zionists and i talk to people who are very hardcore anti-zionists and the commonalities i see in those conversations is that they will each make a separate point that is like yes agree 100% but they're pointing at a problem that's over here yeah and I'm like right yes I agree with you now come back here see how it works this way too right here at home and they're like well no whenever it comes to their issue whatever it is they're unwilling to see it there but they'll see it everywhere else and I'm like guys if we especially from an American perspective this is my issue with this you should be worried about the interests of Americans first and what's going on here first it doesn't mean separate from the world it doesn't mean become an isolationist but like you should

worry about what are the downstream effects here so if china katar iran and israel are all doing propaganda campaigns that involve body counts in the united states i don't make a distinction between any of them it's all the same thing why is it so hard for you zionist and you anti-zionist to see you only see these three and you only see that one it's the same shit it's the same thing yeah i couldn't agree more you know one of the things too that has been a surprise for me even if it shouldn't be a surprise is is the difficulty that americans have in even listening to people who with whom they disagree yeah growing up my just like on my dad's side for an example as an example when my dad's parents came to the united states my my grandmother would

was a royalist, right? She supported the Greek royal family, which wasn't Greek. It was Danish. And the king couldn't even speak Greek. So he was overthrown, which he deserved to be. Or Malacas. So my grandfather was a, was a Republican with a small R. He supported the establishment of the Hellenic Republic. And that's what the, and that's what the, the Greeks have now. Politically, they both somehow became Democrats. On my mom's side, my grandparents didn't give two shits about politics in Greece, and they became Republicans and most of their kids were Republicans. My mom was a Democrat, but my uncles voted for Wallace in 68, very, very happily. And I remember my, and I won't even say it because it's tough vote. Yeah, it's, it involves some not very

nice words. But they voted for Wallace, my two uncles. And then I still remember being a little kid and seeing the Nixon Now buttons that they had on. So it just never occurred to me that there were people out there who wouldn't speak to other people just because they believe in one thing or don't believe in another. My best friends from high school, best friends. I mean, we're all in each other's weddings. We're godfathers to each other's kids. Dave McCrack and Dave's passed away. But Dave was a was a Republican, Gary Sanko, Republican, Guy Cabellas, a Democrat, and Russ Colette, a Democrat. And it never mattered to any of us. And I just don't, you know, people say all the time, I can't believe you would go on Fox News. Why wouldn't I go on Fox News? I have a position on an issue

like John Brennan. It happens to fit in with Fox News's editorial position. But maybe I can educate a Fox News viewer. Sure. If I go on tonight and I have my 20 seconds to speak my piece. Yeah, I think, I think it's very deliberate from they, whoever they is. They don't want us to talk to one another. They don't want us to do it. Like, for example, I'm sorry to interrupt you. No. I'm fascinated by this Fisher that we're seeing right now among conservatives about Tucker Carlson's decision to interview Nick Fuentes. Okay. Okay. Why wouldn't you interview Nick Fuentes? Fuentes. If you think he's a turd with repulsive positions, then expose him as a turd with repulsive positions. Don't say, oh my God, I can never talk to him. No, writing him off can't talk to him. Talk to him

and let him destroy himself with his repulsive positions. But this idea now, well, they have to cut off Tucker. He's no good anymore. And the head of the Heritage Foundation said something nice about him. So now he has to resign it's like what's wrong with you people yeah i think that part i think that part's crazy i do i would love to get your thoughts on this though because i look at this whole tucker situation it's very fascinating to me watching it watching it happen because i think you're seeing a lot of laws of human nature play out and what i mean by that is Tucker raised some points a year ago year and a half ago whatever that were valid points yes apolitical in a lot of ways we're talking foreign policy things going on in the middle east asking yes very valid questions and he's very well informed he is well

informed and he got viciously attacked by people for it who sought to destroy him yes and silence him and one thing about tuckers he's an emotional guy takes one and no one you know and so he reacts to those things and he fights fire with fire and then the fire gets bigger and the fire gets bigger and the fire gets bigger and pretty soon you know you end up saying things just to set each other off and i i think we've gone far past that point i thought the attacks on him calling him anti-semitic we're fucking he's not anti-semitic yeah see but this is the thing this is where that propaganda that you talked about a few minutes ago uh enters in it is that many Americans have been convinced that if you are anti- Netanyahu or if you are opposed to the present

policies of the current Israeli government, you are anti-Semitic. In fact, an Israeli friend of mine, a close Israeli friend of mine who served in the IDF and everything, told me that they're actually taught to do that at school, that any criticism of Israel they're supposed to label as anti-Semitic so that people back off and people generally do back off. So I can criticize any government around the world even china now remember when that was a thing you were racist if you criticize china that's right they love you criticize in china that's right you can criticize any country around the world and it's not racist when you criticize their government but when you criticize this one it's racist yes that's wrong and you know here's the thing

about tucker and fentes because i i am a free speech absolutist right and i think everyone should be allowed to talk. I think Nick Fuentes, I wildly disagree with who he is as a person, everything. But he's got a right to say whatever he wants to say. Free speech. He is a right to say what he wants to say. 100% agree. The question here, John, is if people just look at it on just this situation, don't look at the whole build up to it, which is absolutely relevant, but just look at it in this situation with Tucker. People are looking at Tucker going, why are you using your platform to talk to a guy like that. And I want to be careful how I say this as someone who has a platform and talks to people from all ends of the spectrum.

I think that when you do something like that, when you're Tucker Carlson, you are doing it and giving your enemies exactly what they want. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. But on the other hand, too, look at this way. He does how many of these a week? um one two three i don't even know a lot i'm sure a lot um this is just another one in a long line of guests he's going to have somebody on that's going to be the exact opposite uh he's going to have on um the nun from uh jerusalem yeah george stepanopoulos is his is that actually a sister you know i actually googled it and it said that she is i don't know i don't see any kind of family resemblance and you know funny little funny little small world tidbit george stephenopolis's grandfather

was my parish priest when i was a little kid and he baptized me and i remember george from sunday school he was a year too older than i was no shit yeah yeah small world small world yeah but uh and actually his dad married my brother and his first wife wow yeah he was a priest here at the uh holy trinity cathedral in new york we all stick together are you greeks we all stick together out of yeah Yeah, we all party out. We all enjoy each other's company. So anyway, for me personally, I wouldn't have invited Nick Fuentes, just because I don't think I would have much to say to somebody like Nick Puentes.

But Tucker feels liberated since he left Fox News. He feels unencumbered by corporate structures and policies. And he just decided that he was going to have on anybody who he thought would give him two or three hours of interesting conversation. Yeah. And I also, because I'm also not a believer in bringing someone in there just to stick them through the ringer and, you know, these CBS news, right? Agreed. Which is why I wouldn't talk with Nick. Except for Ted Cruz. That was pretty funny. That was funny. That was kind of funny. APEC Ted. Yeah, I peck Ted. By the way. By the way, trivia question. Who would, who did Alan Dershowitz say was the most talented law student he ever had?

Oh, it has to be Ted. Yeah. I always thought that was interesting. You know, so many people believed that Ted was destined for the Supreme Court, not for Capitol Hill. He was a real thinker at Harvard Law School. Oh, he's it, listen, for as much as he got body bagged and thrown down the fucking river, see the river sticks by Tucker Carlson right there, like, he's a very smart guy. Very smart. Very smart. He was wrong on those issues, which is why Tucker beat him about the head and face.

Oh, it was funny. Who I'd like to see next is Lindsay Graham. it will never happen we'll see if he even survives his primary yeah i i i hope now i don't know how that guys ever survived then oh my god that state but like maybe people wanted to see and and i actually i haven't watched the tucker fuentes sit down yet so i really can't comment on it so i i don't want it it was a normal Tucker interview it was a normal conversation and tucker freely disagreed with a lot of what he had to say all right so But let him speak.

Let them speak. The thing that I think about here, because of how hot button the issue is and how much there is pieces of information that can be used to label going on. Like, let's look at who you might look at as people that are cringe and annoying, which might be like the hardest core Zionists who anything that they don't like is labeled anti-Semitic, which is a woke tactic. it is for them to use if i were those people what would i want tucker carlson to do i would want him to interview nick foentes because now all i got to do is post that screenshot of that regardless of context regardless of intention you're absolutely right what it is and it's like i read this thing recently i was talking about it with mike ritland but i recently read that in at the height of the Roman Empire's power, when the generals would be at war in the midst of battle and the night

before or the morning of a battle, they'd be gathered in their tent, you know, the three to five highest ranking generals to make a decision. They would have this exercise where they would ask themselves if we were our worst enemy right now, meaning the guys across the battlefield who are going to fight us, if we were our worst enemy right now, what decision would we want us to make? That's brilliant. Yeah. And they would think of, It would always land on like the most emotional, fuck you, eye for an eye type decision. They'd be like, okay, let's do the opposite of that. And they won again and again and again and again.

And it is so easy now to get angry at people. It's human nature to get angry at people who attack you incessantly with lies and propaganda and bullshit. You want to punch these people. I'm from New Jersey. Trust me. Like I would not deal with it well. But you got to like go into a room, scream into a pillow and think. What am I going to do with this so that I can rise above it?

Do I want to be more Malcolm X or do I want to be more Martin Luther King? All due respect to Malcolm X obviously had certain stances and whatever, very interesting guy in history. The more effective one was Martin Luther King and he deserves all the credit in the world for that because he rose above stuff in the hardest way as well. And it's like, I get it. Everyone has a right to speak. I'm not saying don't go speak with Nick Fuentes or something like that but when you do that

you have now opened yourself up to a whole new round of attacks that could have I agree appeared credibility I agree the reason why I wouldn't have had Nick Fuentes well it's several fold and you know part of this is obviously my own bias

I see him as just some kid he's just some loud mouth kid and many of his positions have been definitively debunked by historians over the years.

I mean, there are still people alive who liberated Dachau, for example, or Bergen-Belsen or whatever. And I just don't see how it's possible that his base of support grows from what it is. And what it is is a bunch of angry

white guys in their 20s. So I just don't see what good it would do me to interview somebody like him that's why i wouldn't do it he's if you look at it at it objectively just like 30 000 foot view yeah why he's risen or whatever it is obviously he is a very good speaker yeah he is he's very bright he's very bright for sure he has a sense of humor as well he can talk to the camera for hours he's disarming actually yes yes that's the first I ever saw him at any length in an interview. And I was like, oh, he's, he's actually a likable guy at first glance. At first glance. Yeah. Yeah. So there's ways like if you wanted to look at it,

like, oh, the wolf coming in the henhouse or something. That's how it happens when you have those other talents. But when society gets to a point, this is just my macro theory on it, but you look at a middle class that has been legislated away economically like that in a graph since the beginning of the 1980s. That's right. And you see chaos and chaos and chaos and chaos and chaos and lack of hope and people who are upset about their lives. They're carrying around college debt because they were sold a system when they were 15 and had no fucking idea what it meant. You turn that emotion in somewhere and you turn it in to point it at the fingers of the elite people regardless of where they stand that you don't like. And when you have someone like Nick Fuentes who regardless

of how he does it or what he says speaks to that. kind of crowd and does it very effectively. That is how you get something like that to happen. And also this needs to be said because we've seen this on every side of all these issues, whether you're pro or anti, pick your favorite issue here. There are massive propaganda bot campaigns supporting both sides. You're absolutely right. Yes, which is also dangerous and completely unregulated. What do we do about that? I don't know. Can you do anything about it? Like you can pass the law saying, you know, no more about, no more bots. And the Chinese are going to laugh and laugh. The Russians. Yeah. I don't, I don't know if there's anything you can do.

I remember Elon was like looking at that when he was trying to buy Twitter. They were estimating. Yeah, he said it was like 40% of Twitter users were actually bots or something like that. I think it was, I think it was like 60%. Was it? We could check it. It was a high percentage. And I haven't heard him talk about it at tons of. No. But it's, it's a lot of. No. But it's Like, I'm always clicking that on Twitter. That's the one where, because, like, that's always just been my little private platform that no one was called on. I used to get most of my news from Twitter.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. But, like, when you just look at the following, I'll click someone and I'll just be like, huh, November 20, 25, you know? Up to 64%. Yep. Deep's got it. Up to 64% of the accounts were bots. So it's like you also have massive, and I see it on both sides of the issue.

you will see you will see iow yacobi tweet something out pro zionist and it's got fucking 10,000 likes in 10 minutes you will see ian carroll tweet out something Ian's been on my show you know tweet out something and has 10,000 likes in 10 minutes neither of these makes sense sorry it doesn't make any sense right and that's and by the way that's neither of their fault which everyone likes to try to say like oh you can prove that they're like running they don't know I don't know these fucking accounts I don't even manage

my own Twitter account I have a guy that does it for me he called me he said hey you crossed 100,000 subscribers I said hey great

Is that Simon? Yeah Simon doing that damn it's always Simon tweeting I knew that already so that's kind of funny it's just

when Simon sends his best regards he called me in the car oh he did he's a good guy I like Simon but like you know to your point

bringing up like the whole thing we now make these we make content like you know the NFL playoffs or something yeah and like so and so and so and so and yeah I fall in the trap too sometimes oh man when I was in prison people used to get this this magazine

like hip hop weekly or something like I think that's what it was called and I mean it's clearly just a made up tabloid you know with these fake feuds and somebody was in the club and they threw money in the face of somebody else because of something that happened in Atlanta. I got kind of a kick out of it, but these articles sometimes led to bloodshed. I remember two guys beating each other to the death over who had more money, Kanye or Jay-Z. It's like, seriously, you guys are going to go to solitary for that.

There are no better reasons to go to solitary. That's what you chose. Oh, my God. I mean, there's not a lot to do in prison. No. I'll give them that. I saw a fistfight once over whether they should watch Love and Hip Hop Atlanta or 110th in Park or whatever the show was called. 120th in park.

Did you have to make your bones in a fist fight? No. You didn't? No, no. I minded my own business. I made alliances with all the- The racial groups. The mafia was the most important.

Right. Yeah. Who were you? I always forgot. Who did you have a moment of silence for outside the house in Atlantic City after you were in prison? Oh, it was... Scarfo? Yeah.

I was like, come on, guys. Come on. Stand here all day. You're like, I was in Pakistan 15 years ago, taking down Al-Qaeda. I'm actually stopping in Philly on the way home. We're going to meet up for dinner. Oh, that's awesome. You going to Dante and Luigi's?

Most likely. Oh, my God, that's funny. Your life, you can't make it up. See, I'm friends with everybody. That's right. Everybody. Everybody's got something redeeming. Everybody.

Everyone does? Not everyone. I will say, I'll tell you a story. And I'm going to plug my latest book as part of the story. Plug away. So I've got a book coming out called Remains of the Day, a definitive guide to Washington, D.C.'s historic cemeteries. go to rarebirdlit.com, rarebirdlit.com for advanced autograph copies.

So Simon & Schuster's publishing it. They liked it so much they commissioned four more. I'm almost done with the next one, which is Whispers in the Dirt, a definitive guide to the mafia graves of New York City. Okay? So I'm about 70% done. I'll be done by the end of the year and send it to the editor. I'm in the Bronx about two months ago just taking pictures. I'm with my girlfriend. We're taking pictures of the different graves so I can put them in the book. And the first one was supposed to be a field guide. It was supposed to be eight inches by five inches so that you can stick it in your back pocket.

But they liked it so much. They made it a coffee table book. So you're going to have to like lug it into the cemetery with you. Anyway, back in prison, I said to one of the mob guys, So you mind if I ask you, what are you in here for? And he goes like this, he goes, they found a body in a barrel in my storage unit. I don't know how that body got in there.

A hundred people had access to the storage unit. I said, no, no, no judgment for me. I was just curious. No judgment. And I kind of laughed it off. So I'm in the Bronx six weeks ago, whatever it is. no. And I'm like, who is this guy again? I had, I had his name. I needed to take a picture of the grave. His name was Bonventry, the tall guy, right? He was, like, Janaro Bonventry. Genaro, the

tall guy, Bon Ventry. I forget his first name. So my girlfriend said, who is this guy again? And I said, you know, I can't remember. He was a driver, but I don't remember the story. So I pull up my manuscript and I said, the tall guy, Bonventry, was a driver for this guy. He took the boss out for whatever. The boss was killed. Bon Ventry was initially assumed to have been the hitman because they couldn't find him. They found his body six months later in a barrel in a storage unit in New Jersey. And I said, oh my God.

It was the first time I put it together. It's the body from the barrel. But he didn't tell me the full story. The full story is, the tall. guy was too tall to fit in the barrel. Look at the hack a little bit. So he sawed him in half. He sawed him in half. That's what we do in Jersey, John. We saw in half. And the barrel was full of glue and it took the corner something like four months to get the glue off to do the autopsy, which he's already sawed in half. So how much more of an autopsy do you need? But then they sort of pieced him together to put him in his coffin. And I was like, I'm

Oh, dang, he was telling me the truth. Where? Is this guy still in prison? No, he's out. Which is why I didn't use his name. Right. Where in Jersey? Do you remember?

Yeah. Yeah, it was in Newark, but he was not a New Jersey Italian. He was a New York Italian. Got it. So they brought him over here to... Exactly. I have a chapter at the end of the book. Because I go cemetery by cemetery by cemetery.

And there are some like, you know, St. Stevens or Holy Cross or whatever that are just like overflowing with mob guys going back to, you know, Joe the boss massaria or the clutch hand or Lucky Luciano who's got a magnificent private mausoleum. But I have a chapter at the end of the book on non-traditional burial grounds like the Gowanus Canal. Oh. Where they're pulling bodies out of all the time. or there's this there's in the Bronx

there's this vacant lot that they called the mafia graveyard yeah I got one in the Meadowlands here the Meadowlands is a great example so I've got like four or five six of those

that I'm gonna add at the end okay I'm in for that book that's right up my alley I think it's gonna be a good seller already for the one in Washington I just love cemeteries and I've talked to you about this before I think

if it's sunny out I'll just go hang out in a cemetery for hours. You love cemeteries. You love Abraham Lincoln's shit. Yeah. What else is on the list? I lost the shit, though. You did lose the shit.

Yeah. Thank God. It was way too expensive anyway. I'm going to go visit my son tomorrow. And he said, he loves the Lincoln stuff as much as I do. He said, dad, there's this enormous antique mall in Indianapolis. And I think they have Lincoln stuff there. So we're going Indianapolis on Saturday.

Have fun. But anyway, I was shocked when I went to Amazon and found that nobody had ever written a book on the cemeteries of Washington, D.C. There are like a dozen books on Arlington Cemetery, but I thought, well, I'll write one. That's cool. Yeah. Right up your alley. And it's, I did, purposely, I did the biographies, not of the most famous people in the cemeteries. knows about the famous people in the cemeteries i chose the most interesting people in the

cemeteries now how do you define interesting if john says they're interesting they go in the book so would you how would you go about your research with this did you go to the cemetery and like go read a name and say well let me google this guy and then eventually come up with something that was part of it i'm a big fan of the um website uh findagrave dot com which is immensely helpful but what i did is if somebody looked like they might or could be interesting, I would just go to the Library of Congress and look up their original obituary. Meaning, when you say look like they might be interesting, not just you're standing at their gravesite and you're like, I like the way they wrote the name.

No, like I Google a guy that I've never heard of and it says he was a Revolutionary War better. It's like, oh, that could be interesting. I'll check it out. I write myself a little note. There's a guy just as one random example. I'll give you two random examples. But one, it's just a little overgrown gravestone at Congressional Cemetery.

The guy's all by himself. There's no wife. There's no kid. It's just him. The stone is old. He died in 1838. Born in 1778, died in 1838. And he's among like a bunch of, you know, vice presidents and speakers of the house.

I'm like, who is this guy? I never heard of this guy. I don't even remember his name now. He's in the book. I have to look it up. So I went to the Library of Congress. and I looked him up and oh my god what a story this guy was a mid-level nobody at the department of the treasury right he would just sit at his desk with his big ledgers and he would just write

numbers and then in 1812 the british invade washington they set the capital on fire they set the white house on fire it's chaos the president runs to mclean virginia on a horse the first lady gets on a horse and she runs to Leesburg, Virginia just to save themselves. The whole city's in flames. And this guy had the presence of mind to say, I wonder if anybody's thought to rescue the Declaration of Independence.

Nicholas Cage before Nicholas Cage. He gets in a horse. While the British are shooting everybody, you know, gets in his horse, rides over to the building that housed the National Archives. There's the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington's military commission

and he rolls them up into a sheet tucks them under his arm and he rides out to Loudoun County, Virginia and puts them in the rafters of a friend's barn for three years. They were there for three years? For three years. And then when the British are finally pushed out,

he goes and gets him and he brings him back and oh my God, he's a big national hero. Except... What's his name again? I have to look it up. God damn it, John. I know. I kick myself.

I can find it while we're talking. So the problem was that as a person, he was just a dick. And everybody hated him. All of his coworkers hated him. He had no personality. He was just not. Stephen Pleasanton? Stephen Pleasanton.

That is him right there. Thank you. He looks like a dick. I'm not going to lie. Look at that picture. So a group of people went to the secretary of the treasury. and they said, look, we know he's a national hero and all. But we just can't work with this guy.

And if you don't fire him, we're going to resign. Oh, he got fired. So they didn't want to fire and fire him. So they made him the director of the U.S. commission on lighthouses. And so he ended up not only helping to invent the franel lens, which we use today, which is like makes it 10 times brighter as the, because. back then they were using candles right you can't see a frigging candle from a mile away in a ship but with this franel lens that he helped to develop and for the first time since the

founding of the country he actually balanced the budget of the u.s. commission of lighthouses see saving the declaration of independence he sounds a little oddest he's a dick right yeah like what a dick there's another shout out stephen pleasant yeah good Stephen good for Stephen Pleasanton. 1776. I found 1778 that he was born. Oh, 1855. Yeah. Disagreying with CIA Apedia? Yeah, I'm doing my... Hey, and I just read my bio from Simon & Schuster the other day, yesterday for the first time. Yeah. And it said, uh, journalist and historian John Carriaco. And I was like, oh, okay. That's great. I'll take that. Yeah. So get this. I'm at, uh, I'm at Rock Creek Cemetery, which is the biggest and the nicest cemetery in Washington.

60, 70, 80,000 graves there. It's a good-sized cemetery. And all the rich people are buried in the front, like, you know, the Woodward's and the Lothraps and the Bloomingdale's and the, you know, goldfinkels, whatever their name was, whatever the name was, all the people that were rich in the 19th century that nobody can remember why they're important. So I go to the very back of the cemetery.

I go to the very back of the cemetery, and there's a traffic island there that has this magnificent private family mausoleum. So I just wrote myself a note. It was the Butler family. And I went to look in the door of the mausoleum, and the tomb was glass inside. So you can see these very expensive bronze coffins that had the two Butler brothers. their wives, a daughter and a grandson, who was like six when he died. So I wrote myself this note. Went to the Library of Congress.

Turns out these guys were fascinating. They wanted to be chemists. They wanted to go to college and be chemists. They were born right after the Civil War ended. Butler was their name. And when they got to be, you know, high school age, almost high school age, their dad was like, yeah you're not going to be chemists you're going to be bakers bakers bakers yeah we don't have money to send you to college to be fancy chemists you're going to be bakers and he arranged for them

an uh an apprenticeship at a local bakery they hated it so when the baker finally retired he turned over the business to them they just hated they hated every act of being a baker so they said to each other, what if we invent this machine that will mix all this shit for us so we don't have to do it? Oh, shit. So you power it with your feet

like the old time sewing machines. So they invented the first mixer. And they patented it and they were able to sell it all the way out to the frontier, which at the time was Cincinnati. So they start making some making some money

thanks to this new fangled mixing machine, right? And then they said, what if we invent another machine that cuts the dough so that every loaf is exactly the same size, shape, and weight? And they made a conveyor belt with an arm that came down and cut the dough. Revolutionized baking nationwide. They were able to sell that all the way out to, like, you know, St. Louis and then later on to Denver. And then they said, what if we, instead of using water to make the bread, what if we use milk?

What would that taste like? It made it very fluffy and light. Then they came up with this idea, newspapers were becoming popular. And there were young boys that would actually deliver your newspaper to your house, called a paper boy, right? And they said, what if we hire boys to deliver bread to the houses? If you make an order by three o'clock, we'll deliver the bread. so you could have it on your dinner table while it's still warm.

And then they started making cakes and making pies and this and that. By the turn of the 20th century, they owned the entire city block behind what is today Union Station, train station. And they were millionaires many times over. Israel Butler, the older of the two brothers,

decided to retire. Like, right around the start of the First World War, his brother stayed on for another couple of years but they finally sold the business to the national biscuit company Nabisco and the only thing that they changed the bread itself was very very popular but it had this terrible name I forget the name it was like Mrs. McGillicuddy's delicious bread that's not it but it was something like that so they they sold it to Nabisco and the only change that Nabisco made was they changed the name of the bread to Wonder Bread. And everything remained the same.

Wow. Yeah. Like, whoever heard of these people? Never in my life. I found the NFL's first black quarterback. Like, you wouldn't even know that there was a black quarterback in the 50s. In the 50s. Yeah.

He only threw like four passes. But still, why aren't we celebrating this guy? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. How often do you go to cemeteries? at least weekly.

If I'm overseas, I go almost every day. So you like the overseas cemeteries are actually interesting because they're always so different. So completely different. I have this wonderful book I bought at some obscure flea market or used bookstore. It's called Death Rituals of Rural Greece. So there are almost no cemeteries in Greece

because the country is only, like 2% arable. And so the land that's good, they need to grow food on it. So there's this practice. It's been a practice for hundreds of years that you rent a grave for five years. So they don't embalm in Greece. They'll put you in the in the ground for five years. And then on the fifth anniversary of your burial, they dig you, the women of the village dig you up with the priest, the village priest and then they take your by then you're just a skeleton if you're not just a skeleton by then that means you went to hell oh and so they put you right back i thought you're going to say it means you were buried alive i was like oh shit it means you you went to hell so um but just about everybody

is is just bone by then so they take the skeleton apart they wash it with red wine the priest blesses it and they put it in a little bone box and then in an ossuary a bone house just on here i'll show you a picture um just uh on on shelves until um until it's time to build a new church and then they take all the bones out and they put them underneath the church under the foundation because it can't we just cremate at that point no cremation's forbidden strictly forbidden you can't cremation We'll put the bones in a box, but you can't cremate. I know, right? You know, these rules that humans invent.

And you know, it's funny is none of these rules are actually based in religion. No, it's, it's some guy one day had a bright idea and said, this is what we're going to do now as a religion. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's real? Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. There you go. Dief's got it up.

Can we blow up one of those pictures, whatever one you want, Dief? The one, oh. Oh, so they put like the skull... The top left is more accurate. The one with the skulls is in Italy. That's an ashiary in Greece. That's so... And, you know, I've struck up a friendship with the guy.

There's this, well, the nice way of saying it these days is he's on the spectrum. But... He's an artist. He's not able to care for himself. Oh. And so they gave him as a job, just take care of the bone house. Right? So I go over there

Every time I go back to my ancestral island I go to the village where my family's from And he lets me go through the boxes And see if they're my grandparents My great-grandparents or whatever You opening them up? No, I mean, if it's somebody that I know Or I'm related to, I take a picture of the box

And then I'll open it up just to, you know, give them a kiss on the skull or something. Oh, God, all right, all right. That's my great-grandparents. All right, all right. So just cut it, cut it from it. You see the floor there at the ossuary in our village, there's a kind of a trap door and there's an area underneath the floor. So he let me go down there last time.

And it goes back to the 19th century down there. But, I mean, I can't go any farther than that. The Turks burned all of our records. So we don't know really anything about where we come from. And then, you know, people are buried under churches. I did, I did find one relative. This is my great, great grandfather's brother that I found in an ushery in roads on the southern tip of the island. Come on, where is he?

He was a priest, and so they kept him. They didn't bury him under the, there he is. The perks of being a priest in this life, huh? Yeah. And then the next picture is a picture of him. so you can he get lucky sometimes oh yeah yeah high priest kind of guy yeah yeah he was a he was a big deal yeah i said to looks like you yeah i said to my cousin who who also has an interest in our family genealogy um i said yeah you know my grandmother told me he was uh eaten by a shark he was diving

for sponges and he was eaten by a shark no my cousin said that's not true i said oh that's always the story we heard he said the turks executed him because he was teaching children how to speak Greek during the Ottoman occupation. And they threw his body in the sea and the sharks ate him. But he said the Turks murdered him, which gives me just another reason to hate Turks.

Wow. Yeah. The Ottoman Empire is one that's overlooked. And people are like, oh, no, it was okay in the Ottomans because if you just paid your taxes, you could freely practice Christianity. Bullshit. Yeah.

What country are you from? where they were so kind to you that if you paid your taxes you could do your thing what a joke you're funny you're just funny like how you get so upset and then you go back to laughing right afterwards well i don't know how we got on that tangent yeah i'm not sure skulls and cemeteries oh it was my book my book it was very very interesting and the tall guy but you know back to the to the world of the living at least for now yeah you know in in some of our earlier conversations we were talking about the different countries in nuclear weapons and obviously the bombing that happened of Iran's facilities in June and everything but what you know

may I add one other thing about please yeah so this is something that most Americans don't understand or haven't thought about and which most Israelis just deny because it doesn't fit into their worldview but these Israeli attacks on Iran have now forced the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon. They had no uranium that was weapons ready or weapons capable. And besides that, they don't have a delivery system. I would bet my next paycheck that that's what they're going to start developing now. Because if all they have to look forward to is continued Israeli bombing and assassination

and infiltration, you know, the threat is existential for them too. And so they're going to have to do something to defend them. themselves. And the only thing that they can do at this point is to develop a nuclear deterrent. No, why did you say earlier? Because we got off this that in hindsight, then, you think that when the U.S. ended up bombing, this was okay. Because I think that the Israelis really would have used a nuclear weapon. That's where the word existential comes from. Meaning you don't think that was just like a threat and positioning. I think that they really intended to do it. Okay. So this is something I've been thinking about a lot more recently, and I hate that I have to think about it. But I used to have this picture in my first studio at my parents' house. There were two pictures on one of the walls. The top picture was of the nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Oh, yeah. It's a famous one. 47 maybe. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. And the one below it was the picture of Adam and the hand of God. But instead of the hand of God, it was a robot.

And the idea is it was like a juxtaposition in my head of like the ability we invented to wipe ourselves out as a species at the time, you know, 80 years ago, whatever, versus the ability that's coming now where, you know, with AI and we don't know what it could be if that is another threat we build for ourselves that could wipe us out. And part of it was I was looking at AI as like maybe we can be hopeful here because for all the problems in the world, people have been. prudent enough even in the worst of situations for 75, 80 years to not hit that red button with a nuke. And we all have this mutual destruction kind of thing going on because so many countries have them. I will admit that over the past couple years, I've thought more and more and more about just how tenuous that might be and how realistic, I hate even saying this, but how realistic it could be that at some point, somewhere, in the not so distant future, somebody uses a nuclear bomb.

So two questions. One, how realistic is that? And two, if that does happen, and I guess it would depend on where as well, what is the aftermath of that look like? Right. I think it's something that we do have to fear. I could see the Israelis using one on Iran. I could see the Indians and Pakistanis using them against each other. What does the aftermath look like?

I suppose it depends. You know, we talk about tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield, battlefield nuclear weapons that supposedly, you know, aren't going to have the catastrophic fallout that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had or that a modern, full-sized nuclear weapon would have. But I'm not sure that it really matters. You know, if we were having this conversation right after the Second World War, I'd say, wow, the world has learned its lesson, it's going to be mutually assured destruction, this is going to be a policy that's adopted by every country, then we negotiated the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, those days are gone. You know, you get the North Koreans, the Indians, the Pakistanis, now maybe the Iranians, the Israelis. do you trust any of those countries not really none of them so i'm not sure what the aftermath would be i suppose i suppose if the indians and the pakistani's went at it they lob one on each

other and that would be the end of it right what do you think the world would do in the aftermath of that what could the world do what are going to run to the united nations an issue a very strongly worded statement and that's really what it comes down to that's it what are you going to do overthrow a government attack a government because it's used a nuclear a nuclear weapon what if it has more nuclear weapons and then they use it against you or against your troops as they're landing or yeah yeah i don't know i guess size a country obviously matters a lot too so like if north korea used one all due respect you know which is a concern i mean they're gone i would i would think so yeah and that like that's the way

one saving grace i think of in my head i'm like if someone tried to do it to us we'd have to goodbye you're done like like if they did one here which would be catastrophic to be very clear they're gone yeah i can't help but to think that if if we were to be attacked with nuclear weapons we would have to respond using nuclear weapons terrible terrible thing but you have to respond And I agree with you If it were to be the North Koreans Tomorrow North Korea wouldn't exist Right

Which is a you know It's impossible to fathom Something like that And you know World War II People relitigate that all the time And I understand that Sure I do

Sure I get it Certainly I mean that's That's a crazy thing That had to happen It hasn't happened since you know and and that's why like when you know you have israel threatening to use nuclear weapons like you know they're a powerful country but the the size of new jersey like how i i don't

understand why they'd be so careless as to do that because it doesn't take much for them to be gone no you know like what is the what is the thought process there and like now you even have insult to injury you got like jonathan pollard running for conness yeah how do you like that on a on a platform which was be able to use nukes like are you fucking which was another issue that every single israeli prime minister lobbied for with every president you got to release pollard you got to release pollard no he's doing every day of the 30 years and he did every single day but then we let him go back they're not back we'll let him go there and they gave him a parade and a hero's welcome and an Israeli passport and now he's running for the kineset

does that just like piss you off to no end yeah very much so i was having lunch with a guy a nice guy a few weeks ago who was like asking me about different things on this issue and and at one point he said he said well doesn't masad have a have a policy that they don't spy on americans and we were in cypriani and i you know that's a very it's very tightly packed place and I just like I was very hungover but I literally like fell off my chair laughing other people were looking at me and I'm like yeah no they totally have that policy and he's like he's like yeah no they they don't do I'm like are you fucking kidding me they're like the number one threat of spying he's like name one and I'm like Jonathan Pollard and he wasn't even

Mossad he was military intelligence it was like below Mossad yes very much below massad I'm like what the fuck you know and he was handled by what's his name the dude who did the Eichman drop Oh my God, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, yeah. What the fuck is that guy's name again? Oh, my God. Rafi, Ravi Aiton. Rafi Aton?

Yes, I think that is it. I think is his name. That was like his hand. That was Pollard's handler who was, you know, a long time massad guy and everything. But I'm like, I was like, dude. Oh, my God. I'm like, dude. You know, one of the most compelling things you'll ever see is when you and Bustamante were on Danny Jones.

together and you were talking about that you two are from different eras at CIA and you both had the same experience of one of the first days once you're in there and have your job whatever it may be they take you to a room you're not allowed to say what it's called but call it the red room they're like here are the number one espionage threats and it's like israel china and russia that's wild you know it's wild and you can add cuba and france i've heard i've heard france goes crazy you know the french we had we had a little kerfuffle in the early 90s with the french oh yeah and they were very angry with us about what deservedly so one of our young junior first tour guys got caught just going pushing a little too far so they expelled him they expelled the chief and they expelled

a whole bunch of people and so for three four years we had a tough time but the french were just such dicks about it, that we ended up getting orders that we weren't even allowed to transit de Gaul airport. And that was the only reason I was ever in France was just to catch a connecting flight at De Gaul to go here or there wherever in the Middle East. But a buddy of mine was, I forget where he was going, somewhere in the Middle East. And he went, no, it was in Africa. He was going to Africa. And the only way to get to Africa was through Paris at the time. now you can just go directly to morocco and then onward from there but they took his laptop he had a he had a secure laptop so they're like turn it on so he turns it on open it up he's like i'm not

going to open it up i have a diplomatic passport i'm on the diplomatic business of the united states this is the the property rather of the u.s. department of state i'm not opening it up so they took it in a back room he said they had a railroad spike fastened to a table and they just slammed it down on the railroad spike went all the way through the laptop and then they pulled it off and gave him his laptop back so headquarters was like okay nobody can transit er uh de gaul airport anymore wow yeah they're just jerks about it i've heard that they are incredibly talented and they're very talented when i was overseas in uh pakistan my boss asked me if i would uh meet with a french intelligence officer i said sure i was

meeting with foreign intelligence officers almost every day and you just trade you know hey i heard there's a safe house over here i heard hey they give me al qaeda safe house over there and we just trade some information so uh this french guy calls me and he says meet me at the corner of you know a and b i'm like okay you don't just want to meet at a restaurant or something no no meet me at this corner so i go to this corner it's in a residential neighborhood i'm like what does he live here like why would he want me to come here and i'm standing on the corner and he comes peeling down the street makes a quick right reaches over and opens my door and he's like get in and i said oh no no no no no i said i

don't work for you and you're not using tradecraft on me i said i parked right over here i'll meet you at the pearl hotel restaurant coffee bar not gonna fucking let you do a there's a term of art for the for the for the kind that kind of a pickup no no no no no you're not recruiting me yeah we're going to have a cup of coffee and that's it and then i never saw him again after the coffee so they're tough yeah and they're murderous too you know murderous oh yeah if you're a member for example of greenpeace they're going to blow your brains out if you try to you know take over a ship or throw paint on a ship or whatever they kill a lot of greenpeace activists the french intelligence yeah like not the power military no no no no they're

happy to go out and kill people. And that's why, well, that's one of the reasons why we're not, we don't have more of a presence in the Sahel right now in Africa. Because it's all French. They were all French colonies. The French are there just killing all kinds of Al-Qaeda people. Yeah, sure. Oh, so they're killing Al-Qaeda people. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, it's not the worst thing ever, right? So they're like, the French hit squad's nice. I mentioned in a podcast the other day, that I was giving a series of speeches all around the UK at the beginning of the year. And I had five speeches with my conversant being a professor of English literature. I had five speeches with a kind of a B-list actor, and then five speeches with a retired MI6 officer.

and one of the things he said, unprompted by me, was, you know, we really loved working with you guys until 9-11. And they said, you all became serial killers after 9-11. And I said, yeah, unfortunately, that's true. A lot of guys just went out to just kill as many Al-Qaeda people as they could find. Nobody was charged with a crime or, I mean, none of the Al-Qaeda people. people were ever charged with the crime. They were just taken care of. And then he says, yeah, you and the French, my God, the French loved killing people. And I said, that was, that was

kind of my understanding as well. It can't, it, it obviously is a slippery slope because then you start. Because remember, you're the good guy. Right. And you're thinking, I'm the good guy, God and country. I'm going to protect my country from the terrible Muslim terrorists. And you go, blown brains out and here you end up killing women and children and taking out the whole village and that's the problem like like as taxpaying citizen that pays into these organizations I will admit I wouldn't have a problem with you know very tactical strike killings of very well clear and present danger yes is the criterion but when you're blowing up a fucking wedding because maybe two people are there that's where I go or because there's a talk

guy wearing white and then you blow up the funeral yeah the next day just to make sure you got everybody see that's that's what I'm saying it human nature every time doesn't matter who you are leads to strange slippery slopes your hindsight 2020 at every time that's right people die and then you create propaganda then you become the bad guy and then there's situations where there it is yeah right there you now you were in trying to remember your exact timeline because you were working at Langley, you were the chief historian for Saddam Hussein leading into desert storm. That was my first assignment. Yeah, and the Director of Intelligence. And then you were still there for a few years. And then what year again did you hit the farm?

Oh, I didn't go to the farm until 1997. Okay. That's what I was going to say. I was halfway through my career. And did they send you to Greece first? Yes. Okay. Did you get to Greece in 97? as well 98 mm-hmm okay all right so that kind of takes away the because what I'm what I'm interested in is like the France intelligence is you're not the first guy to say that like so many people are like oh look out for them they're fucking good but like first question how well did they get along with MI6 there's always been a strange rivalry between France and England yeah well did those intelligence it extends it extends to the to the organizations themselves Everybody knows by now what the five-eyes countries are, U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

We have given each other literally carte blanche to do anything, to see anything, to go anywhere. We don't spy on each other. We literally had people sitting next to us from other intelligence services, foreign intelligence services from those countries. So that's a very special relationship. And it's even more important at some place like NSA. than it is at CIA or FBI. But there are no other countries like that.

You know, the French, France is a NATO country. It's in the European Union. There's close cooperation. We're good friends. But we don't give them everything like we do with the five eyes. So you weren't on the ground in Europe till 98. Correct. But when you look at an event like Princess Diana's death on August,

31st, 1997. It happened in Paris. It happened in France. Is there any way the French intelligence doesn't know what happened there? I'm not saying they did it. I'm just saying like, I got to know. I would say they probably do. Yeah. What do you think happened there? You know, I really, I really believe it was a series of fuckups. The driver was drunk, being chased by the paparazzi. The paparazzi were overly aggressive. One thing led to the other. I don't remember if she was wearing a seatbelt or not. She died of a crushed chest. I think she wasn't.

Yeah, I think it was just one mistake after another. It's possible. But I don't think the royal family assassinated her. I agree. I just, I never saw the others. I never saw that either. And also, like, I don't, I don't think

Prince now King Charles is that good of an actor. Like, I mean, You know, that was very... No way. When you look at that, obviously, they had their differences for sure. But as a mother of his kids and everything, and there was definitely some human shit going on there. I think so, too. Believe it or not.

I know it's very easy to, like, dehumanize the royal family just because, you know, it's a fucking royal family. Right. Right. They are humans, so... Yeah, they are. But what's the, you know, we're talking about nuclear war. if you mentioned the Indian Pakistan example where maybe that would just be isolated, which would be for the best for everyone else. But if there was something where it wasn't something like

that and the U.S. got involved, what is the protocol in a situation like that? We all see the guy with the football carrying around the nuclear codes with the president. Obviously, the president has the say he makes the decision and then it's done. But is this something that happens in 60 seconds if it needs to yeah it is it's this is a much easier question to answer if if you're asking about a situation in which the united states is not directly involved so yeah we've got underground facilities like there's one um called mount weather that is uh that's on the virginia west virginia line there's another one in colorado where the president the vice president their families the cabinet congressional leadership, their families can be whisked away.

Everybody else, it's every man for himself for the rest of us. Yeah. Yeah, I live three miles from the White House. So I don't think I'm going to make it out. What are you going to do? You won't feel nice. No, no, it'll be fast. If there's a threat to the United States, like we believed there could be on 9-11,

yeah they'll implement that plan where the nuclear football goes with the president just in case we have to launch something the codes are in there and uh and he can launch from mount weather or from colorado wherever he happens to be air force one just flying in circle someplace the thing that i wonder in the event of like mass nuclear strikes around the world happening is if the story of society completely breaks down and none of this stuff happens, meaning it starts and there's such chaos that people are like, there is no president, including the people around.

I'm like, fuck you. Who are you? You have to expect that that would be a real possibility. Yeah, I would think so. I mean, look, we've all seen these post-apocalyptic movies or read the books. What was the Irish, the Long Road? the something road the road that's what it was called the road yeah there's been a nuclear

conflict it's every man for himself and it's just a story of this man and his son just walking down this road you don't know where it goes where they came from is it what it is the road kormack mccarthy that's right um they stumble on an underground bunker and they find a bunch of canned soup and then the dad dies and then the kid just keeps walking that's how the book ends Huh, yeah. Very Irish. Yeah, yeah. It's like the good guy always loses, and the moral of the story is there's no hope for anybody.

We got a pub right down the street. There you go. I want to go live that out. Yeah, I hate that, like I said earlier, I hate that we even have to think about that. Yeah. But it does feel like, you know, you look at these different conflicts around the world, including the ones people don't talk about, by the way. Right. Did you ever see the episode of the original Star Trek

where Kirk and Spock they beam down to this planet and this planet, the planet's leaders are yelling because the next door planet they're having a war with them and there's this announcement that everybody in group A has to go to the incinerator, right?

So you go to the incinerator and you get incinerated and Kirk is like, whoa, what's going on here? And they said, oh, we came up with this treaty with the next door planet that, since we hate each other, we're always fighting wars. There's no sense in blowing up all the buildings. So we have computer models that tell us how many people would have died if we launch, you know, X, Y, Z weapon. And so then we just summon that number of people to the incinerator, and then they get incinerated. So at least we don't mess up our planets. and he's like no

that's not a good idea you have to negotiate peace and then he of course he ends up negotiating peace but it's like we're headed there this is all predicted in 1968 yeah art following life following art something I think about a lot

it does it's just human nature like that imagination comes from something that's based in reality of how we think yes exactly right I was talking with someone recently i think it was mike writlin about like seeing the nolan batman series recently i hadn't watched it in years but the things that christopher nolan in a fucking superhero series it's like supposed to be very fake and not of this yeah the the pulse that he had his finger on

with society think about the years he filmed those movies 0407 and 2011 they came out in 05 08 and 2012 the themes elites versus the The every man, social chaos, people out for themselves, Gotham falling, falling from the inside. Tell me that you've seen Soylent Green. Soilent Green now. Soilent Green is people. Soilent Green is people. Soilent Green came out in the early 1970s.

It's one of the great science fiction and films of all time. Stars Charlton Heston. Oh, I love Charlton. He's a cop in the Megalopolis. We've had such an explosion in population that from Boston to D.C., it's just all one giant city. It's just all connected. So he's a cop in what used to be called Philadelphia.

And eggs are 100 bucks a piece. A jar of jelly is 150 bucks. There's one tree left in New York City, and they had to build a fort around it. So it could be protected. It was the only tree that's left on the East Coast. And like I say, he's a... cop and he lives with this old man who was a professor. So nobody can afford to eat. So the government provides these little nutritional chips. There's soilant green, which is colored green,

soilent red, soilant yellow. And it's like $1.98 a pound. So that's what everybody eats, what everybody lives on. In the meantime, there are such huge riots of hungry people that they have these big earth movers that just go scoop people up during demonstrations and it it throws them into the back of a dump truck and then they just disappear you don't know what happened to them so charlotte heston um he's barely able to make a living at least you know he's got soil and green he can eat and the professor decides he's 70 years old he's sick they have these suicide centers that you can just go, you lay in a bed, and they show you a film of just nature, deer running around and butterflies and birds tweeting. You've never seen anything like this

before. So as they give you the lethal injection, that's what you get to see. There's classical music playing, so it's all very nice. He runs to the, Charlton Hasten runs to the suicide center to stop his friend from committing suicide. And he has to break into the place. He's too late to save him, but he follows the trail that they've taken the body to. They take the body to a processing center where they're making Soylent Green out of all these people that they're scooping up at the demonstrations. And he's, as they're arresting him and beating him, he shouts, Soilent Green is people. Oh, my God.

We used to do this thing at the CIA. We used to do this thing at the CIA just for fun. Like every time you have an operational meeting, you have to write a very detailed, like, below-by-blow minute-by-minute account of the meeting. And CIA cables, by nature, are written only in capital letters. It's like something from the 50s. They just never changed it. So what people would do is they would make these random lowercase letters, but they did it

so it would spell out Soylent Green as people in the cable. We would always get such a kick out of it because it would always make it way through the system, nobody would pay any attention until like the one guy is reading it. He's like, oh, oh, they did it again. The scary part about that is it reminds me of that kind of story doesn't seem far, it seems far fetch for tomorrow, but it doesn't seem far fetch for somewhere in the future. Well, this, um, Soylent Green. It's 1973.

I said 72. It's 73. A lot of it. 70s was unbelievable. It is on Amazon Prime right now for 399. Okay. I'm definitely watching that. Don't miss it.

It's one of the great, one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. I can't believe I haven't seen that. I'm surprised. I've watched a lot of 70s. He did another one at the same time called the Omega Man, where he was the last man on Earth. There was some kind of pandemic. And a handful of people survived, but as like, monsters. like Walking Dead kind of people.

Like I Am Legend almost. In fact, I Am Legend was the reboot of the Omega Man. Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Awesome. Love Charlton Heston. Met him once on the street in London. Couldn't have been nicer. Is there anyone you don't know or you haven't bumped into at some point?

I was with my girlfriend. We were spending junior year abroad. And I took her to see a play called The Cain Mutiny Court Marshal, and it starred Charlton Heston. And he was brilliant in this play. And she says, let's go around to the stage door and see if we can meet him. I said, no, it's such a cliche. I don't want to bother the man. And he's not going to want to be bothered after working for two hours on stage like that.

She's like, please, I love Charlton Heston. So we ran around back. And it was half a dozen other people back there. And he came out and could not have been any nicer, more. cordial just a lovely guy fucking moses right there i know right that's moses and that voice like who in america doesn't know that voice yeah yeah pretty cool yeah again can't believe i i have watched a fuck ton of movies from the 70s the 70s was an unbut the 70s and the 90s for movies oh yes my kids even got me a a coffee table book called called the stewardess is flying the plane movies of the

1970s yeah yeah loved it it's it's awesome stuff real quick john i just got to use the bathroom of course so we'll be right back all right we're back i haven't gotten your thoughts on your very good friend john brennan now being in the crosshairs of he is that's the way to say it he's in the crosshairs of the trump justice department a couple of things i've noticed about john brennan over the last couple of weeks so he was challenged at george mason University in Arlington, Virginia, by a Republican congressional candidate who I had never heard of and who didn't come close to winning anything. But the guy legitimately challenged him over, you know, his role in the memo on a couple of things, the memo on the Hunter Biden

laptop or the letter, I guess it is. And on the CIA's analysis that Russia was behind the Trump election in the video that was shared widely on Twitter Brennan actually pokes the guy in the chest several times besides that being assault that was the first time in the 35 years that I've known John Brennan that I ever saw him loses composure ever it's getting to him it's getting to him he went on MSNBC that night looking exhausted and old beyond his ears. And he disingenuously said, I don't know why they're doing this to me. I don't understand. I didn't do anything wrong. I mean, even by MSNBC standards,

it was not believable or credible. And then just a few days later, somebody, some reporter shouted a question at him. It wasn't a reporter. It was in the metro. it was a guy who may have been a reporter now in retrospect anyway whoever it was it was a guy in the metro and brennan like went after him went up to him with his with his finger and raised voice a buddy of mine called who's an attorney and said what do you make of you know the john brennan of the last couple of weeks and i said he's scared yeah that's what this is he's scared because they're going to find something to charge him with. And not only will they charge him, they have moved the case to the Southern District of Florida. Now remember, you have to charge the case in the federal district

where the crime was allegedly committed. But what they did, I'll give you an example, in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, the CIA whistleblower, they said that he had leaked classified information to James Reisen of the New York Times. Risen then wrote a book. A CIA secretary bought the book in Virginia, so charged him in Virginia. Well, Jeffrey lived in St. Louis. Risen worked in Bethesda, Maryland, and the New York Times is in New York. They charged in Virginia.

So they play these little games all the time. Well, guess what? The game can be flipped. And so the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, whom Trump just fired recently, said, oh, I'm not seeing a crime. I'm not seeing a case. The investigation's not going anywhere. We're going to drop it. Okay, you're fired, and we're transferring the case to Florida. Because all you have to do is say, yeah, John Brennan coordinated that Hunter Biden laptop memo. I was in Miami when I read the memo

on the MSNBC website So it's that easy It's that easy But they never think about it coming back and biting them in the ass And that's that's the thing John Like I think it's well documented Long before I ever knew you Like looking at John Brennan's career

And the kinds of things he did to say nothing of the stuff That you've illuminated for many of us since then There's no doubt in my mind that he's not a good guy and that he has done a lot of things that could absolutely be taken into court and have a case made against it and the anger at some of the things that he's done of course makes me want that to happen what I worry about is all the cases that I think I righteously criticized that they were using with lawfare to make against Trump and people around him for years there strictly because they didn't like him. I now have to be consistent in my criticism

of the lawfare because it feels like we have now the pendulum is swinging. The pendulum is swung and we are setting dangerous precedents of political retribution so much so that you have guys like Steve Bannon coming out and saying to people if we don't win in 2028 people in this room are going to prison and this is the same guy who's trying to go on there and talk about doing a third term for trump which is like against the whole fucking constitution i want to i want to read to you just a couple of sentences from former attorney general of the united states and associate justice of the supreme court robert jackson he said something that was very famous um he was also one of the judges at the nuremberg trials

this is like one of the most important judges we've ever had ever um actually let me find it but he said something in um in a dinner at a dinner event for attorneys his speech was called the federal prosecutor and i think i found it we said a couple things in this speech he said it is not the function of government to keep the citizen from falling to error. It is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling to error. And to me, this is the most important thing he said.

With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, It's a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him.

Oh, that's the Stalin bar. Show me the man. I'll show you the crime. And there it is. Oh, my God. And here we are 85 years later still having the same debates. Oh, wow. Yeah. Now let me make that personal for a minute. You fucking hate that guy. I do. And righteously so. I hate him for you. ruined my life john brennan you ruin your life he i believe committed crimes by the way to to ruin your life if you look at the emails with him and eric holder and just some of the stuff he did it's a guy who runs out and says yeah we shouldn't torture people when he wrote the fucking torture he was the godfather was the guy yeah yeah is there a part of you that would just love vengeance there

oh yeah i would love love to see john brennon go to prison even if it was just for a day or a week just to be dragged down into the muck like he did to me and to Jeffrey Sterling and to Ed Snowden and so many of the rest of us on the other hand I believe in Robert Jackson in what he said

and I think that's what makes America great that's what makes us the greatest country in the world is we're governed by the rule of law if he has legitimately committed crime and I believe he has, he should be prosecuted. If there are others who are under investigation, who are subject to prosecutors scouring the law books looking for a crime, I would prefer not to see something like that happen.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it feels very, it's scaring me a little bit. Yeah. The vitriol and anger, and it's human. I asked a friend of mine, Justice Department, who's not working on the Brennan case, but who, you know, has friends and colleagues who are. And I said, I said, why hasn't Brendan been charged yet? I mean, they charge Comey with some silly crime that's probably going to get thrown out. Why haven't they charged Brennan? And he said, because they want to get that one right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They have an interesting perspective on Brennan. You know, most federal crimes have a five-year statute of limitations most um what we've heard brennan would be charged with

has either a five-year or a one-year statute of limitations and they're they're talking about contempt of congress big deal the federal sentencing guideline calls for no prison time right so who cares if he if he was in contempt of congress i don't care um lying to congress he probably has crossed the statute of limitations they probably can't charge him but what their idea is is that the hunter biden laptop memo the russia n i.e the russia analysis was all part of an ongoing conspiracy to deny american voters their duly elected president so the statute of limitations keeps restarting itself every day so long as this this uh conspiracy continues and honestly i think they've got him on that i that's the thing i think they might too and this is where this is where

it gets weird for me because no man's above the law right and it should right it should be that way we sent a vice president of the united states to prison yeah that was spiro agno right they what they got the greek guy yeah but he wasn't orthodox so it doesn't count okay yeah but like i look at that and i go is the slippery slope of letting a man like john brennan be above the law worse than the slippery slope right of the precedents that we are setting across the board right now and it's almost like and people at home don't want to hear this i don't want to hear this either especially when it comes to a guy like john brennan but it's almost like Somebody here, we used this example for something else earlier, but someone here has to be to Martin Luther King and just be like, no more.

We're bigger than this. We're not doing this because it's making, you know, we're othering each other in this country. See, and that's exactly why Joe Biden should have pardoned Donald Trump. So many people believed that's what he was going to do. I agree. Just like Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for the for the betterment of the. country yes bring the american people back together again joe biden should have pardoned all of those republicans i agree and he didn't i agree i agree with you really very much on this issue that at the end

of the day what's more important is the the strength of the country and the unity of the country it was a mistake to charge donald trump with 34 felonies for not filling out out friggin' form for the state business commission or whatever the heck it was. That was dumb. It was a mistake to charge him. I don't even remember what the crime was alleged in Georgia. What was that? Oh, he called the Georgia Secretary of State and said, find the votes.

Okay, he was excitable that day. It was the election. That's not a crime. That's just a guy having a bad day. Comey, I understand they hate Comey. Comey's an idiot frankly for being as smart as he is he's really stupid at the same time

like to take a picture of the shells 86 47 what the fuck you think he's a moron Brennan however is different in my mind I believe Brennan was trying to enact a coup I really believe it

I think there's evidence that you know even if you wanted to dress it up and call it like a shadow coup or something like that, however you want to say it, when you look at all the things that were disproven that were happening on his watch, one plus one plus one plus one plus one. Seriously. And look at it this way too. There were a lot of bad guys at the CIA at the time that I was there in those circles, right? I mean, we can say terrible things about George Tenet

and John McLaughlin and Mike Morel and Jose Rodriguez and Rick Prado and a lot of people. we can say a lot of there were a lot of crimes that were committed in the name of national security Brennan's different Brennan plotted against an elected president of the united states and he tried to use this you know the intelligence community and this lawfare against him and we can't risk that happening again that is when you put it like that it's it's about as sinister as it gets yeah now now here's the thing John, I think about this a lot. We've been the power in the world for a long time.

We have always had people in different parts of power, be it government, bureaucracy, corporate, which, you know, one feeds the other. There's a lot of cross over. Elites, et cetera, where there are some awful people and people who do corrupt things, people who get away with it sometimes because the issue becomes bigger than the person and they're connected enough. so we swipe it under sweep it under the rug but i get this strange feeling that there is this deliberate movement now to paint everything that america has ever done as evil it's all bad every single fucking i hear that a lot so i say this to a guy who was legitimately fucked over by the United States government and the worst types of people in it, who knows where evil happens and knows that we're not perfect and knows we've done evil shit around the world for sure.

You know, do you have a problem with that narrative? Oh, my God, yes. You know, I go to bed at night watching TikTok videos. I'll watch a hundred of them before I finally fall asleep. And, you know, they lead me to mostly First Amendment auditors who I just love. I just love them. And conservative YouTubers who will go

out on the street and say, you know, what's the best country in the world? And, you know, do you believe the United States is the best country in the world? And they say, oh, you know, I would like to live in Denmark. This is the best country on earth. Period. I've been to 72 countries.

I'm going to add another five more by the end of next year, this is the best country on earth. Of course we have problems because we're human. But the founding fathers gave us a system that is perfect for resolving those problems, right? The three co-equal branches of government, it's a little askew right now, but it's going to return to where it should be. It always does. You think so?

I do. It always has through history. And it will again. But what has to happen for it to return there? Congress needs to find what happened to its ball sack. Did they ever have one? It vanished once upon a time. I remember Jimmy Carter complaining. I was a kid. I was in high school. Jimmy Carter complaining that he couldn't get anything done because Congress wouldn't do what he told him to do. And the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And they were like, we don't work for you. Co-equal branches

of government. Well, we've forgotten that. And so the Democrats are in lockstep with Joe Biden. The Republicans are in lockstep with Donald Trump. That's not the way it's supposed to be. Yes, work together. But look at the 80s under the Reagan presidency.

The Democrats controlled the House. The Republicans controlled the Senate for the first four years or six years of the either four or six i can't remember anymore of the uh reagan presidency but the speaker of the house was a massachusetts liberal named tip o'neill and what happened the president would invite him over for breakfast right and they would sit and hash things out because they were both gentlemen and that's how you got business done in washington let's make a deal exactly everything is open to negotiation everything so let's negotiate so let's negotiate

And you think we can get back to that? I do. I think we can get back to that. Mm-hmm. Besides, you know, the broad general point, which is appreciative of Congress has to find their balls again. Yeah. They're all bums. Yeah, but so how do you flush out the attitudes that have formed on both sides within Congress and Senate at this point where they don't want to do that? I think that we need to elect more independent thinkers. Listen, I made fun, for example. I made awful.

awful fun of Marjorie Taylor Green when she was first elected, you know, the Jewish space lasers and cheating on her husband. I find myself agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Green like 80% of the time now. Wow. It's nuts. I haven't changed. I see Marjorie Taylor Green as having matured in her role as a member of Congress. Yeah, like, wait a minute, wait a minute, this isn't how Congress is supposed to work. What do you like about what she says? I see her as something of a, of a very out there civil libertarian in the, in the mold of, of Tom Massey, Thomas Massey, let's say. She's not as smart as Thomas Massey, of course, but they take a lot of similar positions, like Rand Paul is another example. Bernie Sanders on the on the Democratic side is another one

but I think we need more people like that there's a guy who's been running in the Democratic primary against Nancy Pelosi for years I met him in like 2016 I don't remember his name it's an Indian name and I just don't recall what it is the guy's an attorney he's very smart very bright guy he's an activist we need for him to run against people like Nancy Pelosi I think my lucky star is that Nancy Pelosi's not running for re-election. Of course, she's so young at 82, right?

That's the guy. That's the guy. I met him at the San Francisco Film Festival when we stopped and chatted. I had never heard of him before. He's like, how do you say that name? I just butchered that. Chakra-Bardi. Chakra-Barty. Chakra-Barty. I've got a friend. Um, he's an originally Indian, naturalized American. Bert Thacker. Shout out to Bert Thacker. Shout out to Bert Thacker. Shut up, Bert. Bert, um, Bert's a two-time Jeopardy Champion, uh, number one. Number two, he is a former Republican congressional candidate in Southern California,

moved to Texas, got himself elected to the city council and the city he went to, and is already planning his congressional campaign. We need to have 435 people like Bert Thacker because then we would get stuff done in this country. Bert cares almost not at all about party affiliation. He happens to be a Republican, but he just wants to get stuff solved, get things done. I think a big difference today that's causing a huge problem, which should be like the biggest benefit ever, is the fact that all of us have a voice behind a keyboard online and we police each other for thought. and then where does that sound very familiar from online that then forces its way towards the ballot box and the people who get elected there who are from that same world and understand it or if they're

not from that world understand that they have to live in it so for example you're nancy pelosi you can't possibly make a deal with donald trump that won't play well on ticot it won't no you can it won't play well on instagram it won't play well on twitter and you're going to be viewed as a traitor to your people for doing that. Whereas Nancy Pelosi could have tied one off, you know, fucking 25 years ago if Donald Trump were president and, you know, come up with a deal at a fucking K Street Steakhouse and shit could have actually happened. Which is exactly how Washington used to work. Yes, you're exactly right. You knew that if you went to the Oval Room at 9 o'clock on a Tuesday night, the entire Senate leadership was going to be there having stakes and trying to figure out what to do

about the budget. Right. At the Trump Hotel, when there was a Trump hotel in Washington, I went with friends a couple of times, more than a couple of times,

and we joked that, like, my God, is there a single member of the Republican House leadership who's not at the bar right now? Literally every single one of them. But that's how you get stuff done. Yes.

When I was in college, it was quite, comment for members of Congress to share group houses up on Capitol Hill, you'd pack six, seven, eight guys in a house because it's expensive in Washington. You have to maintain a house in your district, right? And your family's probably in the district. You still have to have somewhere to live in Washington. So, and they don't really make any money. Well, they do now. Great stock pickers. Two 20. It's like a miracle. Like a miracle. They're incredible at it. Crystal ball. So it wasn't unusual to have, you know,

three Dems and three Republicans in a house or four and four. They'd play poker on Fridays. They'd go to church together on Sundays. And then, you know, they would argue in committee. But they're all friends. And they knew that at the end of the day, they could negotiate a deal. And that's just not the case anymore. Yeah, that's where I'm having trouble seeing how that becomes the case again.

Yeah. Because of how people have just been so, you know, in this kind of job, I see it all the time. you know how much people just jump to conclusions on the minute they hear an opinion they don't agree with they're gone yeah they're really not but they say oh i get that all the time listen i'm going to say something that's going to cause me trouble but i'm going to say it anyway i gave an interview to an indian news outlet two weeks ago and i didn't say anything that i haven't said a thousand times for whatever reason and this is why as a matter of policy listen i'm serious no more interviews to any Indian or Pakistani news outlets ever again. Okay. Got that on the record. John's

policy. Done. Because they just make shit up and put it in a banner headline with two exclamation points and say that the CIA, this CIA officer finally reveals the truth behind, you know, like now. I told you, my information's 25 years old. Okay, so I said one thing. I said in a conventional conflict India would beat Pakistan because it has five times the people yeah the death threats

I've lost count of how many death threats I received and then the best of all like my lawyer's like got to keep a low profile just aware of your surroundings I know right John's like yeah fuck you so I get a letter from the president of Imran Khan's political party right whatever it's called the Pakistan whatever party you got a letter a letter in

the mail and he says that they condemn in the strongest possible terms what I said to the Indians and they demand an immediate apology to his excellency the former prime minister to the members of the party and to the people of Pakistan. Forgiving an opinion? Yeah. So my lawyer is like, just throw it away, just throw it away. So I didn't throw it away. I sent him an email and I said,

Oh my God. In regards to your demand for an apology, I wipe my ass with your demands for an apology. And I hit send. And that's how I left it. And I haven't heard back from them. So my lawyer is like, well, that speaking offer at the Pakistani military academy, yeah, you're not going to be doing that. And I said, no, no, I'll never go back ever again.

But they don't, they don't treat me with respect anyway. You could have just said, explain bin Laden. Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, like, it would appear mathematically, India would bodybag Pakistan. No, you know, no, Pakistan, no disrespect. It's just, you know. And you know why they hate each other so much? Because they're exactly alike.

That's why. Really? It used to be one country, right? India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was one country called the Indian subcontinent. Right? And then in 1947, India and Pakistan had a brutal bloody war and they split off. So all the Muslims went west to Pakistan and all the Hindus went east. to India, but now there are more Muslims than there are, you know, pretty much anybody else and

they have a higher birth rate in India. But anyway, and then by 1971, I think it was, Bangladesh is like, screw this. They're part of Pakistan. They were called East Pakistan. And they're like, Pakistan's all the way over there. We disagree with everything. So we're going to be independent too, and they created Bangladesh. Okay, well, India has five times more people. than Pakistan does. And the Bangladeshis like the Indians. And the Afghans like the Indians and hate the Pakistanis. So if you're Pakistan and you're outmanned and surrounded by your enemies,

you're going to win that fight? Yeah, they don't seem to have like a lot of friends. No. Right? No. Because they write threatening letters and expect immediate action. I love that they wanted a retraction. Yeah, retraction.

Like last time I was in your country, I ran the greatest targeting mission in modern history. Don't fuck with me. That's right. And he wants to say in the letter that his prime minister is in prison right now. Oh, he's in prison? Oh, yeah. Why is he in prison? Oh, for all kinds of reasons.

Treason and corruption. And he's still prime minister? No, no. They deposed him. So he's not running it from the prison cell? No. Well, he's running a party from his prison cell. Got it.

They got a new prime minister. It's so awkward. Yeah. And he wants an apology from me. I think you should apologize to all of the people of Pakistan for being a, you know, corrupt typical corrupt leader in Pakistan they're all corrupt listen one time I was with with a colleague a more senior colleague we went to see Benazir Bhutto went to see Benazir Bhutto she was in exile in Dubai and her husband was

this guy Zardari I think his first name was Hussein something like that and so we're at the we're at her beachfront mansion her ten million dollar beachfront mansion in dubai this is a woman who was making you know 60 grand a year as prime minister hey listen good investor right so we hear a car pulling up outside and she said something offhandedly that has just been ingrained in my mind ever since she says so help me god if he's pulling up in another bentley i'm going to lose my mind and my boss and i kind of look at each other like corrupt a little bit yeah you make 60 grand a year how many bentleys do you have with your 10 million dollar beachfront house in Dubai and then she went back became prime

minister again got shot in the head now he's the president of pakistan her husband her corrupt husband funny all the world works yeah you know that is the thing the patterns are the same everywhere in different societies it's human nature it's human nature you get people that get into powerful positions that have connections to be able to do things that the average person can't whether it's legal or not they do it it's you're 100% it's it is human nature and like now in the internet era we can just see it more right in that i think you're exactly right about that yeah the the information is much more readily available for us it's just they're almost instance instantaneously. How much in your career at CIA did you either see directly or get an inkling or a vibe

of, say, elite forces that were not a part of CIA playing roles or having say or having some sort of influence over decisions that the agency was making? I didn't. Never. No. It was always the other way around. After 9-11, we were short on special forces guys. You know, we had this thing called the Special Activities Division. And then within the Counterterrorism Center, there was the special activities group. But we needed operators, like not the ones like John that were going to, you know, whine and die in the guy and recruit him. Exactly. And so we just borrowed people from the special forces. So all of a sudden, I mean, like in the matter of a week or two after 9-11, we've got seals,

we have Delta, we have Rangers, we have all these people. And they're all, they're not what you might imagine. They're not, they're not these buff, you know, he men that stepped out of a magazine. They had five days beard, a little bit of a gut. They could do some heavy drinking and then get up and run five miles. which I never understood but they they knew exactly what the mission was and by God they were happy to get on a plane jump out the back of it and then do the mission and then figure out how to rescue them later I've had a couple of those guys

sitting here yeah they're very very tough guys about yeah they're built a little different yeah they are I've never understood how I've never understood how guys like that can negotiate the psychological weight of what comes with their jobs. It is a, the fact that you haven't figured that out is not reassuring because I sit here and wonder the same thing sometimes. There is the only thing I can come up with is there's just a different gene. I think that's it. I've got two friends.

One was a medic on sealed team. Team 2. He's an older guy. He's about eight years older than I am. So this is when the SEAL teams were first created out of what used to be called the underwater demolition teams. And I've got a buddy who's currently a SEAL. I won't say which team. He's the son-in-law of a very close friend of mine. He does struggle with these issues. My older friend from SEAL Team 2 sleeps like a baby every night no problem i think it's person to person i think it is right yeah but also they pick certain guys for certain teams or certain missions that's right who maybe they've tested under scrutiny and stress not to say by the way that sometimes once the guys are done their career and

come home they don't bring it home with them and they and they frequently do oh yeah they frequently do it's it's a sad thing to see sad but when when they're in there there's something about like reach go mission and that's it about the mission yeah you know glad they're on my side though yeah me too right yep got that right so they were just and i mean i've talked with guys about this before it was obviously like a shit show right after 9-11 sure hands on deck but basically a lot the way you're explaining it is a lot of these guys minus just some of the basic like on the ground forces we know from the paramilitary operation that happened right away in afghanistan but a lot of these guys were literally like, hey, you're in, you're red in, you're in telling. They just showed

up one day. I'm telling you, at the counterterrorism center, we more than doubled in size within two, three days. Wow. And then even after that, all these special forces guys just arrived. Like, okay, where do we go? And then they started doing their thing. And how soon was it after the towers came down that you were first approach about with the enhanced interrogation? Oh, it was quite some time. Towers came down on September 11th. We started bombing Afghanistan in early October. It was in late October that Mitchell and Jessen were introduced to George Tenet at a cocktail party. They pitched the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I think we signed the contract in January. And then we were just waiting to see who's the first guy we're going to

catch. We caught up as a beta in March. Yeah, I was going to say you were going to Pakistan. And then I was approached the first week of May of 2002. Okay. And then you were still in there for a few years afterwards. I mean, obviously that is the core part of your story. We've told that on episode 249 and 250 a bunch before. We went out to go through all that. Sure. But that was a disturbing thing that you saw at CIA. Yeah. Are there other things now years later that you're willing to talk about, that you came across, that maybe didn't involve you directly like that, where people were like, hey, we want to actually bring you in on this, that you just found viciously disturbing that they were doing?

No. All throughout my CIA career, I worked with people who were doing their jobs to the highest ethical standard. It was, it was, because post-9-11, and everybody just kind of went nuts. because this was the greatest intelligence failure in the CIA's history, and because it was specific to the counterterrorism center. I think that's why there was so much that was sort of revealed to me. But otherwise, no.

In fact, one time, one time I was the note taker. I was living in Bahrain at the time. And Ambassador David Ransom, just an absolutely lovely guy. one of the finest human beings I've ever worked for. He was a terrific ambassador and just a really great guy. He would frequently ask me to be the note taker in his meetings with the minister of foreign affairs. And the minister liked me, and I liked him. His English was better than mine.

Crazy as that might sound. But if there was something sensitive that the ambassador needed to raise, he would always mention it to me in the car on the way to the foreign ministry. Don't let me forget to say X, and I jot down a note. So we went to see a foreign minister one time, and he did forget to say X. And so at the end of the meeting, and these meetings would go two hours. He turned to me and he said, is there anything else? Is there anything that I'm forgetting?

And I said, yes, there's the issue with Ambassador so-and-so. And he said, oh, that's right. and he said, he said the foreign minister, one of my predecessors here in Bahrain, it's come to my attention, is now working for the Bob Dole campaign. And we understand that he may come out here and ask you for money. It is illegal for a foreign national to contribute money to an American political campaign. So I just wanted to give you a heads up. And the minister, says, oh, he's already been here. We gave him $50,000. We didn't realize it was illegal, but he went to see the emir, and the emir gave him $50,000. So we get back in the car and the

ambassador says, listen, that last part, don't put that in a cable. He said, that's a hornet's nest that I don't think either one of us want to be involved in. So I didn't put it in the cable. you break the cable out by issue like the ambassadors meeting with the foreign minister middle east peace the ambassadors meeting with foreign minister uh the military agreement with the united states ambassadors meeting with the foreign minister iran and the threat from you know whatever he told me not to write that this was like a month or two or three before i i left to go back to headquarters and i thought about it and thought about it and thought about it and i thought you know for my own selfish reasons what happens if i go for my next polygraph and they ask me if i'm aware of a

crime that i didn't report then then it's me then i get fired so i just pick up the phone one day and i called the general counsel's office a guy a guy answers the phone george and i said hi my name's John Kiriaku. I'm in the office of Near Eastern South Asian analysis. He goes, wait, Kyriaku, are you from Farrell, Pennsylvania? And I go, what? I go, yeah. I was born in Farrell, Pennsylvania. He said, is your dad Chris? And I said, yeah, you know my dad? And he said, your dad was the best man in my in-law's wedding. Oh, my God. And I said, oh, cool. He says, let's have coffee. I said, okay, better than just reporting this crime over the phone to a stranger. So, me in the cafeteria. Nice guy.

we're still friendly not friends but we're friendly so uh so i said you know there's something i'm aware of i don't know if it's a big deal or not it kind of feels like it might be a big deal but i don't want it to trip me up on the polygraph so i told him he's like oh yeah that's a felony and i said okay so like so i'm done i don't have to write it write it down or anything he said put it in an email and send it to me he said i'll send it over to doj but at the very least least we have to report it because if word gets back to DOJ that you knew about it or I knew about it or your ambassador knew about it, we're all liable to be prosecuted. So I sent him an email and, I don't know, a year later so, since he was Greek and we had this

Greek-American kind of group at the agency, we'd have lunch together once a month after that once George Tenet became director, I asked him, whatever happened to, uh, that? thing he said they didn't give a shit nothing ever happened I said okay well we did the right thing you did the right that I wonder if it had two zeros at the end of that two extra zeros if they would have given a little more of a shit right I mean 50k from the Amir feels like grab grab that change off the ashtray listen what I mean the DCM the deputy chief mission another good guy his wife developed a very serious case of breast cancer well well

We were there, and she had to be medevaced, back to the United States. And the DCM went to curtail his position. He had to go back, take care of his wife, et cetera, et cetera. They had a nine-year-old daughter at the time. This box arrives from the Royal D. Wan. It's just a box wrapped in brown paper. And he said to me, I got something from the Royal D. Wan. And I said, well, that's kind of cool.

I never got anything from the Royal D. Wan. The royal palace. And he says, don't leave. I'm thinking I might need a witness. And I said, okay, he opens it up, $50,000 in cash with a getwell card to his wife. That's what lovely people they were. They are. They remain.

Lovely people. We can't accept $50,000. So I walked 20 feet to the ambassador's office and knocked on the door. And I said, Ambassador, you're going to want to see this. so he comes over he's like oh for god's sake and he said i just got it from the royal duan and he said okay we need to count it we need witnesses so we counted it all out it was 50,000 and then i wrote a cable to the treasury department saying we're pouching back 50,000 that's from the emir and it just goes into the treasury with our tax dollars

well i guess thank you for the donation to our tax revenue yeah there's something gets used right yeah it gets used sure do you think that have you discovered things in the years since being out of CIA which has been a long time now been out a long time that shocks you and and before you answer that the reason I ask that is because whether it's CIA NSA sure wherever a brilliant tactic that all these bureaucracies use is they compartmentalize people to to work on what they're working on. That's right. And that's what they want you to do.

You want you to become compartmentalized. So you're not wondering what Fred's doing down the hall. That's right. Because it's none of your damn business what Fred's doing down the hall. So question remains. Are the things that you've discovered that CIA does that doesn't have to be a fair bad reason either.

Oh, yeah. I've been shocked. Yeah, I've been shocked. I was shocked with the Vault 7 revelations in 2017. The WikiLeaks stuff. Yeah. That was shocking. Now, what was that?

Vault 7 is very complicated. Among other things, Volt 7 showed that the CIA had developed hacking capability where they could hack into the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Cubans, whomever, hack the system, and then leave traces of the hack on purpose, but with the traces written in Cyrillic or Mandarin. So that once they were discovered by the IT security guys in those countries, that say, oh, it was the Russians that did it. They left, look, they left one little line of code,

and it's all written in Russian. Conveniently. Yeah. So that was one thing. Another thing that Vault 7 taught us was that the CIA developed the capability to take over your car remotely by hacking into the car's computer system

to drive you off a bridge or into a tree. Now, did we discover examples of where this was used? We did not, but the conventional wisdom among the blogosphere is that, you know, we should ask Michael Hastings what happened to him. Whoa. Yeah, Vault 7 also told us that the CIA is able to take over a smart TV to turn the speaker into a microphone so that it broadcasts everything taking place in the room with the TV

still off. well the TV's on so hello pretty impressive hello langley yeah how are you so what that told me those are cool and and there were a dozen more things that were part of vault seven but what it also told me is that the CIA is running parallel operations with NSA why is the CIA developing this stuff this is NSA and DARPA that should be doing it and NSA and DARPA are doing it what's the CIA is also doing it. How do you like what because on the one hand they have so much money that they can't spend it all so they just make their own NSA make their own DARPA I have a buddy I sat next to him for the first three and a half years in my career he's now the deputy director of the CIA

for innovation what's that he was always a computer nerd yeah and I remember he got a he got an award like 1991 because he came up with a program to make a very crude family tree like computers were new to us at the time when I first started I had this big box that had a green screen it was about that big called the Delta data and I had an IBM Selectric 3 typewriter next to me because half of what we did was on

typewriter still so he came up with this crude family tree so we could do the Saudi royal family the Kuwaiti royal family Bahraini royal family just so it's clear when you're doing your analysis. And they were like, wow, you did that on this new computer? That's amazing. Here's $500 in an exceptional performance award.

Now he's the deputy director of the CIA for innovation, which tells me that he's in charge of all this crazy shit that we're reading about at WikiLeaks. That's what I don't understand, though. Like, why even have DARPA or NSA if it's not just a department of like CIA? or and the other way around with the CIA being an apartment, you know what I mean? Like, why do you even have separation because the same, you may, I'll give you an example, you may call on fucking Tim Cook and Apple to take care of something they need if you're DARPA. And they do.

And they can call them too. Yeah, sure. So why aren't they all just under one roof? Oftentimes it's a bureaucratic pissing match where the Secretary of Defense will say, well, CIA does its own thing for its own reasons. We are very specific. Our mission is, you know, to protect the homeland and our troops and whatever. CIA is like, we don't really give a shit about the troops.

We don't have any anything to do with the troops except maybe we'll see them in the cafeteria when we're at some base somewhere. So we want it for CIA reasons. And NSA is like, well, wait a minute. We're NSA. This is exactly what we're supposed to be doing. So we're going to be doing it. But again, when you have so much money that you can't spend it all in a fiscal year,

you end up just replicating what the other guys are doing. And does Congress even actually know what kind of money that CIA has? No. How does that hit in so easily? Every single year, year after year after year after year, Congress appropriates more money than the Defense Department asks for. I wonder why. Yeah.

Because then you're not weak on defense. Those pinkos otherwise, you know. Yeah. And there's how many trillions of dollars missing? And after how many years of internal audits, Pricewaterhouse Cooper just gave up and said, we don't know where this money went. It's just gone.

How do you, like what kind of, I guess, look through, see through, work with, however you want to say it, did you have with NSA during your career for things you did? And what was that like? I had a good relationship with NSA. I made a point of making that long drive out to NSA at least once a year just to say, hey, how you guys doing? What are you working on?

Let's go have a coffee in the cafeteria. And then we would invite them to come over to the agency. They would always come like six or eight at a time and we'd spend the day and take them to the gift shop and whatever. She got along. Oh, yeah, always got along. And then they would call and say, listen, we're going to publish something in about an hour,

but you need to know what this is. because you work on X, Y, Z issue, and they would give me a heads up. So I could call the seventh floor and say, listen, NSA's coming out with something big. This is what they're going to say. And that was a valuable relationship. Even operationally, I had a good relationship with NSA to the point where in one of my overseas tours, I worked closely with an NSA officer. And he really did me a solid.

there were a couple of phone numbers I asked him to just start intercepting and tell me if there's anything interesting and just to be a nice guy he also began intercepting the phone of one of my sources and so he said to me one day hey I have a present for you

and he gives me this file and it's a transcript of everything that my source has said and I was like this is fucking brilliant So now I can say, hey, do you ever talk to so-and-so? Because I know it's there. I know he does. And then if he says, yeah, actually, I talked to him on Tuesday. You did?

What did he say? And then he'll just pare it back. So I know he's telling the truth. That's called operational vetting. And so I can write to headquarters and say, I know for 100% certainty that he's telling me the truth. Wow. So that's interesting because you always hear about like this interoperative.

agency rivalry and stuff and you would think that when CIA has their own innovation and technology design arm there's like oh we're going to come up with a first or they're going to come up with a first but you guys are still working together it's just yeah and then throw in throw in the whole nonsense about in QTel and Palantir where these do throw it in John where the CIA now is in the venture capital business for a profit uh-huh which is illegal um and not if you're right in the loss not if you're right in the loss where

the CIA in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 created something called in Q-Tel which is a cutesy you know play on Intel with Q from the James Bond movies in the middle like I hope they didn't pay somebody to come up with that

but anyway it's like the kind of famous story that the that the Tourism Board of Scotland spend 150,000 hiring a consulting firm to come up with a tourism slogan, and for $150,000, they came up with Visit Scotland. It's true. Google it.

Well, that's the consulting class for you. Yeah. So anyway, they came up with Incutel. InQTel's very first investment was not a lot. It was like, I can't remember if it's a million and a half. I think it's a million and a half to Palanty. In like 03, something like that. Oh, two, yeah.

And now Palantir is a trillion dollar company that makes most of its money contracting with the CIA. It's a publicly traded company. And everybody, listen, I subscribe to Barron's every week. It's like, buy Palantir, buy Palantir, buy Palantir. What do you think of their capabilities and what they're trying to do just right now? the agency no palanter which is the agency yeah which kind of is the agency you know i i i worry very much about about it's even too weak to say encroachment on our civil liberties i worry about the violation of our civil liberties very much it is against the law for the CIA to spy on

americans period period that's it it's against the law but they do every day It's against the law, and it's actually a part of NSA's charter that they cannot spy on Americans. You cannot intercept the communications of Americans. And that's practically all they do, right, where they had to build this new facility out in Utah, in the desert, that can hold every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years. 500 years. 500 years. How about this? even the FBI no longer has to get a warrant

to take your communications right the metadata from your communications is for sale all they have to do is call T-Mobile and say hey I want Julian Dorey's communications here's the five grand that you charge that's the thing what Pallantier does is a whole nother level and I want to stay with that for a second but I've had Mike Yagley who I mentioned earlier

sitting in this chair twice in the past two months and the way that he got back in the crosshairs of the government where they went what the fuck was he was working on amalgamating marketing data and he realized what you could just buy publicly legally and so he bought a bunch of data in North Carolina around Fort Bragg and tracked a bunch of phones leaving Fort Bragg going to a neighborhood about 45 minutes away that was a little bit higher income meaning these are most likely special forces, track down the names of everyone who lived there, where they went, what they did, realized they were special forces, then watched them and charted

them go across to Syria once every other month for five days to Lafar's Concrete Company or LaFarque Concrete Company, which was obviously a cover for some undercover operation they were doing. And he went to the government and showed them and he said, I did this in my bedroom. What do you think China's doing? Jason Leopold, who is an investigative journalist for Bloomberg, formerly of Vice, BuzzFeed, the LA Times, absolutely brilliant journalist. He was once called a FOIA terrorist by the Pentagon spokesman because he has filed more FOIA request than any other person in American history. He broke the Hillary Clinton email story just by sending in a FOIA request.

Well, he revealed the location of the CIA's secret drone surveillance base in Balochistan, Pakistan. And you know how he did it? He read somewhere that drones use a certain kind of aviation fuel. And so he just did a Freedom of Information Act request of the Pentagon for the locations of all of the deliveries of this aviation fuel. and like millions of dollars of fuel we're going into this you know desert base in southwestern Pakistan this top secret base that's not top secret anymore because the freedom of information act has told us so for all the smart guys in government and we're supposed to keep a secret and claim to be able to keep the secret and whatever they literally write stuff in the

modern metadata that someone at home can get that's it that's why it gets hard to certain secrets, I wonder, it gets hard to believe that they wouldn't be able to be uncovered in some ways. And that gets to some of the weirdest shit if you start to think about it. Yeah. But we got off, we're talking about the regular public metadata right here, but Palantir themselves. I mean, that's a whole nother level. Yeah. So what kinds of things right now are you most concerned about with what they're doing? You know, we don't really know a lot of what Palantir does. Most of it is classified. And even then it's classified at the top secret level because it involves technology and we know that they have massive uh contracts with uh the cia and it's not

just the cia they work with darpa they work with the pentagon writ large they work with nsa they're all over government now they didn't even exist 20 years ago practically that's a peter teal company yeah that's right very powerful guy very powerful what do you think of the the Alex Garp guy who runs it? You know, I did a little, I was, I was hired by an interest group to do a little biographical mock-up of the two of them. And they're exactly the kind of guys that the CIA would want to be doing business with. They're conservatives, they are religious, they are extremely patriotic.

but driven by profit and they'll do as they're told and they'll keep their mouth shut carp is is militarily industrially conservative but he's technically a democrat yeah right yeah i think he never switched his party affiliation yeah he's like a little hard to put in a box with some things and he has said that in interviews where yeah party politics don't hold any interest for him right yeah it's tough when you start talking about surveilling citizens though at like a protest you don't like or something like that with drones the size of a of a bumblebee or a or a wasp yeah no one can even see it yeah we're getting to the birds aren't real territory very much very much yes we are yes it's frightening what about when they're a company that is contracted by

CIA and for all intents and purposes created by CIA in the sense that they funded them how about them working on other conflicts around the world though isn't that like a conflict of interest for other countries yes i would say it is but they would probably argue that they've stovepiped everything and that there's no crossover that if they're working on a CIA project it's just these people in this box working on a CIA project if they have an MI6 project it's over here and never the two shall meet but what about a braxis corporation here's here's another one So right around the time that I came home from Athens in 2000, there was a kind of a wave of senior level retirements. And these were all pretty important guys, you know, the head of European operations, the head of New York East operations, the head of domestic operations, whatever.

And they decided to just create an LLC where they could go, you know, smoke cigars and, you know, drink coffee and hang out and play Peanuckle all day and take a tax deduction. And so you got to show you got to show a gain in two out of five years in order to keep your LLC. So they put in for a couple what they call butts in seats contracts where you just take anybody who's got a security clearance, put them in these seats, let them do data entry for six months. And then the contract's over and they all get fired. They all have 1099s anyway, so you don't care. Well, now they're like a, you know, $20 billion company

because at headquarters, I remember this happening at the time. They're like, oh, we have a real need for XYZ. And somebody says, what about Jack? Jack's got this Abraxas thing now. We know everybody. They're all friends of ours. Greatest show company of all time. And then there you go.

Yeah. And it was taken over once, twice, three times. It changed its name a couple times. I think it's still known as Abraxas, based in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. These guys never expected to be billionaires. They were just looking for a tax deduction on their coffee and cigars. Oh, that's the definition of finding money. It's like, oh, there it is.

Yeah, there it is. It turned up. I might as well take it. Yeah. Ooh. But like, back to Palantir, though, they are, so you would imagine their complying. departmentalizing for different countries. Doesn't it get weird, though, when you have an organization that has intel about every one of

these countries individually themselves, that allegedly they're not passing back to CIA? Especially when the Conventional Wisdom is that this is a CIA company. Yeah. Like, wouldn't, doesn't that feel a little bit like it could be the start of a 1984 novel? I would guess that, okay, if they're working for the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians, the New Zealanders, we don't care. Okay. Because five eyes, we're all sharing everything anyway.

Okay. But let's say they're working for the French, the Germans, whatever, the Hungarians. Who knows? I don't know. I am going to say that an officer from the CIA's National Resources Division, those CIA officers around the United States. The National Resources Division was created. Just so when a corporate CEO or other officer went to a denied area, say he went to Moscow for a meeting or Beijing for a meeting, somebody from the NR division would go and say, hey, you know, I'm from the CIA, you're a patriot.

Can I ask you some questions about your trip? They always, always say yes. Because they're patriots. I would guess that with Palantir there are regular routine meetings within our division saying I was in the United Arab Emirates the other day

and I ran into so-and-so and this is what he's interested in and you know something like that yeah one just scares me I don't know it's also like the guy you did the biography on him but the guys who are in charge just seem a little

teal and carp when they talk they say seem a little divorce from reality particularly of the every man to be clear i and i think that's how he starts yeah right totally agree look at elan musk you know what about elan i mean he's not the same elan musk from 10 or 20 years ago i told you my my alan musk story yeah back when you met him at the across the street from the white house at the hotel when you say he's not the same guy like just normal personality changes or i think it's a combination of things You know, he just signed a $1 trillion contract with Tesla.

He's going to have to make a bunch of targets to collect that money. But it's no longer about the technology. It's no longer about, for example, when is the last time you heard him talk about colonizing Mars? Time was you couldn't get him to shut up about colonizing Mars. What about the high-speed vacuum tube that we were supposed to go from from L.A. to San Francisco in 45 minutes. What happened to that? John, men, when I saw that trillion-dollar deal, I had a thought that I was like,

damn, I should have had this thought fucking 15 years ago, like when you look at the math, because it was already true then, but men are becoming countries. Yes. He's a country. Yeah. It's about to be worth a trillion dollars. And, you know, if I were, Elon Musk, I would worry about, you know, and eat the rich movement. Of course. I really would.

I would worry for my own safety. Well, he has positioned himself. I'm not even saying this is wrong at all. I'm saying it's just interesting. He's positioned himself as the man of the people who saved free speech and is speaking for the every man and funded Trump, who represents the every man and stuff like that. But you are absolutely right. Who said this the other day?

I want to give him credit. But it's like it should be the captain obvious point, but they just put it. so beautifully and it's exactly what it is. They're like, the future isn't a division of left right problems. That's just what we're looking at right now. It's up down. It's elite and everyone else. And when you look at any empire that has fallen around the world, one of the many traits of the falling of the empire, and I would argue it's probably the most important trait, is a severe separation and disagreement in future and hope as it pertains to the lower classes. and the elites. And we talked about it earlier was something else, but you see that wealth

captivated. This is something that's happening around the world and you are getting people who are getting so wealthy that, you know, trump change of their wealth could solve world problems. And I say this as someone who is in no way a socialist or anything like that. I don't agree with that ideology. But, you know, does a person need a trillion dollars? No, the fuck they don't. Sorry. No, sorry. I don't, I'm, I don't think, I think it's a slippery slope to say, oh, you make that illegal. But like, you got to have some self-awareness or something. I don't know.

Give some of it away. I don't know. It's easy for me to sit here as a guy who's worth about $2. Warren Buffett has famously said that he's leaving his children literally nothing. Respect that a lot. I do too. Every cent of it goes to charity. And you know what?

I don't know how his kids or grandkids feel about that, but. I would imagine if they get older and wiser, especially like the grandkids and the ones who were younger, they'll thank them for that. Yeah, they will. You're not, you don't have any fulfillment in life when you're just giving money. I always, in my old career, I saw that, you know, the kids that had the trust funds, they were just dead. Oh, yeah. They were dead. Yeah.

And they never really reached any kind of potential. Nope. They were always living in the shadow as something that wasn't theirs. And I actually felt bad for a lot of them, you know, like they didn't choose. have that happen you know yeah but agreed i i just think there's something about the purpose of life that like you make your own way whatever that is you know i do something public i want to be the greatest in the world at it i will be one day you know i'm gonna have kids yep i want them to go do their own fucking thing i don't want them to worry about like what their dad did and have to

none of my kids none of my five kids have any interest in doing what i did which i think is wonderful and they've all done things completely different from each other. My oldest is a bond trader in Chicago. My second is an elementary school music teacher in North Carolina. My third is getting a degree in supply chain economics. My fourth changes her mind, but right now she's studying engineering. And my fifth is an eighth grade. But they're all, they have completely different interests,

which i think is the best and the healthiest and that's and and that you know i just think that leads to more happiness that way too and that's great that you support that as well also not for nothing i wouldn't want to follow in your footsteps after what they did to you as well so maybe that was one good no that's right no that's right that's right john it is always a pleasure man we'll do this again always enjoy coming here and seeing you love talking with you about world events you have such a good outlook on stuff so until next time good all right we'll have everything linked down below for you, your X, your substack, your new show, all that? Yeah, yeah, that sounds great.

Okay. Great. I look forward to it. Thank you. 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 button on the video. They're both a huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.