Title: CIA Spy Breaks Silence On Elon Musk's Twitter Files — John
Show: Danny Jones Podcast
Date: 2023-04-12
URL: https://youtu.be/RmPpOps1yeI
Duration: 3:04:00

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[00:08] John I was watching a bunch of your um your videos last night uh from you link to on your substack that you do every day on the Sputnik radio station and you were mentioning something about how you met Andy Warhol oh yeah I was like what this guy was warhall in the no I wish I could say I was I I was I was in college I was a senior in college and was just I mean since I was a little kid I just loved Andy warhol's work and he was from Pittsburgh and I was from a town just north of Pittsburgh so he was a local hero on top of it and then I happen to

[00:39] find myself with four days in New York and nothing to do so I thought I'm going to find Andy Warhol I mean now everybody knows where Andy warhol's house was it's it's got a historical marker on it right um but I didn't know then I knew where the factory was what was he like um just like you might think um very very quiet very Meek um yeah but friendly enough I got his autograph that's amazing yeah I had no

[01:09] idea that that documentary they made about him was used with a complete AI voice over that b manufactured his voice M so he's like narrating his own uh documentary 35 years after his death it's it's weird that is so hard for me to to wrap my my head around like the even the morals behind that you know it was kind of it was kind of interesting when when this technology first appeared because then you can have

[01:41] like Tupac Shakur being a a hologram and and uh you know making an appearance at a concert that's kind of kind of kitchy cool mhm but this is just not right where where you're presenting it as you know a legitimate um as a legitimate uh you're presenting the person as a legitimate participant in a documentary or a show and it's just not right it's

[02:13] not true and especially after somebody's been dead for so long like the fact that you could die and they can basically rewrite your legacy however they see fit exactly that's terrifying it really is it's awful awful I'm very uncomfortable with it so we just got done watching that clip of Matt taibe getting grilled by that guy on MSNBC what can you explain when did you first hear about these Twitter files coming out and and how did how did your um your relationship with Matt evolve

[02:45] and how how did you guys communicate throughout his work on the Twitter files right Matt and I have been friends for I'm going to say seven or eight years now um when he was at Rolling Stone if he was working on a story that involved the intelligence community and he needed clarification on a point he would send me an email and say does this sound right to you does this sound crazy to you you know and I'd say oh yeah you know sounds right or no that's not the way it's done or no that sounds like the

[03:16] FBI or whatever and then with the Advent of Twitter back in whatever it was 2009 or 2010 we both got on Twitter he was working for Rolling Stone at the time and I'll tell you when I was in prison people used to like anticipate the arrival of Rolling Stone just to see what taibe was working on that month really yeah that's how popular he was you know because he M this isn't new what we saw what we saw in MSNBC is not

[03:48] is not a new component of Matt's personality he's extraordinarily bright he's a crazy hard worker and when he finally publishes something he's confident that he got it right if he didn't get it right he'll say I didn't get it right or I missed one of these details right but if you're going to take him on you know he's not going to suffer fools and he's not going to he's not going to consider rhetoric um as as a defense so anyway we we stayed in

[04:21] contact usually through Twitter he would DM me I would DM him mhm and then and then he called me one day to say listen um Elon Musk wants me to to do this to go through all the files now I mentioned to you when we were watching the clip that maty Hassen got something wrong like wrong wrong yeah what was that what was what that was was it's it's a very complicated and inefficient way in which

[04:51] Elon Musk has given the three journalists that he chose Mike shellenberg Matt and I forget the woman's name um access to the the so-called Twitter files what they did is they took a snapshot of everything that had ever been uh uh exchanged in emails in the corporate headquarters from the the day that the company was founded until the day that Elon Musk bought it and they made this database it Standalone they made it searchable and

[05:24] then that was it so it's not like oh my gosh uh these these emails that I'm pouring through reveal x what it is is like he has to say I wonder what Twitter said about Hunter Biden right and he has to go in and type in Hunter Biden and then a thousand emails will pop up and then he goes through them one by one and then shellenberger has to say I wonder what they did about let's say the

[05:55] FBI and so he's he's like you almost have to have a premonition that there's something in that database that is newsworthy so when I last talked to him and I'm going to say this is about two weeks ago a week and a half ago he said that they had only gone through 10% of the documents that are in this database he said there's so much more that we don't know about he said there's so much more that I don't know about because you can't just like open

[06:26] up the files and start going through them it's too much just too much so it's almost like you have to go in there with some sort of an idea of what you're looking for and hope and most likely you're going to find it you're going to find what you're looking for such an enormous database but you have to have an idea first it seemed like the overarching thing that this guy was missing that was just grilling Matt on there was that he was trying to nitpick the details but he was avoiding the overarching theme that like intelligence is deeply embedded in these social media

[06:56] companies everywhere see this is the thing I like mcky Hassen he's a nice guy I've been on his show half a dozen times nice guy mcky Hass from MSNBC nice guy but you know there's a reason why people call that Network msdnc right right because they're like the official mouthpiece of the democratic party should it matter for example if Jim Jordan is the chairman of that committee it shouldn't matter why is the for example you know I spent 2 and a half years on the Senate Foreign

[07:27] Relations Committee why should it be okay if John KY is chairing it but not okay if dick Luger's chairing it that doesn't make any sense either you have respect for the institution or you don't have respect for the institution you can't just have respect for the institution when the party that you happen to like is chairing it right and then the committee is crazy when the party that you don't like is not chairing it right don't you think it's kind of a problem though when when Elon is handing him all

[07:57] the stuff like Elon is literally like saying hey I'm just going to spend 44 billion on Twitter hand you all the documents it's going like again like they I kind of have a hard time watching when he was showing you know Matt quoting Matt being quoted on Joe Rogan show saying when they start handing you stuff you've lost and then he basically made the point like elon's handing you everything here right but I think that in the Joe Rogan uh interview what he meant was when it's the CIA handing you the information right but it's kind of the same thing isn't it it could be

[08:28] construed as the same thing yeah now the difference is that Elon isn't handing him a file and saying here's a story he's giving him access to literally everything and is not editorializing he's not saying this is where I want the story to go or I want you to focus on Hunter Biden or I want you to focus on you know XYZ he's not doing any of that The Joe Rogan um interview was done just after the news

[09:00] was made public that kend delanian from NBC and MSNBC the chief intelligence correspondent was caught thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by Jason Leupold then of BuzzFeed now of Bloomberg um he was caught sending his articles to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor saying does this look okay to you guys is this okay to publish it's like dude do you work for the CIA or do you work for for

[09:30] NBC which one because it can't be both and if you're going to be a CIA mouthpiece then be honest about it you know we we saw in that same trunch of of Freedom of Information Act documents um emails from the CIA to reporters saying you better not publish that story if you do we'll never cooperate with you again and you won't be invited to the Christmas party I mean what is that that's censorship I had a guy on here uh a

[10:00] friend of mine Jack Murphy he has a a podcast called the team house podcast and he was working on this really big article he spent I think over a year on it wow where he was reporting I guess he has a lot of uh former CIA sources that he works with and a lot of Army intelligence people that he works with and the gist of the story was um he had evidence that the CIA was working through a NATO partner to conduct sabotage inside Russia MH um I remember that story you remember that and there was like there was um munition warehouses that were catching on fire

[10:31] you know railroad explosions all kinds of crazy things going on and uh he was when he was working on the story I guess he was working through one of the top two or three Publications in the US and he was going through the editor they were like getting ready to press the button to publish it and they go hold on we have to have a conference call with the deputy director of the CIA uhhuh that's exactly how it works and if they were really serious about it the phone call would be with the National Security adviser uhhuh that like makes my heart beat like

[11:03] twice as fast G through that half a dozen times and and once they had that phone call the deputy director basically said this is absolutely 100% incorrect he goes in fact these are rogue ukrainians doing this stuff okay then then put a disclaimer in the article exactly and but but it's a he has an off the Record agreement or something with this publication so the editor refused to do that and then the editor went ahead and said okay we have to make this article JY with everything this the deputy director said so he pulled it he says no I'm not doing that so he

[11:34] published he self-published it see and that's exactly why s h can't get published in the United States anymore he only publishes in the London Review of Books that's so crazy I mean the the I understand like the like I said before I understand the the ne the necessity for the CIA to keep cover Ops off the front page of the newspaper sure right that makes that makes sense I understand that but when you're literally like destroying the Integrity of Journalism in the country and this at

[12:04] the same time where does that go like that seems like a big problem that a lot of people don't know about and then when it comes and then when it when that extends to these social media platforms it gets really terrifying yeah I'll tell you a story when we were gearing up for um for war against the Iraqis in this was in late 2002 very early 2003 we were we were trying to put together whatever they called it the coal of the willing or whatever stupid moniker they came up with and uh and the Israelis came to us and they said we

[12:35] went in on this war and we said absolutely not if you jump in we lose the jordanians we lose the Egyptians we lose the Saudis we even lose overflight uh clearance from the from the syrians absolutely not and then like a week later all these communications Towers in the western Iraqi desert just started tipping over right they're all on three legs they were you know between 500 ft and 1,000 ft these are major Towers like

[13:07] broadcast Towers three legs and then somebody was putting explosives on one of the legs on all of them so all over the Western Iraqi desert these towers just started tipping over well somebody told the New York Times it's an Israeli sabotage team the Israelis doing this and the New York York Times came to us and said what's going on you're working with the Israelis on this and we said we're not working with the Israelis and we don't have any idea it's probably the

[13:37] Iraqis blowing up their own Towers so that they can blame us but what do you say right when you were with the CIA did you have any kind of any kind of communication with these major Publications never never never in fact one time uh in 2002 I got a call at home late like 10: mhm and a guy said he was he gave me his name and he said that he was uh a friend of my wife of my wife's and um and that he was with the

[14:07] Boston Globe and I hung up on him and the next day I we there's a database to report contact with the media so I went in to the database I I said this is the guy's name he said that he was a friend of my wife's and my wife said she' never heard the of the name before and he said he was a reporter from the Boston Globe so the office of public affairs called this guy and said cut it out and he's like uh sorry I had to give it a try W mhm but I was undercover at the time I don't have any idea how he knew

[14:39] who I was so who was he uh he was some junior young reporter from the globe the Boston Globe interesting yeah and he's like hey were you in Afghanistan I'm like who is this oh I think we met in jalalabad and I hung up on him yeah that's creepy not good because was it a guy from the Boston Globe was it some Al-Qaeda guy I mean I I didn't know I mean no matter who it was I wasn't supposed to talk to them anyway but you have to be careful

[15:11] about stuff like that do you think you're I mean obviously I know the answer to this but how do you think your life in the CIA and then not even not even counting what happened to you after how they destroyed your life but like everything that you've been through everything that you've seen all the experiences the crazy I can't even begin to imagine some of the you've seen how has that sort of like affected your outlook on the world and like are

[15:43] you always just like looking over your shoulder are you paranoid oh man that is such a good question you know nobody's ever asked me that question before really yeah funny that is a really good question um it's kind of a complicated answer um listen there's a something I think about all the time there's a psychiatrist in Bethesda Maryland whose entire practice is just to treat up former CIA people who lost their minds overseas

[16:15] right that's her entire practice and when I got home from Pakistan you know every time you come home from from a combat U uh tour you have to go through psychological uh testing at the agency and they were like yeah you're good I said yeah I feel fine this is after the Abu Zeda after Abu zua after the uh the massacre in the church next door to the Embassy seven Americans were killed 14 people were killed seven were Americans two were colleagues of

[16:46] mine and I've got I'll show you later some pictures on my phone you know of of a human head laying on the ground when we first arrived for you know for rescue but I I didn't have any PTSD at all with that said um even after all these years I left the CIA 20 years ago I'm still very paranoid about surveillance and I've actually spotted surveillance a number of times and I've reported it to my attorneys and

[17:17] it always turns out to be the FBI really uhhuh like how are they surveilling you they were just curious to see what you're up to I'm like them I'm a private citizen they would respond to attorney saying that oh yeah uhhuh yeah a number of times how how do they surveil you what sort of tactics do they use they're they're they're good uh it the the style of surveillance is called um uh oh what's the first word discreet to

[17:48] lose discreet to lose means they're so far back that they risk losing me but they're so far back because they don't want me to spot them right but I'm constantly looking in my rear view mirror and side view mirrors and if I see a if I see a car or in the case of the FBI because they thought they were so smart a pickup truck with a snow plow on the front like who's not going to notice that right then I drop myself a little note and then if I see that same

[18:20] car an hour later 15 miles away I'm pretty confident I'm under surveillance if I see him a third time I'm calling my attorney and that's what I would do you know one time in Pakistan I don't know if I told you this last time I was here but I I was very very good about surveillance I actually became a surveillance detection instructor at the CIA after Pakistan and um when I first arrived in Pakistan a colleague picked me up at the airport and he said uh oh

[18:51] we put you in the Marriott and I said the Marriott are you out of your minds if they're going to blow up one place what's it going to be it's going to be the Marriott I said I'm not staying in the Marriott so I stayed there the first night and then they moved me into this little 16 room Guest House owned by a Pakistani family 6 weeks later they blew up the Marriott and killed 156 people so I was in this little yeah with the the truck bomb made a made a a crater so deep that water was

[19:22] seeping in from the water table that's how big this bomb was I'm like you see what did I tell you so anyway anyway every day I would leave at a different time and take a different route to work and every night when I was done and the days were very very long it wasn't unusual to work an 18-hour day I would leave and take a different route back to the guest house so it's not to set a pattern as soon as you set a pattern that's when they kill you because they know that at 605 he's going to cross

[19:54] right through this intersection and that's when we fire the grenade at him right that's how people get killed right so I left one day and I noticed a guy on a motorcycle with a red helmet trying really hard to stay in my blind spot now the only reason I even noticed him at first was cuz he had a helmet and I had never seen anybody with a motorcycle helmet in Pakistan I don't even know where you would buy a motorcycle helmet in Pakistan right but I noticed him and it was red and I thought okay

[20:27] noted so I got to this neighborhood called The Diplomatic quarter where most of the embassies were and he broke off so I wrote myself a note when I got to my desk I left that night I worked 14 15 hours whatever it was it was dark it was dark when I arrived and it was dark when I left and as soon as I pulled out of the DQ The Diplomatic quarter there he is again I don't know how to respond to that I'm sorry oh you're watch as soon as I pulled out of the Diplomatic

[20:58] quarter there he was again and I thought oh that's that's not good right there's a definition of surveillance it's it's multiple sightings at time and distance so you see him at multiple times at different places and at different points in your trip right so I took this weird circuitous nonsensical route back to the guest house and several blocks away he dropped off again I was really nervous and that

[21:29] night um I got everything ready in advance for the next day and I got up at 5:00 in the morning and I went to the front door of the guest house I opened it just a crack I looked up and down the street and I didn't see anything went out to my car and they give us these uh these retractable sticks with cameras on the B I'm sorry with mirrors on the bottom oh really you know so I look underneath the car we all we all had them good God didn't see any like bomb or surveillance

[22:01] device or tracker or anything so I got in the car and uh started driving and son of a gun there he is again so I got to the Embassy and I was waiting for the security officer to come he finally showed up around 700 and I said listen I'm under surveillance I'm positive that I'm under surveillance and he's like well how how are you so sure so I said you know three sightings over 2 days and I told him everything he's like ooh yeah

[22:32] okay that's surveillance we have to wait for the chief to come in Chief came in around 8 8:15 went to his office and I told him I'm under surveillance I'm positive and I told him the story and he's like well you know what you have to do and I said I I know and he says don't worry we're going to have a team out there we'll have guys all around you and then he said you never had to do

[23:02] that before did you and I said ' no never he said yeah it's going to be okay we're going to have a whole group of guys out there so I worked in this Branch I I was the head of this branch that was staffed mostly with contractors they were very very senior Cia officers one was former deputy director of the CIA who after 9/11 had volunteered to come back as contractors so it was me and like these seven old men in their 70s and one was in his 80s he had been the chief in his 80s he

[23:34] he was the chief uh for the Bay of Pigs operation if you can imagine he's long dead now okay okay I'm not thinking of the same guy okay okay I'm thinking of I was thinking of Felix Rodriguez that wasn't pigs that was Felix Rodriguez worked for him okay okay yeah he was he was an old man back in 2002 so uh all day long they're like slapping me on the back like don't don't worry buddy we're all going to be out there don't worry everybody goes through this I said I'm very worried to tell you the truth

[24:06] I'm very worried about this well around 2:00 I had a meeting um at a at a safe house that we shared with uh the host service we used to interrogate prisoners there and so I went we we had this fresh prisoner so I I went to uh to question him and I finished and on the way out my normal contact was this onear General Pakistani General so I'm I'm walking out and he goes are you okay cuz I was

[24:37] distracted to say the least yeah and I don't know what possessed me to say it but I said General are you following me and he said no why and I said because I'm under surveillance I'm 100% sure that I'm under surveillance and when I see the guy again this afternoon I'm going to kill him and he said no it's not us and I never saw him again I never saw the surveillance again we learned later

[25:08] that they were all sitting around one day and one of them said that John kyaku from the American Embassy he is such a nice guy and then another one said you know what nobody's that nice he's he's pretending to be nice so that we'll drop our guard he's probably working against us which I wasn't so they chose the worst possible surveillance guy to just check me out and see what I was doing when I wasn't

[25:39] with them and I spotted him immediately and I was going to kill him and if I hadn't told the general that afternoon that I had spotted the surveillance and that I was going to kill the guy he'd be in the ground right now wow that kind of experience become so burned into your brain even after you return to the United States like I Al-Qaeda is not going to surveil me in the United States the FBI might they're not going to try to do a hit but what about a

[26:12] carjacker you know or or a nut or an armed robber or who knows so you just you know they they trained you so hard over the course of so many years it's just not something that you can forget it's wild that even in your own group of people these covert CIA officers overseas that you you constantly are thinking that your own people could be double agents or against you that is a that is an extreme level

[26:45] of paranoia which is Justified well let me interrupt you on that and I don't mean to jump to a totally different topic we can talk about Julian Assange later but on the Julian Assange case do you remember at the tail end of the uh of the Trump Administration uh when Wikileaks uh released the Vault 7 uh documents and Mike Pompeo said that Wikileaks was a hostile non-state intelligence actor those were very

[27:18] carefully chosen words because anytime there's a covert Action Program being considered like murdering Julian Assange you have to brief the Congressional oversight committees if it's a counterintelligence operation you don't have to brief the Committees why because if it's Counter Intelligence maybe it's the committee members that are the spies that are the moles that are working for the Chinese

[27:49] or the Russians or the Iranians or the Cubans and so you don't tell anybody so just by calling Wikileaks a hostile non-state intelligence actor the assumption is maybe Senator so and so supports Wikileaks that would make him an enemy so you don't have to brief it and then you can go do your hit and murder Julian Assange and deny it in the media and if a member of the oversight committees is interviewed by the New York Times or by CNN he can say

[28:21] I don't think it was the CIA cuz they would have briefed us on something like that yeah and that was that was BAS basically proven that that was a there was a I remember there was an article about this on Yahoo Yahoo news Yahoo news of all places I had I had another CIA officer in here and I asked him about that and he said this is I think he he didn't say it was but he said he discredited it because it was from Yahoo news bull because the author was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning oh wow oh yeah investigative journalist you got to find that that Yahoo news article formerly with the New York Times uh and um and they say in the

[28:55] article that they interviewed 36 current and Former Intelligence offic current and former yep wow yeah how many current CIA officers do you have T are you in touch with are you allowed to say uh sure Uh current I'm going to say two two yeah former wow is there such thing as I mean your case is is different but once you leave the CIA aren't you always in the CIA no uh once you leave the CIA you're

[29:26] in the CIA for another year so what happens is you submit your resignation your resignation is never accepted they um process you uh in a leave without pay status so that if there is an operation that you are uniquely qualified for or if there's an asset that you recruited that will only talk to you they G that gives them the right to call you back in that year and you have to do the operation if there is no call back in the year then they accept your your uh

[29:58] resignation and they implement it okay the readers I have that question is going back to the Twitter files there was that Hamilton 68 that was basically founded by they were all former intelligent people right yeah oh and there's there are several of those kinds of organizations for people that are familiar with that can you explain what that Hamilton 68 was yeah Hamilton 68 is uh is a company do we have it up what is the headline of this what is this article this one oh kidnapping assassination and a London shootout this is not the uh this is not the article

[30:29] this was an article about basically a CIA plot to uh I think kill Julian Assange oh Mike isakov that's that is the original oh this is the original look I think they changed the headline they must have they must have yeah Mike isakov is a very serious investigative journalist H yeah okay so what we talking about Hamilton 68 Hamilton 68 so Hamilton 68 um is like so many of these other

[31:00] um companies I mean how do you even describe a company like this they're they're staffed they're founded by former CIA FBI NSA dni people to go through the news and to decide what is real and what is fake and so they'll do things like issue warnings for example on alternative news sites Consortium news for example uh they'll say oh this is unreal reliable it's uh they they publish Russian propaganda well you know

[31:31] what they actually don't ever uh publish Russian propaganda they were founded by a guy who started with the Los Angeles Times and then spent almost his entire career with the Associated Press he's the guy that broke the Iran Contra story you don't like their position on Iraq on uh sorry on Ukraine and Russia that's why you say it's Russian propaganda or you don't like their position on Syria because now the CIA is arming Al-Qaeda we had them change their name from al-Qaeda in the Levant to the N

[32:05] front it's still Al-Qaeda but it's slightly less radical than Isis like you know it's like WWE in that sometimes there's just no good guy right you know so why do we have to pick a side when all three sides are bad so Hamilton 68 is one of these it's got like Mike Hayden on it and the former director general of NATO and some former

[32:36] dni and it's just so these are like very top level officials in these agencies very very top level Mike Morell and then what they do the way they make money and I think this is scandalous pardon this brief Interruption but I want to take a second to talk about our sponsor Verso now if you've heard this podcast before chances are you already know how obsessed I am with Health and Longevity which is why one of my favorite guests I have on the show is nutritional scientist and neuroscientist Dr Dom dagostino who actually introduced me to

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[34:09] proliferation specifically when it comes to cardiovascular and cognitive function skin Health Vision and the immune system head on over to v.o and use the coupon code concrete at checkout to save 15% on your order I linked it all below now back to the show is they contract out to the government mostly to the Pentagon and different elements of the Pentagon and they say what we'll do is we'll

[34:39] aggregate all the news on the internet and then we'll put a green check mark or a red check mark next to the URL so when people at the Pentagon Google an article what's being said about Ukraine today oh oh These red check marks pop up so don't go to covert action magazine you're saying like on Twitter when they give you the different like didn't they give Consortium news a red check saying that it was like Russian state or something

[35:10] yeah Twitter wouldn't accept the red check oh okay but Hamilton 68 issued it and it's on the Hamilton 68 side and if you're on a government computer the red check pops up oh on a government computer a government computer that's how they make their money wow yeah it's crazy so so then listen if you're an analyst if you're an intelligence analyst analysts are always proud to say that they are allsource analysts so you're not just taking CIA um uh Source

[35:41] material uh you're not taking just NSA intercepts you're taking everything those plus State Department cables plus they're called doirs uh their their uh military reporting and press now I I knew as an analyst that I was less likely to find something original and true in a Sri Lankan tabloid than I was in the Wall Street

[36:11] Journal but now the likes of Hamilton 68 are telling me no no no don't even read that one that one's no good we gave it a red check mark you won't like that it's propaganda but even though these guys are so far removed from these agencies how tied and are they still like do they do they still go to the dinners they still oh my God yes I went to an event at the national Press Club three or four weeks ago and Michael Hayden was the host um he and I never got along I never

[36:43] respected him he was a torture apologist we were both supposed to be on uh the Bill Mar show one time and we were in The Green Room and I called him Mike and he insisted that i' call him General Hayden and and I said I'm not in the military Mike sorry I'm not calling you General Hayden and he got up and walked out and he skipped the show really yeah he had a major stroke about a year ago so at the Press Club the

[37:14] other night yeah he got up and he was literally drooling out of his mouth and he had two canes and this woman wiped his mouth and he's like thank you for being here everybody I just want to say and then there's there's this long pregnant pause thank you for being here everybody and then he sat down it's like seriously you're still rolling him out for these events and then they're like we want to tell you about the alternative media it's dangerous for our democracy and freedom it's like you fashist the alternative media that's

[37:45] funny that's a funny term that's another thing that I learned from these Twitter files is how they're able to label these I don't know what you call them what are they like NOS like this uh election Integrity organization like what is that according to whom who decides what has integrity and what doesn't and if you have any experience in this stuff with like how the the government labels like for example the Patriot Act you look at something like the election Integrity project it's

[38:16] almost like you know what it is yes yeah right um getting back to Consortium news and Hamilton 68 um Hamilton 68 sent a letter to cons news saying we don't like you we're doing a review of you and we think we're going to give you a red check mark because you're Kremlin apologists so you can appeal if you want so I'm on the board of Consortium news uh as are a lot of very serious

[38:48] journalists I mean these are Chris Hedges another two-time Pulitzer winner from The New York Times where where it's a bunch of us uh on the Andrew Coburn who we just looked at this article from the the independent he's on the board so um I said well who who signed this letter he said it's some guy I never heard of so we Googled him and it turned out it's this this guy in his 20s working for Hamilton 68 and he had worked briefly for a

[39:20] science related newswire that went bankrupt and shut down a few years ago he he had three published articles and then he went to Hamilton 68 so this this kid who knows nothing about anything he's going to decide that cover that uh Consortium news gets a red check mark and not only did they give Consortium of the red check mark But as soon as they did our PayPal count was um permanently suspended and Not only was

[39:51] it permanently suspended They confiscated the $9,500 that we had in there and we could meet payroll so we joined a class action suit in federal court in the 9th District uh in California with a couple of other Publications who also got the red check mark and had their PayPal accounts suspended and PayPal said oh no we don't want the cost of litigation they gave us all our money back but we can't use PayPal anymore and we have this red check mark now because the likes of Mike

[40:24] Hayden and this 20-some year old kid decided they just didn't like what we were publishing where do you think all of this goes with the social media and and with Hamilton 68 and this office in the Pentagon giving people checks on certain websites and all this stuff and then when you throw Elon into the whole mix it just gets even more confusing like what is the future of do you ever think about like what it will look like in 10 years on social media are we going are do you think it

[40:55] will there will be a reckoning do you think the pendulum is swinging more towards openness like with open algorithms that provide more transparency or do you think it's going more totalitarian and censored and and more like propaganda based there are efforts to push back but they're very difficult um so are you I guess my overarching question is are you optimistic or are you not optimistic I'm pessimistic pessimistic okay but there there are some elements of hope there's a group called pan Quake um yes

[41:27] that that's sort of an opsource uh it's supposed to be a social media platform akin to Twitter um but completely open- Source completely transparent um nonprofit that kind of thing and so they asked me if I would be interested in um talking it up being sort of a brand ambassador I said let me check it out first so I did I checked it out and um I

[41:59] sent the information to a couple of very tech-savvy friends of mine one uh Tom Drake from NSA oh yeah yeah Tom's a great friend and um and they said yeah looks legit and it's based in in Iceland and it's powered by you know a geyser so it's there's no effect on the environment it's carbon neutral I mean they thought of everything so things are going really really well we Incorporated lawyers in Luxembourg and

[42:32] Iceland and the the corporation is um housed in Tonga because then we're not you know under the offices of the FBI or the CIA and then we get suspended from Twitter with no explanation permanently suspended like for what reason never got an explanation so we're like okay well they threw us off Twitter and bunch of us like tweeted at at uh this is before Elon Musk tweeted at Twitter like what

[43:02] why did why would you suspend these people they haven't done anything there is no violation of the terms of service no response suspended then we get a notification from the bank that we use in Iceland that our accounts have been frozen and it turned out this was all done at the request of the FBI because they said these people that have created this pan quake they're all supporters of Julian Assange so we think there may be criminal activity

[43:33] here it's like so so I'm being I'm being punished because I believe that Julian Assange exposing war crimes committed by the American Military puts you in a uncomfortable position so they finally freed up our our money again but the icelanders who have been or had been very very friendly up until that point said you guys are needed going to need to get out of Iceland so now we're looking where to relocate really yeah like where do we go

[44:03] gery the Isle of Man I mean where do you go is it still banned on Twitter yeah and we've begged Alon musk to let us have our account back no response so I'm not optimistic about the future of transparency and media you know especially now with the with the uh Ukraine War uh underway anybody who doesn't tow the official line is an extremist or is propagating fake news or

[44:33] you're a propagandist or a Kremlin apologist you know how do you defend yourself and that's what you end up doing all the time is defending yourself what do you think is going to happen with Ukraine do you think that there's going to be any sort of a peace deal made how long do you think this is going to last and what do you think the outcome is going to be I I honestly believe that eventually there's going to be a peace deal there's going to have to be because just just based on sheer numbers even though things have gone badly for

[45:04] the Russians they have so many more people that they can commit to the battlefield that eventually the ukrainians is are just going to be spent and so it's so much better so much wiser to sit at the negotiating table and to come up with something you know do you think that the US is not going to be the one to do that no way no way I I think really the only chance right now of anybody doing that is the Turks the Turks yeah the the Turks have offered

[45:35] twice now and the Turks are the only NATO country that have M maintained close relations with the Russians but they're also members of NATO nothing's going to happen before Turkish elections which have now been postponed until October because of the earthquake they were supposed to have taken place in May earthquake crazy right so in the event that there are talks it's going to be the Turks I might otherwise say the Chinese because the Chinese have had such success recently but there's no

[46:08] possible way that the state department will allow the ukrainians to sit at the table with the Chinese right not after what happened in between the Saudis and the Iranians after everything they've done so far like the statement that the United States has made so far like how I can't imagine I can't imagine the Chinese getting Russians to come to the table with some sort of a proposition and Victoria nulan saying oh okay sure exactly exactly you know when I was um when I was still at the CIA I was still

[46:39] an analyst actually it's before I went into operations and I was assigned to the American Embassy in Manama Bahrain so I was I was on loan to the state department for three years from 1993 to 1996 and I was in Bahrain from 94 to 96 I was the economic officer in the embassy and and um this was sort of at the height of the Arab Israeli peace process and the bahrainis were asked to host the Arab Israeli peace talks on the environment they were thrilled and there was a a very formal way in which we did

[47:11] this so I had to join with my Russian counterpart who I really liked we got along very well this was a spy probably okay but he was undercover as an economic officer okay so you guys you guys just assume you guys are under you guys are okay that's amazing so I called him and I said eigor um I got instructions from the Department to deliver the invitation to the peace talks he says yes yes my foreign Ministry sent me instructions I said okay let's go I'll call the foreign Ministry I'll make an appointment for us

[47:41] tomorrow at 10 o'clock and we'll go jointly deliver the invitation to begin the peace talks like an hour before I left I get a cable from the state department and they said go alone don't go with the Russian so real quickly I wrote back and I I said but it's a joint us Russia sponsored peace conference they said no no no we don't want the Russians to have any more influence in the Middle East than they already have which is zero go alone so I went alone it was embarrassing so I delivered the

[48:12] invitation to the bahrainis and he calls me he's like dude what the and I said man I'm so sorry but my instructions came in and they told me to cut you out I apologize he's like you guys are doing this doing this to us in every country in the m Middle East I'm like I know I'm sorry I'm sorry we just don't want you guys to get a foothold here wow man it was brutal and now now we're jumping up and down over Syria because about a week and a half ago um Bashar alassad went to Moscow you know

[48:45] there there of course are syri or Russian troops in Syria he went to Moscow and he asked for additional troops two more temporary bases and he offered up a permanent base to the Russians now they've they've had a they've had a small Navy base in Northwestern Syria for decades okay and we went crazy the state department released these these statements like this is an affront to peace it's going to ensure continued War blah blah blah no no our presence in Syria is illegal I

[49:18] think I mentioned this the last time I was on the show there are only three ways that you can legally be in another country your military can legally be in another country if if that country has attacked you number one number two is if that country's government has invited you and number three is with the approval of the United Nations security Council okay we don't have any of those but we have special forces troops in Syria quote to protect the oil fields they're not our oil fields to protect

[49:50] the Russian military is there at the invitation of the internationally recognized legitimate Syrian government just because we don't like that government doesn't mean that we can just send troops and occupy their oil fields but that's what we do that's what we do sure so you think there's a Poss do you think do you really think there's any possibility that China could negotiate peace between these two countries because I just don't see if China's behind it I don't think I don't think the US would accept will'll never ever accept it absolutely not the Turks will

[50:21] tolerate it our relations with the Turks are not good right now but because they're members of NATO we sort of de facto have to accept the fact that they could play a role in this and I also heard that part of the effort um with this war is to basically deplete Russian yes supplies and ammunition and War materials that's right which is why we were so upset two weeks ago when um xiin ping said that there is no limit to

[50:53] China's friendship with Russia we read that to mean there's no limit to Chinese arm sales to Russia right which then would prolong our cost and pain significantly aren't they just S I heard also they were just selling their stuff back to them because Chinese bought bought stuff from Russia and they were basically just selling it back to them oh yeah yeah that's happening and on the US side the ukrainians don't know how to use American systems right so we're training them on things like surface to

[51:25] air missiles or radar or artillery we can trade them at Fort Hood or wherever most of them are at Fort Hood but they just don't know how to fly f-16s they just don't know how and it's complicated and it's going to take them nine months 12 months to learn how to fly in F-16 and then what do they do with them if we send f-16s to Ukraine and they keep them at Ukrainian um Air Force bases the Russians are going to bomb them and Destroy them but if we have them fly out

[51:56] of Poland that's an act of War because Poland is a NATO country right so we can't do that either so what we've done is we've gone to the Moroccans to the cypriots to the Indians to the Israelis and we've said we want to buy all of the migs that you have and we'll give you f-16s to replace them the cypriots said no the Moroccans said gladly the Indians said we'll think about it it but the

[52:26] answer is probably going to be yes and the Israelis said we don't want these migs anyway we bought them just to have them you can have the migs oh man yeah I have a I have a hard time sort of picturing how how this whole thing ends it's just it's just so hard to to stay on top of it and you know we should be watching Capitol Hill too because at the first the only opposition was the right-wing Fringe you know the likes of margorie Taylor

[52:57] and it's becoming far more mainstream now you know we we we have we have a a defense budget that is $880 billion that's more money than the next nine biggest countries combined we can't keep this up you know we wonder why we have bridges that fall down into the rivers below them why our interstate highway system is is in a disastrous condition why our airports

[53:27] are international embarrassments that anybody who travels internationally can see right why our hospitals are all second rate and falling down it's because we spend all our money on the military you know the Chinese have these high-speed trains that would be able to get us from New York to Chicago in three hours how come we don't have those trains the technolog is out there the French have them the Germans have them how come we don't have them because we've chosen to spend our money on the military not on

[53:58] infrastructure that has to stop at some point and then we are spending so much more now because of Ukraine where's that peace dividend we used to talk about you know the thing the thing about China is is it seems like the narrative is sort of Shifting away from kind of like trying to be like oh you know China like it used to be considered like don't talk bad about Chinese people it's xenophobic well in the beginning of the pandemic and now it seems like thear is slowly sh

[54:29] the other way maybe not slowly it seems like people on the left maybe not so slowly yeah people on the left now are taking a strong stance against China oh yeah you know and me and a couple friends of mine were even laughing when that Chinese spy blue FL flew across the United States and we're talking I'm like there's somebody at the CIA just sitting here chuckling right now at their desk thinking that like this is just some sort of narrative shift that they're trying to put on the media like there's no way they don't know about these spy balloons going across why would they why would they pick one out and just like

[55:01] Focus like that on the news about it that balloon is dang suspicious oh my God yes and you know what's funny this is kind of a pet peeve of mine on this issue who was it that called it a spy balloon right the media yeah nobody's ever confirmed that it was spying yeah what happened after they shot it down didn't they take it apart and and figure out like um they said that they likely wouldn't be able to find it they got pieces of it but for the most part it just sank oh really

[55:32] yeah but nobody in any position of authority in government ever said that it was engaged in spying the media did it's the media that call it the Chinese spy balloon mhm we don't know if it was a spy balloon what do you think it was I think it was probably a weather balloon really I do listen the whole planet is ringed by satellites that are so sophisticated that they can read license plates on individual cars you don't need an impossible to control balloon to spy on

[56:05] anything you already have all the satellites up there spying on everything yeah it doesn't make sense no it really doesn't one time I was flying from DC to LA and we were over Arizona and the pilot came on the intercom and said folks above us and on the left is a weather balloon he said I've been flying for 25 years I've heard about these weather balloons I've never actually seen one until now so I'm going to tip

[56:35] the plane and if you look out the left side of the plane you'll be able to see this weather balloon wow so he tips the plane I happen to be on the left side I'm looking out I'm looking up I don't see anything nobody saw anything so the pilot comes on a minute later and he says the flight attendant tells me that uh that you can't see this weather balloon you have to look really high up to give you an idea he says we're at 30,000 ft and it's at 150,000 ft so I unbuckled my seat belt I got down on the

[57:07] ground he tips the plane and then you could see it it's enormous and it was silver and he's like isn't that an amazing site I've never seen one before this is one of these NASA weather balloons okay I think that's what it was so why we're not the only ones that have them but did Pentagon never officially qualify that as a Chinese spy balloon didn't the government say it was that it was only the media really yeah they said it was a Chinese balloon yeah but nobody ever said this

[57:37] is what it was doing it was picking up signals intelligence it was floating over American uh military bases it was checking out the defenses of NORAD none of that none of it just oh it flew like this like in the shape of an Omega and then it you know went over here and then so you don't think spy balloons are are un Tech technology that's being utilized today by any agencies no I don't think they're necessary except for DEA and the border cpb customs of Border Protection they use them to look for drugs and for people crossing the border illegally um

[58:10] they're mostly tethered though and and instead of being at you know 150,000 ft they're more like 1,000 ft or or 2,000 ft you see them in Puerto Rico you see them all along the border in Texas and what kind of stuff are they are they are they taking like photos or they trying to intercept Communications it's video it's video yeah oh okay although Communications I I would I would expect that the ones in Texas are Communications uh oriented right yeah

[58:40] like that's what it says in this article oh it does what does this say like can you zoom in on it at all it's too small I can't read it see the alleged Chinese spy balloon oh alleged Chinese spy was likely capable those are me mouth CIA words the qualifications wow uhuh that's how we used to write at the CIA likely capable that means we don't know right likely possibly presumably

[59:13] reportedly that's CIA language oh yeah that's CIA language those qualifiers if you were absolutely positive you would say almost certainly that's what they taught us CIA writing training wow yeah yeah exactly so do you think there was any sort of nudge from intelligence to tell these media companies to go with this you think there was any sort of okay absolutely because this fits the timing fits perfectly into this new

[59:44] anti-china narrative that we have right yeah definitely is this anti-china narrative Justified at all can you AR can you can you make an argument that this is a good thing I I can't and I'll tell you why um the Chinese spy on us as much as we spy on them the Chinese are all over the United States especially on University campuses and um in US defense contractors trying to recruit sources of information or they've sent Chinese PhD

[1:00:16] candidates to study in the United States hoping that they'll be recruited into the defense Contracting industry and then report back to Beijing they're very very sophisticated so it's not like you know oh we're beating up on the Chinese and you know no the Chinese are the bad guys here but it's no more now than it was 10 20 50 years ago they've always done this another thing too and this is something that I just don't understand as a part of American pull this down just like an inch sorry American

[1:00:47] policy is the Chinese own so much US Government debt they are the the biggest investors that we have or one of the biggest investors that we have our economy is is INRI intricately intertwined with the Chinese economy if we fall apart they fall apart and vice versa so why pick a fight you know shouldn't we be looking for areas in which we can communicate with the

[1:01:18] Chinese rather than to you know to send Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan and now Kevin McCarthy's going to go to Tai Taiwan which was another thing you know I'm sorry to get a little bit off the subject but when Nancy Pelosi announced that she was going to go to Taiwan right before she left the speaker ship um a reporter asked if she was going to take a military aircraft and the Pentagon said we don't know anything about any trip to uh to Taiwan and then the White House said uh

[1:01:49] we we haven't been informed of any trip to Taiwan that was a lie because there's a there's a process by which members of Congress go overseas the process is you send a memo to the state department leison on Capitol Hill there's one in the house and one in the Senate you say speaker Pelosi and the following people want to go to Taiwan the state department liaison sends that to the appropriate desk at state in this case the the Taiwan desk or the office of of Chinese

[1:02:21] Affairs and then they write a cable to the US intersection in Taiwan requesting country clearance so usually it's an ambassador we don't have an ambassador in Taipei it's an intersection so the the counil general would issue this is just a formality issue country clearance giving permission for this delegation called a codell Congressional Delegation if there was no member of Congress it would be a staffell a congressional staff delegation allowing them permission to

[1:02:51] go into the country so Nancy PCY can't just decide one day I'm going to go to Taiwan and then like log on to orbits and book a ticket that's not how it works right well when somebody that important like the Speaker of the House travels internationally they're not going to go to Dallas Airport and you know take United to to soul and then transfer they don't do it like that they go to Andrew's Air Force Base and they get on an American uh Jet

[1:09:34] digging up the body and I said to the Ambassador there but for the grace of God you know like thank God my my grandparents said you know we should we should emigrate to America not we should emigrate to jibuti right good so anyway I I uh I was on the base and it was funny cuz there's this long line of um hangers and all of them had their doors open and they were all Chinese fighter jets and then there

[1:10:06] was the same number of hangers there's a fence down the middle and then there's same number of hangers on the American side and all of the doors were closed and I said uh how come I'm how come all the doors are closed I knew why the doors were closed and uh the guy's like yeah H we probably shouldn't talk about that I I go why not I was just kidding with him I go why not what's going on in there what kind of Secrets you guys have going on in there he's like come on man don't bust my balls

[1:10:36] then I went to Yemen and uh I was in a cab and I said to the guy so how's the war going and he's like oh the war's going actually pretty well the houthis are very tough but the Saudis are using their drones and they're fighting with the houthis with the drones and I thought Saudis don't have drones we sure do in Djibouti which is 16 miles across the water from Yemen you can swim to Yemen it's only 16 miles

[1:11:08] from Yemen wow if you can make the map smaller yeah zoom out a little bit take a look at Yemen look at that oh it's literally right there uhhuh 16 miles it's called the Babel mandb wow yeah it's kind of a choke point hey John yeah can you just scoot to the right a little bit oh to the right his right yeah oh sure thank you yeah qu that's is such a crazy part of the world it really is what I saw um

[1:11:38] that you just reported on something recently about um Iran and Saudi yeah meeting wow this is such an important uh development it's CRA and they have to be going crazy in the state department right cuz remember the policy from the the beginning of you know of the the postor War II era has been to keep the Russians and the Chinese out well the Russians out the Chinese after after the rise of Mao keep them out of the Middle East right the Middle East is is solely

[1:12:11] our domain right it's always been that way well the thing is is when you take extreme positions like on Syria for example or on Yemen then you put yourself in a policy Corner that you can't get out of and then you know Prince uh Muhammad bin Sal uh not Muhammad yeah Muhammad bin Salman the Crown Prince of uh Saudi Saudi Arabia the president called him uh what genocidal murderer and which he is who

[1:12:41] called him that which president uh Biden oh okay yeah and he deserves to you know be deposed he chopped up uh Jamal Kashi all of that's true but there's going to be some push back from the Saudis and so what the Saudis did is they decided to make nice with the Chinese because they knew it would drive us nuts now the Saudis have always had a terrible relationship with the Iranians always right since the 1979

[1:13:13] Revolution why is this because Iran is the is the world's biggest Shia Muslim country okay and the Saudis are Sunni Muslims but beyond that the King's actual title is King and custodian of the two holy mosques Mecca and Medina both mosks right so the Saudis because they're the Guardians of the mosque the the the custodians of the holy places they have

[1:13:44] to issue visas every year to everybody who wants to come into the country right to make the Hajj or the umrah well in 1980 the Saudis were in the mid I mean sorry the the Iranians were in the midst of their Revolution and Iranian gunmen took over the holy cabba in Mecca and held it you know at gunpoint by force and killed a bunch of people and then the Saudi sent special forces in and they killed a bunch of people and the Saudis broke off

[1:14:15] relations with the Iranians so they patched the relations together again in the late 80s the early '90s but they were always difficult mhm and then the Iranians supported Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province most of the Saudi citizens in the Eastern Province are Shia the problem for the Saudis is that's where all the oil is too and so they're very very sensitive to any meddling at all in the Eastern Province

[1:14:48] well there was a pro-democracy demonstration so what do you do you immediately blame the Iranians you kill everybody they executed I think it was 88 people in one day or 82 people in one day something like that with the crimes mostly being participating in a pro-democracy demonstration and then you break diplomatic relations well we're perfectly happy when the Saudis don't have diplomatic relations with the with the Iranians because if the Saudis don't neither do

[1:15:19] the bahrainis or the amadis and that's good for us because we tell them oh my God the the Iranians are so dangerous you need this new $50 billion system to keep you safe and the banians are going to need one too and they're poor so maybe you should pay for that and then the emiratis you know they have they have all the oil in the world in Abu Dhabi and they have all the trade in the world in Dubai so they have plenty of money so we're going to sell them systems too M and we'll give you f35s and if we can't we'll give you

[1:15:49] f18s you know with special radar but you have to pay cash well now that Muhammad bin Salman is the deao leader of Saudi Arabia he said I'm tired of being under the thumb of the Americans all the time and they disrespect me by calling me a murderer and you know coming here hat inand and begging for oil and then yelling at me when I cut production and make prices go up and screw the Americans so what happened first was about two months ago the Saudis entered into an oil sales deal with the Chinese

[1:16:22] and for the first time ever and I mean literally ever they didn't pay in dollars the Chinese didn't pay in dollars all oil transactions around the world have to be in dollars right this deal was in Yuan and the Saudis accepted the Yuan so that broke that set the precedent it broke this this long string going back to the 1930s well now that the Chinese have been paying in Yuan the Brazilians said

[1:16:54] you know what if the yuan is a legitimate International currency we should join with the argentines the Chileans and I think they said the Mexicans and we should make a Latin American currency and we should stop using dollars well what this means is little by little we're being pushed out of the place where we've been King of the Hill for almost a century now the Saudis uh I'm sorry now

[1:17:25] the the Chinese have brokered the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Saudis and the Iranians now they're offering themselves up to the the Russians and the ukrainians they've got belt and Roads so they're building New Ports all over Africa and like 24 different countries in Africa and they're financing airports they went to Greece and they bought the port of pereus the biggest cargo port in the world they bought the port ofon cre they bought the port of Thessaloniki that's something that I I

[1:17:55] you know I've heard people say that the thing about China is their this Communist dictatorship but at least they don't push communism on everyone else never but look at Australia right look at Greece my buddy Julian his friend just got like a a $5,000 ticket for walking his dog somewhere after hours in Greece I think it was right it was on it was near a port near a Chinese Port oh man wow so how do you explain like that's the Chinese have been so much

[1:18:28] smarter in the way that they spend their money than we have you know uh an African an African leader once told me it was here in Washington it was at a conference um he was the vice president of of the Congo and he said you know the Americans always promised us democracy but the Chinese always gave us food like what do you think we needed we didn't really need the democracy mhm but they sure needed the food mhm thing I've

[1:18:58] been thinking about lately is is by learning more from talking people to people like yourself people who are educated in this people who have been in the government left the government have a very you know comprehensive understanding of Geo politics and the history of these countries and conflicts is that it seems like the general consensus is we might we might not be the number one superpower in the next 50 years it really is going to be a multi-polar world I really believe that there's nothing we can do to stop this Chinese uh uh expansion belon Road was a

[1:19:32] was a work of Genius yes it seems like they do so many things so much better than we do it right I mean I'm not trying to say like a Communist dictatorship like I don't like communism I like capitalism they just they spend their money very wisely right that's what it comes down to and it just seems like our government on the other hand is just it's like the Olympics for narcissist sociopaths who can make figure out how they can make the most money and get the most power isn't that the truth yeah and that brings me to another something else I

[1:20:03] was talking about this other guy I had in here I don't know if you're familiar with Mad Dog Jim Lawler oh yeah sure he was telling me that um he was explaining me basically the story about how he got recruited into the CIA and he was telling because I guess he was out in Iran bunch of other places recruiting people and he says when he was recruiting people he would look for people that had these narcissistic traits absolutely narcissists people to be agents perfect why because they're so arrogant they they conclude well yes of course the CIA would would

[1:20:33] want to recruit me because I'm so important that they can't do their jobs without me that's amazing that is absolutely true what he said absolutely true you know what they what they teach you in training is you have to look for somebody with a vulnerability but the word vulnerability means a whole lot of different things for example let let's say you are um Iranian no that's that's too hard cuz we don't have an embassy there let's say you're

[1:21:05] um Indonesian right and I'm just making this up so I'm not like revealing any secrets or anything but what they teach you in training is everybody has a vulnerability so you have to go through What's called the asset acquisition cycle spot assess develop recruit so I spot you I meet you at a diplomatic cocktail party or I meet you at a dinner somewhere or I meet you in a in a meeting at your foreign Ministry so I assess you does this guy have access to something that I might want you know if

[1:21:36] you are um the officer responsible for you know coffee exports I'm I'm not interested no but if you work at the port in the part that's off limits to everybody else yeah I'm interested I mean I'd like to know what's coming into the port is it weapons is it chemical precursor chemicals for for cocaine you know it could be anything um the third

[1:22:06] part is develop that's when we get to know each other I take you out to dinner our wives become friends I start spending money on you cuz I have an expense account and you don't you mentioned that um oh all your life you fantasized about seeing New York y well I'm going to send you and your wife on an all expenses paid trip to New York or you love fishing but oh you could never afford one of those Charters they're $10,000 a day no problem you want to go

[1:22:37] charter fishing let's go catch a sailfish or a sword fish or a tuna no problem I've got plenty of money um and then once I've understood your vulnerability I'm going to recruit you now the vulnerability can be one of many many different things M maybe you've got a kid uh with a cleft pallet and you can't afford the surgery I'll send your kid to the freaking Mayo Clinic right and pay cash or maybe you so love your

[1:23:09] kid and he's really smart but he's going to go to the local uh School the local College because you know nobody wears shoes cuz everybody's poor no no I'll send him to to Boston College or Harvard or UT wherever he wants to go pick a school we have relationships with all of them happy to get him in we'll pay for everything um or maybe you got passed over for promotion and you want to your boss right you

[1:23:39] want to get him back because you're the smartest and hardest working person in that office and they screwed you and they passed you over you want to get revenge come and talk to me I'll help you get revenge I'll pay you handsomely for it too you know or it's so wild that you can just people can build these relationships like they're like at what point do you draw a line between like becoming friends with somebody and getting to know somebody being friends

[1:24:10] with their family and just trying to get do a job and manipulate somebody like I think I may have mentioned to you in the the last time we talked that the CIA actively seeks to hire people who have sociopath Tendencies not sociopaths that's fascinating to me it it it works it works for them sociopaths are impossible to control they slip through the cracks because they have no conscience and they pass the polygraph very easily because they don't feel guilty about anything at all and they tend to rise to the highest levels of

[1:24:41] the CIA people who have sociopathic tendencies do have a conscience but are still perfectly happy to work in moral legal and ethical gray areas I'll tell you a guy that I worked for a very senior Cia officer that I worked for told me that he had five recruitments over the course of a 30-year career and he said he remembered every detail of those five

[1:25:11] recruitments I was fortunate in that I had five recruitments in four years at one stretch wow it was because we were fighting multiple Wars um I was in poor countries where it's easier to recruit somebody because money goes so much farther people more V vulnerable more vulnerable and 95% are going to do it for the money another like 4% are going to do it for revenge and one% is going to do it for patriotism they just love

[1:25:44] the United States right you know they they watch the those Tom Clancy movies and you know they want to piece the action and what you do is you dummy up an award you just you know do it on do it in Microsoft you make a fake award and you put a gold seal on it you sign the CIA director's name you frame it and then you take it to one of the meetings and you say listen the headquarters gave you this award you can't keep it because you're undercover uh so we're going to keep it in a safe in headquarters and they're like oh one guy started crying when I

[1:26:14] when I gave him the fake award he started crying God bless you God bless you God Bless America I like yeah yeah God Bless America now what about the plans for that Russian tank you were talking about so a long way of saying my my actual point was so you admittedly have uh sociopathic traits oh I was perfectly happy to break into people's houses and plant bugs and cameras and cuz we were the good guys I had convinced myself right that we were the good guys my

[1:26:45] country needed me right right and then after 911 I was like you know what we're all war criminals every one of us I got to get out of here yeah but anyway out of all the people I recruited there were two to whom I said you know what in a different life you and I would be friends I'd like to hang out with you yeah it's sorry about your luck this is not that life that's this is not that life cut his throat yeah

[1:27:15] Jesus how many people like you that are working covert overseas in these obscure countries how many people of these CIA officers have to kill and how many of are all of them trained to kill no no um the average CIA officer will almost never find himself in a position where he has to kill somebody almost never almost never I mean you we had a situation back in the 90s where um where

[1:27:47] one of our let me think how I'm going to say this one of our case officers had recruited a third country National in a European country okay okay so he's in Europe but this guy's from some terrible enemy country and he's given information and the information's good and one of the analysts at headquarters says wow whoever this source is because the analysts don't know who the sources are the analyst said wow whoever this source

[1:28:19] is his information is really good can I come out and debrief him so the station said sure come on out TDY we'll set up a meeting so the analyst and the case officer went to the predetermined hotel to do the meeting when they walked into the room the source pulled out a gun and shot the case officer tried to shoot the analyst and missed and then ran the analyst

[1:28:50] saved the case officer's life by staunching the bleeding oh wow but it was a setup from the beginning it turned out this Source was actually an officer in that enemy country's intelligence service and was running a double agent Op with the point being to kill our officer now the officer should have been armed he wasn't because he thought he could trust the source and in a situation like that he ought to have had a moment to pull

[1:29:22] out his weapon I was always armed in in the places where I served not not in Bahrain nothing ever happens there but but in the other places where I was an active uh uh Ops officer I was always armed usually with two weapons I I had one in a tear away fanny pack and I had one on my ankle you know just in case things got really bad and you went through three Clips well you got six more shots on your ankle so right yeah save one for

[1:29:52] yourself what is the difference between us intelligence CIA mad MI6 and Chinese intelligence like what are the main differences and who is like the most Superior in your view good question there's no easy answer to that you know I'm going to I'm gonna I'm going to say overall they're all good um they all have problems the problem at the CIA is is post 911 we got away from traditional um human

[1:30:23] intelligence and human recruitment and we turned into a paramilitary organization which is not what we were set up to do and it's not something we're generally good at there are units in the CIA whose job it is to go um around the world and kill people or kidnap them so you don't have the average CIA officer you know work in an American Embassy every day uh getting an assignment to go out and kill somebody that just doesn't happen right there are

[1:30:53] these dedicated teams and yeah like the bin Laden team exactly so the bin Laden team was active duty Special Forces on loan to the CIA for that specific operation right they also have former Special Forces from all the branches who leave the military and you know you leave on a Friday and on Monday you're at the CIA for your second career so they do very specific

[1:31:25] high-risk operations so that the rest of us don't have to go through that training and you know screw it up right yeah but they don't recruit anybody they just they're they're snatch and grab teams or or hit teams um you were telling a story uh there was a video I watched where you were you were explaining to an audience the difference between or it was like the state Department's relationship with um Israeli intelligence and the Arabs and uh you were explaining

[1:31:58] how vicious in this circumstance that the Israeli intelligence officers were towards these people that were who were those people and they were stationed in in Israel for something yeah so the the state department and the CIA have this program called the analyst overseas program so there are I don't know dozens of these positions all around the world and if you're a kind of a mid-level young uh CIA analyst uh in order to get promoted into

[1:32:28] the higher levels of the CIA this the senior intelligence service you have to do rotations in another directorate and in a policy uh position the state department of course is a policy organization so we all wanted to do rotations in the state department I did two myself and um these two analysts that I work with husband and wife team they get assigned to what was then the American Consulate in Jerusalem now because this is is not a secret program this is totally above board you really are on assignment at the state

[1:33:00] department um we went to the Israelis and said you know these two as CIA officers they're not going to be here as CIA officers they're on loan to the state department doing legitimate State Department work so one of them went to work um as just sort of a normal Foreign Service Officer and the husband uh took a 2-year sabatical to uh get a master's degree in Arabic right at one of the local universities so they're not harming

[1:33:33] anybody well the Israelis because this is what the Israelis do um harass them and they harassed they harassed them in a very cruel kind of way first there was one night where where they were invited to a u a party at the ambassador's residence which is quite common you go to uh more more than you can even count I can't even remember how many dinner parties I went to the ambassador's residence and um when they got back to

[1:34:04] their house all of their living room furniture had been rearranged all of it with the message being we can do anything we want we can come in your home anytime we want and there's nothing you can do about it so you know the next day they report it to security like oh you know we went home from the party and all the furniture was rearranged and Security's like oh okay thanks for telling us we'll make a note of it but then they went to another party and when they came home um you

[1:34:38] they always give us houses or apartments that are way bigger than we would ever need because you have to entertain so they came home from this second party and people had taken shits in every one of their toilets and left them unflushed they had like four bath rooms in this house and people had taken shits in every one of the bathrooms with again with the message being there's nothing you can do then finally the third time it was the ambassador's Christmas party they go

[1:35:08] home from the Christmas party they go into the house and they can hear the dog crying it's whimpering and somebody had cut off its tail and then wrapped the stub with gauze and uh and medical tape so then you know the embassy has to go to the Israelis and say cut it out why are you harassing these people they haven't done anything to you we've been totally above board with you just leave them alone and you have to torture the poor dog what's the matter with you and

[1:35:41] then like all right all right sorry okay and then they'll let three or four years go and then they'll start doing it again there was another incident where um the Ambassador was in his limousine with his driver on his way from the embassy to the residents and they had it blowout but the odd thing was that two of the tires blew out on one side of the car so as soon as they drift over to the uh to the side um this car pulls up and these

[1:36:13] two friendly guys get out oh we see that you've had a blowout can we help you let us help you oh no we're going to call the Embassy they're going to come and pick up the this is the American ambassador can come and pick him up and take him home so these guys get back in their car and they drive away well it turns out that the two tires had bullet holes in them which is why they blew out and oh my goodness the ambassador's briefcase is missing and God knows what he had in it right you know how many classified documents were in there or Personnel

[1:36:46] reports but this is what they do but why did they do that like did they did they just assume that the US is lying to them about these people and they want to an Israeli mad officer once told me that the mentality in Israel is that they can't trust anybody including us that if they're going to survive as a nation they have to rely only on themselves so if that means that they have to spy on the Americans as actively as they might spy on the Egyptians or

[1:37:16] the jordanians then that's what they're going to do and that's what they do my very first briefing when I was first hired at the CIA was a mosad officer and a shinb officer and it was at an off-site location and I thought that was kind of funny like why don't we just go to the conference room that's where everybody else gets briefed they said no no no no Israelis are not allowed inside the building we used to allow the Israelis in but then they brought a gift

[1:37:48] one time it was a big CIA seal and it had a transmitter embedded inside with enough batteries to last a year and a half and they were like oh you should put this in your conference room so we exray it and we find it's a listening device so no more Israelis allowed in in headquarters so we meet at this off-site location and it's a whole bunch of analysts this was like right as we were getting ready to attack Iraq what country was this in um it was in Washington oh in

[1:38:18] Washington and um because I was the most Junior analyst I was the last one to speak so everybody's like giving their briefings and my boss said go ahead and use your real name because you're not undercover which I wasn't at the time so he's like they're they're cleared up to the secret level for the information don't give them anything top secret but there wasn't much to give that I would have given them anyway that wasn't at the secret level so it comes to me I'm the last one to speak and I said John kiraku

[1:38:50] from the office of leadership analysis and the guy said spell it and I spell it k i i spell the name and he looks up to me and he goes you are Jewish and I said I am not recruitable and that's how I left it like how dare you how dare you try to develop me 5 Seconds into our first conversation you think I've never been

[1:39:20] trained shame on you five minutes from laying yeah right 5 minutes from Langley exactly you are Jewish do you think they are the most ruthless intelligence agencies out of all of them AB absolutely have you ever seen the show fa no oh my god listen what's that one about whoever is listening to this or watching this you got to go on Netflix f a u d a FAA it is about shinb bet and it's a special unit inside shinb um and how it

[1:39:54] fights the Palestinians with the help of the PLO so it's a completely true to life based on facts show written by former shinb officers if you want to see how shinb and mosad work you got to watch the show I got chills just now look at this I got chills thinking of it cuz the balls these guys have the stuff that they do that we would be like oh my God I would go to prison for for the rest of my life if I did something like that right and

[1:40:26] they just do it and then move on like it's nothing this seems like a good opportunity to bring up Jeffrey Epstein what do you think about him what do you think he was Intelligence I'm confident he was Intelligence yeah this is a thing that I've had a debates with with people too is that I've had people tell me that blackmail is not a real thing blackmail is useless that there's no there's no reason that this guy would be bringing scientists and politicians to some Island to get some sort of dirt on them for some sort of to hold them hold

[1:40:57] blackmail over their head for favors I agree with that you do blackmail is effective in in the very uh short term right if you need somebody to give you something and you have you have information that you can really hold over his head he might end up confessing to his own side he might end up killing himself which happens with some frequency so it's only going to work for you for a little bit I don't think that was necessarily the case with Jeffrey Epstein I'm convinced that Jeffrey

[1:41:28] Epstein was working for mosad and I'm convinced that he was working for mad for a long time he he was he fit the profile I'll put it that way of what we would call an access agent an access agent yeah so Jeffrey Epstein's not going to give you classified information because he doesn't have access to classified information that's not why he would have been working for mosad let's say mosad wants access to a former president of the United States a member of the British royal

[1:42:00] family the greatest Minds on Wall Street who are willing to talk when their guard is down and their pants are off about the people that they know and the people that they're talking to you think Bill Clinton didn't talk to Barack Obama of course he did presidents and former presidents talk all the time time to get advice from one another all the time um so you're going to get somebody who's

[1:42:33] Jewish who loves money and who loves Israel and you're going to get him to invite all these people down to his private island put them in compromising positions and just get him talking and then you report back everything everything because it's not necessarily the guy as much as it is the people that the guy has access to I'll give you another example when I was in training one of our instructors said

[1:43:05] that the best recruitment he ever had in his life was a copy machine repair man he said now does the copy machine repair man have any access to classified information of course not but what happens when the the copy machine breaks in the prime minister's office they got to have it fixed so you recruit this guy just wait till it breaks or need service and then when he goes to repair it or to service it he

[1:43:36] puts in a device that every time somebody makes a copy it sends another copy back to Langley and so you see literally everything that the prime minister is seeing that's access the repair man's not he you're not going to win a medal because the you recruited a repair man you're going to win the medal because you got the repair man to compromise the Prime Minister but why all the scientists and the physicists oh yeah the Chinese are

[1:44:09] really really focused on hard Sciences because those are the guys that are working on the nuclear program those are the guys that have access to DARPA scientists they're working on things like microwave weapons they're working on things like Havana syndrome maybe whatever that turns out to be um they're working on things like um anti-missile laser systems that are going to be the next generation of what we deploy to the battlefield yeah I'm

[1:44:39] talking about like Jeffrey Epstein bringing all the having those scientific conventions on his Island oh the same thing the same thing listen that that whole island had to be wired for sound and probably sound and video and everything going back to the most mad so that they can see the the Mad has never the Israeli government has never trusted that we give them the best of our technology I mean I always assumed that we did but they are convinced that we don't so if they can steal it and then

[1:45:10] compare it to what it is that we're giving then they'll know well you steal it by gathering the the information from the scientists who are working on the systems and at the very released even if this let's say this scientist uh goes to a a an Epstein convention and he doesn't really say anything there are going to be 10 mosad agents attending that convention too pretending to be scientists and that's where you make the the uh introduction and you start that

[1:45:43] spot assess develop recruit uh cycle wow it's a it's a longterm yeah operation this is not something that that happens overnight I remember somebody in my uh in my training class my operational training class saying well how long does it take to recruit somebody well a cold pitch takes you know 5 Seconds you knock on the door and say hey CIA I want you to work for me that almost never ever ever Works in in

[1:46:13] my whole career it worked one time um normally it's going to take you a year to ingratiate yourself with the the person to make this person think that you are their best friend to the point where you're going to be able to safely make the pitch sometimes it'll take two years so you know you got to meet them at some point and then once you meet them and you exchange business cards then that slow development begins what do you

[1:46:45] think is going to happen with like there's a trial of Gan Maxwell yeah and that was really weird because I mean it was in I think it was it was not videotaped because it was in federal court right there's like a a weird rule I don't know why that rule exists that seems weird but there's a a lot of stuff a lot of like crazy conspiracies that think that say that he was murdered because he had dirt on people and that we knew about that and we didn't want to let that out like people like Hillary Clinton right and Bill Clinton would have had him you know there I'm sure you're familiar with like the whole

[1:47:15] Clinton kill list and they there's stories of like people that have worked with them that have end up like committed suicide with a shotgun wound in the chest right things like that like what do you what do you make of that whole conspiracy uh I I don't the the Clinton's aside because most of those Clinton the Clinton deaths have beened yeah they've been debunked oh most of them have really yeah yeah like even even surviving family members of people who who have died or committed suicide said look you know it's a dis it's a

[1:47:47] disservice to their memory to say that the clintons had anything to do with this like the guy was depressed for 6 months and suicidal and had attempted suicide once before and then he ended up committing suicide it's not Hillary Clinton's fault now on on Epstein man I I've looked at this from every angle I did a podcast about this one time and I think I was able to come to this conclusion only because I've been in prison myself most prison guards have their heads up their asses sorry hate to say it but these

[1:48:20] guys are flunkies from the military right or flunkies from the local police academy or they were too stupid to get into the police academy in the first place right right number two the cameras never work right cameras in prisons break and nobody ever fixes them so that's how people get away with things in in prison I think what happened was Jeffrey Jeffrey Epstein was suicidal he was

[1:48:50] clearly he clearly told people around him that he was suicidal um he should have been in solitary confinement and when you're suicidal what they do is they strip you naked and they give you a paper smok to put over you right so you can't use it to tie a knot and hang yourself they never did that with him they put him in with this cop right who just got convicted yesterday that guy just got convicted yesterday yeah it was in the news really yeah four counts of murder

[1:49:22] this guy was was a beast did you see that guy he looked like a gorilla on steroids I I don't think I've ever seen anybody so huge as this this cop I don't I don't remember his name well maybe we can find a picture it yeah find the name of the the cop who uh was the prison cellmate of Jeffrey and that's another thing but why would they put him in a cell with that guy right maybe they wanted the guy to kill him so another thing was the guards look at this guy look at the picture on the left go to the one the top left black and white monster that's the one

[1:49:53] that was in the New York Post yesterday that guy is a mammoth of a human being yeah that's got to be all steroids oh yeah 100% jeez oh man look at go to the one where it shows him in the black shirt on top left with next to Jeffrey ep's face yeah his neck is wider than Jeffrey's whole body seriously so the cops one of the cops who's working a double shift you're not allowed to work a double shift right you get too tired

[1:50:23] and so they had him on a double shift anyway they were supposed to go by Jeffrey Epstein's cell every 15 minutes and he didn't he he was at least 30 minutes because he was probably sleeping in the guard booth so I think that rather than you know Jeffrey Epstein being murdered I think he did commit suicide or was allowed to commit suicide in part because of of the incompetent boobery of the Bureau of Prisons and in

[1:50:55] part because pretty much everybody in that case wanted him to commit suicide you know they didn't want him to talk about the clintons right they didn't want him to talk about Alan dershwitz and and the trumps and all these people that had been to the island yeah but isn't that kind of like everyone in the case wanted him to commit suicide isn't that just like evidence that they could have killed him like they all want him dead like if he was a Massad if he was a Massad agent and he did have all this money and he had all his contacts the

[1:51:25] guy is obviously a narcissist a sociopath to an extent yeah definitely he didn't seem to me like a guy he seems to me like I mean I'm ignorant on a lot of this stuff obviously but he seems to me like a guy who thinks he might have an out he seems to me like a guy who thinks he has you know he knows powerful people yes and the powerful people walked away from him so what is there to live for I mean he got by the skin of his teeth in 2006 right how did a convicted child sex

[1:51:59] predator end up making a comeback after 2006 had Bill Gates coming to hang out with him after that after that and Alan dtz you know and Bill Clinton and Bill Gates who wait I'm for some reason I'm I'm blanking on who Alan dershwitz is again oh uh the Harvard law professor uh Trump's one of Trump's attorneys oh okay yes yes yes yes yes okay dwit was a lifelong Democrat and then he flipped to Trump but but he's like probably the the most important attorney in America today

[1:52:29] yes oh yes yes yes I know who he is now I'm going to get roasted in the com known who he was he's the guy that said that he kept his underwear on right right he he is probably also one of the only guys now who defends Epstein yes he defends Epstein to the death yes he does yes one of the only guys right and he's like the Michael Jordan of lawyers yeah yes he is very much so he even has a book published um he published a book with the same publisher as uh Robert

[1:53:01] Kennedy Robert Kennedy's new book oh skyhorse skyhorse yeah they're my publisher too oh are they really that's amazing I've done five books for them really yeah you're coming out with a new book aren't you yeah in in June first week of June what's this one about it has nothing to do with intelligence I it's funny um my second book was published by um Rare Bird books there with Simon and Shuster so detail give us a list of your books real quick sure so the first one was um The Reluctant spy my secret life in

[1:53:33] the CIA is war on terror dang it which I meant to bring for you uh I'll send it to you okay the second one was doing time like a spy how the CIA taught me to survive and thrive in prison the third one was the convenient terrorist Abu zua and the weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars and then then they commissioned four books so I did a series the CIA insiders Guide to the Iran crisis the CIA insiders guide to surveillance and surveillance detection the CIA insiders guide to lying and lie

[1:54:05] detection and the CIA insiders guide to disappearing and living off the grid um and then I said to myself I'm going to do a book for myself right something that I've always been interested in and that nobody else had ever written about so I wrote this book it normally takes me nine months to write a book I wrote this book in six weeks I can't tell you how many times I look at my watch and it's like 6:00 in the evening and I start writing and then I look at my watch and

[1:54:37] it's 2:30 in the morning and I'm like ah crap I got to get up in four hours that's incredible I wish I had that Talent bang this thing out in six weeks it's called Remains of the Day The Ultimate Guide to Washington DC's historic cemeteries so I called the guy at uh Rare Bird and I said listen I know you don't normally publish books like this but my my first book with them won two literary awards including one of the big four I won the pen First Amendment award which with the pen fauler the Pulitzer

[1:55:08] and the Edgar Alan Poe are the big four so I'm a serious you know I'm a serious author and I've I've written seeven I had written seven books at that point so I said I know you guys don't do books like this normally but this one's actually really important to me um would you take a look at it and he's like um well we we really don't do books like that but okay send it to me I'll take a look at it he calls me two weeks later and he says this is the best book you've ever written and I said really and he said the editorial board liked it so

[1:55:39] much they want to commission two more they want the mafia Graves of New York City and they want the historic cemeteries of Chicago and I said okay send me a contract so then he sends me the contract I sign it I finished the I had finished the Washington book I'm about a third of the way done with the Mafia book and um and he calls me he goes what do you think of the country western Graves of Nashville and Memphis and I said Relax let me finish these next

[1:56:12] three books and then we can talk about the Nashville Memphis interesting so what made you want to write about the cemeteries in Washington you when I was 9 years old we lived not too far from a cemetery when I was a little kid when I was 9 years old I was in the cemetery looking for salamanders under rocks and I found a salamander and the rock that I found it under was next to this small Tombstone had some guy's name on it and it had a medallion of the Congressional Medal of Honor I I never heard of the I

[1:56:43] was nine I I didn't know what the Congressional Medal of Honor was so I went back home I had this shoe box with my salamander in it and my mom said did you have a good time I said yeah I found a Sal salamander and I saw a gravestone and it said Congressional Medal of Honor on it what is that and she said oh that that guy's a hero we should go to the library and and see what his story is and she told me everybody has a story so we went to the public library we were regulars at the library when I was a kid and we looked him up and he was a farmer in our town and he uh fought in the like

[1:57:17] the the fourth Pennsylvania infantry and he captured the conf vate Battle Flag at the Battle of Petersburg and got the Congressional Medal of Honor returned to Newcastle Pennsylvania and farmed until his death in the 1890s and I became fascinated by cemeteries like I would go back to that cemetery and you see the giant Obelisk that has the name of the local hospital on it so the Jameson family made Jameson Memorial Hospital and that's where the Jamesons

[1:57:48] are or you know the guy who owned the tin Mill is in that giant Mausoleum over there the guy who had the steel mill or the coal mine they have these big 19th century memorials I wasn't interested in those people like I said this guy was just a a common farmer who did something very very brave and so especially when I joined the CIA no matter where I was in the world I went to a cemetery or two or

[1:58:18] three and I mean I found like aita Peron and Nikolai chesu and everywhere I'd go i' Oscar Schindler you know there are just so many interesting stories there's this wonderful website too called findagrave.com that will give you a little hint if somebody's interesting and then you can do your own research so what I wanted to do is write a book nobody had ever written a book about I mean there are a million books about Arlington Cemetery but there are none literally none about the cemeteries

[1:58:50] inside Washington DC so it took me months just wandering around cemeteries and I found 250 of the Most Fascinating People that you've never heard of wow and incredible things that they did hey there's this guy in Congressional Cemetery I I won't waste your time but it's a cool idea it it's so much fun there's this guy a little tiny stone with his name and the dates the dates are like 1787 to

[1:59:20] 1852 right and so I'm wandering around and I I have my phone with me all the time and I'm on finer grave you know like well who's this guy he's probably a nobody 90 90% of them are nobodies so I look at this guy he was a midlevel nobody in the department of the treasury okay a nobody we would call him a cubicle drone today and in 1812 the British invade

[1:59:51] Washington they set the White House on fire they set the capital building on fire the president flees to to mlan Across the pomac the first lady Dolly Madison grabs the portrait of George Washington and she flees to Lowden County it's chaos this night in Washington this guy has the presence of mind to say oh the British are burning the whole city I wonder if anybody's rescued the Declaration of

[2:00:22] Independence and the Constitution so he goes to the National Archives everybody's fled and he takes the Declaration of Independence the Constitution the Bill of Rights and George Washington's military commission and he rules them into a sheet and he takes them to a barn in leeburg Virginia and hides them in the rafters of the barn until we push the British out and then he returns them to the

[2:00:52] archives so he's greeted as a hero he never told anybody that he did this when the coast was clear he came out with hey you know I've got these documents I saved them all so he's greeted as a hero at the treasury Department but the fact of the matter is that he was actually a dick and nobody liked working with him and so he got kind of a little bit of a hero complex after this and so many people went to the Secretary of the Treasury like I can't work with him he's a dick

[2:01:24] that they fired him and so as not to you know set a bad precedent and humiliate him they said we're not firing you we're transferring you to a job in the National Lighthouse service well this is a total deadend job so he's just s sitting there he's supposed to manage all the lighthouses and he was bored and so in his spare time while he was bored he invented the refractor light that we still use today in all of the lighthouses in

[2:01:56] America it's named after him wow this guy was a genius yeah he was a genius and nobody would have remembered him no nobody knows who he is that's incredible man that's you know that's it's it's so true how when you start picking up rocks and looking under rocks you'll find some of the most interesting things in the world people never know people are lazy they don't like to do that and that's that's really cool that you did that there's a there's a a very little known small Cemetery in very far upper

[2:02:27] Northwest W not even Northwest it's right on the northwest Northeast line at the very top of North Capital Street so another block and you're in Maryland and it's called the old soldiers and sailor home National Cemetery so there's a there's a nursing home there that was set up in during the Civil War um for people who had like lost legs and couldn't care for themselves and when they died they were buried in the cemetery next to the nursing home um there are like 23 or 27 Congressional

[2:02:58] Medal Medal of Honor winners there they they weren't very interesting to me because you go on the Medal of Honor website and it's like killed lots of Indians killed lots of Indians killed lots of Indians well that's just not interesting so I'm wandering around the cemetery and there are about 15,000 burials there which is quite small for a cemetery there's one woman one so I was like well who is who's this woman Agnes

[2:03:30] Bowski maybe she was just married to the guy in charge maybe she's nobody so I I started to research her oh my God what a fascinating story it turns out she was married to the guy who ran the place that's why she's there but that has nothing to do with her story she was born in 1897 in Washington and wanted to become a librarian and the first world war broke out and her parents said maybe you shouldn't be a librarian maybe you should be a nurse she said yeah that's probably a better idea so she goes to bellw Hospital in

[2:04:02] New York City the famous bellw hospital now it's a mental institution um they had a nursing program there and she became a nurse and as soon as she graduated she joined the Red Cross and they sent her to Italy to care for severely wounded American soldiers and as soon as she arrived she was assigned to care for a severe severely wounded um American ambulance driver by the name of Ernest Hemingway who she called Ernie 19 years old and they immediately began a torrid

[2:04:35] Affair that lasted for 4 months and then she broke up with him and she married an Italian Lieutenant well by then Hemingway had recovered and was transferred out they never spoke to each other ever again but in 1926 he wrote his first short story he published his first short story and she's the lead character and then in 1932 he published the Snows of

[2:05:06] kilamanjaro and she's the lead character again and then his Masterpiece uh A Farewell to Arms she's the lead character and it turned out that she's the lead character in six of his books she later went on to divorce the Italian and she married this American Colonel who was in charge of the nursing home Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in I think it was 1958 62 something like that 62

[2:05:38] maybe and a year later his brother called her and said I'm writing a book called my brother Ernest Hemingway and I'd like to interview you for the book she said how do you know that I knew your your brother I never told anybody I never even told my husbands and he said that Hemingway never stopped talking about her that she was the only woman he had ever loved he had four failed marriages he was a

[2:06:09] notorious alcoholic and he was abusive to all of his wives but she was the only one that he had ever loved and so the brother went up to Washington and interviewed her she gave him pictures of them sitting on his hospital bed while he was recuperating and love letters that they had exchanged and she had kept a scrapbook every time he was in a newspaper she would cut out the article and she said her husband just always thought she was a Hemingway fan

[2:06:41] no way and so the picture the love letters and the Scrapbook are now in the Hemingway Museum in um Key West Florida and uh and now people know who Agnes pakowski is that is fascinating man oh my and you just stumbled upon this lady just stumbled like I wonder who that is so cool I'm sorry I'm wasting your time but I'm going tell you one One More Story your time this is amazing I love this I was walking around um uh Rock Creek Cemetery which is really the nicest and largest cemetery in in Washington and

[2:07:13] there are important people buried there uh there's when you first pull in on the right hand side there's a little call to and there are Monumental mums all around with all the most important names of the 19th century business families um like the the hect company the big department store it's the hect family and there's a beer family and the you have you ever heard of Woodward and loop another big department store chain the Woodward family and the Lo family I'm not

[2:07:45] interested at all in any of those people yeah there you go what are we looking at Rock Creek Cemetery oh this is Rock Creek see the one uh up and over one right there I'll tell you about that in a second so um so I I Came Upon This Mausoleum that is on a traffic Island so this is Prime real estate in a cemetery and it was a name that I didn't recognize it was Boyd was like I don't have any idea who that is probably just some rich guy from the 1800s but I wrote it down like ah when I

[2:08:15] get home I'll take a look M so I look in and and instead of of being or Granite it's all glass inside so you can see the coffins and it was like six of them there was you know Mr Boyd his name was Israel Boyd and then his wife and his kids and his Grand one of his grandchildren so I just made a little note so when I got home I had actually gone to see that that sculptures by August St Godden the greatest sculptor in 19th century America It's a Spooky looking sculpture yeah yeah it's a it's an important one too that is uh John

[2:08:49] Quincy Adams grandson John Adam's great-grandson and his wife the the grandson had that sculpture made by St Goden cuz his wife had killed herself and he wanted that grief to be expressed in a in a statue wow people come from all over the country to look just at that statue it's incredible there it is so anyway I get back home and I look up this guy Israel Boyd it was a story you're never going to believe so this guy is a a boid and his

[2:09:20] brother born and raised in Washington and they wanted to be scientists they wanted to be chemists and their parents are like yeah uh no you're going to be Bakers we don't have money to send you to college to be scientists you're going to be Bakers they didn't want to be Bakers but the father's like no you're going to be Bakers so they open up this little Bakery and they hated it kneading the dough every day it's hard work and you have to get up at 4:00 in the morning

[2:09:51] so they said you know what why don't we invent a machine to need the dough for us so they invented the first mixer okay so you just pour it all in this big tub and the mixer goes like this and it mixes all the dough and that worked really well and then they said you know what else we should do we should invent a machine that cuts the dough so every loaf is ex exactly the same size shape and weight

[2:10:24] and they did that too right and other Bakers are like wow look at these things that the boy brothers are are inventing we want to buy those so they started selling this equipment all across the country and then one of them said I wonder what it would taste like if we put milk in the mix instead of just water that made it fluffier nobody had ever thought to put milk in the dough and then they said you know how paper boys deliver the

[2:10:55] paper every day we should hire an army of boys to deliver bread so if you call in your order by 3:00 the boy will deliver your bread in time for dinner and it's still hot well by the time of the first world war they had the biggest Bakery in America it took an entire city block behind Union Station and they were Rich beyond their

[2:11:26] wildest dreams so they decided time to retire we're going to sell the whole business so the business their their their Flagship product was this bread and it had a terrible name it was like Mrs McGill's delicious bread right this is stupid name so they sell the business to the National Baking Company Nabisco National Baking Company H and Nabisco

[2:11:58] loved the whole setup they hated the name of that bread Mrs mcgilla C's delicious bread so the only change they made was they changed the name to Wonderbread no way it's it's labor intensive how many people did you have to dig through their lives oh thousands thousands yeah the research takes forever the writing I just blow right through it blow right through it there's one in

[2:12:29] Congressional Cemetery you know uh Jay Edgar Hoover is buried in Congressional cemetery and about 30 30 feet away from him is his alleged boyfriend um Clyde Tolson so um I mean everybody knows the stories about J G Hoover but what they don't know is that there was a guy who's acknowledged to be the first uh gay activist uh in the military right he was even on the cover of Time Magazine he's in uniform and the the title just says I

[2:12:59] am a homosexual he was the first person to come out and he led to first person in the military in the military he led to the gay rights movement he created founded the gay rights movement so he thought it would be kind of funny to buy a plot as close to jayed Grover as possible he he said in an interview that it was his last you to the system well after he died because he became such an iconic figure hundreds and hundreds of gay

[2:13:31] people began began buying the plots my fault you're good began buying plots around him so now Jay Edgar Hoover is in the very center of the only officially gay section of any Cemetery in America that's incredible I didn't realize there was a gay section yeah nobody does that's amazing and everybody's gay and everybody's important in the gay movement isn't it so funny how people

[2:14:01] they we put so much value on what happens after we die isn't that the truth yeah you know I don't know if you're aware but like the cemeteries some of the cemeteries in Mexico that like worship these Narco Warlords yeah they do they're insane they spend millions and millions of dollars on these like these little houses built on these that they walk in where they have music playing 24/7 they'll Park cars in there and they go there and like have parties and these mausoleums for these like f like these like legendary Nar

[2:14:33] like Mexican narcos nuts it's nuts you know you'll you'll see a lot of uh plots from the 19th century where um for example there's kind of a famous One in Massachusetts uh I went once to see it but it's a grave and then immediately next to the Grave is a um a set of stairs that goes down to be alongside the actual ENT tment oh and it was because the grave is for a little girl she was 8 years old and she was afraid

[2:15:04] of thunderstorms so every time there was a thunderstorm her mother would go down there and sit next to the casket so her daughter wouldn't be afraid you know and you see a lot with with steel grates on top of the Grave because they were rich people who were afraid that grave robbers would take their bodies and hold the bodies for ransom you see you see a lot of that I saw one funny one it was in um it was in Princeton New Jersey um I went to find there was a handful of graves I wanted to find there um uh I forget which

[2:15:38] president was like Chester Allen Arthur or somebody like that some obscure president uh but the Menendez uh Kitty Menendez and I forget her husband's name their sons murdered them in La remember the Menendez murders the Menendez brothers in the 80s anyway you're too young but um I found one gravestone and all it said was I told you I was sick I told you I was sick yeah that's all it says there's no name no dates no nothing that was like her last her last

[2:16:11] communication I told you I was sick that's so funny it's also so weird that we're like that we like to bury our dead in boxes that's right you and not just boxes but then concrete vaults and they're lined with lead like why why do we do this let nature take its course have you ever heard of a Tibetan uh what's it called it's like called a oh it's called a Tibetan Sky funeral no where I guess in Tibet what they do is they take the dead

[2:16:41] up to the top of this mountain and they let the vultures come like rip the the carcass apart because I guess it's like a part of like letting the the human body go back into the EOS system Circle of Life mhm like um in the rainforest if something die or like in specifically the Amazon rainforest if something dies in the rainforest there's so many different types of animals and insects and bugs and fish and probably strip it down something dies it is literally

[2:17:11] nothing it's it's dust in a matter of hours because of all the animals that will consume it and it just gets absorbed wow wow I believe that like the fact that we don't like let our bodies go back into the Earth is a weird thing to me it is indeed we got a little bit off track what we talking what were we talking about before we talked about killing killing no we were talking about something else oh oh EP I know what I want yeah we were talking about Epstein um did you know about the going back to Epstein are you aware

[2:17:44] of the bone in his neck that broke yes theid what's it called hyid hyoid that's it yes that was always a weird thing to me that seemed like the Bigg because that's common in a strangulation right I don't know how common it is with a with a sheet right but it is with strangulation manual strangulation so it's really hard to break that bone yeah I think the I think out of all the autopsies that were done from hangings I think it was only like 40 I'm going to I'm definitely

[2:18:14] getting this wrong you could probably look this up but look up the statist statistics easy for you to say on hyoid bone fractures and it was like 40% of hangings I think so it's really hard to break that bone unless you got some like violent trauma yeah maybe the cop did it right that's that's the argument for the cop for the hyid one being broken is that you know maybe the cop maybe the cop killed him um which is fishy I never really that that's the reason I question it you know otherwise you it if if you don't

[2:18:45] believe one of the elements of a conspiracy with Epstein what does it say 17 to what 76% I can't read it it's too small uh John you got yeah it says uh injuries to the high bone bone are rare the most commonly reported injury is fracture yet this is often a postmortem finding with an incidence of between 17 and 76% in victims of strangulation and hanging in survivors it's more often associated with a trauma other than manual strangulation okay interesting okay so anyway if if you believe the

[2:19:17] official story mhm you have to believe that at every step of the way something went wrong the cop was too tired the cameras weren't working the cop didn't make his rounds you know somebody fell down at every step of the way yes or he was killed or he was killed MH then why do you why do you believe that he was that he killed himself because every one of those guards has his head up his ass every one of them they're all

[2:26:05] uh an x-ray like he had scanned an x-ray and attached it and it clearly had a chip like in the head and I'm like no way so I did a reverse search on Google and it's just out there like it's a Google image it's a Google image somebody planted it on the internet and it it's used 100,000 times so I'm like look sorry if you're not going to be honest there's nothing I can do to help you but no I said this the the CIA doesn't give a about you they're not using you as an experiment they're

[2:31:14] wonder I wonder how much of that stuff went into DARPA I wonder um but like if you look at the Modern stuff like the stuff that these fighters fighter pilots picking up on their on their new radar their which is amazing to them I mean you you listen to their Communications and they're they're Amazed by what they're seeing yes but then I've had other people tell me that DARPA does like hologram technology to like to like throw off enemy radar so I don't know what to think you know there's there's lots of those technology that technologies that they mess around with

[2:31:45] and experiment with MH and you know why wouldn't they experiment with it right with our own people off of our Coast right although I I it would be arrogant of us I I don't want to sound like a nut but it would be arrogant of of us to think that of of the billions maybe more Limitless number of of galaxies and planetary systems that were the only ones that are technologically advanced oh right I agree with that at the same

[2:32:16] time you know I would wonder why especially our government is putting it in the light like is elevating it to the level it is right that well it could be two things either it's they think it's aliens or it's so highly classified DARPA that they want to throw everybody off right right that's what I that's what I wonder so you think you don't think it's DARPA I don't because I think that if it were DARPA we would at least be using some elements of of the new

[2:32:47] technology in the systems that that we have you know like the F35 wouldn't be crashing into the ocean like it does like we would be going half to the speed of light you know well that's what these things do do yeah that's what I mean but we would be doing it on the battlefield right now instead of having eight different companies designing the the F35 and then oh no it fell apart oh it fell off the aircraft carrier oh no what are we going to do and everybody hates the F35 like

[2:33:18] oh can't you bring the hog back can't you bring the F16 we would be doing these spaceships by now well maybe we're not there yet maybe they're just testing it or maybe we you know obviously dark works with a lot of contractors right so a lot of these a lot of these military industrial complex contractors like Boeing and all these other places could be right could be testing this stuff and not yeah I don't know it's possible do you remember when John podesta said that if Hillary Clinton were to be elected president the first thing she would do on her first day as president would be

[2:33:49] to release all the UFO files podesta this is like a a hobby for him he's fascinated by it and I I guess Hillary loved the idea too yeah but the reason but none of them do a lot of them say that like and then they don't do it Clinton it's like the Kenn assassination bill was famous for saying something yeah like the Kennedy assassination listen if you're going to release it just release it stop talking about it and just release it right it's probably they probably don't know though like like could you imagine if they told Trump about aliens you think he could keep that a secret oh not for a minute

[2:34:19] not for a minute it's got to be above their heads yeah you would imagine crazy have you ever worked with anybody in DARPA mm never NOP never I know a lot of these uh these former Navy Pilots do they get they get they talk about like doing work for DARPA or like being contracted by them to do certain things you know imagine the brain power in a place like that like you know a lot of different organizations claim to have the best and the brightest these guys are like frighteningly smart mhm

[2:34:50] yeah but they're the crazy thing is too they're Geniuses that are also Rich making a lot of money yes and like they're motivated by getting their budgets ramped up and you know trying to sell these new technologies and these new this new these new war game Technologies and all this stuff and it's just you know I don't know it's fascinating the book's great I don't know if you've ever read it but no it's called the pentagon's brain by Andy Jacobson it goes back to like the uh the

[2:35:21] early nuclear tests and stuff that they did off of uh bikini at wow and uh like these nukes that were detonated in brief that they could detonate in briefcases like one of the one of the first guys that worked on the uh on the first um thermonuclear bombs he was able to bring one on a commercial flight in his briefcase brought it to Washington as a test God can you imagine no it's dark man is there anything else that you're working on that we haven't really talked about I know we talked about your book

[2:35:52] well you know what I'm on substack now which has been a lot of fun John kyaku what is it John John kiraku Dos substack do.com I think whatever it is is it true that they're not putting I heard that just recently they stopped putting like the like and the retweet on substack links on Twitter oh elon's like doing some crazy right now you're kidding me yeah I saw that that was part of this whole Matt taibe thing you know somebody hacked into my Twitter account two weeks ago and took it over and I I

[2:36:26] did everything I was supposed to do I reported it to Twitter support they hacked in they changed my my password and then they changed my recovery email address to some email address in Brazil so can you give me my my Twitter account back they said please uh send supporting documents I'm like supporting documents you're the ones that informed me that I was like okay so forward the the emails from Twitter saying the password's been changed the recovery email's been changed this is the new uh the all they

[2:36:58] do is like Doom dobz or BR whatever Brazil is so then um they send me another email uh last Tuesday and they said oh sorry there's nothing we can do we recommend that you just start a new Twitter account and I'm like no I've been on Twitter for 13 years I'm I'm verified with a blue check mark which I earned I didn't pay for I have 50,000 followers no I'm not going to just start a new Twitter account so

[2:37:30] they were they just didn't bother to answer me so I was going to call Matt T this morning I I was doing this no I did it in the cab or in the Uber on the way over here I was going to call Matt and um I got a I got a text from Katie Halper and her Twitter account was hacked and they stole her her address too and she just got it back so she was texting me to say she's back on Twitter I said I'm still not back on Twitter I was going to call Matt this morning and ask if he could recommend somebody and she's the one who told me

[2:38:02] what I told you and she said no no here's a woman at Twitter support just send her an email directly and say I sent you her email address so I'm hoping I can get my Twitter account back so you emailed her already no not yet I'm going to do it on the way back to the airport that's crazy man yeah this is how you have to do it now didn't you do you think that's intelligence with you no I think it's Louise mench with me Louise oh yes that's that crazy lady who said a bunch of about you being a Russian what she say about you yeah she said um oh man I was in Cuba a

[2:38:34] couple of months ago really and uh yeah uh my my first book was included in the permanent collection of the National Library of Cuba so there was this ceremony for authors they inv they got some crazy cemeteries there oh and they're gorgeous really yeah gorgeous that's a whole another conversation but uh how long were you in Cuba a week okay so um I couldn't sleep one night and so I went on my uh on my email and a friend of mine said buddy

[2:39:05] you need to check Twitter so I go on Twitter and here's this this Louise mench former member of parliament in the UK she describes herself as an unhinged British witch that's her bio yeah um and she says uh and I've never met the woman never met her never interacted with her no idea who she is other than she's a former member of parliament so she says John kiraku convicted of Espionage for spying for

[2:39:37] the Russians uh has something to say about like I tweeted something about Israel Palestine and then a minute later she tweets John kiraku convicted traitor #t treason # death penalty and I was like what the is this I called my attorney it was 2:55 a.m. I W I woke him up he's also a friend of mine so he didn't go nuts and

[2:40:07] I said I'm so angry right now I feel like flipping out I said I'm going to send you two screenshots and I sent them and he's like oh yeah we got a suit this is called defamation per se she knew it was a lie and she tweeted it anyway so I filed a suit and I did a lot of research before we filed she does this to everybody everybody from the entire leadership of the FBI to the entire leadership of Congress to half of the nonf Fox News

[2:40:39] News Personalities in in the country anybody she doesn't like or if she doesn't like your politics you're a traitor and Espionage and a Russian propagandist and a Russian stooge and she's just a bomb thrower but I'm a litigious prick so we fedexed papers and said you have 48 hours to retract and apologize and she retracted and apologized and this all happened while you were in Cuba I had just gotten home

[2:41:09] from Cuba by the time we filed the paperwork yeah what were you doing in Cuba by the way uh my book oh so they included it in the uh in the National libr of Cuba the first book um so it was me and like a a dozen and a half other authors oh okay yeah and then they translated my first two books in Spanish and so they they were sting them around to bookstores all around the country that's incredible it was it was nice how what's it like down there I heard is the

[2:41:40] is the the inter what's their internet and like their television and their communication I heard that like everything is everything is completely what I heard was I watched this documentary about this um this like Caribbean island band who went down there to do a concert and they needed to let everybody know who they were because apparently they don't have any access to music or or the internet or TV or anything like that no in fact I wrote a column about this oh did I was so surprised in fact the day I went to Cuba

[2:42:14] was the day that uh Joe Biden gave his State of the Union Address so here's Joe Biden State of the Union Address that's carried live on every Cuban uh Network and there's a simultaneous subtitle in Spanish I couldn't believe it so I'm flipping through the channels and it was everything CNN BBC RT I saw my own show really my own show is it's uh syndicated by Aura TV it's a Mexican um Network MH and here's my it's me

[2:42:46] talking to talking to was it Len B that night I think it was Len actually really yeah um but I I had no problems watching anything that I wanted I'll tell you what's especially popular in Cuba is ESPN because they're all about baseball 247 right so no I I I had no problems with the internet either although people on the trip who had been there before said that it's

[2:43:17] it's markedly better now now than it was 2 or 3 years ago oh okay markedly better yeah the story I heard was that there's this kid who has who started this thing called The Pete where he had this little hard drive that he would come he would ship it from the United States or bring it from the US and he would load up all that months like top hits on music top documentaries movies and news put it on this little hard drive bring it down there and then they would pass it from neighborhood to Neighborhood to Neighborhood everyone would download everything on it and that's how they would GA their information well I'll

[2:43:48] tell you um a friend of mine uh asked me if I would um check out AM radio while I was there and could I hear any stations in the United States so I I there are radios in the rooms we stayed at the hotel National and I got like stations not just Miami obviously but like as far as Chicago like every station is available in Cuba really yeah I I listened to a Cubs game in English was there anything

[2:44:18] you couldn't get it like was there anything that was being censored there no nothing not in my experience the only thing that they warned us about before we arrived is they said uh not to bring in any pornography and I was like oh okay I mean nobody had pornography it's free on the internet there's no reason to like bring it in and uh they said that they they're really sensitive about pornography what's the deal with with

[2:44:49] Cuba and and the US and and presidents taking the stance against this embargo and what is what is like can you explain like the overall topical question yeah so you know one of the crown jewels of the Obama Administration was opening relations with Cuba something that they worked on for years and um and it looked like things were really going well we opened we reopened embassies there were cultural exchanges we were providing visas they were providing visas and you didn't need a reason to go to Cuba if you if you just decided hey I'd like to

[2:45:21] go to Cuba today you could just get on an American Airlines flight and go right then Donald Trump ended it like completely utterly ended it no more travel at all why did he do that uh cuz Cubans are bad guys they're Communists there was no other reason behind that nope nope and wouldn't it benefit us to have very very much yes we would get much more out of that relationship than the Cubans would yes so then when Biden

[2:45:51] was elected everybody just assumed that because this was such an important part of the of the Obama Administration that Biden would just reimplement what what Obama had agreed to and he didn't what he did was he opened the door just to crack so you can go back to Cuba if you have a specific reason for doing it that's been approved by the treasury Department so because this was an official event I was allowed to go on my US Passport frankly I would

[2:46:24] have gone anyway through Cancun on my Greek passport so it was no skin off my nose but you can go from Miami from Orlando from Tampa or from Fort Lauderdale really yeah and if you don't have a reason to go you can go through Cancun Mexico City NASA or Santa Domingo oh okay yeah yeah interesting but I'll give you another example of of how rough it makes things you know it's

[2:46:55] like stepping back into the 50s mhm every cab is a 57 Chevy it's crazy I I took so many pictures because I I couldn't believe what I was seeing um there was a woman in our group who was uh she got bitten by a mosquito and got Deni fever so at breakfast that the next morning she's like I don't really feel very well by noon she had raging fever and she was like so we took her to the hospital well Den gave fever's endemic to Cuba they

[2:47:25] they know how to deal with it they gave her an IV they gave her an antiviral and she felt better they probably gave her um what's it called the the horse paste yes what's it called uh uh uh why am I forgetting the name of it right now what's the famous pill that for the the one the the one that people that Joe Rogan was taking and he was talking about everyone hat I that's what they her I that's used for Den yeah so so she felt better the next day they released her from the hospital so she was a night in the hospital she had a doctor assigned to her and two nurses assigned

[2:47:56] to her she said she was never without help right and the next day she felt great and they let her go her bill was $65 so H how do you pay it because of the Embargo American Express can't use any credit cards any zero no credit cards and they don't take cash cash at the hospital they only take credit cards but Americans aren't allowed to use their credit cards in Cuba because of the Embargo every other country in

[2:48:26] the world can use a credit card Canadians the Mexicans the bahamians any European not Americans so this became like an entire day thing well because we were an official delegation the minister of Health paid out of his pocket the $65 really mhm now is it like that is that the same thing in China if you go to China can you not use your credit cards no you can use your credit cards there but not in not in Cuba not in Cuba not in Iran not in North

[2:48:57] Korea those are the only three MH and I'll tell you something else when I came home I wrote a long like a 4,000-word article about this for um for the shear Post in Los Angeles and they paid me for it so they sent my money by zel and in the memo line it said said article a CIA officer's trip to Cuba I get an email from zel saying I'm suspended from using zel for violating

[2:49:28] Cuba sanctions so they said you can appeal your suspension by answering these questions why were you in Cuba what were you doing in Cuba where did you stay so I'm like none of your business none of your business none of your business that's how he answered all the questions so then they were like well now if you want to appeal you have to go to they gave me some address in Arlington Texas I live in Arlington Virginia so I wrote back and I said and you're too stupid to realize after 13

[2:50:01] years of banking with PNC Bank that I live in Arlington Virginia not in Arlington Texas so I don't know I can't use zel anymore that is so bananas man yeah it's crazy you know you said earlier you said something about there you said you mentioned that there should be or could be one day a balance between all these superpowers and all these countries in the world I believe we're coming to that do you

[2:50:32] think that you know obviously the word globalism or like a one world government is a very very it's a thing you got to stay away from it's scary especially when you think of things like the world economic form and you think of like you know eat bugs and not own anything it's scary and dystopian sounding but nationalism obviously is nothing better than that like there's something in between there that's good between globalism and nationalism yeah what what

[2:51:04] do you think it would take to have some sort of Harmony yeah I think that that multipolarity is a good thing because it's going to force the United States to engage in diplomacy where we walked away from diplomacy during the Bush Administration and except for this brief period in the second in Obama's second term we just haven't utilized diplomacy like we always did in the past I remember complaining at the CIA that and I was complaining about the George W

[2:51:35] Bush Administration that I had never seen people work so hard to not talk to our enemies like sanctions we need sanctions more sanctions well how much more could you possibly sanction and what have we achieved with our sanctions right the Cubans have been under sanctions for 62 years we haven't brought the Cubans down and that country is this big right I mean do you think that more sanctions are not going to force uh these these

[2:52:06] other countries into the Embrace of the Chinese right or the Russians mhm so we need we need to let diplomacy do what it's supposed to do and I think we don't have the stomach for that I think we like being the only big kid on the Block but the Chinese with belt and Road and the fact that they're swimming in money is kind of forcing us to that position I think that's where we're going to end up what do you think about Trump going and talking to all these people like wasn't the first president talk to go and talk to Kim Jong-un personally and like meet

[2:52:37] with and all these people like one of the only regularly good things that I can say about about Trump is he was right on North Korea he really was right and um I only regret that that he seemed to not even he he wanted to do it but his North Korea Envoy seemed to back off in the second part of of uh Trump's term and the Democrats were just waiting to kill it anyway right so Trump was right about North Korea he was wrong about

[2:53:08] sanctioning the Chinese because that began this slow deterioration of our economic relationship with the Chinese and it was something that the Biden people wanted to jump on because you remember in the in the 2020 election um Biden was accused of being pro-chinese do you remember that Trump was pro-russian and Biden was pro-chinese I remember talking to this old lady in my hometown she was a friend of my mom's she was probably 80 82

[2:53:39] whatever and she said some election we're going to have and I said yeah it's going to be a tough one MH and she said I don't like Biden and and I said really why not and she goes he's with China and I saidwhat do you mean by that and she just kind of looks at me like what do you mean and I said well no what do you mean he's with China in what way mhm and I said come on Miss C you got to stop watching Fox News you throw these grenades into the middle of the room and

[2:54:09] you can't back them up right but yeah Biden wasn't with China any more than Trump was with Russia it was just all nonsense right so instead of lying about each other why don't we maybe try to build some diplomacy like we used to a lot of people think that you know that he was really good on foreign on uh foreign politics and foreign policy Trump with like dealing with these people yeah I I yeah I never did you don't think so I get that a lot from my from my friends who are conservatives but I I'll tell you I talk to a lot of

[2:54:42] foreign Nationals and I travel a lot I've made I made six foreign trips in the last 12 months in the last 10 months and um and people hated him and feared him yeah they didn't like him at all people in other countries yeah he was so unpredictable yeah one guy told me actually he was he was a senior official in the in the Luxembourg foreign Ministry I I went to Luxembourg to sit on a panel and he sat next to me and he's like as crazy as it became he said

[2:55:14] the first thing I would do when I open my eyes in the morning is I would reach over get my phone go on to Twitter and see what craziness Trump was saying right I feel like the media secretly wants him back in office I kind of get the same feel I think it's weird that don't you think like the timing right of Elon getting Twitter and letting Trump back on Twitter yeah and now this whole this whole thing of him getting indicted and having to go to court in New York and like I'm just like I'm just thinking like imagine this gets a

[2:55:44] mug shot that's gonna that's going to outdo Escobar's M mug shot that's going to be his campaign poster and he is going to win in a landslide if that happens well listen I'm addicted to the polls right I I talk about this on my radio show every single day I go through like the statistics and I go through everything in every poll that's released every morning and Joe Biden can't beat any of the Republicans running for president with that said none of the Republicans can

[2:56:16] beat Donald Trump exactly you know the week before Trump was arrested the week before Trump even said he was going to be arrested he was leading Ronda santis Nationwide from between five and 13 percentage points depending on the poll MH now the polls are consistent that he's beating DeSantis by 30 to 35 percentage points wow yeah nobody's anywhere is in the same

[2:56:46] orbit yeah it's only helping him thing about about him that sucks is the worst I mean there's a lot of things that suck about him but the worst thing is like the divisiveness and how he breaks people and I think China likes that yeah China just I think they just want to throw fuel on that fire they want us to be just more divided they want absolutely because it makes their job easier exactly they just love the chaos yes and they do something I've been hearing recently about Dan santis is is that he they're saying he's a trojan horse for

[2:57:16] globalism I think I I think Ros said that um because he there's some sort of like act that he's trying to put in place in Florida did you hear about that with bloggers he's trying to make political writers have to register with the government before they're allowed to write about politicians oh see we have this thing called the Constitution right yeah but this is a this is a real thing it's all over the place I mean people are writing about it that if you're in Florida and you're a blogger a political blogger or a journalist you have to register with the your local government

[2:57:46] Authority and let them know what side you're on what and you have or else you get fined like thousands of dollars oh man I would beg for them to arrest me in F I would beg them so what would John kyaku do if the United States was no longer the world superpower and China is now the number one superpower and and the United States is brought to its knees where would you go what would you do what sort of CIA spy tactics would you use to survive and thrive in the world I'll give give you

[2:58:18] two different answers depending on how much how much on our knees we ended up being right I'm a patriot I love my country I want it to succeed I think that it's making a lot of mistakes which I write about and talk about every single day by the way that's amazing for someone like you to say after what happened to you after the CIA systematically dismantled your entire life well see I see them I see them as the criminals and so uh that's what I write into talk

[2:58:48] about yeah you know there was one one night the night we captured Abu AA we captured dozens and dozens of al-Qaeda Fighters and we had so many we captured so many people that night that we didn't have enough space to interrogate them all and so the pakistanis were bringing them over in groups of 10 in a Patty wagon bringing them to our safe house and we were splitting them up and interrogating them so this load the first load of 10 came in and they were being led in by this this idiot

[2:59:20] that was working for me and they all had hoods on and I said why do they have hoods on and he says uh I we didn't want them to see our faces and I go Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention seriously it's a war crime to put hoods on them you can't put hoods on them take the hoods off and he goes guys if you take take those hoods off I'm reporting you to headquarters and I said no no I'm

[2:59:53] reporting you to headquarters because you've committed a war crime so I grabbed the hoods and I took the hoods off of every one of them we reported each other to headquarters and I got in trouble they said I had displayed a shocking lack of commitment to counterterrorism and I'm like it's a war crime it's a treaty that has been approved by the Senate it has the weight of

[3:00:24] law they didn't want to hear it and I said look we can't just ignore the laws we don't like we can't just pretend that they don't exist if you want to torture people God bless go torture but you got to change the law you can't just pretend that we don't have an anti-torture statute you can't pretend that we're the authors and the original signatories of the United Nations convention Against torture change the law right you think

[3:00:54] torture is so great put your name on it let's have a vote oh you don't want to do that then you're a war criminal right so I'm right they're wrong and I can sleep at night but you don't you don't put the CIA in the same basket as you put the United States of America no no I don't like I say we have a lot of problems but I see myself now as kind of an activist for the things that I believe in and the things that are important to me um I'm

[3:01:26] opposed to Ronda santis because he was in the Judge Advocate Advocate General's office in Guantanamo and sat in on torture sessions why aren't we talking about that he should be disqualified for what he did in the torture program Des santis yeah Des santis I don't even know about that nobody does when was when was he there 2005 wow yeah but he's I don't want to talk about it well you know what buddy you're running for president you have to talk about it um so back to my original question

[3:01:57] yeah oh no the second my second answer then oh oh oh okay I'm a Greek Citizen and all my children are Greek citizens we have dual citizenship and I love Greece it's my second Homeland and what is Greece's relationship with the rest of the world why would gree is there is there is that just coincidence that you're you have a Greek citizenship or is Greek strategic Greece strategically a good place to be well both uh my my grandparents all came from Greece and

[3:02:29] when I got arrested I'm I'm I'm kind of famous in Greece like the last time I went there was a camera crew to document my arrival at the airport and they're like welcome home Mr kiraka welcome home I'm like I at first I I looked I said oh there must be somebody famous on the plane and I I looked and they're like no no welcome home I'm like oh my God I'm so embarrassed my hair was like I slept you know propped up against the the side of the plane and anyway so so when I got arrested the Greek

[3:02:59] Ambassador called me and he said what can we do to be helpful and I said you can give me citizenship and bang like that I got citizenship now I I qualified for it anyway but instead of waiting 3 years for it to work its way through the bureaucratic process they just gave it to me just like that that's incredible great and then once I had it I got it for all five of my kids so we're all Greek citizens that's amazing it's awesome Greece is a NATO country it's a it's an EU country it's strongly

[3:03:30] pro-american but it doesn't get involved in these these highlevel entanglements you know right they just sort of sit things out right all right well you heard it here folks get a Greek citizenship John thanks again man thank you um tell people uh link it below but I'll link your substack thank you and your if assuming you got your Twitter back I'm I'm going to get my Twitter back I'm optimistic next time you come here you have to wear the SpongeBob shirt oh I still have the SpongeBob shirt well that that's a deal then okay

[3:04:01] you're wearing the sponge SpongeBob shirt for episode three yeah I'll do it all right cool man thanks again thank you and uh goodbye world
