The David Knight Show - BEST OF INTERVIEWS Killer AI Weapons, CIA Whistleblower, CPA Looks At Election Corruption

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

1) Paul Scharre, former Army Ranger who served in Iraq & Afghanistan, and author of award winning study of autonomous weapons — "Army of None", VP & Director of Studies at Center for a New American Security. While the book "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" focuses on AI in the context of power and competition between US & China, Mr Scharre writes "This book is about the darker side of AI". It's not the usual concerns about AI becoming sentient and malicious, but AI used maliciously by humans. 2) CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou, on a variety of issuesPardons for sale in the Trump administration? Kiriakou's experience with Rudy GiulianiThe importance of the Wagner Group and Ukraine.The plan to assassinate Julian Assange and what it meant to label him as a "hostile non-state intelligence actor"RFKj and the vaccine issueWhat RFKj heard as a child from the CIA Director regarding JFK assassinationWhat John says happened on 911DeSantis and torture at Gitmo3) Joseph Fried, CPA & auditor with 40 yrs professional experience, on various types of election fraud and what it would take to have honest elections in Republican controlled states and in Democrat controlled states. Author of "Debunked?: An Auditor Reviews the 2020 election — and Lessons Learned"Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Music Using free speech to free minds. You're listening to The David Knight Show. Thank you. © B Emily Beynon Joining us now is Paul Charest. He has a previous book, The Army of None, about artificial intelligence. He is a former Armyanger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. His book, Autonomous Weapons and the Army of None, was an award-winning study. He is vice president director of studies at the Center for New American Security. And this book, which is a real page-turner for something that is heavy into technology, but also politics, geopolitics. It

covers a wide range of areas. And I got to say, I really did enjoy it. It's a massive book, but I did enjoy reading it. The book is Four Battlegrounds, Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Shari. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you. I want to focus at the very beginning of the book. And this is one of the things that hooked me. This book is about the darker side of AI. And that's what I want to focus on too often. We get this Pollyanna vision version of the future, you know, and everything is going to be just shiny new toys and technology, but the reality is a little bit concerning, isn't it? Uh, I thought

it was interesting that you began the book with a talk about an AI dog fight. Uh, that is a little bit concerning, isn't it? I thought it was interesting that you began the book with a talk about an AI dogfight. That is, and again, there's a lot of great anecdotes through this, which makes it such a good book to read. Tell people what was happening in DARPA's ACE program, that's Air Combat Evolution. Yeah, thanks so much. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed that one.

I thought it was really exciting to learn about. I talk at the opening of the book about DARPA's ACE program, Air Combat Evolution, and the DARPA did a few years ago, taking a page from AlphaGo that beat the best humans at Go, was designed to beat a human in dogfighting in a simulator. And there's a lot of caveats that apply from a simulator to the real world. It's not the same. Right. But nevertheless, a big challenge because that's a very difficult environment for humans. You're maneuvering at high speed, requires quick reflexes, situational awareness, anticipating where's the other pilot going to go. Yeah, let me interject here and say, you know, one of the things that surprised me about that was that because of technology, typically missile

technology, right? You don't have dogfights anymore, but that's really a measure of pilot skill is how they were using that. So tell us how it went. That's right. Pilot skill, and it's always pilot trust, pilot trust in the AI, right? If the AI can do dogfighting, then it's going to help pilots trust it more. So in this competition, a number of different companies brought their AIs. They competed against each other. Now, the winner was a previously unheard of company called Heron Systems, beat out Lockheed Martin in the finals. And then their AI went head to head against the human experienced Air Force pilot, totally crushed the human. 15 to zero, human didn't get a single shot off against the AI.

And the thing that was most interesting to me was the AI was able to make these superhuman precision shots when the aircraft are racing at each other, hundreds of miles an hour head to head that are basically impossible for humans to make. So the AI actually was not just better than the human, but was fighting differently than the human. Yeah. And as you point out in the thing, typically we've all seen dog fights in movies over and over again, even in Star Wars, the whole thing is to maneuver around and get behind the guy

and take the shot from behind, but it operated differently. What did the AI do? So for humans, exactly, they want to maneuver behind, get into the six o'clock position behind the enemy and then get a shot off. But there are these split second opportunities when aircraft are circling and they're nose to nose. And there's just a fraction of a second where you could get a shot off when they're racing at each other head to head. And the AI system was able to do this. It's a shot that's basically impossible for humans to make. It's actually banned in training because it's risky for humans to even try because they risk a collision when the aircraft are racing at each other head to head. But the AI was able to make that shot, avoid a collision.

And the really wild thing is AI learned to do that all on its own. It wasn't programmed to do that. Oh, really? It simply learned to do that by flying in a collision. And the really wild thing is AI learned to do that all on its own. Wasn't programmed to do that. It simply learned to do that by flying in a simulator. Wow. So it's basically playing chicken with the other plane and then taking a kill shot and getting out of the way and not getting out of the way. That's pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. Now, of course, you point out in the book that it has complete situational awareness, which is something that helps it. But later in the book, you talk about poker. And I thought that was very interesting because for all the years, I haven't been following all the different game stuff that's been happening. You know, we had

all these competitions where you had computers against chess players and against Go players and all the rest of this stuff. But I remember at the time, the early days when I was looking at that stuff, they were saying, well, the real thing would be poker because in poker, you don't have, uh, you don't know the world, the entire world situation. Don't have a complete, uh, surveillance of everything that's there. And now as of 2017, you talked about what happened with poker, tell people where AI is with poker and how it got to that situation. Exactly. So poker is a really exciting challenge for AI. It's difficult because it's what's called an imperfect information game. There is this hidden information

that's critical to the game. So in chess, in Go, the AI can see the entire board. You can see all of the pieces and where they are. for poker the most important information your opponent's cards is hidden from you and so human players have to make estimations what do i think this other player has based on their betting and based on the cards that have come out so far and it's it's a really hard problem for ai um it is yet another game that has fallen to ais uh and i talk in the book about librados the first ai that was able to achieve superhuman performance in head-to-head texas hold'em and then pluribus which actually could do this against multiple players which is way harder from a computational standpoint because now there's way more factors yeah um and the really wild thing to me about this

was that when you think about what it would take to achieve superhuman performance in poker you think you would need something like a theory of mind understanding okay this other player you know what are they thinking about you know are they bluffing turns out actually you don't need any of that you just need to be really really good at probabilities and he is able to do that and to beat the best players in the world wow i'd like to see it do a game of Blackjack 21. Definitely be banned at the, that'd be an easy one for it to do that. But yeah, that is interesting. And you tied that into your experience in Iraq, I guess it was, maybe it was Afghanistan, but imagine Iraq with IEDs and how people would try to guess which path would be least likely to hit an IED.

Talk a little bit about that and how the application of its ability to scope stuff out and probabilities in poker, how that applies to a real world situation like that. Yeah. So I tell the story in the book about sort of what is, you know, how might these tools that are valuable in poker be used for warfare in a variety of ways? And in fact, the company, the researchers rather, that built the Labradas, the system that achieves super Iraq during the war there where you're worried about IEDs, roadside bombs, being on the side of the road. And I would have discussions with other soldiers about, okay, what's the strategy here, right? Do you swerve from side to side to keep

them guessing where you're going to be? Do you drive down the middle? If you see a pothole, do you drive around the pothole, right, to avoid it because there might be an ID hidden in the pothole? Or is, you know, they know you're going to drive around a pothole. And then if you go around it, there might be a bomb on the side of the road and you should drive through it. And there's not like a good answer to these. That's right. That soldiers talk about when they're in the war and trying to figure out what to do. But one of the things that's really compelling about this technology is it

might give militaries the ability to be more strategic and instead of apply sort of like, you know, just, just guesswork, which is basically what we were doing to then apply a little more of a rigorous strategic approach to keep the enemy constantly guessing. It's interesting, you know, in your, in your book, you point out how the AI and some of these war games was super aggressive, always on the attack, never tired, never exhausted. My son said in Terminator, the Terminator would block blows from humans. And actually, I wouldn't do this.

It's not a threat. It would take the blow and immediately kill the person. You know, that's that's a but it is very different in the way that it fights. And, uh, people are saying this is going to change everything as it gets onto the battlefield. Isn't it? Well, that's, what's amazing is, um, you know, I talked about how this AI dog fighting agent fights differently than human pilots and uses different tactics. That's true across all of these games. So the AI system that plays poker,

it actually uses different betting strategies than human poker players. That's also true in chess, in Go, in real-time computer strategy games like StarCraft 2 and Dota 2. We have these simulated battlefields with different units. And there are some commonalities actually across how the AI systems are different than humans across all of these games. And so one of them is that in some of these computer games where these AI agents are fighting against the human units, the human players talk about the AIs exhibiting superhuman levels of aggressiveness, that they constantly feel pressured all the time in the game because there'll be these little skirmishes among these units. And then for humans, the battle's over and they have to turn their attention elsewhere. And then

they look to a different part of the game and they figure out, okay, what am I going to do over here now? And the AI can look at the whole game at the same time and it doesn't need to take a break. It doesn't need to turn its attention somewhere else. So this is really significant effects for warfare because when you look at how real wars unfold among people, there are lulls in combat. The enemy has to take a rest. They have to refit. They have to sleep. They have to eat. They have to go reload their ammunition. They have to focus their attention and say, okay, what are we going to do next? The AI doesn't have those challenges. It's not going to get tired. It's not going to be emotionally stressed. And so we could see

not just the AI is changing the tactics of warfare in the future, but even the psychology. Oh, yeah. You go back and you look at World War I, the trench warfare, you know, people waiting long periods of time, and then it'd, you know, be, I've heard many people say, you know, war is these long periods of boredom where nothing happens and then sheer terror, you know, that type of thing. And even going back to the Civil War, I mean, they would even fight seasonably, right? You know, would take the winter off or something like that. But so the pace of all this stuff has been accelerating. But now with AI involved, it really puts the pedal to the metal.

And I want to talk about the four different battlegrounds here and a little bit about deep learning. But before we do, you've also talked about the ethics of some of these things. Things like, will it surrender? It sounds like it's pretty aggressive. Well, recognize surrender, I should say. Will it recognize surrender or will it just keep coming? And that's one of the ethical issues about this. I mean, what do we do in terms of trying to keep control of this, even on a battlefield, so that it doesn't get out of control and just keep going even?

Does it recognize that it wins even? Right. And this is a central problem in AI, whether we're talking about a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bing or a military AI system, where the consequences could be much more severe, how do we make sure that these systems are going to do what we want them to do? How do we maintain control over them? Some Chinese scholars have hypothesized about this idea of a singularity on the battlefield. At some point in time in the future, where the pace of AI-driven combat exceeds humans'

ability to keep up, and militaries have to effectively turn over the keys to machines just to be effective and that's a very troubling prospect because then how do you control escalation yeah how do you end up right if it's happening at superhuman speed yeah yeah and there's no answers to that right now that's the thing that's kind of scary yeah this is hanging over our heads and this technology again it's uh again, we can't have an AI gap. So everybody's working along these lines. It's one of the things that reminded me as I read your book, reminds me of Michael Crichton and the reason that he wrote Jurassic Park was to awaken people to how rapidly genetic

technology was changing and the fact that people were not talking about it in terms of how to control this or the ethics involved in it. It's just like, can we do this, you know, and just run with it. And it seems like we're getting in that situation with this as well. Let's talk again, before we get into the four battlegrounds, the whole idea of swarms of hundreds of thousands of drones, as my son said, nothing good ever comes in a swarm. So this aspect of it. Have you ever read the book Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez?

It was back in 2012. It's kind of the theme of that where they had come up with swarms. Are you familiar with that? I am. It's been a while, but yes, that's a great book, yeah. So where are we in that kind of scenario where you've got this massive swarm of, of, uh, you know, killer drones that are communicating with each other. We don't have to get into how they communicate, but it basically is kind of following on an

insect model. Um, yeah. Is there a defense against that? Is that something that is in his book essentially made, uh, ships obsolete, made all the conventional weapons obsolete, uh, and, uh all the conventional weapons obsolete. And the military industrial complex had to reset the board and make all new weapons. And they liked that. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think we're not there yet, but I do think it's coming. So right now, today, drones are largely remotely controlled. There's a human on the other end, if not directly flying the drone by a joystick at least telling the drone where to go giving it the gps coordinates and then the drone goes there and generally speaking there's like one person to one drone but that's limited because that means that for every drone you put on the battlefield you need a person behind it and people are expensive people are limited and so this idea of swarming is that now you could have one person controlling many drones tens hundreds thousands of drones all at the same time and the human obviously is not

telling each drone where to go they're just telling the swarm what to do so telling the swarm go conduct reconnaissance or look over this area find the enemy and attack them or it could be for logistics right resupply our troops give the troops the ammunition and supplies that they need. And this one figures all that out on its own by these individual drones, or there could be robotic units on the ground or undersea, autonomously coordinating with one another. shift in warfare, a huge shift in what militaries call command and control, the way that militaries organize themselves. So we're not there yet. Most of the systems today are pretty remotely controlled, little bits of autonomy, but that's likely the path that this is taking us, and it's going to transform warfare in very significant ways. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about earlier, when we talked about the ACE program that DARPA had, combat warfare. Of course, DARPA runs these contests all the time. I think the first one they had was autonomous cars.

But they've had some, one of them, intelligent UAV swarm challenge. Tell us a little bit about that and how that turned out. So we're seeing the U.S. military and the Chinese military invest heavily in these new types of experimentations and demonstrations. So the U.S. has done a number of swarm demonstrations, where they'll take swarms out to the desert somewhere and drop them off of an airplane and swarming drones and have them coordinated together. China is doing the same. So they're taking a page from what the U.S. is doing. They're often following up with experiments of their own. And the really difficult thing for the US military is this technology is so widely available.

So for example, we're already seeing drones used in Ukraine, commercially available drones. There are some military ones coming from Iran and Turkey, but also commercially available drones like you could buy online for a few hundred dollars. And civilians are using them. They're using them to assist the Ukrainian military. And in some cases, we've even seen artificial intelligence integrated into these drones. So AI-based image classifiers that can identify tanks, for example, and find them using AI. And so just the widespread nature of AI and autonomy is a real challenge for

militaries. Think about how do you control this technology? Huge problem for the U.S. military because all of the U.S.'s advantages are negated when anyone else has access to this. Wow. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting that they're being used for mainly reconnaissance

like we saw. That was one of the key things that early planes were used for in World War I was mainly reconnaissance. Before that, they had, you know, reconnaissance balloons, been Civil War and that type of thing. Then eventually, they start dropping small munitions, and then it's on, you know, and so it's going to escalate much faster with that. One of the things that you've talked about is, again, in terms of the AI running away from us, you talk about a flash crash of stocks. Talk about what that would look like with a flash war. We've got circuit breakers for the stock market. What do we do for that, again? What is the problem? Define the problem. Right. So the essence of the problem is

how do you control operations going on at machine speed and in a competitive environment? So we envision what this might look like in warfare. So our machines are operating at machine speed faster than humans can keep up. Their machines are doing the same. They're interacting. We're not going to share our algorithms with adversaries. They're not going to share their algorithms with us. There's this potential for these unexpected interactions things to spiral out of control well we've seen this actually we've seen this in stock trading where there are algorithms executing trades in milliseconds far faster than humans can respond and we've had accidents like these flash crashes where the algorithms interact in some unexpected way with

market conditions in these rapid movements in the price. And the way that regulators have dealt with this in the financial system is they put in these circuit breakers you talked about. They take a stock offline. The price moves too quickly in a very short period of time. But there's no referee to call timeout in. So who's the regulator? There's nobody. And so if you're going to have some kind of human circuit breaker, that's something that militaries have to do on their own, or they have to work with competitors to agree to do that, which is, needless to say, that's really hard to do. Yeah, not too likely to happen.

That is a very concerning circumstance. Again, as you point out, it's a great analogy in the stock market. We've already seen how that works, but there is no referee in a war. Talk a little bit about the non-belligerent use of artificial intelligence other than as killing machines. So AI is a widespread, multi-use technology. We're seeing AI integrated into any aspect of society, in medicine, in finance, in transportation. One of the really troubling applications that I talk about in the book is the use of AI for domestic surveillance. And we've seen this really extreme implementation of this inside China, where half of the world's 1 billion surveillance cameras are in China. And the Chinese Commerce Party is building up this really dystopian model

of this tech-enabled authoritarianism. Because if you've got half a billion cameras, how are you going to monitor that? Well, use AI. And they're using AI for facial recognition, gate recognition, voice recognition, tracking people's movements, in some cases for really trivial infractions. Facial recognition being used to go after people for jaywalking, using too much toilet paper in public restrooms, but also, of course, to go after political dissidents and to clamp down on control that the Chinese Communist Party has and to repress its citizens and minorities. Hang on right there. I want to show people this little clip. I know you can't see it there.

This is actually a China restaurant. And in order to get toilet paper, the guy has to go up to a screen, and it gets a facial scan of him. And then it spits out just a little bit of toilet paper. But that's the state of where this is. I mean, this is kind of where it hits the fan, isn't it? I mean, it's even for that and perhaps they're going to grab his DNA. Who knows? Uh, this is a toilet paper. You talked

about going to China and, um, I don't know what year you went to China. It was a very different situation from when my family went about 2000, what was it? 2005, 2006. And, um, now you talk about what it's like coming into the country. What do they do when you come in to the country now? Tell people. Sure. So I did several trips to China just before actually COVID hit, was able to get in there before all the restrictions came down and got to see firsthand how a lot of AI technology is being employed by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil its citizens. So one of the first things that happens is you get your face scanned when you come through into the country,

and it gets recorded in their database. Now, I'll point out that also happens at many border checkpoints here in the U.S. Yeah, it's rolling out in the TSA now, yeah. That's right. So when I came back through Dulles Airport of Washington, DC also got my face scan. Now, what are some of the differences, right?

So same technology, but it's being used. Same application. That is to check that people are who they say they are, but in a very different kinds of political structures and governance regime. So here in the U S there are laws that govern how the government can do that. They're set by the elected representatives, by the people. There's also a lot more transparency here in the U.S.

So when I walk through a border checkpoint in the U.S., there are signs that say, we're going to collect your facial record, your face, and we're storing it in a database. It tells you for how long that information is going to be stored, gives you a link you can go online to get more information on the website. And in fact, the first place I learned about this wasn't going through a checkpoint in the US, it was reading about in the Washington Post. So the fact that we have independent media in the US also a way to have more checks and balances and government power and authority, none of which exists in China. And that to me just really highlights, it's not about the technology, it's about how we use it.

And are we going to use it to protect human freedom or the Chinese model to crush human freedom? Yeah, it's hard power versus soft power. Soft power is going to be coming from our dedication to the rule of law, to individual liberty, to those types of things. And the problem is that it's getting to the rule of law, to individual liberty, to those types of things. And the problem is that it's getting to the point now where if they want to collect your face, facial information in order to fly, they may tell you all about it.

But if you don't want to have your facial scan done, maybe you won't fly. And that'll be your choice. You don't get to fly, but we'll tell you we're going to do this. And so it's that kind of level of coercion that kind of has the pretense of choice with it. I'm very concerned that we're just a couple of half steps behind the Chinese and that most people in this country, as well as elected representatives, most people are sleepwalking through it. Most elected representatives don't really have it on their, you know, what they're looking at. But talk a little bit about what is happening in the area that they are so focused on, the Uyghur area, and as they are looking at that particular population, how they weaponized it there. So China in particular, the most sort of extreme version of this techno-dystopian model

that China's building is in Xinjiang, where China has been very active in repressing the Uyghurs there as part of a mass campaign of repression against them, including imprisonment, home confinement. And then throughout the area and the major cities, a series of police checkpoints that dot the cities every few hundred meters that check people via facial recognition, gate recognition, that scan their phones, that use biometric databases, all to track the movements of these citizens and where they're going. So, for example, if someone drives through an area, a camera checking the license plate on the car and then seeking that to other data like the person's face or their geolocation data for their phone and saying, okay, is this a person who owns the car? And if not, bam, you get flagged and the government's going to come take a look at you. And it's all part of this model the Chinese Communist Party is building to control every aspect of its citizens'

movements. Because if you can control how much toilet paper people are using, then you're not going to have people rising up against the government. That's right, yeah. And of course, you know, as I've said, we look at central bank digital currency, that gets us there really fast. But these other aspects, constant surveillance, geospatial intelligence, even being used to anticipate where people are going to go, anticipatory intelligence. Talk a little bit about that, what people typically think of as pre-crime for a minority report. Talk about how they are pulling all this data together, data mining it, and making decisions about what you're going to do in the future and who their suspects are going to be. That's right. So one of the things that they built is a platform for looking at people's behavior, tracking it. China's put together

a social credit system, scoring people based on activities that they're doing, including sometimes trivial infractions, like not sorting the recycling. That might get you docked points to try to shape people's behavior. And then also trying to anticipate where they might find something that looks suspicious. So if someone books a hotel room on their credit card in the same city that they live in, that gets flagged by the police and the new police cloud database that many police departments in major cities and provinces are building in China, where they'll say, okay, well, that's suspicious. What are you doing? We're going to look at you, looking at geolocation data. So if they see a person is going to be in an internet cafe at the same time as another person, multiple

times during the week, they're linking these people and saying, okay, what's going on between them, trying to ferret out any kind of behavior that the party might see as a threat to it. Yeah. And that's the thing that's very concerning. And of course, the reason you're talking about this is because it's artificial intelligence that allows them to be able to make these correlations and to sort through just a staggering amount of information. If we go back and we look at the Stasi, they were keeping track of everybody. And you point out that they put in some Han Chinese and in the Uyghur area to be informants but that's nothing compared to all the biometric surveillance and the artificial

intelligence and how they can put that stuff together you know they had so much information everybody was spying you know more than half the people were spies and informants on the other less than half of the people and yet they didn't have a way to put that stuff together. That's the kind of leverage that this technology now gives to dictators, right? That's what's chilling about it. It allows this surveillance at a scale that's not possible with humans. And it's not just that AI can be used for repression. Lots of technologies can be used for repression. A police baton can be used for repression.

It's the fact that AI can enhance the system of oppression itself and further entrench it so that it's even harder for citizens to rise up against the government. So it's not that the Chinese Communist Party is just using this to crack down and find the dissidents if there's another Tiananmen Square protest in the future. I walked through Tiananmen Square, surveillance cameras everywhere, as you might expect. I estimated about 200 cameras across the square at every poll, watching every single movement. It's the goal really for the party is making sure that the dissidents never even make it to the square. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine if you did something there in Tiananmen Square that indicated that you were concerned about that, that would really put you on their list for sure.

Talk a little bit about Sharp Eyes. This is something that came out about 2015. I remember when this program came out. Talk about the Sharp Eyes initiative in China. So China's been steadily building components of this digital infrastructure to control its population. So one of the first components of this was the Great Firewall, firewalling off information inside China. There's a propaganda

component of this. But increasingly, with programs like Skynet and Sharp Eyes, China has been creating the physical infrastructure as well. So not just controlling information, but now controlling physical space. So Sharp Eyes is a massive government program to build out surveillance cameras in every aspect of China so that every single place is covered. Bus stations, train stations, airplanes, hotels, banks, grocery stores, every kind of public area is surveilled so that any place someone goes inside China, there's a camera watching them and tracking their movements. And you mentioned Skynet, uh, you, you mentioned in the book that they didn't name it after the Terminator, but it's kind of a transliteration of what they've got. Uh, so it's, uh, but it's essentially going to be the same thing, I guess, once they hook it up with some military equipment.

Let's talk about the four battlegrounds because because that's what your book lays out. And your book is set up primarily for people who are in the military, I think, to look at where we are relative to China in terms of – you don't really talk that much about Russia. You do have a quote at the beginning from both Xi Jinping and from Putin about the importance of artificial intelligence, but the real threat seems to be coming from China in this. And so you look at this from a power standpoint, and you talk about four different areas. Talk about the first one, data. Sure. So how can the U.S. stay ahead of China in this really critical technology? Well, data is essential. Data is essentially the fuel for machine learning systems. Machine learning systems are trained on data. Now, it's often said,

or people might have this impression that China has an advantage in data because they have half a billion surveillance cameras. They're collecting data on their citizens. When I dove into this, my conclusion ultimately was that that's not true, that China doesn't have an advantage in data for a couple of reasons. One is that what matters more than the population size of a country is the user base of these tech companies. So China's got bigger population than the US or Europe. There's more people, they're going to collect more data on their citizens, but US tech companies aren't confined to the United States. So platforms like Facebook and YouTube have over 2 billion global users each. Whereas, in fact, China's WeChat has only 1.2 billion users.

And other than TikTok, Chinese companies have really struggled to make it outside of China and break into the global marketplace. So that's an area where the population turns out to be not really an advantage for China. In fact, the US probably has advantages in global reach of these companies. Another reason why people think that China might have an advantage is because the Chinese government's doing all the surveillance. Well, it turns out that the Chinese government doesn't let Chinese companies necessarily do that same level of surveillance. So the Chinese Communist Party is actually pretty restrictive about who gets its spying powers.

They don't want Chinese companies to have the same spying powers that they do. And they've been passing consumer data privacy laws. So even though there's no regulations inside China on what the government can do, they actually are passing regulations on what Chinese companies can do to Chinese consumers. So those same spying powers don't necessarily exist on the corporate side. Whereas, of course, in the U.S., U.S. consumers have actually acquiesced a fair amount to this sort of model of corporate surveillance of U.S. tech companies hoovering up lots of their personal data without a lot of pushback, grumbling, but there's no federal data privacy

regulations. And so a lot of pushback, grumbling, but there's no federal data privacy regulations. And so a lot of these things- We've said for the longest time, if it's free, you are the data. You're the product, right? Your data is the product. And that really underscores at how much better they're able

to get that information from people just by providing a free product. And we give them all the information about ourselves. That's right. So we actually are giving up a ton of information voluntarily, at least to companies, you know, if not to the government. And so, you know, I'm not sure that China actually has an advantage here. I think both countries are going to have access to ample data.

The more important thing is going to be building pipelines within companies or their militaries to take this data, to harness it, to clean it up, to turn it to useful AI applications. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how that is used by AI, why data is so important. As you mentioned, people said data is the new oil or whatever, because of machine learning. Tell people why there's so much concern and emphasis on the quantity of data that they've been able to collect about us. How's that used? Yeah. So as I'm sure people are aware, it's why we're having this conversation, part of it is there's been this huge explosion in artificial intelligence in the last decade. And we've seen tremendous progress through what's

called the deep learning revolution. So not all of AI, we talked about poker, it doesn't use machine learning, but a lot of the progress right now is using machine learning and a type of machine learning called deep learning that uses deep neural networks, which are a connectionist paradigm that are loosely modeled on human brains. And in machine learning, rather than have a set of rules that are written down by human experts about what the AI should do. And that's how, for example, like a commercial airplane autopilot functions. A set of rules for what the airplane should do in any given circumstance. Machine learning doesn't work that way.

And instead, the algorithm is trained on data. And so people can take data of some kind of behavior and then train this AI system, for example, on faces. If you have enough pictures of people's faces and then they're labeled with those people's names, you can feed that into a neural network and it can learn to identify who people are based on really subtle patterns in the faces. The same way that we do, really subconsciously, not even thinking about it, we can identify faces. And the thing is, you need massive amounts of data. So AI systems that do image classification, for example, that identify objects based on images, use databases with millions of images. Text models like ChatGPT or Bing use hundreds of gigabytes of text. In fact, a good portion of the text on the internet. And so having large amounts of data and

having it ready to train these systems is really foundational to using AI effectively. Yeah. One of the examples that you have is being able to distinguish between an apple and a tomato. Talk a little bit about that. So if you think about a rule-based system, the old model of AI, how would you build a rule-based system to tell the difference between an apple and a tomato? So they're both round, they're red, sometimes green, they're shiny. Maybe they have a green stem on top. Like if you're trying to tell the difference to someone who'd never seen one before,

that's actually kind of tricky to do. But they look different. And in fact, a toddler can tell the difference between them if they've seen both of them. And it turns out that building a rule-by-system for AI to tell the difference is really hard. But if you feed enough labeled images of apples and tomatoes to a machine learning system, it can just learn to tell the difference. The same way that humans do based on all of these subtle cues about the texture and the shape and how they're

different. And so that's a great example of these kinds of problems that AI is really powerful for using machine learning. Yeah. You know, when we look at generative AI, the AI that people are using so much for artwork and that type of thing, and you compare it to the chat programs that we've seen and the real colorful episodes that people had as they were working with it. It's the same type of thing, essentially. They're able to create this interesting artwork because they've got so many different images that they have seen and just pull these elements together. But that's exactly what they're doing with the chat when it goes off the deep end as well. They've had all of this massive amount of conversation

and scripts or whatever, novels, and they're able to pull that kind of stuff together just like they pull together the interesting elements of artwork to make something that's different. Isn't that a good analogy or what'd you say? Oh, absolutely. They're doing essentially the exact same thing, just one with images and one with text where we've seen this explosion in generative AI,

like chat GPT, like these AI art generators. They're really, really powerful. And they're not actually sort of copying and pasting from the database. What they do is they have a model that's trained on these massive databases of images or text. And then what happens is they have a model that's trained on these massive databases of images or text. And then what happens is they build a statistical model of statistically associations of text or associations of pixels and what an image looks like. And then with a prompt, if you're talking to say chat GPT or to Bing,

you start having a conversation, you give it a prompt, and then it's going to spit back a response. And almost all of the really weird stuff that these language models are doing, when you think about it, it's modeling something that exists on the internet. So these models, they can get argumentative. They're arguing with users. They're trying to deceive them. In one case, the model is telling this user that it's in love with him and he should leave his wife. Well, all of it seems like really loony behavior, but there's all that stuff on the internet.

There's all sorts of weird, wacky things on the internet. So it's learned based on this text on the internet, those kinds of behaviors. And then it's no surprise that it spits them back at us when we prompted to do so. Yeah, even coming up with a kind of a Hal scenario, like from 2001, you know, I was watching these people on the, on the, on the cameras. They didn't know I was watching them on the cameras, that type of thing. Yeah. It strikes me as we're talking about the importance, and I don't really understand how these machine

learning models work. I mean, I've just come after this from a procedural standpoint, you know, it was in engineering and programming. So I don't really understand how these things can assimilate this and build these models from looking at you know pictures a lot of pictures of tomatoes and apples and everything but they do it somehow but the key thing with all this appears to be the data and so i was wondering because i've been wondering why there's so much fear and concern about TikTok with various people. And I know part of it is that, you know, it's going to be able, it's going to be easier

to scrape this data off of, to have, if they own the platform, they can get the data more easily than they could if they were just trying to scrape it off publicly because everything on Facebook and all the social media is out there publicly. But the key thing about this, I imagine besides getting information about interesting individuals might be the larger access to, you know, having that big platform of data because you're talking about, you know, feeding as kind of a strategic resource for nations, the fact that you can get this stuff from Facebook or other things to feed into your artificial intelligence. Is that part of it, you think, with TikTok?

Absolutely. Data is part of it. And then the algorithm behind TikTok is another big part of it. So TikTok looks really innocuous. I do think it's a major threat to U.S. national security, not because the platform itself is a problem, because the ownership is a problem. Because the company is owned by a Chinese company that's ultimately beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. And so one of the problems is that the app could be used to take people's personal data.

So it's on your phone. Your phone will sometimes ask for permission. Oh, this app can access other information about you your location can access other apps and you know i'll be honest like myself maybe a lot of people just okay allow sure right but then all of a sudden that app's grabbing all sorts of information maybe your contact list maybe it's grabbing your geolocation maybe it's seeing what you're doing with other apps and it's sending it back and in in the case of TikTok, if the Chinese Communist Party says, we need access to that data, the company has no choice.

If they say no, they go to jail, right? They can't. So when the FBI told Apple, you need to unlock this phone, Apple fought the FBI. They fought them in court and they fought them in the court of public opinion. And neither of those things exist inside China. A Chinese company can't fight against the government in that same way. They don't have any kind of freedom from the government. And so that's a main problem, but it's also the algorithm behind this information.

Because in TikTok, that's true for all the social media platforms, true for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. Right, yeah, Facebook does it to us. Occasionally they will push back against the government, but for the most part, they're going to do what the government wants to do. And they're grabbing all that stuff on as well, right? Right. So for all these platforms, they're feeding you information based on this algorithm saying,

okay, we think you should look at this information. And companies are all very opaque about this. They're not very transparent about what's in the algorithm. There's been a lot of controversy about many of the U.S. platforms that maybe they're pushing people towards more extremist content. The problem with TikTok in particular is that this algorithm could be a vehicle for censoring information. And in fact, it has been. And in fact, there's been leaks coming out of TikTok that shows their internal censorship guidelines. That's been leaked. We've seen it. We've seen actually their guidelines. And TikTok

has said they would censor political content. So anything that might be offensive to the Chinese Communist Party, something about the Tiananmen Square massacre, that's censored. And so that's a real problem we think about. This is an information environment that Americansored. And so that's a real problem. We think about this is an information environment that Americans using. This is be like the Chinese communist party owning a major cable news network in the United States. That's a real threat to us national security. And we have to find ways to address it. Sure.

Yeah. It's kind of like what we saw with the Twitter files. You know, we saw how that at the beck and call of officials and government that they would censor or they would give them information on people. And of course we see the same thing. You know, when we look at five G you know, they're concerned about Huawei because the Chinese government's going to use it

to surveil us. But again, our government is going to use the, uh, the other five G that's made by our companies to surveil us as well. Uh, talk a little bit about, um, you know, while we're on data, uh, the, the issue of synthetic data, cause I thought it was interesting. As I mentioned earlier, you know, while we're on data, uh, the, the issue of synthetic data, cause I thought it was interesting, as I mentioned earlier, you know, the, the first, uh, competition that DARPA had was a self-driving cars. And, uh, in your book, you talk about the fact that, uh, Waymo, uh, the number of miles that they've driven and then how they've synthesized this data.

Talk a little bit about that. Sure. So synthetic data isized this data. Talk a little bit about that. Sure. So synthetic data is AI-generated data. That could be AI-generated text, like it comes out of chat GPT. It could be AI-generated artwork. But it's also a tool that companies can use in building more robust AI systems. So self-driving car companies, for example, are collecting data driving on the roads. They have the cars that are driving around with all the sensors and all the cameras,

and they're scooping up data as they're driving around. But they're also using synthetic data in simulations. So Waymo's talked about they're collecting data on roads, but they're also running simulations. I think they've done 10 million miles on roads, collecting up data. And I think it's 10 million miles a day they've said that they're doing in simulation. So they're able to supplement with many orders of magnitude more because they can run these simulations at accelerated speed. And so now if there's a situation, they see where there's a car, there's a new situation on the highway they've never seen before. Car cuts them off, does

something weird. They capture that data, they put it in a simulation. There's a new situation on the highway they've never seen before. Car cuts them off. There's something weird. They capture that data. They put it in a simulation. Now they can rerun it different times of day, different lighting conditions, different weather conditions. And all of that can make the car more robust and more safe. So it can be a really valuable tool as a supplement to real-world data. Or in some cases, just as a complete replacement. And this is what the alpha dog fight did. That AI agent was trained of 30 years of time in a simulation. So synthetic data in a

simulation, teaching them how to perform a task. That's interesting. And you know, when we look at it, you point out 10 million driving miles every single day at 10 billion simulated miles as of 2020. And yet, you know, we look at this and some skeptics of AI are talking about the fact that we've gone through a couple of different waves of AI where everybody was excited about it and then things didn't pan out and it dropped off. And we've, we're now like the third time of that. We've just had Waymo lay off 8% of their labor force and they're having a problem

with it was in San Francisco. I don't know if it, I think it was Cruz. Maybe, maybe not Waymo where their, their vehicles all went to one intersection and blocked it, you know? So, you know, there, there are certain hangups like this that are happening, but, uh, even in San Francisco where Waymo is headquartered, they were all very upset about the, um, the fact that the cars are moving slow. They were having difficulty. You know, if you've got a situation at a four-way stop or something,

they have difficulty negotiating with the humans as to who's going to go next. And so they just sat there, um, talk about that. that. Is that showing a real Achilles heel for artificial intelligence, what we're seeing in a self-driving car? Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're talking about all the amazing things that AI could do, but it's worth keeping in mind that a lot of the things we're talking about are really narrow, like playing Go or poker or even generating art images. And humans have the ability to perform all of these different tasks, right? So humans can write an essay. They can make a painting, maybe not a great one, but they can do it.

They can use a camera to take a picture. They can get in a car and drive. They can make a pot of coffee. You can have a conversation. We can have some special purpose AI systems that could do some of those things, but the AI systems are really brittle. And so if there's something that comes up that's not in their training data, they might do something super weird. And that's a big problem for self-driving cars because you need a self-driving car that's good, not just some of the time,

not just 80% of the time or 90%, but the right that's good all the time, that's safer than humans, I think we'll get there eventually. But we're seeing with self-driving cars how hard that is out in the real world in an unconstrained environment. And the human brain, for now, remains the most advanced cognitive processing system on the planet. And so when we think about using AI, there are going to be some tasks where we might be able to use AI instead of people. But people are still going to need to be involved in all sorts of aspects of our society because humans have the ability to take a step back, look at the bigger picture, understand the context, apply judgment in a way that even the best AI systems can't do. Yeah.

And, you know, when you look at it in terms of the self-driving car, you know, you got the different levels of driving ability. Five is fully autonomous. Four is like we're doing most of it for you. But if it's an emergency, we're going to kick control back to you. And, of course, that's a really dangerous one because typically at that point in time, the person is fast asleep or playing a video game or whatever. And it's like, you know, here, take this. Take the wheel right now.

And so, you know, when we see that, I would imagine that's really the big issue, you know, we started talking. Uh, about the dog fight. I imagine that's the really big issue with the pilots, you know, it's like, oh, okay, now we're in a tight spot here. It's up to you now. I can't handle, I'm going to kick it back to the pilot. I mean, is, I'm sure that's the, the issue with them as well.

Right. That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem because right now, you know, if you had this AI, can you do some things, but not everything? How do you balance what the AI does and what the human does? And what we often do, which is a terrible approach, like you're saying, is we can have the AI do as much as it can, and then we expect the human to fill in the gaps. And that leads to situations that are just not realistic for humans. So the idea that someone's going to be sitting in this car, going on the highway at 70 miles an hour, not paying attention because the AI is driving.

And then in a split second, the human's going to realize, uh-oh, something's wrong. I need to take control, see what's happening, grab control of the steering wheel to the car. It's not realistic. Humans can't do that. And so we need a model for human machines working together that also works for human psychology. And in fact, one of the things that this DARPA program is doing with putting an AI in the cockpit is looking at things like pilot trust. And in fact, what they're doing is now they're taking these AI systems.

They're out of simulators. They're putting them in real world F-16 aircraft, they're flying them up in the sky, the AI is doing maneuvering of a real airplane. And that itself is challenging, moving from a simulator to the real world, because the real world's a lot more complicated than a simulator. But they're also looking at what's the pilot doing? So they've instrumented the whole cockpit and they're looking at things like tracking up what's the pilot looking at?

Why is the pilot looking at the map and thinking about the higher level mission, which is what we want the pilot doing? Or is the pilot looking at the controls, trying to figure out what the AI is doing, looking out the window because the pilot doesn't trust the AI. And getting to that level of trust, getting to that seamless coordination between humans and AI is going to be really important to using AI effectively. Well, let's talk about the other three battlegrounds. We talked about data.

The next one is compute. Tell people what that represents. So compute means computing hardware or chips that machine learning systems run on. So machine learning systems are trained on data. They're trained using computing hardware or computing chips, sometimes massive amounts of computing infrastructure. And for a large language model like ChatGPT, it's trained on hundreds of gigabytes of text,

often trained for thousands of specialized AI chips, like graphics processing units or GPUs, running for weeks at a time, churning through all this data, training them up. If data is a relatively level playing field between the US and China, and hardware and computing power, or it's sometimes called compute, the US has a tremendous advantage. Because while the global semiconductor supply chains, they're very globalized, they fall through a number of countries.

And in fact, the most advanced chips are not made in the US. 0% of the most advanced chips in the world are made here in the United States. They depend on US technology. And they're made using technology, tooling, and software from US companies. And it gives the US control over key choke points in the semiconductor supply chain. And the U.S. has used this to deny China access to semiconductor technology when it was strategically advantaged to the United States. The U.S. did this to Huawei. When it turned off Huawei's access to the most advanced 5G chips, they weren't made in America, they were made in Taiwan, but they were made using U.S. equipment.

And so the U.S. said, using export control regulations to Taiwan, they're made in Taiwan, but they were made using U.S. equipment. And so the U.S. said, using export control regulations to Taiwan, you're not allowed to export any chips to China of this certain type to Huawei that are made using U.S. equipment. And now the U.S. has done this actually across the board. Biden administration put this out in October, very sweeping export controls to China on semiconductor technology and the most advanced AI chips. And then on the equipment, this is really critical for China to make its own chips, holding back China's own domestic production. Yeah, that's changed quite a bit since I was a young engineer. We had, you know, the state of the art in terms of geometries, they were unable to domestically here.

The company I worked for was unable to do it here. All of their yield was coming out of Japan. They were able to do it. But we had, in terms of commodity products, that had already been seeded 40 years ago to offshore sources. But we had kind of the lock on CPUs and things like that. That now has changed, as you pointed out. And I was surprised to see that in the book, that pretty much all the sophisticated chips are coming out of Taiwan.

You said Taiwan has 90% of the most advanced chips in the world made in Taiwan. And so that's one of the things that we're looking at here with China and Taiwan that is extremely important and why I think that's going to be a source of conflict, flashpoint, all the rest of the stuff, why we're seeing this tension build up there as the Chinese are moving towards Taiwan. It's because of the advanced chips there and how it is really kind of at the center

of the state of the art of the semiconductor industry, whereas we've just kind of got a few choke points here and there in the semiconductor industry. They've got the big foundries as well as the most advanced foundries there, right? Absolutely. So 90% of the world's most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, as you said, and that's a real problem when we think about security of supply chains, because Taiwan's an island 100 miles off the coast of China. The Chinese Communist Party has pledged to absorb by force if necessary. So Taiwanese independence, protecting Taiwan is critically important. And finding ways to ensure that China doesn't engage in that military aggression

as important political and economic and military reasons. Yeah, yeah. And that's important to understand as people look at this conflict building up, the strategic interest that the U.S. perceives in this. And as you point out, I thought it was kind of interesting, you know, looking at Moore's Law, very familiar with that, that the chips would increase an exponential rate doubling every couple of years. But you pointed out that there's another law that I had not heard of, Rock's law, that semiconductor fabrication doubles every four years,

and that computer usage, because of all this deep learning stuff, is doubling every six months. So it's outpacing it. But the cost of the semiconductor manufacturing facilities is causing an amazing concentration because of the capital cost involved in putting up these state-of-the-art facilities and foundries. That's right. So the technology that's used in making these most advanced chips is simply unbelievable. It's some of the most advanced, difficult technologies on the planet.

And as the costs continue to go up, so a leading edge foundry might cost anywhere from $20 to $40 billion to build that foundry using the most state-of-the-art technology. What we've seen, of course, as a result of these market pressures and rising costs is the number of companies operating at the leading nodes of semiconductor fabrication has continued to shrink. And so we've seen at the most leading edge now, it's now just two companies really, TSMC and Samsung. On the equipment side, there are some companies that have a sole monopoly. So for the equipment that's used to make the most advanced chips, there's one company in the world, a Dutch company, ASML, that makes the equipment needed to make those chips. And these concentrations of the supply chain give the U.S. and allies unique elements of control over who gets access to this critical resource, the computing hardware that's needed for the most advanced AI capabilities.

And of course, this complicated, complex distribution of the supply chain is something that is very worrying as we move towards the future. The lifestyle that we have and the things that are just strung out all over the planet, and it is truly amazing to think about how that has happened with globalization. You know, you got one company in this country and another one in another country with a different aspect of it. Talk about talent. We're just about out of time.

Talent and institutions. But let's talk a little bit about talent because China had the Thousand Talents Program, and we saw this manifest itself in a Harvard professor during the concerns about bioweapons and other things like that. Talk a little bit about the U.S. versus China in terms of talent. Yeah, so the last two battlegrounds are human talent and institutions, the organizations needed to import AI technology and to use it effectively. And the U.S. has a tremendous advantage over China in human talent because the best AI scientists and researchers from around the world want to come to the United States, including the best scientists in China. So over half of the top undergraduates in China studying AI come to the U.S. for their graduate work. And for those Chinese undergraduates who come to the U.S. for graduate school, who study computer science, do a Ph.D., 90% of them stay in the U.S. after graduation. So the best and brightest from China actually coming to the U.S. and they're staying here.

And that draw of top American universities and companies as a magnet for global talent is a huge advantage that China cannot compete with. You've got an anecdote about China and their chat program. Talk about that, the China dream. Oh, yeah. So, you know, one of the chatbots in China, Microsoft chatbot called Chow Ice, said on a Chinese social media platform, someone said, well, what's your Chinese dream?

It's a phrase used by Xi Jinping to talk about sort of their version of like the American dream. And this chatbot says, well, my Chinese dream is to go to America. And they're not like that. They probably censored that chat bot. Yeah. See, I think that's why, you know, when you look at soft power, I think that, you know, having a climate of liberty and freedom and prosperity, if we can maintain those things, that really, I think, is upstream, you know, our overall system. And that's really what concerns me when I look at talent, when I look at what is happening in universities and other things like that, because we're starting to lose that kind of freedom. But talk real quickly before we run out of time a little bit about institutions. So institutions are the last key battleground, and it's institutions that are able to take all of these raw inputs of data, computing hardware, and human talent and turn them into

useful applications. So if you think about airplane technology, airplanes were invented here in the United States. By the time you got to World War II, they gave the U.S. no meaningful advantage in military air power. All of the great powers had access to aircraft technology. What mattered more was figuring out what do you do with an airplane? How do you use it effectively? The U.S. Navy and the Japanese Navy innovated with aircraft carriers, putting aircraft on carriers, using them in naval battles. Great Britain, on the other hand, had access to aircraft technology, but aircraft on carriers, using them in naval battles. Great Britain,

on the other hand, had access to aircraft technology, but they squandered that advantage and they fell behind in carriers, not because they didn't have the technology, but because of bureaucratic and cultural reasons. And so finding ways to cut through government red tape, move faster, innovate, be agile are really essential if the U.S. is going to stay in the lead and maintain an advantage in artificial intelligence. It's been fascinating talking to you. We could go on a long time about this. But again, the book is Four Battlegrounds. The author, as you've been hearing, is Paul Charest, also the author of Army of None.

And I don't know what that was. But thank you so much, Mr. Charest. Thank you. Appreciate you coming in. Thank you. Also the author of Army of None, and I don't know what that was. But thank you so much, Mr. Shari. Thank you. Appreciate you coming in. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. you're listening to the david knight show a friend of mine said you need to get to rudy giuliani giuliani's getting all kinds of people pardoned and the sad truth is and i hate to sound crass

but pardons were for sale in the trump administration they really were yep so um Yep. So so I reached out to a guy who I know who works for for Giuliani. And I said, you know, listen, I I'm really interested in a pardon. Here's my story. Here's who I've spoken to. I've got Tucker Carlson helping me and a couple of other people, Alan Dershowitz. And he said, well, as it turns out, we're going to be in Washington next week. So why don't we all get together? I said, great, I'll meet up with you anytime you want. And he said, and I should have known from the beginning, this was a problem. He said, well, we've got to meet before two because Rudy's usually so drunk by two that he can't get any work done.

And I said, okay. So we met at noon at the Trump hotel and it was Giuliani, his number two, my lobbyist and me. And so we're talking about, you know, the weather and the bar is really nice. And, oh, there goes, you know, Matt Gates walking into the bar. And I said, so about the issue of this pardon. And as soon as I said it, Giuliani says, I have to hit the head. And he stood up and he walked away. And I looked at his number two and I said, what just happened? And he said, you never talk business with Rudy.

You talk business with me and then I pass it to Rudy. Like it's the Sopranos, right? Exactly. It literally is. Yeah. So I said, all right, I want a pardon. I need a presidential pardon and I just can't seem to get any traction. And he said, well, Rudy's going to want two million bucks. And I said, two million bucks. First of all, I wouldn't spend it to recover a $770,000 pension. Yeah.

And he said, okay, well, it's 2 million. And that was the end of it. And Giuliani came back from the men's room. We shook hands and I walked out and that was the end of it. Well, it turned out he had been doing this with a lot of people. And I saw later in the New York Times, there was an article about his divorce, which I think is his fourth divorce. But he said that he's a member of 17 country clubs and that he needs $6 million a year to maintain his current lifestyle. So this is what he was doing. He was just trying to gouge people as best he could at the end of the, of the Trump administration, because he had gone all in on Trump.

And he knew that if Trump were to lose the election, he was done. And that's exactly what's happened. Giuliani, you know, he's going to end up selling single cigarettes on the street corner. Maybe hair dye. If this goes any longer. Yeah. You could get a hair dye sponsor. That's right.

Yeah. I used to have this problem when I would start sweating and when I was lying in my hair, dye would run down my face, but with this new improved brand, this is why you should use this brand. This never happens to me again. That guy is absolutely an amazing clown and of course you know he was just

he was grifting everybody this whole stop the steel thing was such an amazing gift all right joining us now is john kiryaku somebody that i've had the pleasure to talk to many times very knowledgeable about a lot of things a guy who had the integrity to blow the whistle on torture because it was wrong. Torture that lied us into the Iraq war, lies about weapons of mass destruction. He was the only one who was punished for the torture because he blew the whistle on it, not because he did it. People who did it got away scot-free. As a matter of fact, Gina Haspel was Trump trump's cia director uh who did the cover-up

but uh he's joining us now he's very busy i really do appreciate him coming on for this pre-recorded interview he's got a weekday radio program from noon to two uh in washington dc on the radio you can also find it on substack he's got a substack account there, John Kiriakou. That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. And the show is Political Misfits. Thank you for joining us, John. Thank you, David. It's such a pleasure to see you again. It's good to talk to you.

It's been a while. And I wanted to get you on because, you know, we've talked a couple of times about this whole Rudy Giuliani thing. And I'm sure that your phone's been ringing off the hook for the last couple of weeks about this after this lawsuit. And because the same thing happened to you and you've now had a confirmation from this woman in the lawsuit that Giuliani was selling pardons for $2 million. To your knowledge, you know, she said she's got tapes about this stuff. To your knowledge, does she have any tapes about the bribery aspect of it? There's allegations of sexual misconduct

and things like that. But is there any existing tapes about the bribery aspect of it? There's allegations of sexual misconduct and things like that, but is there any existing tapes about the bribery part? That I haven't heard. And you know, we should probably say at the outset too, that what this woman is saying in the lawsuit, well, she's saying a lot of things in the lawsuit, but one of the things that she's saying is that Giuliani had bragged to her that he was splitting this money, these $2 million sales of pardons with Donald Trump. And there's no evidence at all that that's the case. Certainly never said to me that he was going to split $2 million with Donald Trump. Yeah, that's why when I looked at this, I thought, you know, if she can substantiate this with radio, with recordings of this, if she can substantiate that, that would be the end really for any for any politician or

or current or former president to to sell something like a pardon would be the end and so it surprises me because i can understand why the conservative press would not talk about it but i would have thought that there'd be all this rampant uh you know oh i think we got him again you know you see all the time from the mainstream media and the left wing press. I would have thought that this would have been a feeding frenzy to try to get information about it. But it was just a little blip and then just kind of disappeared. My take on it is that I really do think that they want him to get the nomination. That's just my take on it. I don't know what you think. I think that there's something to

that. Yes. You know, I don't want to get us too far off the topic but um in the uh in the what was it the 2022 election the democrats took a lot of heat for funneling money to the most conservative senate candidates and gubernatorial candidates in the country and that enraged a lot of people farther to the left than the DNC. But their point was that they were willing to take a shot to help the most easily attacked candidates win Republican nominations. You know, interfering in each other's political parties is just not democracy. It's one of those sad situations in this duopoly that we have, the two sides of the same coin. Well, of course they're going to donate money to each other's extremist candidates. That's what makes this world go round.

That's right, yes. And it's what gets us in the kind of situation that we're in. Although there seems to be a lot of agreement on things like foreign policy. And I want to get your take on what how you see this ending. They're doing everything to make it clear that this is an existential fight for Russia. I had an interview many years ago with Alexander Dugin, and he's been saying this since Yugoslavia and that type of thing, that NATO is coming for Russia, and they're doing everything they can to validate that assumption. Now with the F-16s that are there, I don't really know how effective those are going to be as weapons, but it's a constant escalation.

We have the drone attacks. How do you see this playing out? Do you think that Russia is going to settle for taking the eastern part of Ukraine and kind of having a neutral buffer? That's what some people who said, maybe we could have peace if that were to happen. Is this going to result in the kind of regime change that they're looking for?

Are we going to wind up in some kind of a Dr. Strange love nuclear war? What do you think? Or something else? This is a, this is a very complicated, uh, situation.

You know, I, I had occasion to meet last Friday with a, with a very senior Russian government official, very senior, like cabinet level. And he laid it out very plainly, very clearly that Russia is enormous. It spans 11 time zones. It has 200 million people. It has an army that's something like five or six times the size of Ukraine's army. And while we in the West joke that the United States is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian,

that's exactly what the Russians intend to do. They'll fight the very last Ukrainian. He said the bottom line is the United States can send whatever it wants to Ukraine. Missiles, planes, ammunition, patriots. It makes no difference that Russia will win. Whether it takes a year or 10 years or 100 years, Russia will win because it can't lose. It can't lose because Ukraine is an existential threat. On multiple occasions since the Clinton administration, the United States has promised Russia that NATO would not expand to its borders. And then the United States went on to lobby for Poland joining NATO, for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to join NATO. Romania, which isn't on the border, but it's pretty darn close, joined NATO.

We've allowed and supported Montenegro, for example, and North Macedonia. What national interests do we have in those countries? That we're going to go to the defense of Mont montenegro and north macedonia come on kosovo being next like how many times are we going to tell the russians that we're not a threat to them which is just to protect us and then we push right up to the border they just don't understand it and they don't believe us yeah you know in in the Clinton administration, I was still in the CIA during the Clinton administration, and there was a lot of talk of the Russians joining NATO, right? Because the Soviet Union had fallen, the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist,

and our fight was, at the time, we said it was going to be against Muslim extremism. This is in the days just before and during the creation of al-Qaeda. Our fight was, at the time, we said it was going to be against Muslim extremism. This is in the days just before and during the creation of Al-Qaeda. Maybe farther out, it might be China or North Korea. But as far as we were concerned, we had no problem with Russia. They were a Christian country. They're white, frankly. And so they were easier to deal with, let's say.

Now those are a problem for the current administration. Being a Christian country and a white country, that's a black mark against the kind of current administration we've got now. But yeah, for the longest time, I think they realized what the real agenda is, that it is an existential fight. But the U.S. is not even trying to hide that anymore. You know, you got Lindsey Graham and other people, they're making it very clear this is about regime change. And I thought it was very interesting. What was your take on the Wagner group when you had Bergozin after the fall of Bakhmut

and he had a lot of harsh words for Russia, for the Russian bureaucracy. He said they were throwing sand in the gears as they were trying to do this I I thought that was pretty amazing that he was able to say that and uh you know still uh be at large evidently the Wagner group is very very important to the war effort right I could say yeah it might be a little bit less important than it was six months ago, but without the Wagner Group, the Russians could not reach into other parts of the world, like Africa, for example. You know, the French were thrown out of most of the Sahel countries over the past couple of years, off the Rwandans who have attacked it from the east. And it was the Wagner Group that stepped in to help the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And the DRC doesn't have money to pay them, so they gave them mineral rights. Mineral rights. Can you imagine? This is exactly what we're going around the world trying to secure. And the government just gave them to the Wagner Group because they came to assist. So, yeah, the Wagner Group is very, very important. And I wanted to add something, too. I spoke with a friend of mine today. He was on my radio show today. He's an American citizen. He's got his own radio show from New York.

And he tends to be pro-Russian. And he wanted to see the situation on the ground for himself. So he went to the Donbass. He just got back a couple of days ago, was promptly put on the Ukrainian kill list, which we can get to in a moment, using US taxpayer money. They put an American citizen on the kill list, post his picture, his home address, and his cell phone number. But anyway, he said that one of the things that struck him the most, well, two things that really struck him. One was that Ukraine is shelling the Donbass 24 hours a day, artillery, and hitting civilian targets. Now, this is something that we criticize the Russians for all the time, because when you attack a civilian target, that is a war crime. It's quite clearly a war crime.

It's a violation of international law. And we criticize the Russians every day for hitting civilian targets in Ukraine. But the Ukrainians are also hitting civilian targets in Donbass and yesterday and the day before in Moscow as well. Why aren't we criticizing them for that? You can't target civilians, period. It's against the law. And it should be against the law for everybody, number one.

Number two was when people say on Twitter that the Ukrainians have Nazis that are fighting for them, not neo-Nazis, actual Nazis, you tend to get your account suspended for saying that on Twitter. But he said that all around Donbass, there are tables set up where Ukrainian Nazis are selling Nazi paraphernalia, Nazi memorabilia to raise money for the Ukrainian war effort. Well, why isn't that being reported i have another friend who said that on twitter and had his account suspended we can't say there are nazis in in ukraine you can't say that nazis are fighting on behalf of the ukrainians but that's the truth yeah it's documented yeah that's what the azov battalion is it's a nazi battalion right but we don't talk about. Right. But we don't talk about

things like that. And we don't talk about the fact that this has been going on for a very long time, that there's shelling of the civilian areas since the CIA coup that happened back in 2014. When we look at this going forward, how do you see this playing out? Because as you said, Russia is so large and I've been saying this uh Gerald cilenti's on frequently we've been saying this it's like you really think you're going to run down uh the Russians how did that work for Hitler had that work for Napoleon yeah these guys are not going to give up they'll never give up and they're larger and so how do you see this uh out? Is this going to go nuclear?

Let's just put it that way. Yeah, this may not be such an original thought, but I'll tell you what this senior government official told me. He said the United States hates the idea, but the Chinese, the Turks, and the Brazilians are all pushing to be mediators. And he said eventually we're going to get to a point where the american taxpayer is going to be sick and tired of paying for all this where enough ukrainians have been killed that will finally get to the negotiating table the united

states hates the idea because it's not the united states that would be the one to broker the peace yeah right the chinese just had great success between the Iranians and the Saudis and between the Saudis and the Yemenis. The United States certainly doesn't want to see Chinese success between the Russians and the Ukrainians. But we've thrown our weight behind the Ukrainians. And it's really kind of suicidal. I was going to ask you about that. You know, you haven't had a lot of experience in the Middle East. And look at the fact that, you know, China brokered this agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who've been, you know, at each other for a very long time.

I don't know the roots of that. You probably do. But, you know, why didn't the U.S. ever do that? Do you think the U.S. even wanted to have that happen? Or would they rather for these different factions to be fighting each other? That's my suspicion. Oh, you know, forgive me for being crude, but I'm going to state a geopolitical fact right here. And it's going to be a little blunt for the diplomatic world.

But our relationship with the Saudis is very, very simple to explain. We buy oil. They buy weapons, period. We don't like each other. We don't like to be with each other, but that doesn't matter because we buy their oil and they buy our weapons. Well, now they're not going to need all the weapons that they normally buy from us. Or maybe they'll buy some from the French or some from the British, or maybe some from the Chinese, which would really upset us. But the fact is that peace is against U.S. interests in the region. After 9-11, David, we transitioned into a full-time, wartime economy.

And if we were to declare peace anywhere and not be able to sell those weapons and weapon systems, we'll move into recession. Yeah. And we just can't risk doing that. That's right. And so war is good for us. War all around the world is good for the U.S. economy.

We're used to it, right? We've all eaten from that same trough, so to speak. And people, at least here in Washington, don't want to see that end. That's right. Yeah. And of course, they would love to see this extended going into China. I had an interview with Paul Charest, who wrote a book, Four Battlegrounds. And I really wanted to talk to him about artificial intelligence, because it was primarily about artificial intelligence. But the four battlegrounds were different aspects of technological competition with China. And it kept coming back to of technological competition with China.

And it kept coming back to China, China, China. I thought it was going to read a book about artificial intelligence and it became because he's working with the military industrial complex. It was all about how China was, was the target with all of this. And, uh, and of course, I think that has a lot to do with the fact of why they're going after Russia first, because it's not just that they want to have regime. But they want to get rid of Russia as a military power because they don't want to have to fight Russia and China at the same time. Would you say that's correct? Absolutely correct. This Russian government official asked me the other day for my own off-the-record opinion of something

that can be done to improve relations between the United States and Russia, even in wartime. And I told him that two things came to mind. I said, even in wartime, the CIA and the whatever, the FSB used to be the KGB, can cooperate in three areas, even during wartime. We can cooperate on narcotics trafficking, right? 93% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan, and most of it goes to Russia. Russia and Iran have the highest rates of opioid addiction on the planet. So number one, counter-narcotics. Number two, counter-terrorism. We both hate the Chechens. We both want to crush whatever Al-Qaeda morphs itself into on any given day. Number three, counterproliferation.

Nuclear proliferation is as much a threat to the Russians as it is to us. We should be cooperating on those three things. And I said, second, your excellency, I understand that you have laws just like we have laws. But whenever you arrest an American citizen who happens to be doing whatever it is he or she happens to be doing and charge him with espionage and then just hold him or her until there's a prisoner exchange that's a bad look in the united states and he said do you know how many russians are in jails and prisons around america one thousand really do you think that the United States government ever

offers to release any of those 1,000 prisoners? And I said, I understand that, and it's wrong. But I'm telling you, the American people don't know that, and if they knew it, they wouldn't care. And so when you arrest Brittany Griner or Paul Whelan or anybody else, like this kid from the Wall Street Journal, it's a bad look. You should release them. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's a bad look when we have our surrogates arrest people like Julian Assange, isn't it? And, you know, that's one of the things that got us on the pardon thing with Rudy Giuliani when we talked about it before.

The fact that, you know, this is a real existential threat to free speech. And I know that you've gone to Australia. You've talked about this there and you've also mentioned the fact that there was a very there was essentially a very specific term that they used to refer to Julian Assange as a hostile non-state intelligence actor tell us the implications of that label on Julian Assange and who used it? Mike Pompeo used that. And David, as soon as the words came out of his mouth, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. And it was funny to me because so many in the mainstream media just either ignored it or made a fleeting reference to it. Oh, he said Assange is a hostile non-state counterintelligence

actor. Those were very carefully chosen words because whenever the United States, whenever the CIA carries out a covert action program, it has to brief the congressional oversight committees, and it has to tell at least the gang of four. That's the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees. This is what we intend to do. This is what the potential for blowback is. And this is why we're doing it. It's what we want to see happen in the end. But if the covert action operation is counterintelligence in nature. They don't have to brief the committees. And the thinking behind that is counterintelligence means foreign spying. And maybe the committees are spying on us, right? Maybe Senator so-and-so or Congressman so-and-so is a spy for the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans

or the Israelis, for that matter. And so you don't brief them. Well, the plan was, according to Yahoo News, which interviewed 36, count them, 36 current and former CIA officers, the plan was to murder Julian Assange in the street in broad daylight in Knightsbridge, London, or if he were lucky enough, fortunate enough to get onto a Russian diplomatic plane to shoot the tires of the plane out in what would be an act of war, at the very least a major international diplomatic incident,

to disable the plane and snatch him off of it to kill him then. Wow. Now, why did that not happen? Who got in the way of that? Or was it just lucky events? It wasn't clear. clear i speculated in an interview uh early on that um donald trump's second national security advisor general i forget his name now already there were so many of them i went through a lot of people it was like the apprentice a lot of people the one that replaced um general flynn um anyway was it mcmaster my guess was it i don't know sorry go, my guess is for any covert action program, you have to get the approval of

the National Security Advisor. It's more complicated than that. You have to get the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department to sign off. When OLC approves it, it goes to the Attorney General. From the Attorney General, it goes to the National Security Council General Counsel. If he approves it, it goes to the National Security Advisor. And once everybody's in agreement, it goes to the President for his signature. And my guess is, when it finally got to the National Security Advisor, he said, wait a minute, wait a minute wait a minute we're talking about assassinating an australian citizen a five eyes citizen who up until that point had

never been charged with a crime that's right we're not going to do this right and i think that he was the adult in the room who just finally put his foot down. Well, that's good. Yeah, in terms of people who have not been charged with a crime, in terms of pardons, I think about Ross Ulbrich with Silk Road. And of course, RFK Jr. has said he would pardon Julian Assange, and that he would, he hinted that he might be pardoning Ross Ulbrich as well. What's your take on RFK Jr. in terms of what's going on with Ukraine, and especially since you were in the CIA, his certainty that the CIA killed both his dad and his uncle? Well, I'm proud to say that I've struck up something of a friendship with RFK Jr. I have a

great deal of respect for him. And let's put vaccines aside because at least on the left, that's the go-to attack against RFK, right? That way you don't have to say, well, you never run against an incumbent president, even if he suffers from dementia or can't put his pants on. They just go straight to the vaccines. And I raised that with him early on. I said, you're going to have a problem with Democrats on the vaccine issue. And he said, look, the truth is my kids are vaxxed. My wife is pro-vaccine. He said my beef was with Dr. Fauci enriching himself and with the fact that people were forced to vaccinate their children, even though there was evidence that vaccines could cause autism, right?

At the very least, he said said let's investigate this right but nobody wanted to even talk about it so he said the way i'm going to present it on the campaign trail is that i am anti big pharma and big pharma has been in part the ruination of this country yes and i said that's the way to go that's right um rfk is very how should I say it? RFK is adamant on some of these issues. Number one on whistleblowers. He very generously without being prompted or asked by anybody, he very generously tweeted that he would pardon Julian Assange, Ed Snowden, Tom Drake, uh, Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower, um, and me. Uh uh it was an incredibly generous thing

to do and let me ask you no two million he doesn't want too many but not for two million and let me ask you rhetorically how many votes is that going to win him none zero yeah it'll probably lose him votes yeah but he said it's the right thing to do. And so he said he would do it. On Ukraine, and broader than Ukraine, on these bigger issues of war and peace, he is 100% behind the rule of law. And the rule of law is also very clear on war. It says that you cannot attack another country unless that country has attacked you first you cannot move into another country unless that country has attacked you or unless you are invited in by the other country or with the approval of the united

nations security council so why are we in two dozen countries around the world? Why are we in Syria, for example? That's right. A lot of people were concerned about, amazed to say, well, we got, you know, we had a shelling and we had a civilian that was killed in Syria in the oil fields. It's like, what are we doing there? When do we put boots on the ground? Do you know when we put boots on the ground? I don't remember the press release about that. Do no but i remember in 2014 uh john kerry as secretary of state trying to justify why we were there and a journalist saying but wait a minute it's a sovereign country bashar al-assad whether you like his politics or not is the internationally recognized president of that sovereign country syria has not attacked us. Syria has not invited

us in. And the United Nations has not said that we could put boots on the ground there. And we did it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Why? That's true. It truly is amazing. So yeah, let me ask you, you know, since you're in contact with RFK Jr. and I'm not, one thing that I would like to know, since I am a climate skeptic and he has said in the past that he would jail climate skeptics, and I know that he's said a lot of stuff about free speech. Question is, has he changed his position? I think he ought to say if he's changed his position and why, because maybe he's the target of this and he's lived through this.

That would be the obvious explanation if he's changed. But it seems to me like he needs to say that. I agree with you. He needs to say it. He's become much more of a free speech absolutist over the years. And he believes that literally everybody should have their say, so long as you're not encouraging violence against somebody or, you know, shouting a fire in a crowded theater, as the old saying goes. But yeah, I think he's evolved on that issue. And you asked me a moment ago about his position on CIA involvement in the

assassination of his uncle. We actually spoke about that. And I said to him, he told me a story that I'll tell you in a second. And I said, you know, that story is of historical importance. You need to publish that. And I mentioned it to Jefferson Morley, who's probably the country's leading scholar on the JFK assassination. And he said he had heard a variation of that story, which fascinated him he thought it was important too rfk told me that on the on the day that his uncle was killed november 22nd 1963 he was in something like fifth grade and his mom uh drove to the the local public school in mclean virginia where they lived and picked him up early and took him home. And he said when he got home, his father was in the driveway speaking with John McCone, who was the director of the CIA at

the time. Now, John McCone and the Kennedys were very, very close. McCone had been appointed by John Kennedy as the CIA director. And almost immediately after he was named the job, his wife died of breast cancer, and he was distraught. And the Kennedys, frankly, were afraid that he might harm himself. And so they invited McCone to have dinner with them every single day. And when the weather was nice, McCone would go to the house. It's called Hickory Hill in McLean. He would swim in the pool and then they would all have dinner together at seven o'clock. So he said his dad was

in the driveway speaking with McCone, and he overheard his father say, tell me your people didn't do this. And McCone said, I don't know who did this. Bob said, he didn't say, of course my people didn't do this. It was probably the Russians, or it was probably the Cubans, or a lunatic. It was what he didn't say. He didn't say any of that. He said, I don't know who did it. Wow. And Oliver Stone's a friend of mine, and he used to needle me quite often in very harsh

language, I might add, which is his way of doing things. Because I said to him one time, I made the stupid mistake of saying to him, you know, I think we should look at the mafia too. We should look at Santo Traficante Sr., who when told that Kennedy was killed, responded, we finally got the son of a bitch. Well, who's we? And we know that Jack Ruby, through his contacts in New Orleans, was connected to the Traficante family. So I said, oh, maybe we should look at the mafia. And he was adamant that no, it was the CIA. Well, you know what? I've finally come around to that view. I don't think it was an

order from the top of the CIA down, go kill the president. But I think that there were angry and violent elements of the CIA who had been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, who were in leadership positions at the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs, that likely had something to do with it. And of course, the CIA is like any other very large bureaucracy. It's not monolithic, right? It's got different factions. Absolutely right. And that's something that so many people don't understand, especially back then. This is 15 years. Well, not 15. It's 12 years before the creation of oversight committees. So the CIA had to answer to literally no one. They did whatever they wanted, whenever and wherever they wanted. And who was going to call them on it?

There was nobody to call them on it. Yeah, and then the NSA, they even denied their existence of such agency for the longest time. That's right. That is exactly right. Until James Bamford's book was published in, what was it, the late 1970s, the government didn't even admit there was any such thing called NSA. That's right. Yeah. Kind of interesting background.

Well, while we're talking about, before we get on to some other things, too, because I want to get your take on DeSantis and Gitmo and some things like that, because that disturbs me um but um uh going back to uh some of these seminal uh conspiracies that many of us believe are more than theories what is your take on 9-11 what do you think with 9-11 are you a skeptic i was just i not only was i in the cia on 9-11 but i was assigned to the counterterrorism center and um i've always been adamant that 9-11 was carried I was assigned to the counterterrorism center. And I've always been adamant that 9-11 was carried out by Al Qaeda. Now that, that is not to say that we weren't purposely asleep at the switch. But, you know, you mentioned the CIA not being a monolith. The FBI is the same way. And the CIA, most Americans underestimated the depth of hatred that the CIA and the FBI had for each other. Hatred to the point where,

as Americans now know, they kept information about the threat from each other. For example, the CIA knew the identities of the hijackers, but thought that they could recruit one or more of them and so didn't tell the FBI. Well, the FBI knew that the hijackers were in the United States and thought they could recruit one or more of them and so didn't tell the CIA. And so they're working independently of one another. And it was a perfect storm that allowed them to carry out this operation now The Bush administration we know Had made a policy decision to not focus on terrorism. They were focused on China

both Dick Clark the the counterterrorism czar at the NSC and George Tenet who was CIA director said said that they, in their memoirs, that they were shouting from the rooftops about the Al Qaeda threat. I know that that's true because I heard them shouting. It's all anybody ever talked about at the CIA was this big one's coming and we don't know when, we don't know where, but boy, we know it's going to be big and we can't figure it out. So I think that, you know, and I don't want to sound like a kook or anything,

but, you know, when you look at the Dick Cheneys of the world and the people under Dick Cheney and the people who had supported and funded the George W. Bush campaign, they were all tied to the military-industrial complex. And it's no secret now that 20 years after 9-11, we have the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America, right here in Washington, D.C. And that all comes from defense contracting. So I think that they made a policy decision to just pretend that

everything was fine, pretend to look long-term at the chinese as our existential threat and allow 911 to happen yeah you know when i look at it i don't really know what happened on 9 11 i just don't believe any of the official stories like the magic bullet with jfk you know the the aspects of the the third building that was not hit and the three skyscrapers had just come down their footprint early video from the pentagon that didn't show the kind of, didn't show plane parts, didn't show, um,

you know, had a very small hole in it, all that type of, of things that I look at it, you know, the old, uh, whenever anybody asked me about nine 11,

I say, well, you know what? Arthur Conan Doyle had his character Sherlock Holmes say, when you rule out the impossible, what's left, no matter how improbable is the truth. And so it seems like when I look at this stuff, that's my answer to it.

It's like, I don't know what happened, but I certainly don't believe the government's official story on that. Let's talk a little bit. Yeah, go ahead. One thought there, too. Part of the government's problem is that nobody believes what the 9-11 Commission came up with. And it's because the 9-11 Commission, just like the Warren Commission before it,

had its hands tied before it even held its first meeting. For example, when you don't allow the commission's members, who are some of the most highly regarded, brightest people, and most highly cleared people in all of government, you don't allow them to speak to the CIA officers who were the ones supposed to be working to disrupt this attack, then what do you hope to gather from that? So you can't believe anything they say. I will add one thing. I was confronted by a nun recently who yelled at me very pointedly because she said it was a missile that hit the pentagon and i said sister i said what do you say to the thousands of people who

were stopped in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic watching the plane fly into the pentagon that morning one of whom was a friend of mine who was the head of security at the commerce department. And she said, she said, I think that they believe they saw a plane, but it happened so quickly. And they weren't driving like this looking for a plane. They were listening to the radio or looking to at traffic or trying to make a turn or whatever. It happened so quickly, they didn't realize it was a missile. And I said i said but then sister what about all those people who were on the plane and she said i believe that they were bused to a military base and executed and i said well yeah okay yeah well my one of the things that i find interesting is the fact that you've got the Pentagon, which has got to be one of the most heavily surveilled areas anywhere in the world, and there's no existent video of a plane or a missile or anything coming in. Yes.

Do you find that? The Russians said afterwards to our ambassador that they had a very hard time believing that we did not have surface-to-air missiles all around the Pentagon. Like, what were you people thinking? What do you mean you don't have surface to air missiles? And we don't. We never have. Yeah, but they've got cameras. They've got cameras everywhere.

And there were cameras at adjacent places that they confiscated. Let's talk about DeSantis. We've, you know, the torture that's there that you talked about that's there at gitmo and uh there's now been some statements made from some prisoners uh about his time there um i think that's something that's going to resurface during uh this campaign at some point uh allegations from one prisoner saying uh i recognize that guy you know he was there while i was being tortured and he's joking and laughing at these other people. What's your take on that? I think there's something to that.

It's human nature for some people, many of whom I worked with at the CIA, to have wanted to sit in on some of these torture sessions just to say that they did. Something to tell their children or their grandchildren you know back in the day uh we caught the bad guys and i went in and i watched them get the information from them it's sick it's not something you and i would do yeah but there are a lot of people who would do it like i say i worked with a lot of them and when we we get reports like we did from this one uh guantamo prisoner, who otherwise would never have had any idea who in the world Ron DeSantis was, but then recognized his picture as somebody who had not just sat in on the torture session, but who was a representative of the judge advocate general at Guantanamo at the time. I think it's something that's worthy of investigation. And you know, it's funny. DeSantis, to the best of my knowledge, has never denied doing it. His denials are non-denial denials, where he says things like, I won't even give you

the luxury of an answer that's so preposterous. Okay, well, you didn't say no. All we're asking is to say, that never happened. I didn't do it. The information is incorrect. He's never said that. That's a ridiculous question. I refuse to answer it. What are we supposed to conclude from that? I think he did it. know that there were CIA people, FBI people, military people, this has all come out in just the last five years or so, who, even though they weren't authorized to be in the room when the torture was taking place, found themselves in the room anyway. Yeah, absolutely. What is your take on his position in terms of foreign policy? I mean, we pretty much know where people like Nikki Haley stand, Pence stands, and all the rest of this. Your take on that in light of his involvement

in Gitmo. One of the things that I really love about the Trump-era Republican Party is the return to its anti-war roots. You know, this is the Republican Party of the 1930s and early 1940s. This is something that the Republicans used to have as a major plank in their platform about foreign entanglements.

You know, we never get anything positive out of a foreign entanglement. recall de sanis made a mistake when he first announced his candidacy the mistake being um he momentarily fleetingly expressed support for the ukraine war and then everybody jumped on it and it was as though he said oh yeah yeah i'm supposed to be against that and then he went back to his opposition. You know, like I say, I'm glad to see that this is no longer the party of Dick Cheney. I think Dick Cheney has done a national disservice of historic proportions by bogging us down in some of these forever wars. And by convincing a lot of the American people, whether they're Republicans, Democrats, or independents, that it's our job to be the world's policemen, whether we're asked to be or not.

I'm glad to see that the Republican Party has moved away from that. The Democrats now are the ones that push forever wars. Yeah, that's right. It's better role reversal. That's right. Yeah. And ramped it up. And, you know, you mentioned earlier about drugs and, you know, where we could come together on this. But it's kind of interesting that drug, that the heroin supply and other things like that went down after we got out of Afghanistan.

Because it was booming the whole time we were there. We were probably. David, may I tell you something about that? In 2011, I was the chief investigator on the senate foreign relations committee and i went to um afghanistan to do a formal report a committee report on heroin trafficking and uh i asked the military to uh fly me down to kelmond province to a village called lashashkar Gah, which is literally physically in the center of heroin poppy country. For as far as the eye can see, it's nothing but

heroin poppy. And I very naively, we drove out to this village and I said to a poppy farmer, and I said, listen, let me ask you a question. Instead of heroin poppy, why don't you grow things that have two growing seasons, like onions or pomegranates or tomatoes? Why do you grow heroin poppy? And the translator translated my question. And he goes like this. Like he was so frustrated. And he says, look, the Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were hiding, I could grow as much poppy as I wanted. And now you come here and you tell me 10 years later, I can't grow poppy.

And I said, what Americans told you you could grow heroin, Poppy? And the military escort that I was with says, we got to go. It's too dangerous here. We got to go. And they physically pulled me into the Jeep, and we drove back to the helicopter and flew back to Bagram Air Base. Wow. That's how I reported it. Yeah.

Nobody cared. Well, you know, we had Geraldo Rivera go to the fields and show that the soldiers were guarding it. And the excuse that they gave was, well, these people need to be able to earn a living. And it's like, since when are you concerned about that? We've got a massive welfare state here in the United States. So I think that if you were at all concerned about drug supply, you just put these people on welfare. They don't have a problem bringing in citizens from other countries and putting them on welfare.

Just give them money. We've done that in the past that's right and i said to this i said to this uh this colonel that was my escort a lieutenant colonel um why why are we do we have all these american military people down here there's nothing down here but poppy and he said oh it's to protect the farmers said, so they can grow their poppy. He said, no, no, no. The Taliban comes around and gives them sacks of poppy seeds and says that if they don't plant the poppy, they're going to come back and kill their families. I said, that's nonsense. In the year before the 9-11 attacks, you know how much heroin poppy Afghanistan produced? Zero. There was no heroin poppy. They started doing that when we took over Afghanistan.

Yeah. Yeah. And got record crops out of it. Before we run out of time, I wanted, you've got a couple of very interesting books that I know that my audience would be interested in. Surveillance and Surveillance Detection. You did that in 2022. Another book that came out, these have both come out since I've talked to you, How to Disappear and Live Off the Grid. Let's talk about that one first because we've just had CBS recently putting out a report talking about how easy it was to take down the entire electric grid here. I think what they came up with, they said, well, all you have to do is take down nine substations and you can black out the entire country pretty much.

Is this predictive programming for us? And of course, you know, getting off the grid, that may not be our decision. Somebody else may be making that decision for us, right? Yeah, it may not. It's hard to live off the grid, but it's doable. You have to change your lifestyle. You know, you have to get used to life without a cell phone. You have to get used to life without the internet. Maybe you even have to change your lifestyle. You have to get used to life without a cell phone. You have to get used to life without the internet. Maybe you even have to come up with a fake name, and sometimes in not so legal ways. I mean, you can certainly change your name. You can move out of the country.

You can go down to Baja, California, as my friend Jesse Ventura has done. He lives literally off the grid for six months out of the year. I have great respect for that. He has incredible self-discipline. I don't know how he does it. He's down there right now. But it's hard to do, but it's doable. It depends in part on why you want to do it. If you want to do it just to not be bothered, yes, it's doable. If you want to do it just to not be bothered, yes, it's doable. If you want to do it to escape after having committed a crime, it's going to be a lot harder. The big difference is you either

have people chasing you or you don't have people chasing you, but it's certainly doable. Yeah. And it's going to be, I think as people look at this, my audience, I think they're going to be looking at this, kind of tying it in with the surveillance aspect of this. Because I think everybody's very concerned about this absolute obsession that not just our government, but every government on earth seems to have in terms of giving everybody an ID and a cell phone and tracking and measuring every single thing that we do, the CBDC that's coming out, the smart cities, the 15-minute cities. They want to get us under a complete control grid. And I reported a story this week about a school system in Dallas that is now using artificial intelligence to create a behavioral profile of all the individual students so that it

can notice when they have deviated from their baseline behavioral profile and flag them for whatever reason in a kind of a pre-crime thing. And it's like, what are we trying to create? What kind of a society are we trying to create? I think you can see that in the schools as they've gone through this progression of a police state with metal detectors and constant surveillance and police in the school system. And now with this artificial intelligence, data mining the stuff and creating a profile for the kids,

we see this coming in every direction. When you talked about in your book, surveillance and surveillance detection in 2022, were you talking about something more along the lines of that or more along the lines of somebody putting a tail on you, like the FBI or something like that? I addressed AI in the book, later on in the book, but this was mostly about keeping yourself safe from tails. I said, maybe you're a cheating husband or a cheating wife. Maybe you're being cheated on and you want to do surveillance rather than counter surveillance or surveillance detection. So I went through each issue from both perspectives and tried to put it all in one place.

Then I finished the book with exactly what I was taught at the I was assigned to a certain country post 9-11. You know what it was, but they wouldn't let me say it. And one day I left the small guest house where I was staying, and I noticed that there was a motorcycle being driven by a guy in a red motorcycle helmet. And he was trying very hard to stay in my blind spot. And the reason why this was a little troubling to me was I don't even know where you would get a motorcycle helmet in this country. This was the first, they have hundreds of millions of people.

It's the first time I ever saw a motorcycle helmet. So I speed up, I slow down. The guy's staying right there in my blind spot. And then when I got to the diplomatic quarter, he split off. I worked 14 hours that day, 15 hours, and it was dark by the time I left. And I get in my car and I start driving in a kind of a windy, twisty way to see if I'm being followed. And sure enough, there he is again. Now, the definition of surveillance is multiple sightings at time and distance. So you see multiple times at different times and

at different places. I'm under surveillance. I was nervous about it all night. So the next day, I woke up at five o'clock in the morning. I checked under my car with a mirror to make sure there were no bombs under there. I looked up and down the street. I didn't see anybody five o'clock in the morning. I get in the car. I start going back to the embassy and there he is again. And he's on me. So I waited for the security officer to arrive, told him what happened. We went to see the station chief and the chief said, after I explained everything, he said, well, you know what you have to do. And I said, yeah, I know what I have to do. And he said, you never had to do that before, did you? And I said, no, never found myself in that position. And he said, well, don't worry about it. We're going to have a team. They're going to be there to help you

sign out a gun from the armory. I said, I know I got it all day long. These guys are telling me, don't worry, buddy. Don't worry. We're going to be out there with you. We've all had to do it. Don't worry. And I wanted to throw up all day because I'm going to kill this guy if I see him this afternoon. That afternoon, I had a meeting at a joint safe house that we shared with the local intelligence service. And at the end of the meeting, as I was walking out, I had second thoughts. And I stopped and I said, General, let me ask you a question. Are you following me?

And he said, no. Why? And I said, because I'm under surveillance. I'm positive I'm under surveillance. And if I see this guy one more time, I'm going to kill him. And I never saw him again. And later on, we learned that they were all sitting around one day talking about me. And one of them said, you know,

he is such a nice guy. And somebody else said, yeah, nobody's that nice. He's probably pretending to be nice to trick us. And he's probably spying on us. I wonder what he's doing when he's not here. And so they picked the worst possible surveillance officer to surveil me to see what I was doing in my time that I wasn't working with them. And I was going to kill the guy that afternoon. Wow. Wow. You just never know. It's like Rowan Atkinson, you know, the spy who gets the job by default.

That's an amazing story but I'm sure you know that book and the book about living off the grid, disappearing from the grid that is I think an overwhelming concern of everybody as we look at the obsession of governments in every country you know and I have people and we're not the worst

it's worse in certainly in the UK, every square inch of the UK is under surveillance it's worse in China, it's worse in, certainly in the UK. Every square inch of the UK is under surveillance. It's worse in China. It's worse in Israel. I mean, it's bad here, but it's going to get a lot worse. It's worse in the UAE. I was in the UAE in their command center one day, and they had 100 screens, right?

More than 100, all over the wall. This is a system built by Siemens, specific to Dubai. And while we were watching the screen, we saw a taxi hit a light post. Well, before the taxi driver could get out of the taxi to call 911 or 115, which is their equivalent of 911, we had already sent an ambulance because we watched it happen. So while the guy's on the phone, the ambulance is already arriving.

Wow. Fleet and total blanket surveillance. Yeah. Yeah. And of course with artificial intelligence, we'll be able to, uh, you know,

do individual profiles on all of us to pre-crime stuff that is there. It's, it's very concerning, especially when we look at the long history of this. And people like James Clapper, who famously said they're not doing it intentionally, they've been doing geospatial intelligence intentionally for a couple of decades now, at least, having big conventions about it that the mainstream press never covers. Speaking of that, if you've got just a couple of minutes,

you had a recent op-ed piece on Consortium News where you talked about Havana syndrome. Is it paranoia or reality? Tell us your take on that. You know, I used to think that Havana syndrome was relegated to the realm of the mentally ill. And then people who I know and respect started coming down with some of the symptoms. So I decided to do something of my own investigation. I wanted

to write about this. And I interviewed people from NSA and from CIA, and I interviewed psychologists and psychiatrists. And I've come to the conclusion, and I think it's pretty well documented, that there is science behind this. Something's happening out there. Now, I don't know if... I'm not a scientist, and so I can't really speak as to directed energy weapons, although we do know that the government, our government and others have experimented with directed energy weapons. I don't know if the Pentagon is, you know, beaming them at innocent civilians walking down the street. I don have documented traumatic brain injuries that just can't otherwise be explained. Now, I don't believe that the CIA sneaks into your bedroom at night and they give you a shot and you're unconscious and they put a chip in your head. I don't believe that. And I believe that a lot of mentally ill people think that they are subject to directed energy attacks.

But there are others where the evidence kind of points in that direction. You know, it's kind of interesting, going back to the Navy Yard shooter, I don't know if you remember that, but there's a guy who shot at a place. Sure do. I have a cousin who was in the building at the time. Wow. And when he died, you know, he had carved onto the stock of his gun, my ELF weapon. And that kind of rang a bell with me because of a paper that was done by Michael Aquino, a guy who worked for the NSA. He went on Oprah Winfrey talking about, you know his uh temple of uh set or something he has some kind

of satanic temple or something yes and he wrote a book called mind wars and in that he talked about using elf so i was just wondering if anything and that was pretty old i was back in the 80s that he did that and uh so i i thought that was kind of interesting i didn didn't see, you did mention extremely low frequency radiation and things like that. There was also a Navy scientist and he discovered, his name was Alan Fry and he discovered the Fry effect. Have you ever heard of that, the Fry effect? Yes, I have. And so that's when I, and I, when I was looking up the Savannah syndrome, that's when I found the Fry effect and it seemed to kind of line up. But your take on it was that there are definitely people who are more susceptible to EMF type of radiation, right?

Yeah, you know, this is something that I found, that a lot of people who go into what's called the radio quiet zone, which is an area in Western Virginia and West Virginia. This is where we have these enormous space telescopes, enormous dishes that are trying to listen to signals coming from other galaxies. There's no cable TV. There's no satellite TV. There are no cell phone towers. There's no cable TV. There's no satellite TV. There are no cell phone towers.

There's just nothing. And when people who suffer from these kinds of ailments, these Havana syndrome perhaps for some of them, they're just unusually susceptible to radio waves and low-frequency emissions, things that the rest of us just don't feel. Because at any given time, we're bombarded with a million different waves that are just flying through the air. Oh, absolutely. And a lot of people believe that that's something that's responsible for an increase in certain chronic diseases or long-term things. That's right. And all of us, we just are not susceptible to it.

I've seen a video that people have taken of pulsing EMF, and they have a bunch of bugs on a leaf, and the bugs are jerking all in unison, you know, so it would pulse it. So they could sense it as well. That's one of the things that concerns me about five G five G and other technologies that will come along after it, six G is a completely different thing, but five G they're rushing this out. I've seen pictures of them in New York city, putting these antennas

right next to people's windows. And the people called up and they said, Hey, this is right next to that. They wake up one morning and there's this big antenna, this alien triphid or something, and it's right there by their window. So this is right by my toddler's bed and say, well, sorry about that. And then they say, and there's a label on it says, don't put this within 10 feet of people. And so they sent a technician out and he removed the label.

Uh, but they don't really care what the health effects are. It's just seriously. They just, uh, yeah, that was reported in the New York Post, I think. And there was a series of stories as they started putting them up. It was a couple of months ago. And they really don't seem to care about the health consequences like we saw with the vaccines and other things like that. They've got an agenda. They're going to rush that thing through. And then the other side of the 5g thing is the surveillance state you know they need that as the uh in order to have the broadband data uh you know uh with that they can broadband

to uh do the kind of surveillance and real-time analysis of that and that's really the thing they don't really care what happens to us uh as long as they get their ability to spy on every single thing we do that's something that really concerns you remember when you could take the battery out of your cell phone? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, well, you can't do that anymore. And the Washington Post did a study not too long ago where they did a route around the city with a cell phone, and then they did the same route around the city with the cell phone off,

and then they did the same route around the city with the cell phone off and then they did the same route around the city with the cell phone on but with location services off and all three times the phone tracked their movements within three feet wow within three feet they should they should have tried that uh putting it into a sleeve to uh to shield it uh i would be interested to see if it could still do it with that, if there's something internal there. I would imagine it's got to have some kind of radiation there, but that would be the other experiment to do with it.

Well, it certainly is interesting to talk to you always and such a broad range of things that you've been involved in. And again, your show is from noon to 2 o'clock. People can find it on Rumble. And tell us the name of the show again that they can look for it on Rumble. It's called Political Misfits. Political Misfits. And I also post a link to it every day on Substack. John Kiriakou. John Kiriakou. That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U, right? Thank you, sir.

Great. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know how busy you are. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to see you. It's always great talking to you. Thank you. Bye-bye. And by the way, we didn't go into the Havana syndrome. I think most of you may know about that, but just in case you don't.

These are people who are working at the U.S. and Canadian embassies in foreign countries. They started having ringing in the ears, cognitive dissonance, very disabling mental capacities, something far beyond temporary cognitive dysfunction. It was permanent and disabling in many of their cases. So thank you for joining us. Always interesting to talk to John Kiriakou. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the

communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary, but each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidknightshow.com. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing.

If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. thedavidknightshow.com Welcome back. And our guest is Joseph Freed. He has an MBA from Case Western Reserve, as well as many years as an auditor for Ernst & Young. Then, back in 1983, he formed his own firm. He's had a 40-year career doing this. He's done a lot of audits as well as he is an AI CPA authorized peer reviewer for dozens of other audit firms. In 2003, he had a book. His first book was How Social Security Picks Your Pocket. We know that certainly is the case. 2008, after that financial crisis, he wrote a book called Who Really Drove the Economy into the Ditch. But now he has a book that is about the election from an auditor's perspective.

And so we want to talk about what went wrong, but we also want to talk about some solutions. So joining us now is Joseph Fried. The book is Debunked, an Auditor Reviews a 2020 Election. You can find that on Amazon. And is there any other place that people can get that? Thank you for joining us, Joe. Is there any other place that people can get that book? Amazon or Barnes & Noble, either one.

All right, good, good. David, thank you very much for having me on. I sure appreciate it. Well, it's good to have you on. Let's talk a little bit about the Dominion issue. I have focused, way before this happened. I was talking about Smartmatic and Dominion and ESS and Hart and all these other electronic voting machine things. And I said, it gives us a unique kind of vulnerability that is even worse than if you've got the old classic voting machines that they would typically put in the trunk and drive around.

I said they have all these different levels of vulnerability that you can see when the CIA gets hacked, when the Pentagon gets hacked. Don't tell me that these things are not going to get hacked. Don't tell me that they can't easily be manipulated from the inside. And if you do that, it is a lot of opportunity for corruption. And then, of course, where you come in, which is the auditing aspect of it. Talk a little bit about that and the difficulties that we have just from an auditing standpoint to know if an electronic voting machine has been hacked. Well, let me just preface it by saying when I heard Sidney Powell first talking, I said to myself, this lady might be 10 or 15 years behind the

times because things have changed in the last five or six years dramatically with the mail-out ballots, the mail-in ballots, and with not only a lack of ID, but the six swing states I looked at, for the most part, scrapped the signature testing. So my theory is, why would somebody bother with the cyber stuff in this era when, well, let me give an example. Nevada, three months before the election with Trump and Biden, they gutted their regulations. Harvesting has no limits in Nevada. It can be done anonymously. It can be done for money. A guy theoretically could just walk in with 500 ballots and say, sign them all, because they don't catch those signatures. And there's reasons for it. I articulate those in the book. Their method is ridiculous. And there was an informal test done, by the way. A very clever reporter for the Las

Vegas Review-Journal conducted a test, and now it's just an informal test, but eight of nine bad signatures went through. He had his friends write their own, to keep it legal, they signed the ballot envelopes, but they traced it in his style so that they knew it was not their normal writing. They all went through anyway. But there were actually reports, and that's in my book, there was a mail carrier who said, I'm looking at thousands of these ballots sitting here. What is going to become of these? They were finding them on floors. They were finding them on mail areas of buildings.

So there was, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is. You mentioned when you said they had mail-out out ballot elections and I've called it that. I said this was a mail out election where they mailed out so many ballots that they had no control over where people were getting multiple ballots. You might be somewhere that was close to two jurisdictions, get a ballot from both jurisdictions. And that was the thing. It was completely out of control. And the electronic voting thing has been there for a while, decades. We've talked about the vulnerability of that. And I had said in the 2016 election, I said, well, I think the next one is going to be a hacking fest. But it changed because of the

lockdown. And that was one of the things that I've been saying all along is that because they did the lockdown, because we had a lockdown election, know, Trump claiming it was a pandemic and we all had to lock down. That was the fundamental issue right there was doing this, you know, by mail. And of course, that ties into all the ballot harvesting and things like that. But but there's no way for people to be able to verify those things. Right. Well, some of it, though, is so obviously phony. Like in Michigan's a great example. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson mailed out 7.7 million ballot applications that had never

been done before in Michigan that she had no there was no basis in the law to do it. But the courts backed her up. But the point I'm trying to lead to is there was it's not like people to get a ballot would go up face to face and cough in somebody's face this was all done remotely anyway yeah it's not like what was the reason for this you either did it through the internet or you did it through an email or you did it through a text message she had no basis to do that then you know what she did? She followed up immediately by declaring that all her staff were to presume signatures were valid.

So that's telling the fraudster, oh, there's lots of ballots around here. By the way, less than half of them were actually used. So there was 3.4 million extra ballot applications floating out there and she's telling fraudsters by the way if you sign them we're going to presume that it's it's legitimate that's that's totally unnecessary she used covet as an excuse but there was no basis in fact for that and they all do that and i've been involved with third party politics and we have to get signatures to get on the ballot each time.

You know, they'd have some high threshold of retention, ballot retention, so that if you had to get, like, say, maybe 10 percent of the vote for governor or for president to stay on the ballot. Very difficult for a new third party to do. So every time that didn't happen, you'd have to start all over again and do the signatures. They go over them with a fine tooth comb. And of course we have seen this as well in terms of just like the recall election of, uh, uh,

Gascon and, um, and, and LA, uh, they said, you know, they went over the signatures of the fine tooth comb and threw them out.

So here in this state, they say, we'll just assume all the signatures are valid and we won't even bother to look at all of them. That's the kind of fraud that we're seeing. But let me you this of course you know as you point out the ballots are controlled on a state-by-state basis right yeah and and so at the beginning of all this two days in there was this lie that was going around the you know from steve pachinik about how it was a sting and how there were blockchain watermark ballots that were out there. And I said, everything about this is wrong that the states are in control of the ballots. There's not any ballots being shipped in from the federal

government. There's not any technology to put blockchain watermarks on all these things either. So all of that was, was incredibly, uh, off the mark. Wasn't it? Yeah. I, uh, I think I know that i forget his name the guy you're referring to is that yeah well there were suspicious things but not necessarily um yeah i i know what you're saying i know in fulton county they did have some whistleblowers who said wait a minute uh we saw a lot of ballots that looked strange, that they didn't look like they had ink, but they looked like they were printed with toner. But this was in a single county. It wasn't a national thing.

That's right. And the ballots differ from state to state, and the ballots are officially in charge on a state to state basis. Yeah, I just wanted to clear that up. So let's talk about, uh, the ballot harvesting and we hear so much about ballot harvesting and we hear that Trump wants to do ballot harvesting now. And you've got a, an op-ed piece. You wrote, uh, uh, should the G he really do ballot harvesting. So tell people what ballot harvesting is first.

All right. Well, bail is harvesting the distinction between a good ground game, which is perfectly fine and legal and has been done a long time, and harvesting is you never, with a good ground game, you don't get your hands on somebody else's ballot. You keep your hands off of other people's ballots. They put it in the mailbox. They put it in the election center or they put it in the drop box there are and by the way even if you take the 10 closest states in the last election in all cases except for one harvesting is still illegal which is which is a good sign in a way because i when i say still for the most part what I mean is there are minor exceptions like

in some states you can harvest three ballots in other states you can have harvest the ballots of family members in other cases you can do it for somebody disabled in your family but they're minor exceptions these are not like you take 500 ballots and you stuff them in a box right and let me just insert here and say when i talk about you know the vote by mail election how that turned everything upside down i had somebody contact me and say look i'm disabled i always did so i said no we're not talking about that you know a kind of absentee ballot that is driven by process where you request it and they send it to you and there's some handshaking and stuff like that happening and it is a small number anyway that's not the issue the issue

was this lockdown election and how this became essentially you know the the major way that everybody voted right well here's the problem for republicans this is why i strongly advise them against it i'll start with the last one first because that's the big one. They'll be prosecuted. Republicans forgot what's happening right now in Manhattan, where we have a prosecutor who is elevating a bookkeeping mistake, because whether you call a nondisclosure agreement, nondisclosure expense or legal expense, in this particular case, there was no tax implication.

This was not anything more than a ministerial clerical error, or maybe deliberately to conceal something embarrassing, but it wasn't malevolent. And he's tried to elevate that and tie it into a federal crime that he doesn't have jurisdiction over to get a republican at the same time he's taking serious crimes and de-escalating them or diminishing them that's right so yeah we don't have a justice department that's fair anymore they're going to escalate it because of political connections they're going to escalate the minor situations and the major felonies and vice versa right oh can you imagine how the media would have fun catching a republican harvesting ballots they would if he did two ballots they would make it the biggest story of the week yeah

and they and republicans seem to think you know this is what happened by the way with january 6 to a large extent people don't talk about this. But a lot of Republicans saw that summer of love that had just taken place. Seven months earlier, there was a horrible, if you want to call it an insurrection, at the White House instead of the Capitol. And a lot of, I suspect that there, and I wasn't there, but I suspect that a lot of Republicans were saying to themselves, we're going to show those Democrats they think they can go rioting we can be tough too they didn't understand the double standard that was going to come down on them well i'm here in tennessee and so we just had this situation where you know we had some legislators lead a mob

they were pushing and shoving other legislators trying to keep them from getting into the chamber then when they got into the chamber these tennessee three got up there and took over the whole democratic process and then look at the way this has been portrayed oh my god you know this is uh some kind of anti-democratic thing and these the tennessee three have been brought into biden's white house and celebrated uh they're not being put in a jail and tortured, you know, like the January 6th people. They have had similar things happen as well in Kentucky. You know, you had the trans activists took over their legislature the same week. So, yeah, there is obviously a tremendous double standard, and you're right. If the Republicans want to go in and do some of these things that are really questionable,

and I think that they're corrupt, and i think you probably agree that as well they'll look the other way when this type of corruption is being done by them but they're not going to look the other way when it's done by republicans they're going to make it look like criminal activity and it's not that hard to make it look like criminal activity because i think basically ballot harvesting is is designed it is criminal you see that's the thing uh there's no incentive to do harvesting unless you do it on a big scale but let me tell you the other all right so i started with the that one which republicans better remember that they'll be prosecuted but here's some other reasons they're not going to be good at it because if you really look at where the harvesting takes

place it's among the homeless i mean you could homeless can vote 20 times because they're they're in one parking lot and there are cases where the one or two thousand people with the same address and when they and the democrats always say well yeah but those are homeless people they have a right to vote too you know yeah right but the trouble is a month later they're all in a different parking lot. And somebody's going around registering them again. So but who owns the homeless? They're all in the Democratic strongholds, those homeless.

They're not in the Republican areas. The Republicans aren't going to recruit those people. And there's other factors. A big element. I don't want to get my mailman mad at me, but mailmen are implicated in harvesting. And there's been, I think in that article I may have cited John Levine, I think it was, of New York Post, who wrote a great, you know,

he got a great story. He found an anonymous harvester, big-time harvester, working for the Democrats for 20 years. And he talked about how he had mail carriers, plural, in his work crews. And if you think about it, why not? Who can do it better? Here's a mailman. He's going on his route.

And he says, oh, I've got this apartment here. And there's five bales going to the same place. And I know that, oh, there's only one that's valid i'll take the other and i'll make ten dollars on each one i got forty dollars just on that one newman like seinfeld right newman the mailman he's not going to determine who's going to be president uh another area are the nursing homes because you know that the the the disabled demented patients are taken advantage of sometimes and nurses tend to lean they're not super liberal but they tend if you look at the voting records they do lean to the left so i'm just saying it's not even going to work well forget it instead try to, and you can expose the Democrats.

You know how you do it? Offer rewards, big money cash rewards. I know some people will fight it, and they'll say it's intimidation. But first of all, I start with a public announcement. You can do this six months in advance of the election. You put out public announcements saying don't hand your ballot to anybody in our state that's against the law and you don't want to be participating in it and and your vote may be altered then you also back it up with cash

rewards if you hear of this there's a ten thousand dollar reward for the conviction of somebody who is harvesting ballots illegally and it's almost always illegal like i said except for minor exceptions so that is the way i think to go to expose now i'm then you have the problem well who's going to prosecute it because the democrats don't prosecute their cases one of the things i put you know there was a great um the public uh information legal i forget it's pilf it's p-i-l-f is the acronym as in pilfer it sounds like filth but it's filth and they they did a great study in Florida a couple years ago where they found that there were 156 referrals made for election fraud. And, David, do you know how many of those were followed up on and prosecuted in any way? Let me guess. Zero, probably, right?

Zero. Yeah. No investigations. They ignored it. Now, thank God that we have a Florida governor now who has formed an election force. That's great. And they're doing magnificent work, by the way. Don't believe those left-wing summaries.

Go to their report in January of this year, of 23. After just five and a half months, the Florida investigative force for elections put out a report. And I'll tell you something, they've done magnificent work. And they got a big blockbuster candidate who is blowing the whistle. She says for multiple years, I think decades even, there's been a scheme going around where people have been hitting black residents and buying their ballots. And they're working on that case. so there's some big potential cases but in most parts of the country those cases are totally ignored do you think that uh in detroit in uh fulton county in manhand they care about those they'll ignore those cases but you need so i guess i was leading up to that that you

you need uh i was saying expose the harvesting and then you got to find a prosecutor who will take it seriously if you can't find a prosecutor one thing i've just started to get onto is the power of the sheriff the county sheriff has tremendous power yes and they did the sheriff in racine wisconsin is the one that blew the whistle on the nursing fraud it's major nursing fraud there in the 2020 election but the uh and i didn't know this i'm just telling you what i've learned fairly recently that a sheriff is first of all he he's an elected officer. He's answerable to nobody except the people of his district. That's right. And he's usually established his position in the Constitution of the state.

So he's got a tremendous amount of power. And so people, and already Democrats, are trying to mobilize a counter offense here saying uh governor so and so you need to uh rein in this uh rogue sheriff here or something but i i don't think they're going to find it easy because like you say they're set in the constitution with certain privileges so it's a very powerful position and i've been saying because i'm fed up with uh all of the establishment politics i've been telling everybody pay attention to who your sheriff is and we saw this i've been saying, because I'm fed up with all of the establishment politics, I've been telling everybody, pay attention to who your sheriff is. And we saw this. I've been saying that for years.

We saw this very clearly during the lockdowns of the pandemic and everything. They could make it a lot worse, or they could nullify even these rules that were coming from the state governor. And it's the sheriffs that can do that. No, we're not going to enforce that. We're actually going to protect people. I talked just earlier in this show about a church in Illinois where Pritzker was horrible about the lockdowns, but the local sheriff was protecting the church to allow them to meet and they put their deputies there on Sundays to keep the state police from bothering

anybody, you know, so you can do things like that. It's a lot of power. The sheriff, they can investigate, and they have the ability to have those police actions. The other part of this that we look at, and it's been there for a long time, and when I looked at all these different aspects of fraud, and of course, North Carolina, where I used to live, they had, still do, I think, the longest voting period of anybody. They had no IDs.

And I've told the story many times about a friend of my brother-in-law's who went to vote on Election Day. And all you have to do is give them a name and an address. And they look it up and say, you've already voted. And so does this other person at your address. He goes, wait, that's my mom. She's been dead for years. And so that's the kind of fraud that happens you need to be able to vote early and vote often with these people so there's a lot of things that have been there for a long time that are very simple and they don't want to fix them you know at the time we had republicans in charge these are rules that were put in by the democrats long voting periods and no id and stuff like that but

we had a completely republican legislature republican governor they didn't want to change any of that stuff yeah the republicans were really slow to the dance here and uh one of the biggest uh you know in retrospect someday i think people will look back and say Trump's biggest accomplishment might be that he's fighting the election. I know there's mixed opinions on this, but somebody had to sort of wake the Republicans up to the fact that shake things up, that you have to start paying attention to these processes because we were like frogs in a warm pot of water that was getting hotter and hotter. And we were falling asleep. Yeah. I mean, you got to wake up.

Yeah. Yeah. Everybody goes to sleep when there's a Republican in charge or they think they're in charge. It was actually in charge. You don't see. But when they think that the Republicans are in charge, they go to sleep. Talk about why there weren't any convictions, in your opinion, for the election fraud. You know, they didn't do too well in courts.

We had the courts throwing it out, saying, as a candidate, you don't have standing to look at all this stuff. I've looked at this for the longest time, and, you know, I was saying when this was all happening, why do they keep going to the courts? I mean, certainly you would expect the courts would give them a hearing. They did over the 2000 election. We had the hanging chads and all the other kind of stuff that went all the way the supreme court did it pretty quickly but this was distributed

over several different states so it was different in that regard but they just got shut down everywhere and so i looked at four states and they had razor thin margins and i said so why don't they take their case if they've got a case uh that can prove fraud, why don't they take it to the state legislatures that are Republican in those four states that had Republican legislatures, razor-thin margin that went to Biden. And in two of the four states, they even had Republican governors. And I thought, why don't they take it there? Because the state legislature can send a different slate of electors. And if they had done that, then, uh, you know, as Thomas Massey said, if they'd sent two different slate of electors, if one of them had come from the state board of elections and the governor,

and another one had come from the state legislature, we could have a discussion as to which one of those groups we want to recognize, but it had to be sent officially. And nobody sent, uh, pretended to send another slate of electors. I think you're alluding to the independent state legislature theory and um

but do you say don't you think and i know you're an attorney so i defer to you no i'm not an attorney oh you're not no no i thought you were no i'm an engineer but oh okay well that's better i'm glad to hear it dave i feel better uh but you know um, I think that that theory has not been tested at the Supreme Court level, but it may be soon. As you probably know, the Supreme Court is considering a case. I think it had to do more with redistricting, but it may have implications for the election of whether a state the legislature could take control i don't think in the aftermath of 2020 i mean i think there would have been pushback so fast oh yeah it would have gone i'm just saying that that might have been one way they could get it to the supreme court right if you could convince the state legislature look you know here's our proof we

got some fraud here they say all right we're going to send a republican slate instead of a democrat slate and then you know if uh you know thomas massey pence and other people look at it and say well this is one we're going to recognize and the constitution says that the state legislature will set up the terms for the uh for the electors or whatever then the the court would have had to have heard that and would have had to weigh in on that i think and and look at that they may not have looked at the evidence They may just have looked at the point of law and said, well, you know, are we going to recognize the State Board of Elections? Are we going to recognize the legislature?

But I thought that they had a case there. But why do you think that they didn't, you know, Well, you know, when I first heard the independent state legislature theory, I thought it was kind of extreme and wacko. And I've come to believe more and more in it. And I actually think it could be a very positive thing. And here's what I mean. What turned me around was seeing the Pennsylvania and the Wisconsin Supreme Courts. They made decisions so unbelievably abominable that I'm thinking, they basically threw their states to Biden. And I'm thinking,

and I'll back that up real quickly, Pennsylvania. Trump finally won the right to have observers after going to the court a couple times at the lower level. He won the right to have observers within six feet of a table processing ballots. And the Supreme Court said, no, no, no, you have to stay back 15 to 18 feet. In Philadelphia, the rest of the red part of the state, you can have close observation, but you can't have close observation in Philadelphia. Now, what kind of Supreme Court does that? And then they, I think we said already, when the signatures, when the book fire, the Secretary of State wanted the signatures to not necessarily be used, the Supreme Court takes it a step further and says, oh, no,

you can't use those signatures to match anything. So Pennsylvania's got no standards at all. They gutted their election. And in my opinion, by doing that, they made it an invalid certification. So when I see these Supreme Courts like that and the one in Wisconsin, I won't digress to talk about that, but that was just as bad. I'm thinking, well, why should seven people on a state Supreme Court be able to throw an election like that? Why not have it so that you have the legislature step forward and say, we voted, the majority of our legislature says,'s you're not following election law

the supreme court of wisconsin or pennsylvania says yes that is our election law you take it then up the road up the federal court system so you go i don't know i'm not a attorney but you would start at the lower levels and work all the way to the federal because that's basically what happened with uh gorv the uh uh bush right well you know you have a divided government you have a separation of powers and that's true at the state level and so you have the governor you have the courts you have the legislature and then you've got the constitution says the legislature shall make the rules that's the only guidance that we've got about that but if you had a disagreement between uh the you know the state board of elections which is you know they're on the governor's uh side and you've got

a disagreement with the legislature uh that sets up an interesting uh checkpoint of um of powers that that might get you into a deeper discussion of what is there but let's talk a little bit about since your book is about uh auditing and you're an auditor, you know, debunked and auditor reviews, the 2020 election. Let's talk a little bit about the, the impossibility of auditing and the things that have been done to keep you from being able to do a real audit. Well, election people don't even know what an audit is. They, you know,

they think it's counting. Counting is the end product. Well, we start with a risk assessment. We look at the external threats. In the case of the election, there were a lot of those. There were those, all those 19 bellwether counties that didn't go the right direction. There was the, you know, all these signs, and everybody's heard those. You know, Trump got so many extra votes over the previous election. That normally means he wins.

Those are external threats. It's valid to consider them. They're certainly not proof or even evidence of fraud. That's for sure. But those are the external threats. There's internal threats we look at, too, which might be like a complicated dominion machine that nobody has a right to look at because of proprietary restrictions. That would be called an internal threat.

And we look at those threats and we say how significant they are. And then we say, well, what kind of internal control system does the election center have to fight those? Like, do they, for example, rigorously, well, first of all, do they have ID? No, they don't have ID. Do they check signatures? No. For the most part, the six weak states did not check signatures.

And I could go down the list. I won't waste your time on it. But so their systems were terrible i mean just terrible systems you know what really riles me you i'm sure you know john r lott uh junior the uh phd who works on election issues and he he put out a great study a couple years ago uh comparing well basically what the 47 countries of Europe do. And every single one. Last year, it was all but one.

Part of Britain did not have ID required. But now they even moved to it starting January 1st of this year. Every single one of the 47 have ID. And I believe it's all but one is photo ID. And it's really crazy because they're so focused now to an extreme of having biometric identification. They want a global digital ID. They wanted vaccine ID and passports and all the rest of the stuff, but not for voting. That's not suspicious at all, is it?

When you got to do it to cash a check or whatever. I mean, but they don't everything except for voting. want to fly on a plane you got to show me your id you know well you you want to hear a real hoot uh the democrats always act like they're people uh voters can't figure out how to get id it's going to be too confusing for them. That's right. Yeah. In Georgia, Georgia from 2016 to 2020, their rejection rate for bad ballots dropped to

one 18th. So if this is it in 2016, it's one 18th as much in 2020. Yeah. But here's what's really significant that's the statewide fulton county the the stronghold for democrats that's in atlanta right it's near atlanta right they uh it dropped to just 14% of the state rate.

So those marginalized citizens who don't know how to do anything, they were seven times smarter when it came to filling out their ballots, apparently. Seven times smarter than the rest of the state. It's so obvious what happened there. They were just letting all the ballots slip through no matter what. Signed, unsigned, any defect, didn yeah signed unsigned any defect didn't matter no address didn't matter you know when i was in texas i did a report there about the state board of elections and the guy that was running it had worked at the rose law firm you know where hillary clinton was and they brought him back and he was brought back

by a republican i think it was rick per Perry who brought him back because they had a long list of Republican governors. But he came back under Rick Perry. And every election, he would tell every one of the counties, don't keep an image, a facsimile image of the ballots. Just get rid of all those things. And in the Constitution, it said that they had to keep them. But he would send it out every election and say, don't retain those things. So we don't even have anything to look at, let alone, you know, and that's what is happening in most cases, right? There's not anything that you could go back and even take a look at. As you're pointing out, you've got different risk assessments, internal and external, and you would audit things like that.

But, I mean, even if you wanted to go back and do a recount, you know, they don't have the stuff where you can get an honest recount. Well, you know, I digress a bit. The next step after you do all that analysis is that then you'd plan some tests. You'd say,

well, this, but, but I want to say something. In some cases you stop right there and you never go a step further. In other words, when you hit, I give this analogy sometimes. Imagine you have a pizza shop where they have no record system,

but they have a big cardboard box in the middle of the room. And they sell some pizza. They throw $20 in the box. They need some sauce. They take some money out and buy some sauce. And all year long, that's going on. And at the end of the year, they say, say hey joe we need our financial statements audited no it's not auditable i don't care what you do we don't count anything i don't care how much money is in that box because it doesn't mean

anything that's really what you had with these six these six swing states that I looked at, and it's meaningless when you have unsigned, when you have no ID and you have no real signature standards. And let me say one more thing while it's on my mind about signatures. Even under the best of circumstances, signatures mean nothing. There's a test I cite in another article,

it's something else I'm about to write where they um compared how well professional signature examiners do to non-professionals and non-professionals are what we have in our election centers the non-professionals had a failure rate of 38 percent and you know how they fail they tend to they said the professionals tend to focus on the differences between two sets of signatures the non-professionals tend to focus on the similarity so they tend to have these uh level one mistakes where they over match. They think that everything matching when it's not matching. So signatures mean nothing. Get that out of there.

Yeah. So when you look at this thing and the record system is so messed up, you would, as an auditor, you would just say, well, that's it. There's nothing that can be done. That's right. But if you did say, well, all right, I can work with this, then you'd beat the heck out of those transactions you'd be you'd be uh getting a thousand of this type of balance you'd be test

retesting signatures you'd be actually and by the way the very best test the the test that i recommend for republicans to use use canvassing of residences not of people necessarily but of residences so in other words you select like 800 houses this will this will ferret out the harvesting you select 800 houses ran uh in a systematic way so it's representative of the whole county and you knock on doors and you say and you have a list of all the people who supposedly voted by mail according to the county, because you can get that list. So you say, well, according to the records, you voted by mail in the last election. Is that true? And you're going to get a certain, I guarantee you, a certain percentage will say no.

But it's very important to do it right away before memories fade you want it accurate if you wait six months people will legitimately forget what the heck they did so you got to do this like in the days following election but that's what the cyber ninjas wanted to do in maricopa county by the way remember that audit but they were blocked big time uh car Maloney, Jamie Raskin, Merrick Garland all came down on them with both feet and said, no, you will not. It's intimidating. Even though this is months after the election, it's intimidating to voters. But that's the way. To be fair, if you want to get it representative, you're going to have to go to the graveyards as well, right?

Absolutely. You're going to have to go to the graveyards as well. Right? You had to pull them as well. Let's talk though about what we've talked about. What's wrong. Let's talk about what needs to be done on the theory that the Republicans would be interested in doing it. Okay. Um, well, I got to ask a question. Are we talking about Republicans are control or the Democrats are in control of the state?

Well, let's say the Republicans are in control of the state. What needs to be done? Okay. We can talk about both of them, but let's start with the Republicans. Okay. Yeah. Obviously, you want to get the ID in there. You want to ban harvesting completely.

Mail-in ballots, okay, but you've got to to have a reason like you're disabled or you're traveling. So these are just reasonable things. Um, uh, you can still keep signature standards as an addition to the ID requirement, but that's all, you know, just as an addition. Um, let's see, I would have a uniform. Shorter voting period. Would you put that in there? Yeah, I was going to, I was just about to get to that. I was going to say a uniform period for voting with a uniform cutoff as well as a start, too. And as for the machines, I would never allow a vendor to say, you can't look at our machine. It's proprietary secrets. I would make that, when you bid

out those, if you're going to use the machines, frankly, I don't even think some of these counties need to have machines at all because, you know, accounting isn't such a big part of the process. So all these are big adding machines. They're very expensive and complicated. Yeah, when you look at the, uh, they have people who go around and look at the, um, uh, slot machines and the casinos. And, uh, I don't know how far they're able to get in there, but I imagine it's probably not nearly as, uh, uh, sealed off a black box as it is for the voting machines. Yeah. They compare with these,

these things, but yeah, I, I would look at it. I mean, my ideal solution would be just hand ballots. Everybody votes on one, maybe two days and you've got a holiday,

you know, so that you got, cause I understand that some people, if you make it on a one particular day, some people can't get off of work. So you make it two days, you make it a weekend or whatever. You get people holiday and everybody votes at the same time. I always talk, Joe, about

the situation when the American government ran an election in Iraq. They had it on the same day. They didn't have a good way to ID people. So when you vote, you get your thumb painted purple and you couldn't wash it off, right? And that's how they kept people from voting multiple times in different places. You could do some, so they know what it takes to, to have an honest election and the state department will typically look, this is another thing.

I don't know what, in terms of in terms of the exit polls, the state department will look at the exit polls and, and a country's elections and what was officially reported. And if they see more than a 5% difference there, they'll say there was fraud, but you never see, you know,

we have one agency that does all of the exit polls and it's pooled for all the media and they'll give them demographic cross tabs and they'll say, well, you know, this many people who are white or this many people are black or a male and female, or, you know, the, the one-armed people, they, uh, they voted for this candidate, that candidate, but they'll never give you the total because they don't want you to compare the total to what was actually reported. The exit poll total versus the official poll. Well, you were saying if there's a discrepancy of so much in

the exit poll you know that reminds me of something too remember i was talking about georgia and how they dropped from what from the 118th of of the rejection rate of of 2016 any i you were saying what would you do to make better controls? I put a provision in any change in rejection that goes that big triggers an automatic audit. That was 78,000 votes in Georgia. That election was only 11,800, the margin. And you've got 78,000 changed just by rejection rates, by, in other words, the discretion of the people counting the ballots. That's not an election that's just baloney i mean yeah and then in fulton county it was even more you know what it dropped to if

you compare the state 2016 rate to the fulton county one one hundredth and twenty-eighth it's hard to even say but imagine more than 128 parts it It dropped to one of them. That's so obviously fraudulent that, you know, people don't want to hear that word. They say, that's not proof. You know, no court's going to say that. It's proof to an auditor of something seriously wrong. That's right. Seriously wrong.

But do you want me to get into what to do with the Democrats? Yeah, let's keep going with that. Yeah. So we got that for the Republicans. And I would, you know, my preference would be to see hand counted, hand ballots and to have, as you pointed out, a close observation where people are watching it. That's the way they do it in Europe as well. I remember when they had Brexit and they were counting ballots and you had people who were, you know, standing over them, watching this stuff, not standing over them, but, you know,

close enough, five or six feet away from the table they're not going to interfere with them but they can see everything that's going on clearly you know that reminds me of something too that's another change i would make is have a bigger period between the election and the certification because the standards we have worked when people walked in, 90% would walk in, they signed their name in front of somebody. And it was pretty quick. It really was mostly just counting. Now it's more than counting because you've got all these baloney ballots coming in unsigned, no ID, you've got to examine them. I mean, frankly, the whole system's atrocious but it takes time how is anybody going to launch a lawsuit or an investigation in two weeks or something some of the states have incredibly

short periods it's very it varies a lot with the states yes but anyway all right uh the democrats are in control this is tough now and there's no easy solution. But first of all, you have to have some very tough-skinned observers, including a lot of lawyers, going to these districts because it was sad. I felt bad for the people. I mean, in Detroit, in some of those, there were several areas. Fulton County was one. Detroit was another. There was about four or five cities where those people needed helmets.

They were being abused terribly. You should see the hundreds. One of the things Sidney Powell did right, she did a lot of things wrong, but she had like 100 affidavits. And unfortunately, all her crazy talk about certain things distracted from it. But she had a lot of testimony under oath from people or affidavits, I should say under oath from people citing the same thing that they throw out a Republican observer and the whole room would cheer including the paid workers. And there were racist comments made about them. And they were really intimidated. And that's got to stop. Yeah. So but anyway, that's the first thing is tough, thick skinned observers. Next thing is documents. Start requesting the vital documents

with your right to know your freedom of information, whatever the terminology. Right away, before the election's even over, like put in your request. We want the chain of custody documents. You know, in Arizona, 740,000 ballots were not covered with any chain of custody document. I mean, you're taking it out of faith. Wow. 740,000. And that's a verifiable fact, thanks to Verity Vote in Pennsylvania.

They did a great job on that. So that would be the second thing is to documents, to get those important documents. The third thing, which should start right away is the canvassing. If you can find a tough auditing firm, and I have to admit, auditors tend to be little worms. As the image says, I don't think they're what, you know, if I weren't retired, I'd have a hard time writing this book because my clients would be attacked. They would be told, hey, why you have this horrible election denier doing your books for you?

Why are you doing that? He shouldn't do your audit. He's a monster. So they don't want to get involved, even the big firms. You know, they just don't want to get involved. But if you can, if you can't get them, get some very credible retired people with great images and integrity because they will be attacked. But they've got to knock on those doors and ask people about that voting. That's the only way to attack the harvesting and the phony ballot through the mail votes. Well, that's the same kind of thing we saw throughout this pandemic.

You know, if you've got a doctor who's got a different opinion from the official narrative or whatever, they get attacked. They lose their job. They lose their career. They lose hospital access. And this is one of the really, I think, frightening things that's happened to our society. It really is a totalitarian approach. People understood that you, in the days of Solzhenitsyn,

if you criticize the government, you're going to lose your home. You're going to lose your job. You're going to lose everything. That's what they're doing to people. And if we, each of us stand down because of those threats against us, that's when we lose. We only can get through this if we stand up one by one and i know a lot of courageous people have done that in different places but that's not what most people do they

will succumb to that kind of pressure just mandates and everything yeah well writing this book i mean my first the first two months i just tried to grab all the information i could because i saw it disappearing i mean because you, YouTube started striking everything off. Yeah. And it's terrible. I mean, a lot of I imagine there's a lot of people who don't realize what's going on because they're not trying to get that. I mean, if you want.

You know, it's like what were they saying on Twitter that after Elon got it, he discovered there was all this child porn going on and stuff, that that was okay. But on the other hand, talk about vaccines or talk about elections was banned from Twitter. I mean, it's a crazy world. That's right. Oh, yeah, and it's still that way. Let me finish. Okay, so what else to do?

If you can, do an audit now nobody's going to let you do an audit but the unless skip back to your comment about the legislature they might have the authority and they did for example in arizona have the authority to have uh dr shiva ayaduri i don't know if that's a name you've heard yeah yeah yeah okay he's a brilliant man. I mean, he just proved that the Arizona audit was a fraud. I mean, he proved it because he assembled a panel of six people, three professionals, three non-professionals to examine 499 sample signatures, compare them to the registration, and they found 12% didn't match. 12%. That is extending it out to the

population of Maricopa County. That's 204,000 votes in the election decided by one 20th as much 10,000. Wow. So 20 times more. And you know what you would, I could almost hear it in my head, what the Democrats would say. They said, yeah, but Joe, those would be cured. That's their word du jour now, is curing ballots, which is the phoniest thing. They think that you could, well, let's say you cure 90% of them. You still have 20,000 phony ballots in an election decided by 10,400. I mean, there's no way that was a solid, that should have been certified. And I never will go to the point of saying Trump won because, as I said before, to an auditor, if something isn't certifiable, you stop there. You don't

say, but I think maybe it was this, or maybe, you know, I can't really certify this, but I think they made a billion dollars you don't do that you just stop and so i'm not going to say who won that election let people can make up their mind who is the who are the ones cheating but um but i'm going to say that okay what else can you do the audit if you can and the last thing i think i'd recommend is that reward strategy again. We're not using rewards. Some of this corruption can be ferreted out because you know something, harvesting usually is a multi-person operation.

And those people will rat. I mean, you're going around. A lot of people know what's going on. The reason, remember I said, I told you about Orange County, Orlando, that black Democrat woman. And I say a race only because this was all done within the black community. And she was pointing that out. She said this was a black thing that they were targeting black voters. And that's why she couldn't, didn't feel she could win in an election there.

This has to be stopped. But there was a lot of people who knew about that. A lot of people. And believe me, if you dangle a $10,000 reward, some of those people would have stepped forward years ago and blown the whistle on it. Oh yeah. I agree. Yeah.

The thing is though, that reward is going to have to come from the legislature. And even then they're going to get, uh, they're going to get sued by the justice department or something like that. Because if you go back and you look at what you look at the amazing case of this guy who was convicted of trying to manipulate the election because he put a joke meme up there, you know, oh, by the way, don't forget to vote on Wednesday type of thing, right? And the other side, again, as you're talking about, don't try what the Democrats do because you had Democrats who were doing the same thing.

Nobody even said anything about it, but this guy puts it up and they call it election interference and convict him on that. So if you put up something there and say, we're going to run a reward that better come through the legislature, uh, or they're going to come after any individuals with that. It truly is.

We're in the final stages of an unbelievably corrupt and totalitarian government. That's the real takeaway from all this stuff. I mean, we've had so many problems with elections for such a long time. And as I've told people, the corruption in elections begins with a two-party system that determines who even gets on the ballot and who gets to have a debate. And now we've just had both Trump and Biden say, no, we're not going to have any debates this time.

So it's amazing. Before we lose time here, again, the book is Debunked, an Auditor Reviews the 2020 Election. And people can find your articles at Western Journal. Is that correct? They're at Western Journal. They're at American Thinker. I have at least as many there. And I have a Substack account.

It's joefreed.cpa at Substack or something like that. Okay. Bye, John Substack as well. Great talking to you. Thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate it. Thank you, Dave.

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