“I am the DEEP STATE, Pal!” - CIA Whistleblower Removes the Mask | James Erdman

Shack here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana or 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shack. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shack. Hey, have you always been so big tall and handsome? Not always. I was six-ten once. Seven days to live and return it, Mr. Shack. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvano.com. The deep state had a look. It might look like you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got it down. I do. I do. And actually, did you ever see that video? There's a dude on roller blades. And he's got no shirt on. He's wearing like some old man trousers. He's fat, middle-aged. Is this Will Farrell in old school? No, no, no. It's an actual dude. He's in like a skate park. And he's in the roller blades and he's like, you may not like it, but I am peak male form. And he comes into the skate park and does like a flip, does some crazy shit, and he looks like me. And he comes and he's like, you may not like it, but I am peak male form. And you may not like it, but I am the face of the deep state. And that's. There you go. Yeah, this is it right here. That's right there. I told you he's fast as fuck with it. Yeah, I've seen that one. Okay. Yeah, that's you, but deep state. Yeah. So roller blades. Yeah, gotcha. So it's, and it's, you know, when we first started chatting, I looked up, I actually listened to a bunch of what you've put out. And I think you've got, you've got a big chunk of this right. I just think that it's worse than what you think. Okay. Worse than what I think. I do. I do. Do you know what we talk about? I do. I do. I, you know, I, I went through probably, at least, there was at least 14 episodes I pulled right off the bat to around. I try to do my homework. Yeah. That's what the deep state does. Okay. Yeah. I'm going twice if I need help, everybody. Keep that in mind. So, so, you know, I was listening to what you had to say. And you have quite a bit right about, you know, there being a big problem with bureaucratic and transigence, with, with just the things that are going wrong that you don't have a good explanation for. And the only thing you can say is like somebody's doing this. Right. So, the 60 million dollar question is like, who's doing it? Unfortunately, I can't answer that question for you. It's not because I don't want to. It's just, it's worse than you think because the deep state isn't a conspiracy requires members. Okay. So, you got to have people part of the conspiracy. You can get rid of members if they're not really on board with the conspiracy. But if you have a bunch of people who over time have been part of an organization and all of their decisions are defendable, like small decisions over time where they're like, I need to do this because this is how we're doing it. And this is after a while, you accumulate this, this dead weight of bureaucratic bullshit. Right. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. And you justify it to yourself. You don't even know you're part of the deep state. And that's it. So, like you, you're making decisions because this is how it was done before me and you continue on making those decisions. So, it's not a conspiracy, which you can eventually identify. It's that it's a culture. And you can't, you can't indict a culture and you certainly can't vote it out. So, I think it's actually probably a little worse than, you know, you've got these multiple conspiracies, which in my opinion probably do exist that there are people that have done things they shouldn't be doing. And all of this has occurred. And it's still occurring in an administration that has said, we're going to reform, we're going to get transparency. So, well, they dream the swamp to a lake or something like that. Right. Right. And, you know, part of the big issue with all of this is, I was looking at what you've done. Did you say it was like seven years you've been doing this? Six and a half. Okay. You have provided hugely invaluable benefit to people like me. So, you people like you? Yes. Oh, yeah. And I don't mean to the deep state. I mean, to people who are waking up. So, or are in the process of questioning things. And so, you have put people on your platform, like John Kiriaku, these other people who you look at and you go, okay, this is a guy who and I don't know the full details about what happened and what didn't happen to him. What I do know is he passed his humanity. Okay. He said, you know, last I checked, enhanced interrogation is probably just torture. Okay. And great. Yeah, I do. I do. Now, part of the reason I'm part of the deep state is he passed a test of humanity. I didn't. Okay. You didn't hear me complaining about it. You didn't hear me getting jailed over complaints about it. So, you have to take ownership. And part of that process of waking up is taking ownership for the decisions you did and didn't make over time. So, like, I came forward because the promises from this administration, the the importance of transparency and reform, you know, I'm fully on board. But it wasn't like my transformation is not is not something that, you know, people should lionize. Because that was that was the guy who was like, well, the Middle East is a burning dumpster fire, but good thing we're here for democracy. Okay. So, you know, it takes time to realize that maybe some of the things that you thought before and wrong. And there's some people who are on the front end who recognize it early. Some people aren't. But for me, you know, I started noticing that the institution, we had individuals more interested in protecting the institution than protecting the Constitution. And I foolishly assumed that if I started like telling people in the organization, hey, this this might be the wrong way to go, I was under the impression that I would be rewarded for that behavior. Okay. So, you know, I mean, you know, I thought like listen, I'm amongst friends here. We're all part of the organization. We care about it. But there's there's some things that have happened. And the sad part is, you know, I didn't really fully come forward until I was attacked personally. And so, you know, you want to do the right thing. And I have no regrets about coming forward in front of Senator Paul's committee on May 13th of this year. I have no regrets in March when I went in for a transcribed interview. No regrets on any of that. But it's a process for people. And it got me thinking when I saw what your your platform is similar to maybe a handful of others where you've brought people out and let them speak the truth, let them say, this is what's happening behind the curtain. We get to see, we benefit. And when I say we, I'm talking about the organization I'm working for now, which is all federal government employees. I know it's hard to believe, but there's federal government employees who actually think there should be transparency, reform, accountability, a small government. It's a bit, it's a huge, huge organization. I've no doubt there's people want the right things there. The question is, what are they able to do about it when we have so many examples of the people who did try to do something at Stonewall? Good point. And it leads right into what I wanted to say about folks like, again, Kiriaku. We get to see the guy, man, he was rigged through the calls. Dude's life was destroyed over this. And this is just one example. But you put him up there and you said, tell us what happened. And he's out there screaming it at the top of his lungs. For someone like me on the inside, all of a sudden you realize, hey, wait a minute. I know it's going to be, there's going to be some pain involved. But maybe we can do the right thing now. Inside the system, use the system to try and make changes. And from the outside, you look in there, you're like, well, everybody keeps losing that battle from the inside. They're plucked out. They're sent out. I retired at my own accord. You know, I was not pushed out. There was nothing, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have given me anything of stuff. to do. Maybe they would have. Maybe not. But because of you speaking up. Yeah, there's a whole series of this. You know, we have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of these other people who have come forward. You don't, you don't come forward on your own. It's not like somebody says, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to come forward and do the right thing. They got to see, they got to see that somehow, somewhere, somebody got through it. They may have, they may have experienced a great deal of pain along the way. But what your platform does is tell people in the federal government, people are listening and they want you to do the right thing. You're not going to do it unless, unless you see it. Again, it's not great for these people, but I wouldn't have come forward if I wasn't seeing other people who have managed to, it's not great, but managed to get through it. And, you know, part of the reason I'm still, so I co-founded Feds for Freedom during COVID. Feds for Freedom. Well, I was Feds for Medical Freedom, which at the beginning, because we said enough is enough. We're not going to take your jab. We had lots of reasons. We had lots of reasons why we didn't like the reasons you knew that the public doesn't. No, no, I'm not saying it like that. But I will say, I guess in some way, maybe, maybe, and here's, here's what I mean by that. I worked for an organization whose whole sole purpose was to collect information and then pull it together and finished intelligence and then send it off to policymakers to make wise decisions. I couldn't understand why we had this cognitive block with, say, COVID origins. Like, no one wanted to hear the possibility of lab leak. Nobody. I remember Brett Weinstein who was just on the pod. He did a famous podcast with Joe Rogan in June 2020 where he needs an evolutionary biologist. Yeah. Great guy laid out the entire thing, bar for bar word for word. He got so much shit for it. They tried to cancel and he was on the percent right. He was. And that's that is what I said. I can't remember if it was a written statement or the public statement during the testimony. Who got it right during COVID? Well, it's the amateur internet sleuths that everyone wanted a bad mouth about doing your own research. Groups like drastic Richard E. Bright, Brett Weinstein. All of these people had it right. And we were looking from the inside. Most of us, we were mad about what was going on with the COVID protocols and the mitigation measures that didn't work. But we're also looking at going, yeah, this is this is a clue. I mean, we're intelligence officers. We're supposed to be able to look at something and say omission of facts is also a clue. So yeah, a little bit, you know, when you are privy to secrets and you decide you're not going to take those secrets and use them to the fullest effect you can. And I got to see even more when I was working for director Gabbert and director director's initiatives group running the COVID-19 origins investigation for. When my dad hit his 50s, he started noticing his energy fall through the floor. Everything felt harder. The same workouts didn't hit the same way. The recovery wasn't there. Felt energy crashes midday all the time and even had brain fog that was tanking his focus. Then he learned about something that really got his attention. 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That's because Marsmen help support heavy tea levels, energy and stamina. They've a 90-day money back guarantee. So there's no risk. For a limited time, our listeners are going to get 50 percent off, but light. Plus free shipping and three free gifts when they go to mengotomars.com that link is in my description below. That's mengotomars.com. link about description below for 50 percent off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. But you saw that. And at the time, during COVID, we had scientific reasons. We had a bunch of people with religious reasons. And I don't want to spend a ton of time like how did I end up from there to here, unless you really want to, but in May of 2021 is when I started really asking questions in the agency. And it started led you to actually at that time be like, you know what, this is it? Now we got to look at this. Well, I had been looking into COVID origins. I had offered some assistance and I don't want to go too far down that road with that. But the questions in May had to do with the questions in May had to do with there was some very clear safety signals that were already showing up in fares. And we had a group of people, it was just me and like six other people, seven other people who would show up in my office. We'd take our stupid masks off. We'd sit down close to the door and be like, listen, we're not crazy. We're not crazy. This this whole the mitigation isn't working. All the people who are vaccinated keep getting sick. We're the only ones running the office. And we're the ones who are unvaccinated. And so those questions started piling up. And so I said, well, tell you what, I'm going to send an email to to the our office of medical services. And I pulled together, and you know, there was a bunch of organizations out there pulling the data together. So I pulled the data together. I sent them a bunch of questions that if you were to bucket them, it was, what are you going to do about my myocarditis and paracarditis, thrombosis, and autoimmune disorders and some of these neurodegenerative disorders. I said, if you want me to take this thing that you're pushing and they were pushing it, oh, they were pushing it, can you answer those questions? Now, I sort of knew they weren't going to give me a good answer, but I wanted at the time to put it on the record that I was asking these questions. And I want to come back to that putting your name on the record. It's essential. It's essential. It started there. And then when I couldn't get any answers, we had problems with the whole, like they were keeping Excel spreadsheets of the unvaccinated. They were putting them on sticky notes in their office. I mean, oh, sticky notes. That's not a fake story. This is, I collected more, more little vignettes, just like who's unvaccinated in the office on sticky notes on sticky notes in the highest agency of spying in that we know of in the land. Yes, that's yes. Very reassuring. Yeah, it should be sleep tight America. So and again, like I you know, we were looking at we're like, this is this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And last I checked, we worked for the CIA. Like we are intelligence officers in an organization that is yeah, it's got a rep. And so then I went to the office of privacy and civil liberties. I put my name on that complaint. And I said, this looks like a violation of privacy medical privacy. And we had a bunch of other people who had actually gotten vaccinated, but they just were like, I shouldn't have to tell you my vaccination status. And so they were getting sideways. They were following the rules and still getting sideways. So I ended up going to our office of general counsel, our office of inspector general, the EO office, which by the way, I had never made a complaint in any of my jobs ever in my adult life. Yeah, you don't seem like that guy. No, no, no, like your business. Yeah, just leave me a fuck alone. Right. Sorry. Leave me alone. Let me do Jersey. Okay. Okay. Leave me alone. Let me do my job because all I really want to do is steal secrets and recruit spies. Okay. So let's just do that. And so I started sending and I finally got in in August, late July, late July, late July of 2021, I got an exasperated email from the office of general counsel. And I said, Hey, Jim, we know you have a problem with the COVID policy, but you have exhausted all of your administrative means for employee, employer dispute mechanisms. If you have a problem with policy, you have to take it up with the person responsible for policy. So I was like, well, get you up, motherfuckers. Okay, who's responsible for this? So I can send them an email too. And they said, well, it's the number three in the agency is the chief operating officer. I'm like, okay, and I didn't want to be accused of wasting government time. So I came in on a Sunday. Sunday was August, eighth, I think, 2021. So before the mandate, before the military mandate, which was August 24, this is right at Afghanistan. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. And Yeah, exactly Afghanistan around that time. So I, I send this long email and I cite scientific studies. I talk about the impact to the workforce because what they were asking us to do was inculcate a lie into where everyday work and you're going to say, Jim, CIA lies, right? I mean, I, you know, my work for me. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I get it. You're right. It's a little dip what I'll say about this is it's a little different when it's something meant to like, heard their own on something that has nothing to do with the work you guys do. If that makes sense. It does. And here's, this was one of my problems with it, with inculcating a lie. So we are given a lot of authority to operate on our own as an, you know, an operations officer. You are expected to make decisions on the fly because you can never predict. You're never going to be able to predict every situation. The longer you spend in the agency, the better you're at it at predicting these things. And so, you know, you, you're given a lot of leeway and you're given a lot of trust. And well, you're polygraphed. So there's that too. So that helps with the whole trust thing. I feel like you know how to pass some of those. I, listen, no comments. All I'm saying is there's lots of polygraphs and there's lots of ways. I mean, they get access to your banking. You know, you give up a lot to, to, to get the, and I mean this sincerely, that I always felt blessed that I actually got in and got to work at the CIA. I still do. Everything good in my life has been touched by service there. It doesn't mean you can't change your opinion on what needs to happen to fix the place. But so when you are given all that authority, there's a lot of things you can do with that authority. Talk to 40 million and gold bars guy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that was the guy. The CIA spy that like took the gold bars off the balance sheet or something. I don't know exactly what happened with that. Obviously, but it's a matter for DOJ to work out. You know that guy? I met him once a long, long time ago and it was like in passing. So, um, they've chance encounter that I don't, I don't know anything, I have no connection with him. Let me say that. Go check his house. I don't need any more ass pain. Pause. Yeah. So, uh, you get a lot of authority. And so what happens is, um, there were a ton of fake vaccine cards. A lot of them. And CIA too. Oh, fuck yeah. And they were just getting wet. God, that was such a bad system. Everyone got away with that. So, so like there were fake vaccine cards. People just loaded them up, okay? And I am not judging them, frankly, um, but here's what happens. One lie. That's all it takes, okay? If you can justify why you need to make this just, just this one lie, what you're doing is setting the stage for more lies to the organization you're not supposed to lie to. Because you've been blessed by a job in the agency, okay? And I mean it. It's so much fun. Just as a quick editorial here, by the way, we're going to get to Jim's full story. Everybody. I just want him to stay with us because you're laying out like a key critical moment to where you suddenly are kind of stepping out of it after a lot of years in this and, and realizing what happened. We'll get to the full backgrounds so you guys can understand that too. Please continue. Sure, sure, sure. Sorry. And I sort of just jumped in. No, it's great. So I sent this email on August 8th and it's me and my seven friends in my office with their masks off. You know, they come in Monday. I said, Hey, I came in Sunday. I sent the email. I cited these studies. I'm sure they'll listen now. So they didn't listen, they didn't listen. And in fact, I started getting hit up by people I didn't know in the agency. Out of blue, they're like, Jim, I saw your email and, yeah, I agree with everything you're saying. What are we going to do? Because it looks like we're going to have a vaccine mandate. Are they just texting you? Yeah, they're, they're, they're contacting me through agency systems. And so my first question was like, how did you, how do you know? I sent that email. It was sent to the coos office, which by the way, that was like my bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses, boss. So checking on my TPS reports. And so, you know, I'm like, how did you know? I mean, it turns out that like, instead of like taking anything, I said, seriously, you know, the email was forwarded probably in a, they're probably laughing at me like some cuck, whatever. Don't care. But what happened was by the end of the week, instead of seven people in my office in August of 2021, there was 50 of us. And so they're all asked me, Jim, what are we doing? Like, I don't fucking know. I just send emails, you know, are you allowed to say where the office was at this time? You keep referring to her? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I guess. And let me just, I handled financial intelligence at the time. So were you based domestically at the time? I was domestic. So I was, I was, I was not overseas at the time. I was domestically. I came, came home in 2019 from Africa. So when you are saying 50 people in my office, are you referring to the entirely complex? Sorry. No, no, no, no. And there are seven people in my office where I worked, me and seven people, like your desk, your desk. Yeah. My, yes. My office. After that first email, it was 50 people from across the agency. Okay. So they're all asking me, like, what are we going to do about this? I'm, shit, I don't know. I mean, I, okay, I guess I'll send another email. I was like, you know, they didn't answer my questions, but it worked so well. I'm just going to send the coup another email and ask them to answer my questions and give them a few more studies. So I came in the next Sunday, I wrote another email, send it off and I mean, I was sort of like, I didn't, I was taking it seriously because it was bothering the, I didn't want, I definitely wasn't going to take a vaccine. I knew it at that point. And so I sent it off and just sort of shorten the story by the time vaccine mandates hit on September 9th of 2021, I had spoken to 1100 officers in the agency give or take that did not want to get, get the shot. That's a significant number. That's a huge number. Yeah. A huge number. And so I knew I wasn't wrong. One of the problems up to this point was we were all sort of separated. There was never, there was never this connection where you could like, look over and go, I wonder if that person, other than the fact that like, there was a period of time that only the people who weren't vaccinated had to wear a mask, so you could identify them pretty quick. And this was across the whole federal government. So when all of this started 2021 and that, honestly, that is not exactly when I woke up. I woke up before that, but that was sort of the last draw that this whole period because and again, it's, it's not flattering to me, but it really didn't wake up until I experienced the pain point and whatever, get it up, we're going to just take it. What happened on September 9th when the mandates went in just to understand this? What happened because you didn't do it? Was it just you were just wearing the mask or? Well, here's what happened. We got emails saying we're going to be fired if we didn't get the shot by a certain date. Okay, and, you know, when you think of yourself, you have spent millions of dollars training me and, well, multiply that by 1100. And lots of time, money, I mean, they trained me in Arabic and Chinese free gifts from the agency. And you're fluent in both of those? My Arabic's gone pretty bad. But Mandarin, I'm still. You're nice with the Mandarin. It's, yeah, it's good enough, they will use him for the movie, Diff, I need that. It's Mama. Okay. So. Him and Maldonnie. Maldonnie. Maldonnie. You know, Maldonnie kind of spits it. I'm not going to lie. It wasn't AI. You seem speaking Chinese. Yeah, I did. I did. Bigly impressive to a person who doesn't understand Chinese. Yeah. Yeah. In any case, you know, they, that was what happened. You know, that was a turning point and when they said you're going to get fired, I had all these people were talking to me like, Jim, what do we do? And I'm like, again, I'm just sending emails, man, I'd like, but when it happened, I went on and started calling lawyers and you would think I thought for sure lawyers were just all blood sucking. They wanted money. They didn't care whether you had a case or not. They'll take your case. No one wanted in DC, no one wanted to take a COVID case. I wonder why. Yeah. And again, I had never, I had stayed away from legal issues as much as humanly possible because you know, you don't need that, that hassle when you're working at the agency. So I started calling and I finally got a hold of lawyers at federal practice group. And I get a hold and they said, hey, Jim, you know, it's going to cost you this much for each plaintiff. And I'm like, sure. And they said, you know, you're also, I forget what they quoted. It was like an initial, each person would have to dump in five grand and, you know, I'm talking to government employees, you know, that's a lot of money for anybody. And so, they said to me, but there's somebody else over at State Department who's doing the same thing as you are. You guys should, one, call each other, talk, figure this out. And two, you can't really just sue individual agencies on this one. If you're going to go after this, you have to sue the federal government because there's, I'm like, why? Like, are you trying to steal money from me? Like, why are we doing it this way? Like, I just, I don't like care about as the agency and the handful of NSA and DIA people that were part of a group. But I called up Marcus Thornton, a State Department employee. He had lined up a bunch of people from State Department and Customs and Border Patrol. And so I had like 200 people that were willing to go to court or because of various reasons just provide money for the lawsuit. So it could go forward. And they just sort of hope and pray that we got it through. I talked to Marcus and he had a whole bunch more at State and CBP. And so we decided that day on September 9th, we needed to form a 501C3. I don't know if we picked the name at that point because I, to be honest, I wasn't really into the name to begin with. I'm like, we sound like a bunch of glowies. But whatever. It's sort of true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I give you said that out there. I went, yeah, we're for your free. We're here for your freedom. Yeah. But we are. We got a good group of people. And so anyhow, we started suing. And I did, I've got, it's not, it's not a fully formed philosophy. But over the last five years, there's a, I'll call it more like trade craft on how you oppose government overreach from the inside. And the crafts way of saying is it don't be a pussy. The more, I don't know if there's a more elegant way to say it, but you have to put your name on everything and you have to use the system and you have to own everything. Because if there is any daylight between what you stay state explicitly, you're doing. And while you're doing it and what you're actually doing, they're going to destroy you. Okay, they being the deep state, or even just the organizations you work for. So like when I was sending those emails between May and September, my name was on it. I was telling them explicitly what I was doing. I didn't know I was developing sort of a trade craft behind it. And this goes back to our discussion on Karyaku. We, we're the one organization. Feds for freedom now was feds for medical freedom. That has learned how to use some of the levers on the inside to actually make change. And we can talk about some of the changes that have actually occurred as a result. And it's part of the reason like I left government service. There's lots of other things I could do, but I'm giving Feds for freedom a little more time. Because what I see here is this. We're standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that other people have gone through this mess and gotten through it. What if you don't have to? What if you got an organization? We've had a ton of whistleblowers show up at Feds for and we handle it quietly. And there's some examples of what we've done with part of the reason I'm out talking now is people have to know that we exist and that we are going to help you and we'll be in your corner. What I'll say about all that is we'll be in your corner, but it's all on you. I'm not, this is not a recruitment video where I'm like you should come to Feds for freedom and do the right thing. If you want to do the right thing, come on by. We'll help you where we know the system is broken. We know because we've lived it for five years. We've been living inside the system going to, you know, intel oversight committees, going to oversight committees, working through the administrative procedures internal to the organizations. We know it's broken because we've lived it and the people at Feds for freedom, they weren't recruited into the organization. They were brought in by a test. We're not, we're not just picking anybody at this point. The people who showed up in the beginning, they didn't want to lose their job. Somewhere between 23 and 24, the people who now are sticking around, they're sticking around because they're like we like being on the right side of history and we really, really want our government to function like it's supposed to. We're going to stick around and we're going to put our name on everything. We're going to file complaints. We're going to, and it's not like a resistance like one of the arguments is what what makes you different from some other group of people out there going we don't like what the president is saying and we're going to, we're going to fight and we're going to subversively undermine. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is an organization that is using their authority in their jobs to ensure that the people above understand the decisions they're making and that people have stated explicitly like here's the implications of what you're doing and and you need to know that because this is, this is the facts. And so Feds for freedom thought the vaccine mandates we've, we've got a nationwide injunction that stopped the vaccine mandate for all staff, federal employees throughout the entire Biden administration and up until January. Yeah. Yeah. So we got a settlement at the end of the day, which really just covered some legal fees, but good enough. And that didn't make you persona non grow. Oh yeah 100%. Okay. So, so it's a great question. Great segue too. Like, yeah, you, when I say you're going to experience pain, you're going to experience pain. You're like, for a while, I entertain this, this idea, okay, I'm going to go back to just doing what I was doing before eventually. It's still not perfect. And I'm not like, honestly, I'm not complaining about what happened because I'm whatever, you know, if you're going to get in a ring and get in a fight, you better expect to get punched. That's right. And if you're going to get in a ring and get in a fight, and then you get done with it and you start bitching and moaning, I got in a fight and I got punched. That's dumb. And that isn't going to convince anybody that you're doing the right thing. Put your name on everything. Do it by the book. Don't have daylight with what you're doing and what you're saying you're doing because the fastest way to lose any kind of credibility is to do that. And also, you'll just get destroyed anyway, just quietly, not loudly. And you lose anyhow. So yeah, unfortunately, I think, and this exists far beyond just even deep government bureaucracies and everything. Sometimes if people are looking at the chess board, they want to make that move, just write it the king to say, look what I did check. Yep, but it's not checkmate. You know what I mean? You have to play things longer. And sometimes that means you have to do the things that feel like you're not speaking up in order to get your way slower to the end result. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not even I'm saying what I'm saying is we've got a group of people that have decided that they will speak up. They're not going to avoid the hard conversations. They're not going to hedge what they're saying. And the hard part is you had what's her name, Shawnee Delaney on. Okay. She was on a panel that I saw before I even knew that I heard about, I guess, before I even knew that she had been on your program. And she was on a panel with with with another officer from the agency. Really, really good officer about what insider threat looks like. Okay. The changing face of insider threat. Was this with Jim Lawler? No, no, no, but I know Jim Lawler too. He's a he's a he is a fantastic old school case officer. Interesting guy. Very interesting. I don't want to show a few years ago. Did you really? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I didn't catch that one. I wish I had yeah, 129 back in the day, but very, very fascinating guy scared me a little bit. He's writing books now. You know, his nickname was mad dog. I'm well aware. Okay. Okay. He's like Julian, when I look at you, our eyes, they meet. And suddenly I have you in a trance. And you're going to do what I'm like, okay, is this really like happening right now? Like are you doing it to me? But he's he's he knows what he's doing. He has to be in a case officer. But you were saying Shawnee was Shawnee panel. Yeah. So the problem with what I'm describing here, government insiders saying, you know, what we're going to do? We're going to we're going to we're we are going to complain about things that need to be complained about. We're going to put things on the record. That is what some people might call an insider threat. And so we've had five years to work this out now. And I mean across all we had 34 government agencies and departments as part of feds for med freedom when we started feds for freedom. And when COVID hit, we started getting information from every single one of these agencies and departments, not classified. We don't accept classified information for the record. They're better not send it to us. Like I said, we don't need any more ass pain. - If you do, just let me know off camera. - Okay. (laughing) So we got a window into what was happening in all these different agencies and departments. And we started seeing all these patterns emerged. It was all the similar BS. And it's part of, we can talk more about it later, but one of the last things that we did was sue the CIA before the day I retired, the-- - Justin June, this year. - This year, 'cause these patterns emerged where people were put on insider threat list because of asking for religious accommodation, being involved in protected activities, which by the way, lawsuits are a protected activity. And if you want, we can jump straight into the lawsuit, but these things happen and we saw that these people were being identified and I mean, I don't, you don't have to be a genius. It looks like a purge. It looks like a purge, okay? And if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a damn duck. - Yeah, now you were, you're highlighting a thing that was a real hit point for you because you literally ended up starting an organization out of this and it had to do with the Vax mandates and you not wanting to do that. And obviously that was the biggest story in the world there. A couple years and we were all dealing with a lot of bullshit. That said, you've had a long career there. You had a long career before you were in CIA where you were in State Department, I think. Army Rangers as well. You've seen a lot of different things around the world. You've run some missions that you can talk about, some that you can't. And you, in a nutshell, ended up having access to a lot of different things in there within the agency that are, let's say major questions the public has that still are unanswered, some of which I guess you can talk about others. Maybe you're still trying to figure out yourself, but maybe we could take a step back right here as my point so that people can understand how you got to this point and how you're someone who's been able to see all these things and do all these things. Where did you begin? Did you, did you want to be a spy when you were growing up? Was that ever a thought? - No, no. In fact, there was probably a time when I was 18 and live in LaVonia, Michigan. If somebody said, hey, do you want to travel the world? Why would I leave Detroit? I love this place. You know, that was not on the Bingo card. - You like Detroit, huh? - I did, you know, I moved to Detroit when I was 16. I think it gets a bad rap. There's some, there's some awesome. Like you, you've got good food. You got a good music scene. People don't realize the music scene is pretty awesome. And if you get tired of Detroit, you can just cross the bridge up to Windsor and drink at 19 and it's cleaner and the people are nicer. So I love Detroit. I love Cleveland, you know, and yeah, no, I did not dream of it. I had, you know, other plans. I was at Michigan State for a while. I dropped out to join the Army. I joined Second Rage of a Time. - Why did you drop out to join the Army? Was that out of nowhere? - I sort of, I sort of just, I got tired of, it felt boring. Like, you know, I had some friends who were joining and one of them said, "Hey, there's this Ranger thing." And, you know, a lot of people like to say, "Well, I joined 'cause of patriotism." Well, at that point, it was not patriotism. They said that I could jump out of plans and kill people for a living. And I said, that sounds like Ranger time. It sounds like it'd be cool. That was my immature young Jim thoughts. Like, "Hey, this would be cool." There's patriotism involved in there somewhere. Like, I love my country. I was at Michigan State during the first Gulf War and I remember seeing the protesters and I've always been a conservative, conservative my entire life. And I saw it and I was like, "Yeah, I sort of want to join the Army." And they told me that there was this thing, Rangers. I had a friend to join. His name was James. And so I did. And, you know, I watched all the Army movies and Marine movies before I left getting all psyched up and then I got there. I was like, "Holy shit, I may have made a terrible mistake." Like, what the hell? - Yeah, it's hard. - Yeah, parents were paying for everything and I was, you know, I didn't realize I was spoiled. I was spoiled. So I got there, but I was like, I got so lucky. I had this, he's still. All those guys that were at Range of the Time with me, privates with me, my squad leader, they have shown up all the time, my entire life. They're my closest friends. They are the inner circle. If I have a problem, they're gonna show up with hatchets, shovels, plastic bags, and they will take plastic bags. - Yeah, they can, full meal deal. - That's right. You know, my squad leader was a guy, everything I learned about leadership, I learned at Range of the Time. And because I was not, I think probably if someone had known, or even most of my life, actually, I'm not somebody who bucks the system for the most part. I didn't, you know, my mom would put my ninth place finish up on the fridge and say, good job Jimmy, you're the best, you know. So, you know, it's not, it's not like I was, I'd never been with a group of people that challenged you all the time. These were a hyper competitive group of people and just constantly. And so when I got there, I was meeting standard for sure. You know, I was a little more physically fit than most. I was a little smarter than most. I was never the smartest. I was never the most physically fit. And when I got to Range of the Time, I realized, this is not the exact fit for me. I'm really glad I'm doing this because these people are making me better. - And yeah, what made them teach you so much about leadership? I guess a better way to ask that question is, what do you think are the key tenants that make great leaders? - He's not agreeable on anything. And I believe it or not, I'm actually fairly agreeable. At least I was, I'm not anymore, but I had never experienced somebody who was willing to respectfully, ethically, morally, challenge people who were in a position of authority. - Just asking questions, if you will. - Yeah, just asking questions, if you will, exactly. He was also a man of faith. And at the time, and my faith has changed, definitely has changed. It started with the birth of my son. But before that, when I met my wife, she said, here's the rule, I'm Catholic, you will be Catholic. And I believed, but it wasn't like, it wasn't anything that was part of my life. I was raised a Piscopalian, which is almost not religion at this point, but whatever it is, it's not. It's not what I, God, I sign up for. And so, yeah, I took her seriously. She said you have to convert and I still haven't, but I definitely don't mischurch anymore. And I definitely have a difference in opinion, and it was after my son was born. When my son was born, you start doing this thing and maybe other people don't, but I started saying, make sure you're being a good boy, be a good boy. And that's maybe where the transformation started, 'cause I started asking myself, have I been a good boy? Have I really been a good boy? I really like not, I mean, I won't lie. I like not being a good boy, it's fun. And then you start saying it over and over, and you're like, I should probably be a good boy too. And, you know, it sounds dopey. - No, no, that means it does, it doesn't, I don't. That started it down the road. So I have a difference in faith now. And it's not because I've had any kind of, man, I wish I had one of those experiences people talk about where they're like, I know, because this happened, I don't. - It was slow, it chipped away. - Slow, yeah. - And I think my wife did it too. She slipped it in, everywhere she could, but. - Right, so you were saying the, the squad leader, the fact that he would ask questions respectfully of authority when things didn't clock to him, and that he had strong faith. Those were things that wanted to be in a great leader. - Yeah, and he didn't equivocate on anything. He never hedged his bets. He never said, well, if I say this right, I'll navigate this. And so, you know, there are guys that I served with arranged battalion are, they're so fricking hardcore. And they've gone on, they went on to be, most of them are all retired now, 'cause, you know, we're men of a certain age. And, you know, hardcore dudes. And I remember thinking, I am cosplaying here. I've got the uniform on. I feel pretty good. I can meet standard and I'm keeping up with all of them. I'm doing everything arranged you're supposed to do. But if someone said, Jim, do you think this is gonna be the rest of your life career? I'd be like, no, I didn't quite fit in. I fit in well enough and they made me a better person. And part of that making me a better person was my leadership that I had there, but all So the team I was with, they were all good, like genuinely good people, rough, but good. - They could be both. - Yeah, yeah, and they're my friends to this day. - And this is in the 90s with a joint. - Yeah, there's a 93 to 97, I was an active duty. - Okay, so the war is not hot, obviously. It's all pre-9/11, the 90s were until the end when you had the Balkan stuff, like largely a pretty decent time. So are you on the base this whole time or did you get to go places too? - There was a lot of training. Went to Panama. We were deployed for Haiti, and that was probably the closest we ever got. We were ducks in a row at Guantanamo Bay. Before Guantanamo Bay was a thing. - Ducks in a row? - We were on the airfield. Ducks in a row, battled up, geared up, ready to go into Haiti, and the mission was, I was at a restored democracy, and then it turned into a pulled democracy. And we're, why is it always about something with democracy? - Oh, because you've got to have the, you know, the big patriotism, you know, and-- - Spread the wealth, right? - 'Cause voting will fix it, right? - Voting will fix it, right? - So we're ducks in a row, waiting to get on these helicopters to go in, and the mission was pretty much just kill everybody, but us, we're gonna go into the airfield and the presidential palace, and fix things that went wrong. While that was going on, it was, it was Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, and there was another guy there doing negotiations, and he was saying to the folks that he listened, 82nd Airborne is in the air right now. Third range of battalion is in the air right now, and I've got first and second range of battalion on an airfield in Guantanamo Bay, and they're coming. So, you have a choice. It here to Democratic elections, or, you know, we can't guarantee that anything will be good for you at this. (laughing) So in that, you know, restored democracy turned into uphold democracy, and we thought, we thought, okay, well, that's it for us, 'cause Rangers aren't peacekeepers, but we were left in Gitmo for, I forget how long, but then a special forces guy got shot in the chest in a village called, man, LeCai, LeCai. - In Haiti. - In Haiti. And they had a special forces compound there, and they had like a siop's team that was running around town, saying, turn in your weapons at the weapons turn end points, and never was actually called a siop's team. - Yeah, there was a siop team out there. I believe it was called, I mean, that's what we called it, and I was some dumb private that, "Racho, we got our war." (laughing) I was that guy. (laughing) When are we going to war? - Yeah. - So, we got sent in as a show force. So we flew into LeCai, and we were rotating in, and I was on the, what they call the siop's team as well, so combat search and recovery. So when VIPs were going out, we were up in the air, making sure that nothing happened to them. And if they did, we'd fly in, and that was our job. So we were there for a few days, putting up blocking positions, we raided a hotel. - You raided a hotel? - Yeah, we pulled out, I'm trying to think, it was like 50 guys in the hotel, and there was some, and I don't remember all the details, but we got, (laughing) this is after, oh, we did show everything, we got in five ton trucks, went out to the hotel. No shots were fired, which by the way, is a feat for a range of Italian. They went in, they blew the doors in, they being us, and I was on the recovery team, or the search team for the folks that they pulled out, so we're pulling stuff out of 'em, and they had a team, went in, pulled everybody out, and then we brought 'em back to the police station, where we had hold up, and we got to see grown men ballin' their eyes out when they saw where we were taken on, because that was the police station where people just disappeared. And we didn't know that, I don't think we knew that, when we took that as our sort of, but it worked. SF interrogators came and did their thing, but that's the closest I ever came, and it was, yeah, it was an interesting time. And it was a different time, because you didn't have the global war on terror. - Right, total, it's like night and day. - Yeah, and range of Italian is night and day. The range of Italian I grew up in was very, it was obviously harder when I went through, but-- - They always got to say that. - Yeah, but it's a totally different animal now, and so I'm just grateful that I got to serve with all these guys, and they taught me leadership, that leadership. Actually, in the way they taught leadership too, they taught you how to follow first, and people don't go down that road far enough. Everybody wants to be in charge. They teach you how to be a good follower too. Like, part of being a good leader is actually learning that first step. How do you support the leader respectfully, ethically, morally? How do you make sure that that person is successful, and everybody comes home? And so you learn to be a follower first. You learn the job that is two jobs above you. You always learn the job that's two jobs above you, because you never know what's gonna happen, and I always carry that with me from then on. And you don't realize what shapes you when you're a young man until you got to pull it out of your back pocket and say, and leadership in the agency is totally different. It's not this hierarchical chain of command. Like everybody goes around everybody else, and you know, there's a, it's flat. Yeah, I was gonna say spies talking behind each other's back, that would never happen. No, they don't do that. Right, right. They follow chains of command, but it taught me everything. I needed to know, to have a strong foundation, and I'm grateful for all of them. Yeah, I also feel like that gives you a wildly different perspective than a lot of the people who end up in case officer jobs and CIA. And I've talked with guys in the military before I've had to work with those types of people as well. And you know, sometimes they work with them well, and they get it. And then other times a major source of the frustration is they're like, you know, this person was sitting at Dartmouth four years ago. And you know, I just did fucking 12 tours of duty and lost 12 of my guys along the way. And they're trying to tell me how it works in a place that they've never fucking been. But you understand having been in the guys who are, even if you weren't in there for the war on terror and everything, like you've been out there, you understand how it works, you see how the military thinks, you see how the tip of the spear works so that you can work with them well later. And the human factor too, you know, that just there are people who are disconnected and sort of an aside but related. You know, I got administratively demoted out of my job at the CIA because of my heretical views on COVID, right? So I got a two year letter of reprimand, career killing letter of reprimand for-- - A two year letter of reprimand was, was I mean? - So for two years, I was not allowed to get promoted, couldn't PCS overseas, couldn't TDI-- - TDI? - Temporary duty in other locations. So couldn't go to training, couldn't do any of those things, I was also suspended without pay for a week over Christmas in 2021. And even though I had the year prior received four leadership awards, it was because I was a bad leader, like 'cause of COVID, not 'cause they were fully aware I was organizing litigation. - No, not that kind of leadership. - No, no, no, the other kind, they should sit down and shut up kind. So I got administratively demoted and this is gonna sound crazy too. And it's sort of an aside, we're sort of all over the place here, but-- - It's okay, I'll bring you back. - But every person should be demoted once in their life. - I agree completely. - Everybody should be demoted. Like, did I deserve to be demoted? No, fuck them. But I did and I got put in a entry level position and I was a senior manager running two full branches and yeah. Division anyhow, I was demoted and I'm not saying this to wine, I'm telling you that I got put in a branch and the branch manager was junior to me and he's like, "I want the fuck do I do with you?" "We're not gonna do with you." And I said, "Well, just tell me to do what I'm supposed to do." Like, your job is to tell me what to do. Give me my tasks, I'm here to work. And that's part of my, it's not a philosophy, it's trade crap. - That's a humbling thing though. Did I say that? - Well, I told him, just listen, you're in charge. Like, I'd be glad to give you advice if you wanna, but you're in charge and my job is to make sure that I do my job and the people around me do it. And so he did and it was great. And the thing was, I realized I had sort of drifted over time and some of the things I was saying to my staff when I was a manager, I was like, holy shit, I had totally lost the beat on what it takes to be, what it takes to be a line officer, a junior officer, sitting in those branches and you got some dipshit showing up gone, why is this not done yet? Like, what is up and then you realize, oh, I know, it's a giant bullshit bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything. - That's right. - And so, you know, just as short as I, Good leaders. your ship is getting demoted just once? - Yeah, and I said, right when you said that, I completely agree, 'cause I think it can be more than that as well, it depends on the context. If you run your own business or something, you technically can't really get demoted within your business, but you can have things happen to you. And I know everyone out there runs a business will be able relate to this. You can have things happen to you that you objectively in no way deserve, you did everything to avoid. And it's just the universe fucking you a little bit, but then it creates an opportunity for you to kinda rise Phoenix from the ashes a little bit. And I think a big part of it is the point you're making where you get down maybe to the bare bones of stuff that you didn't previously have time to do or you ended up delegating it off for a while and then you lost control of how it developed over time. And maybe it's a certain details need to be done in new way and now you get to see that from the inside out. I think that's huge. - Yeah, and it also like every once in a while, maybe just go straight back to basics. And like I developed a skill set over a long period of time and the skills I developed as a junior officer when I was grinding. I mean, I was grinding because I wanted to be, I did not want to be a bad officer. I wanted to be a really good case officer. So you grind for those years and then you start moving into positions where you're running programs, you're running personnel, you're interacting with more senior people so you're learning that skill set. It's easy to forget or conveniently forget some of those very basic trade craft, very basic skills that you should have known. The best thing that could have happened is one demotion just wants, even if it's undeserved, even if it's the universe laughing at you. If you treat it with the right attitude, it's an incredibly valuable experience. - That's the key. - You have to have the right attitude with things. It doesn't mean you're not human and when it happens, you can't take a minute and be like, what the fuck? But then you gotta get that out of your system, say, you know what, I can't control this anymore. So how do I make the best out of the situation a minute? Sounds like you did that pretty quickly. - Yeah, and the people I was working with over there, I think they appreciated having somebody who actually had done the work in the field for years. And having them sit shoulder to shoulder, saying, you know, this might be how you wanna handle this, this is how you write up this cable, this is how you, whatever. So I was grateful for that too, you know, and I think that's, if you are going to fight a system, you better learn to, you're gonna have to learn to appreciate the things however small they are, give a little gratitude for the things that come your way. So I learned leadership from the Rangers. - I knew it was four years in there, 93 to 97. - 93 to 97, there's a little less than four years. And then I stayed in the National Guard after it got out. - Quick question, because you had said, when you went into the Rangers and we're in training, you're like, yeah, I'm not gonna do this for the rest of my life or anything like that, you knew that. But then as you went along in it, was there ever a point where you're thinking, I'm gonna stay longer? - There was for a very short period of time, I thought maybe I might really list because I was interested in the Special Forces medic career track. - Okay. - You know, I was, I always had a love of science. I thought, okay, well, this is something for a hot minute, but that changed. - I asked. - It passed, you know, I started, I was like, listen, part of the problem with the military for me was if there was somebody who had been in longer and that person had been in longer, they will always be in charge of you. And you have to be okay with that if you're gonna stay in the military for a long time. My battalion commander was, at the time, I think he was Lieutenant Colonel McChrystal. And, you know, before he was General McChrystal. - Yeah, like me, Stanley McChrystal. - Yeah, he's another part of that leadership piece there. When he showed up at second range of the time, people hated him and you know why? He said, we're going back to basics. I know all you guys wanna do is do the special operations missions, the airfield seizures, the CQB, the clearing. But we're gonna do some patrolling and you're gonna be in the field. You're gonna do raids, ambushes, recon. So you're gonna go do those things. And we were like, come on, you know, we wanna do the fun, cool stuff. And, you know, he instituted different physical standards. What was it? 10 mile Ruck March every week, 12 mile Ruck March every month, a 25 mile Ruck March every three months and a 30 mile Ruck March every four months. - And you're still doing that schedule today, right? - Right, right, can you tell? Well, I remember, we all couldn't stand 'em because he was like, you're gonna do this. And the thing was, there was an incident with a bunch of privates who may or may not have been setting a fire on the back of a range somewhere at Fort Lewis. You know, may or may not have been cooking stakes up on a Friday night. And it's before midnight and McChrystal shows up and he's doing his 10 mile Ruck March 'cause he's gotta get it done before Friday, before the end of the week. He's doing all of these standards. When he instituted the first 30 mile Ruck March, it was like, I forget the order, but headquarters element went first and Alpha Bravo Charlie. He did the 30 mile with every single one. - Fuck yeah. - Every week. - That's cool. - And so like, I may disagree with McChrystal now on politics or other things, but I mean, that's leadership. - That's, I completely agree. - So you never wanna do something that you wouldn't, you never wanna ask someone to do something that you have not done yourself or wouldn't do yourself. I think that's just like a key tenet of anything. - Yeah, and he did it. I mean, hard as nails. So, that's where you learn leadership. It was a different kind of leadership at the agency. You had to navigate a more complex hierarchy. That's the kindest way I can say it. - We'll touch that later, I'm sure. - We can, we can. And so, when all this mess happened, and I said, yeah, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not gonna equivocate on, you know, be nice so that we can just get along and get past this. At that point, it, for me, was the most obvious example of this was a purge going on. This was not motivated by government efficiency, which is the, what they claimed. They said, this is about government efficiency. Really? That was the final straw. There were other things, I mean, I haven't, I don't generally talk about it all the time, but as far as I can tell, the 2020 election was stolen. And that's my opinion. And it's my opinion. - Based on what? - Okay. So, in my career at State Department and the agency, we've monitored elections overseas, right? - By monitored, you mean? - No, no, I really, hold on, hold on. I really do mean monitoring. - Thank you for that clarification. But we've monitored elections overseas, right? - I think they were monitoring the election in Guatemala in 1962, right? - Yeah, there's Italy in '48. - Yeah, before my time. - A lot of monitoring going on. - There's monitoring going on. But if the number of anomalies that had occurred in the US election had occurred in one of these countries that we monitored elections for, we would have demolished them. There would have been a nasty, sorry, State Department would have sent a strongly worded letter. (laughing) Remonstrating them for their poor behavior. - It's called a demarsh. - A demarsh. It would have been like, what are you doing here? These aren't free and fair elections. - Is that a word or is that like a French guy? - That's a word we use. - That's a word? - That's a real word. And we would have said, what are you doing? I mean, I know it. I mean, all of those anomalies, I mean. - Did you know this at the time when you were looking at it in 2020? - Yeah, I was looking at it as going, this is insane. - What was insane specifically? - Okay, well, so I did have some cognitive dissonance surrounding it. So what was insane to me was especially after the election, after the election, everybody saw that curve. You know, the curve with a jump and you're looking at it and you're going, that doesn't happen, that's not possible. Statistically, what happened wasn't possible. There was those bell weather, what is it, bell weather counties, bell weather counties? I think we're almost always at predicts who's going to win and that was wrong. And you're looking at all of it. And I'm like, the election was stolen. Now this is again, before I have been involved in any kind of litigation whatsoever, ever. I have no idea how that process works. Now I'm a full-fledged jailhouse lawyer, but at the time, I didn't know how it worked. So my cognitive dissonance with the whole thing was everything I saw pointed towards a stolen election. But every time something went to the court system, it never went anywhere. So I'm, you know, pardon me, I was like, I know something feels wrong, but it's not sticking in court. And if there was something wrong, it would definitely stick in our courts. And so my cognitive dissonance at the time was, well, maybe there was some black swan event. Maybe, and I was going back and forth on it, but it sure felt like a stolen election. Were there people in CIA quietly having the same conversation as you? - Yeah, of course. - Of course. - I mean, people are people. And if you're having that conversation out on the street, you're having that conversation with people you trust in the agency. Now, you better not be vocally pro-Trump because they will shout you down and they'll complain about politicization. Never mind that they'll talk about everything else on the other side of the aisle. How many people, and let's go back to 2020, 2019, 2018, 2020, if you had to guesstimate a percentage of CIA that was anti-Trump and a percentage that was pro-Trump, what would you say? They are mostly anti-Trump. I don't think I could estimate a percentage, but they are mostly anti-Trump for the most part. And they're more anti-Trump in certain parts of the agency. And the parts that handle our relationship with Europe, for sure, that actually makes sense. It does, doesn't it? It's funny, too. You'd spend time in the Middle East, and I did, and you'd talk to Middle Easterners. And they're like, "Yeah, we sort of like Trump." And it was like, it didn't even ban a bunch of your countries from people coming in like, "How's this work?" They're like, "America needs a strong man." And so I mean, I'd actually had these conversations with them. They're like, "Yeah, America needs a strong man." And at the time, I'm like, "Okay, you know, getting up, you do you?" Do you think, you know, if you're looking at the different factions of anti-Trump, maybe that exists? And again, I'm very specifically asking about Trump term one here, because these are very different worlds to me. Completely different. But, you know, people in CIA, like everywhere else, they have politics. Maybe they're a little more jaded by it because they know what happens underneath the scenes, for sure. I think that's fair to say. But they still, you know, they'll have a belief here and there. They also know, though, like Joe Rogan used to have that famous line that I think is very accurate, where he's like, "These people in places like that, when a president comes in or a senator, or whoever, maybe not a senator, because they seem to last all fucking their lives now." But, when a president comes in-- Good old Mitch McConnell? Exactly. We just had him here a few weeks ago. He wasn't doing too well. But, you know, when a president comes in, the people in the bureaucracy, like the CIA, they're like, "We were here before they got here. We're going to be here after they leave." So they kind of control the process. But among the people that were anti-Trump, I would imagine it also included people who were maybe conservative-minded or something like that. So what do you think outside of something like Geyser station in Europe, not like in the day, didn't like NATO or something like that? What do you think drove so many people who maybe thought that way to be like, "Yeah, but not like this, you know?" Let me break it into groups. Okay. And there's some people who are conservative, who have never liked Trump. Never Trump or is this what they call them, but some of them, those are, can be broken down even further. Some of them, it's, it's, I'm not saying it's superficial in the sense that like there's nothing to it, but there's a superficial piece to it. He's crass. He's, he's not likeable. Like they may, even in some cases agree, and I've had these conversations with some of the things he was saying, "Hey, we need a wall. Like we got to have borders." And they're like, "Yeah, we agree with it, but he's so mean about it." And you're like, "EIA, that was their complaint." That's some of them. Some of them. Wow. Some of them are, were never Trumpers. And this one, this is one of the things during the first term that, that I remember when he was running, I didn't get my absentee ballot in time, so I couldn't vote for him. And I didn't do the paperwork in time. I was overseas and I was glad he got elected, though. And it was funny. I had a conversation with a very close friend. I had just done a trip, road trip in the US, and there were Trump signs everywhere, everywhere across the rust belt, because I was going through the rust belt. And you know, when I was talking, I was like, "Who do you think is going to win on that?" I think Trump's going to win. And they're like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "I'm telling you, I'm from Ohio and Michigan, and I've, you know, I got family in Pennsylvania. I just drove through this area, and they all love Trump. I think he's going to win." They're like, "You're crazy." "Hey, line squirrel. Everyone's small." And so they, some of them don't like Trump because they didn't like his economic policy, which I, during the first term, he was talking about tariffs during the first term. And so I'll never be labeled a libertarian. But I actually appreciate libertarian philosophy, particularly on the economic side. It's a consistent, whatever you want to call it. And for me, tariffs was a way to put, put, put the weight of additional cost on the poorest part of the United States, and I didn't think it would work. And then it did. And maybe it's because our economic system is so fouled up. It's not really capitalism anymore. It was a low bar. It's a low bar. Yeah. Okay. No, enough tariffs to cause it, but it didn't actually hurt the economy. In fact, it helped a bunch of people. So one of my complaints that I had about Trump during the first term was I didn't like his economic policy, which we can talk about that a little bit more, too. But so they've got, they've got those complaints and I had a bunch of people are like, this economic policy is dumb. Like it's not going to work. And then did, or at least it didn't not work, if that makes sense. This wasn't the worst thing you ever saw. Yeah. Certainly, his foreign policy was not what a lot of people wanted to hear about NATO paying their fair share and and with that part, they didn't want to hear. I could totally see like the part where it's like, we're going to leave it and stuff like that. And they don't want to hear that. But like the whole. All right. We're paying. I'm making up numbers. 40% of this. When, you know, this fucking 40 other countries and then we should be paying 20%. Yeah. It's about control. I mean, maybe some of them weren't quite as, maybe I'm mischaracterizing some of them, but I did have this conversation. Like if you're paying for it, you own it. Allegedly. Well, I mean, we paid for the who and we didn't own that so there's that. So there was a lot of different reasons and it felt for a while. It felt like you had to, if you, if you were conservative, you had to come up with it. Some reason why you didn't want to support Trump, but deep down some of them, they voted for me. They voted for him anyway. They just said the things that they had to say because they felt like it because there was this group think, peer, group think, peer pressure. Yeah. Do you remember like a week into his first administration in 2017? He went to CIA by the gold Star wall and did it by the Star wall and did like an impromptu press conference there. It was streamed on every network. I don't ask. I was going to ask you if you were there because I know I was overseas because you couldn't, you couldn't see any of the CIA people, obviously, they were keeping them off camera. They just had Trump. But it was interesting because you could tell there was a crowd there and it was like kind of a mixed crowd. And I was curious if you knew people who were there and what that might have been like. I do vaguely remember this occurring, but I was overseas at the time. Okay. On that, so we had a very senior DNI official show up in a post that I was at during Trump's first term. And we had a whole meeting with all the people that were there and this was a big, big group of people. We had like 50 people stand around talking to this person. And she was, she was a career person and she was speaking to the group from a very senior position. And she was entertaining questions. So of course, what if the junior officers pipes up with their question? And this is on the economy side and before I, it's an interesting anecdote. Says, what's it like working for the Trump admin? And I'm trying to think this must have been 2018, I believe, yes, it was 2018. And I'm like, how are you doing this? We don't need a, let's just, but she gave a really, really good answer. She goes, I've never seen an administration that looks at every question through an economic lens. This is the first one like this. So that hit me. I'm like, okay, well, that's not only is that a good answer, that's a fair answer. And she's not, and she was no fan of President Trump. And so I was like, okay, well, I guess I'm going to ask a question to that. I said, well, that's strange. If he's viewing everything through an economic lens, why have I not seen a sea change in the requirements for me as a collector on what I need to be collecting? Because if every single thing he's looking at needs that economic angle, I should be seeing stuff coming from Washington saying, hey, folks, this is what the president wants. The president wants to know the economic situation, what are the levers? How do we make the most for America? And for me, I'd be happy to see that. I would have been thrilled to see, even if it's not our priority collection requirement, seeing the agency actually respond to a new administration that has a completely different idea of what we should be doing. Never saw it. And I got this non-answer, just like, well, it takes a long time to steer a ship and blop blop blop blop. that's the problem with the bureaucracy. Maybe it's true. Maybe it is, just takes a long time, or maybe there's sticks in the mud that are like, well, that's sort of dumb. We're not gonna. - Right. - So there was a lot of reasons why people didn't like Trump. As some were superficial, some were based, at least on the surface, it looked like they were based on honest questions about how Trump wanted to handle policy issues. But a majority of the agency did not like him. In my opinion, from where I sat, because you had people who they weren't allowed to talk about their love of Trump. - Right, yeah. - Right, and it seems like in talking with you before a camera and on camera now, like going over this stuff. One thing about you is your, I mean, this is a compliment, like you're a real observer. - For trying to be. - Yeah. - We're sort of paid to do this. - Yeah, you are, but you know how it is. People can get really locked in their own world of just observing in their little zone what their job is. Even if they're looking at every fucking detail on that, they're not opening up the scope off the blinders. It seems like you're kind of looking at a lot of different places all the time. - I try to, and thank you. I try to, and I think it makes you a better - Operations officer. - Sure. - I mean, your job is to sort of consider 90% of your job is risk medication. So risk mitigation means you have to consider all of the possibilities that are out there. And that's, that was the whole mess in COVID too. Like when you bring it back around, like what finally was the nail in a cough and form me on, like yeah, I'm done playing these silly games. There was no consideration of the other possibilities. There was just shutting conversation off, and that was it, that was it. And the friends I had prior to COVID, most of them are gone. All the friends I have now are from different parts of the administration that is currently here, different parts of the federal government, and they were all people who were tested during COVID and made it through on the other side. - What do you make of the fact that there were people that you had long-term relationships with in doing what you did for a lot of years in some of the most high stakes environments who based on one thing now won't talk to you anymore and you don't have a relationship with them. I'm radioactive, so I'm gonna give them this. Like some people like deeply respect, they're like, I gotta get the shot, okay? I've got to, I've got a kid in college, I've got. So some of these people, some of these people made an honest decision. They didn't want it and they took it for reasons that are theirs and theirs alone. And the folks that took it that stopped talking to me, but were talking to me, some of them, I think they're just, they don't want to have to deal with that decision, they want to put that behind them. The people who have always been against it, I mean, and that I used to have a relationship with that have since left me, I personally think, it's my personal opinion. It's hard for them to have to deal with the fact that, actually, let me break it into two. There's two halves to this. There is moral harm for everybody involved in this. So you've got these managers who may have deep down thought it was a terrible idea. And at the time, most of my friends were all senior managers or higher. And so they were forced to push things on people, they didn't want to. So if I'm trying to give as much grace as possible, some of them probably feel pretty bad right now. And I do think some of this stuff is finally getting out to people inside the bureaucracy. So if I'm giving them grace, some of them, they're hurt too. You know, they were hurt by the process too. They did what they thought would get them through it, they hedged their bets, they navigated things, and now they're not feeling good about it. And why would they want to talk to me about that? It doesn't, it's not going to fix anything. It's that they don't owe me anything. I don't owe them anything. The other folks, I think they wanted us out. I think they wanted to purchase people who have faith they were being purged out. And this was, they were almost successful. Do you want to know why they didn't succeed? This is my working opinion now, right? They didn't succeed because they're cruel. And imagine this. So whether you like Trump or dislike Trump, what did he do this administration? He came in and said, we want to reduce the size of government because government efficiency actually gets better with a smaller government. So let's make doge. Let's do these things. He offered very benefit, he offered packages for retirement to get out, just take this. Hey, you are a valued employee of the federal government. You have done everything right. Tell you what, here is this package where you will get paid for, I think the first package, like seven months of severance pay basically. And then you'll get full retirement as long as you meet these standards. You're fantastic. We loved what you did. You're a wonderful employee and you can go now and you can go now with a runway. Imagine if the Biden administration had done that during COVID, okay. And I said, listen, there's a pandemic. We firmly believe that this is a very dangerous virus. If you have religious beliefs, we understand you do, but it's not going to work for us. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you a seven month runway. We're going to give you a very generous package. We're going to help you get out the door and then you can go find a job in a company with less than a hundred people 'cause that's what was happening with the OSHA mandate. They didn't do that. They said, we're going to pursue you until you actually just leave. We're going to make it as miserable as possible every step of the way. If they had done it the other way, nobody would have started a lawsuit. There would be no legally defined harm. So the cruelty with which they implemented this stupid policy, which had nothing to do with public health, forced all of us together. And Brett Weinstein, you said you just had them on. He and I don't know where he said it or when, but I remember there was a conversation he had and he said it was a tactical error because what happened was all these people from very different fields, all got drove together. All these people who had a moral backbone, who even if they weren't religious, they had discernment in terms of whether it was science. You had like Ed Doud mentioned him before. Ed Doud is like this guy who was black rock and then he's now a financial analyst and he's doing all this work. Steve Kirsch, who's punching his calculator when getting the numbers gone. All these different fields and he drove all of us together and that's what happened within the federal government for the folks who fought the vaccine mandates. We got a group of people from, at the time was 34 different agencies and departments that all came to get, we never, I would have never met somebody from weights and measures, you know what I'm saying? Like I've got friends from Social Security Administration. I didn't want to know about Social Security. Like I could give a shit. But there's good people there too, surprise, surprise. Who do important work, who face the public every day and make sure that these old fellows who have nothing else actually, you know, get their payments so that they're not as much a drain on the economy. Like these are, it's good people. They drove us all together. So there's always a silver lining. You try and find it as best you can. And, you know, the sad thing is I actually want to get past the COVID discussion. I don't think we should forget it, but I do want to get to the point where that is something that is documented. We know what went wrong and we can talk about the real issues 'cause COVID was just a symptom of some really big problems. - Yeah, I think COVID because it was something the entire public dealt with, which meant there was a push pool also as it relates to the government with the public that parts of it were also to divide people for sure and there were lies and mistakes made everywhere. Like it, yeah, so it was, it was all these things could not agree more. It changed the world because it also broke a lot of people on how they look at things. And I don't mean that as a bad thing. It's suddenly things that, I'll speak for myself too, that I took for granted in the past. Like, yeah, that's just how things are done or whatever. Now I'm like, wait a minute, you know what? Who told me that? Why did I believe that? Why did I say that? That makes no sense. And so that's all, it was all like a portal to a lot of other things. That includes many things that happened behind closed doors, which I think is part of what you're alluding to here to where it's like there were accepted ways of how things were done or how we thought things may have gone down with stuff. And therefore that's how we're doing things moving forward. That now, you know, if there's someone intelligent like you who's seen the facade come down in such a huge way during the pandemic, You're gonna. suddenly, maybe not suddenly, but you're going to be much more apt to say, wait a minute. I was told, this is how everything was. If it was like this for the pandemic, why should I think it was like that for all these things? 100%. Absolutely. 100%. And if you just described my transformation, and there were key things along the way, there was more than COVID, there was here election, there was the birth of my son, there was things you can't explain internal to the agency where you're like, I don't understand why we're not pressing China on issues, for example. So I saw that firsthand, where like, no, no, no, no, this is definitely a China issue. And you could say that about COVID too. I mean, so US issue as well, but it's a China issue. So you see all these things, but for me, the exclamation point at the very end was when I was lucky enough to get selected to work for director Gabbard over at the dig. And so the director's initiative's group was brought in because director Gabbard, former director Gabbard, understood that the system was broken. Okay. And a lot of us did too. We had been through the system for five years at this point. So she wanted to find the guys like you who had been trying to say, Hey, yeah, yeah, I mean, she picked people who knew where the bodies were buried. And we came in and I will say we fully, I fully believed, I won't speak for other people. I fully believed this administration was going to reform radical transparency. The full meal deal that was promised, no new foreign wars. Last I checked that almost all those promises have been broken. Okay. So, you know, the election of president Trump was a false summit. It was not the panacea. And, you know, I'm with an organization. It's a 501c3 and I can tell you, we are not partisan in any way. We will, if the administration isn't getting it done, we're going to tell them they're not getting it done and they're not getting it done. They either lied or just have been so incompetent. Well, I mean, the no new foreign laws was pretty, pretty clear a lot. And so when you're at, you're at the dig and you're running the like we were brought in because there was weaponization that occurred and we wanted to get to the bottom of it. We wanted, you know, there's a ton of eos that came out, anti-Christian bias eradicating that. And so we were given tasks. And at every step of the way, we had, and I'm going to call it the deep state, there's blob, whatever you want to call it. Okay. There's there, the agency in particular did not want, did not want the results that they were getting. And I'll give you a good story on this. Trump Russia collusion. And it's somewhat related to the ICIG, but let's talk in general. So like, I've described to you a group of people that feds for freedom that wants to go fight from the inside and fix things. And there's a process you need to do. You need to stick to the rules and say what you're going to do and then do what you're going to say. You're going to, you're going to pay for it. You will pay for it, but that's the process so you don't make it worse. Okay. And I firmly believe that is the only way we can fix some of these things that are, you have to have people on the inside who know that folks like you've platformed come out on the other side and still have a life. Not all of them. They've been destroyed. So we get in the dig and we're doing all these things are getting divvied up. And Trump Russia collusion stuff. I'm going to tell you a story and I got permission from Bill to tell this story. Bill. Just Bill. Okay. Okay. Bill was a CIA officer. He's retired. He worked at CIA and he worked at Hipsy House permanent select committee on intelligence, the congressional oversight. Sorry. If I start using it. I could see that you were going to do it. You're doing a good job with that. Every time today you've started to say something, I'm like, clarify. I do this all the time. So please just jump in. Usually I have to jump in, but I can see you're on it with that. So Trump Russia collusion. We cared about it. We believe that there was this whole bullshit story that director Gabard got out the door and that was on July 25th of 2025. Is that one that came out from Gabard? I think so. Trying to remember because she did things when she was outgoing this year. Yeah. After her husband got cancer, but she did. Which I'm very grateful and we can talk about that. Right. She did the Russia collusion stuff. I think you're, I don't know. It was July, but it was July 25th. So here's what happens. The digs communications, they were being monitored by the CIA. Okay. And you're going to ask me, how do you know that they were being monitored? I know because there were phone intrusions that were traced back to the CIA. When you say a phone intrusion, we were, we have secure phone lines and we were having conversations with whistleblowers. And there was phone intrusions. There were there were people on that line that weren't supposed to be on there. And you how could you tell that? I totally believe you. Yeah, just because they didn't do it very well. Their trade craft was poor. So you heard that. Sort of. Yeah. Come on guys. Because like at least don't give us the BT. If you're going to do this, give us the AT. Yeah. They get a challenge. So there was that. How do I know we were being monitored? The day after whistleblower shows up, CIA whistleblower, he gets fired. Then other people who showed up to talk to us, they got communications from managers over at the agency about what they should do if they ever talk to the people at the day. So we'll set that aside. Just go with me on this for now. We know they're monitoring our communications. And it's insane why they would do that because this is our administration. This is the people who are coming in to deweaponize why on God's green earth would they need to do that? So Trump Russia collusion, there is a series of documents that are really important. And Bill, Bill had written one rebuttal to this whole Trump Russia collusion thing long time ago during the first Trump admin. And there were three copies of this report. Two were with director ragcliffe during the first Trump administration. And one was in a safe at CIA headquarters. But not when ragcliffe was the director because he wasn't the director. He was the director of national intelligence. Okay. When he was the first guy and so we at the dig wanted to get our hands on that document and start looking at declassification because we knew it was a powerful document well sourced. Well, the stuff that we put out in the end of July, that's the stuff. Okay. How many people are working at the dig roughly? I can't say. I can't say that. I can't say that. But it grew and then there was divided tasks people had different responsibilities. Okay. So we're looking at it. The agency knows we're looking at it. Okay. So what happens is Michael Ellis, the deputy director asks Bill to come in and help them do their declassification effort on Trump Russia collusion. So Bill wants to get out largely what director gathered put out. That is what he wanted to get out through the agency. He was working on it and he ran into bureaucratic obstacles. There was problems. He was trying to get it done. He leaves on a short vacation. And then in early July that I see that came out that CIA put out first. It's a white wash. Okay. It's a white one. It's a it's a it's it's bullshit. Well, it's not bullshit in the sense of what they said. They said, Hey, listen, there's this list of anomalies like too much emphasis on one report. They didn't give access to all the information to all the agencies that were involved like all of these series of things that amount to terrible analytical trade craft. But at the very end of that I that I see that came out. I think it was July 2nd 2025. So before anything else came out, it says, but the premise was sound. Why? Why would they put this whole paper out that lists the analytical anomalies with at the very end saying, but the premise of this was sound? I can tell you why? Well, you're in a race against time. Okay. And again, this is this administration. There's a couple reasons why one, if Brennan is actually going to have to go to court defend himself, we can take that thing and say, listen, there are some problems. But look, even this administration says the premise was fine. It's another reason. And this is my supposition. But Director Radcliffe had these documents during the first Trump administration. Why didn't he just release them then when he was DNI? Why didn't he just go through the process of getting those things released during the first Trump admin? I don't know, I don't have the answer to that, but I think it's a really good question. It's a great question. Okay. And why would you need to do it? Why would you monitor the communications at the dig and try and get it out earlier? Well, because now anything that comes out after that is a refutation of whatever came out first, okay? And when Bill saw what came out, when he came back and he said, "What are you guys doing?" He had no idea the agency was doing this other ICA effort. In addition to him being called in to run this declassification on these documents that were a parallel process was going on over at Under Director Gabbard. That is the definition of deep state. That is the definition of, "I'm going to protect our institution as opposed to protecting the Constitution, protecting truth, which I can't, I know people laugh, but if you're a CIA officer, your job is truth. Your job is to pull out from all of these lies. One little bit of truth you can present to policymakers so they can make good decisions." You see how that's not truth though. I do. I do. So I'm going to pull out from all these lies. Let's give them the 1% little dog bone that you on. I do understand, I really do. If you're dealing with misinformation and disinformation and underlying motives, it's always a guessing game if you're dealing with human beings and you're trying to figure out whether or not their motives are pure or unpear or whether they're trying to influence as well as inform, but your job is to take your best guess at all the information out there, because even liars, good liars have a nugget of truth at the center. So CIA trains good liars, so we should be good at picking that out. It's called, "Look at the shiny object over here. It's the definition of a limited hangout." That to me encapsulates what has happened to this administration. I don't know if there was some direction from the top to make that happen, or if all the underlings that are still there who were part of the reason we got to this point, like all the people running the agency, the seniors, they were part of the problem. What I find insane is, okay, so we got to a point where the agency is not doing what we need them to do, whatever you want to define it, however deep you want to go on that. We kept the same people who got us in that position, and they're the ones going, "I'm going to help you reform." Right. It's not going to change a thing, and this ICA is a perfect example. It's a perfect example why you have to have people who, as much as it sucks, and as much as you know that you are Don Quixote, swinging at windmills, you got to have some folks stay inside the administration morally, ethically, lawfully, present truthful information and put their name on it and just own it, and you're going to get the shit kicked out of you. But there are still people out there doing that, and why are you able to? Because you did this privately in the sense that you did it internally for a long time when you had your issues, and then I guess some of it went public when you started the organization back then while you were still in, and now you've come out in June, I guess, retiring and you're talking about all of this. These are some of the most powerful people and institutions in the world. Why don't they just put a bullet in your head? Well, I didn't realize I was doing it at the time, and like I said, it's not a philosophy, it's more like a trade craft. Philosophy implies that there's some deep thinking involved, and you know, the closest philosophy I can say is stoicism, but I'm not a stoic. I bitch and moan, I've sent angry emails and laughed as I sent it off, you know, and told people to fuck off, to fuck off a stand, and so, you know, I'm not a stoic by any stretch of the imagination, ask the guy who went through Rangers, my Ranger buddy, my Ranger school. That's not it. So again, I'm going back to this trade craft thing. The reason they didn't just totally get rid of me is because my stated actions were exactly exactly what I was doing in the agency. So when I was suing the agency, suing the federal government, I was sending group emails to a couple hundred people, and you don't normally, like you could get really sideways for using government information systems, but I sure. Yeah. But I said, hey, guys, this is how you legally go through the administrative process to get straight. So I know it's hard to believe, but if you're in the CIA and you want to sue the CIA, the CIA makes you have to go through an administrative process to approve your lawyer, approve what you're doing, and you have to tell it, like if you're going to write an affidavit, you have to give them the affidavit first so that they can make sure there's no classified in it. But Linda Langley does, she just sits back there in the office and, yeah, right. So I said, okay, if we're going to do this, I'm going to be as transparent as a CIA officer can be. And I am going to send the group emails to the people that are interested, and I'm going to give them a step-by-step to the point where I even took screenshots of the administrative things you had to fill in and say, listen, guys, first things first, we work for the CIA, it's a blessing to work here. We need to stay focused on our mission. But I'm sending this to you because if you do not believe that your religious accommodation or whatever is being properly processed, here are the steps you need to take. And I just did it out in the open. I sent my put my name on it because that is the only, like they're going to beat you up for it one way or another. I was not, again, they weren't giving me a two-year letter of reprimand because I was suing the government. It was because I was a bad leader, right? Okay. So that happens. You've got to be willing to put your name on it. So you're asking, why did they let it keep going? Yes. They let it keep going because there was a legal basis for what we were saying and there was actual, like, I don't think they thought our organization was going to get an actual injunction. Now I had already been administratively demoted when that happened. I had already been suspended for a week without pay, but I was doing exactly what I said. And you know, you have to have the right reason. I was watching, I was trying to watch my peace and cues. I was trying to do everything by the book, complete the tasks I was given. Has that ever mattered before? John did it by the book when he was in there and they still fucked him later. Yeah. And this is where I come back to what your platform has done for people. He knew that you get fucked anyhow. I mean, take a look at John, OK? It wasn't even he didn't even get fucked by the same administration. He got screwed over by another administration that came later, right? That well, the only thing I'd say to that is it was through the holdovers in the bat one guy. I can't say publicly because he's explained this is like John Brennan. Yeah. He's the due to cause the whole thing. He's the one they have the emails. He's the due to cause the whole. Yeah. He's been holder who obviously was a pretty fucking corrupt guy. I can't name the last time we had a good fucking attorney general ever, but like holder obviously did a lot of bad shit. But holder on these emails goes back to John Brennan and says, no, we already investigated this. Nothing to do there. And John Brennan, very Joe Stalin, like goes find it, you know, and I'm paraphrasing here. But it's the same levers. It's just they're under a different mask. It is, but the answer is they did it alone. They did it completely alone. I was not alone. I just have to be the one sending the emails. But when you have 200 people on an email and I say, hey, listen, this is just happened. You should file a fraud waste and abuse complaint. If you don't like this, here's my fraud waste and abuse complaint. You can copy and paste if you want because I do believe this to be wrong. And so there's there's a difference. All of these people you described, they're like truly brave people because they did it on their own. I was able to see that, hey, these people, at the time I wasn't thinking through it like this, I've had time to sort of contemplate. But I think we got through because there was a huge number of people. It was not just Jim saying, this is wrong. It was Jim writing an email that says we say it's wrong. Got it. At the same time though, Jim, Jack Kennedy had people behind him too. But the logic is you cut off the head of the dog that's barking a little too much for your taste. And that's why I wonder, you know, I have to ask these questions too. You're absolutely right too. And it's a good question. I think part of it too is, and it goes back to, I don't know what you want. It's not stoicism. It's, don't be a pussy, okay, don't be a pussy, okay, put your name on it. The problem is the other side, you've got maybe some people who are actually part of conspiracy. So people saying, yeah, we're not going to let this happen, we're not going to let this happen. The majority of the people, it's the culture, and they're pussies, okay? When push comes to shove, if they have a bunch of people saying, hey, this might be illegal, they're going to be like, you know, and I'm talking about COVID right now. But it's applicable, it's applicable. Okay, and so Don't be a pussy. Don't be don't Don't vacillate if if you believe it put your name to it own it get in a ring and fight Don't bitch about it when it's done because that's not gonna help it nobody's gonna want to Join your cause if you want to call it activism. It's not activism If you want to join the cause of hey, how about constitutional governance where like you can actually get answers for the government That'd be nice I did I answer your question? I think so I think so and I appreciate you understanding why I'm asking it because you know That that's something I've had to look at over the years to like this starts with nothing in my parents house I'm just kind of slowly build it up and eventually you're getting a lot of different people to come in here and then eventually You get some guys who literally it's on their resume. They were in CIA or something like that And I've had to learn along the way like all right. Why is some of this happening? Who are some of these people? How many of these people still work with them and things like that? And these are legitimate questions You have to ask because media no matter what media it's in is Certainly manipulable. Yes, so for me. This is just how I've always looked at it. I've talked about this a bunch, but you know I much I much prefer to talk to guys like you where it's open on the resume We stick you on the camera everyone else out there can hear what you have to say and sniff through it or agree with it Or somewhere in between and I'll let people be the judge of that I get more concerned admittedly when I have someone random in here about some random story that has nothing to do with geopolitics or something And there's something that feels off later. Mm-hmm. I'm like wait Why was that person here did they just sneak something in there in the middle of that fucking whatever and they really work for someone else and you should? Fortunately, I have a good reason to be suspicious about that what that doesn't mean though is that when I'm talking to a guy like you Everyone on the spectrum from like boost amante to Kiryaku, you know from someone who's like died in the wall C.I.A. To someone who claims to really dislike it. I always have to ask as best I can and I'm not a fucking mind reader Why is this person talking with me? Why are they saying the things they're saying? Why are they? Maybe coming out and blowing the whistle on something like that. So for people at home right now who might be like, all right, wait a minute This guy spent a lot of time. I guess since 2013 in C.I.A. And before that you're in the army rangers We still haven't even gotten to some of the stuff you you were probably doing between then so we'll get to that at some point people But you know suddenly he's coming out and he's saying all these things referring to you that you know are not advantageous for seemingly on the surface for the government. Is there some greater reason for that? Are you someone that's kind of sent out to just make a lot of noise about stuff and distract from other things? Do you understand why people have these questions? It's totally fair too. They shouldn't believe me. I mean this sincerely You should not believe me and I'm not saying it because I want people not to believe me. I do but um the government has lied so many times now repeatedly and has been caught You like even like I want you to believe that I'm telling you the truth and I'm giving you an honest story And I've got someone of a record over the last five years now because I've been involved in Sue in the government, right? So you know, maybe there's a little bit of credibility with that But like let's just take COVID origins. I went in front of Senator Paul's committee and I said things and I gave a written statement Most people don't know the agency called me the night before and told me I was not supposed to go and I went anyhow And this is in March you did that that was in May in May in May You know, they called the night before I came in with the subpoena On the Monday of that week I had received it the week prior. It's a long story, but a pipe broke in my new condo and it was like 22 grand in damage And so I'm you know taking care of that. I get the subpoena I bring it in on Monday morning Sorry, and I want to make sure I stay I sometimes go and yeah, it's all right. I'll pull you back pull me back So I get it I give it to a Monday morning And um, I'm like here's my address. I moved by the way and the roof caved in because it flooded Um Here's my phone number you already have it You already know my email can call me anytime. Here's the subpoena. I intend to go. Oh send it I send it to my supervisor my new supervisor because I had left the DNI. I was on loan on a joint duty assignment came back And I said can you please make sure it gets to office of general counsel and uh Again, this is my whole philosophy put your name on it own it and so I did And uh, I didn't hear anything all Monday and I'm like I for sure expected screeching and pulling of hair and Nothing all day Tuesday And again Wednesday is the hearing and it's Tuesday. I leave them like well. I guess I'm going to the hearing and I I pick up my lawyer from the airport Who I at this rate will keep her employed forever Uh, and so we're talking about things and I'm gonna drop her off at her hotel. I've got my phone up on the Car window and The phone rings it's 7 30 at night. It's like less than 15 hours away from the hearing And it's the office general counsel at CIA and they say Hey, Jim. Um, yeah, we're calling because we're gonna have to direct you not to appear Tomorrow and I said yeah, well, um, I'm gonna have to direct you to my lawyer But you're in luck. She's in the car with me. So I give the phone to Carol Carol says so uh, I love Carol. Yeah, I get you bluetooth shit. Yeah I give the phone to Carol Carol Carol's like so can you explain um How Jim is supposed to um ignore a senate subpoena, you know, because that's sort of a requirement. Yeah, you gotta go They probably laughed at that. Oh, it was uncomfortable. Uh, very uncomfortable Seven. What's that? Seven subpoena and we can have talks about oversight too if you want but um So she's She's like, well, tell you what, why don't you get your stuff? They said well, you know, we can't we can't it's it's there's There's case law and there's regulation. I think it's how they said it. She's like great. Just send an email with the regulation affords you the right to stop someone from appearing at a senate subpoena And they're like, well, tell you what call me back. I'm going to my hotel call me back and uh, she calls me up later From her hotel and she says Jim uh, they They don't want you going They won't send the regulation because they say it's classified And then they said that you have to get your stuff cleared and I just like Carol you know, this is bullshit because They had all day Monday to hit me out. They had all day Tuesday and now they're doing it after hours 730 at night the night before and now it's 9 o'clock at night And I don't want to go until there's some people who helped me out um, I called some friends about getting things cleared in time And it didn't get cleared in time and I went anyhow Um, they said I broke my NDA when I did it because you were still with CIA. Yes. Yeah. I'm still employed. That was in May I'm like I told Carol listen your your job is to make sure that when I leave the hearing I'm not leaving in handcuffs That's it. That's the only I'm going. I'm going to this hearing because this whole lie about COVID origins how we can't even with the full weight of Gabbard at that point pushing pushing pushing we couldn't get anything out. I mean I saw this whole hope of reform And this hope that we would have radical transparency. It just shit the bed Okay, and this was it felt like the last chance to actually like do the right thing. Let's do the right thing Congress voted unanimously COVID act to 2023 release it all okay You have people saying in this administration we're going to get to the bottom of this stuff and Despite Gabbard being in charge of the DNI She's still fighting every day to try and get this out and unbeknownst to most people her husband was very very sick And the people who want to call it some political machinations they can shut the fuck up So I believe that I do too 100% and I'm not like in her inner circle know that anyhow um, so I went anyhow and I want them to believe me, but they shouldn't Anybody can say anything at this point that no one gives a shit if you lie to Congress nobody cares So like yeah, we have a new watergate every fucking day. Yeah, like and it's like no one does anything about it So I want you to believe me But you shouldn't what you should believe are documents and this is why um I'm very grateful for director Gabbard's work because right up to the very last day She fought to get stuff out the door the transparency. We were promised even if other people aren't going to keep the promise. She did her best On the last day a bunch of COVID stuff got out. It doesn't it doesn't um Provide support for everything I said in there, but I think it's enough That people can look at it and they can compare these other documents So don't believe me believe documents and that's my watchword for for everyone like I want you to believe me But I will I will give her this too Because she also released the ukrain bio lab stuff as well It's something and she was really you know, we hit her hard during some of the stuff that happened post Iran because she stayed in there. The one thing I did say while I was doing it is she was really stuck between a shit and a fart because she had basically said we're going to be against all this stuff. And then the minute it happens and they had clearly locked her out of the room, I do believe that. She either says, well, this isn't what I signed up for and quits and gets blamed for like leaving when the go and gets tough. Or she stays in there and toes the line publicly which to people, they don't give a shit what's happened privately. They only hear what happens publicly and she looks like a cuck. Yeah. You know, it's a very in hindsight. I will say it's a very hard place to be. I don't. And this is a good, this is a good segue to talk about Joe Kant. And I want to talk about Joe because he's super important to this story. Let's do it. I was mad at Gabbard too. I was like, you're in charge here. Why can't we get this done? Now, I was hired because I execute things. You know, I my job, my entirely free people. Yes, things execute projects to their completion. So I don't know if that's a code word or not. And I got to watch that. It's good. I'm glad you're a push, push, discern. So, you know, the, the, you know, I was mad too. I was like, listen, you hired us to help get this done and we're not getting it done. Like you gave us a task, we want to get the task done. Joe Kent, in my opinion, did one of the most honorable things you can do when your position is a senior executive like that. It used to be a normal thing. What's his name? Secretary of State for Carter, Cyrus Vance, Cyrus Vance. Okay. That guy, he didn't want to do the Iran rescue mission. And so he resigned in protest publicly, respectfully. Wait, the Iran rescue mission, that the Reagan administration negotiated underground secretly with Iran to delay until after the election so they could win the election and then look strong. I think, you know, I'm, again, like I'm remembering, but this guy didn't want to do that rescue mission. I think Cyrus Vance went on record as I recall and said, no, I don't want to do this. I, you know, again, I'm a science major, not a history major, but there were other people in the past who have resigned in protest. That's an interesting thing to protest, but okay. Okay. But yeah, I know I got you. You've got, yeah, you've got relief, got a belief and you do it and do it publicly. Joe Kent is in a position to do that. And he should do that because that is the honorable thing to do. It's not dishonorable and it's not, it's not subversive. What would be subversive is saying, I disagree with what President Trump is doing. And, but I bet you, if I just stick around longer, I can, I can maybe move things around and, and, you know, affect this, this thing. Okay. So I think some people thought that that was what Gabbard was doing. Okay. I don't think so. I don't. And there's a difference here. And I also want to talk about it from those people are in different positions. They are people who pull levers. Whereas people like me, I'm a gear. I'm, I'm in the machinery. Okay. If I all of a sudden up and say screw you, I'm out, you know, I could do that. Is it honorable? Maybe. But our job is to make sure that we push up information to people, put our name on it and say, this is what we think. This is our honest opinion. This is not politicized. This is not, if you just up and leave, first of all, it looks like you politicized it because you're not in a position to like, who gives a shit. I remember, there's a guy early in my career kept saying, I'm so mad. I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit. And finally, a bunch of us just said, fucking quit. No one cares. No one cares. You're part of the machinery. Okay. If you're going to quit, you got to be somebody who has the gravitas. And when they do that, it comes downhill to, to the folks like me, the machinery. And we may have been harboring silent questions. We're like, oh gosh, I don't, it seems bad. And well, then you validated for us. And it steals our resolve to do the right thing, not be subversive. It's not, I'm not talking about the resistance with the blue hair running around going, you know, it's illegal to, you know, not let us have our trans bathrooms, whatever. That's now what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, we're hired to be professionals. So all of a sudden, it's like, listen, the professional thing to do is make sure they understand the person who makes the decision, understands all of the facts. It would not be honorable for me to like, well, resign in protest. Yeah. No one cares. No one cares of gym resigns. They care of, they care of Tulsi Gabbard resigns. They're a public fit. You can see who they are. Yeah. Now, with regard to Tulsi Gabbard, she's also a military leader. And she, you can't separate, and so I mean, so is Joe Kent, obviously. Yeah. You know, there's a certain amount of, like, listen, unless it's 100% a violation of the Constitution law, there's a riggle room to make a decision on what you're doing. And we all didn't know as well that there was personal stuff going on for director Gabbard. Sure. We would have never known. So maybe she just did the catch and said, listen, I'll finish up the last few things. And then when it's time to help my husband, I don't know. I'm, this is all speculation. It's possible. I do remember the day after Joe resign. I think it was exactly the day after he resigned. She had to go in front of Congress for like the hearing on the Iran War. And she has no friends. You could see it in her eyes because she's like, I am so fucked right now like because I can't just say like I resigned right here. Joe just did that yesterday. No fault to him. Yeah. But it was just a awful spot to be in. I would never want like, I can't imagine a time where I'd be like, no, I really want to do. I want to be in that job. Right. You know, maybe there's a time. But right now she had a no win situation. And I watched to my discredit. I judged her very harshly during the process because I was like, why aren't we getting this done? You hired us to get this done. We want to get it done. She had, she was working behind enemy lines. She had no friends. No friends. Yeah. Can I ask a question on that actually on the, on the role itself, the N I. Yeah. So the way we're told to understand it in the public is that that position oversees all the intelligence agencies. Correct. Effectively. So this might be an oversumpification. But if you look at the organization chart, therefore a guy like John Ratcliffe who runs CIA reports to Tulsi Gavard. That's okay. Yeah. That's exactly why I'm asking you. Please. Yeah. Let me, so after 9/11, after the failures of 9/11, which all in other story. But you know, they created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And the point was to integrate intelligence, all source intelligence into products that would be provided to the executive branch and legislative branch that combines all of it so we don't miss anything. And those statutes have been read in different ways. There were a couple other people along the line that wanted to do what Director Gavard did, which was exercise all of her stat, all of their statutory authorities to the absolute limit. Press the limit on what the lawyers believe that statute means. So what happens when a new log is put into place or they decide that they're going to create a new office like this? All the lawyers get together beforehand and after hand. Before hand, they say, here's a statute. This is what we think we can do afterwards after it's passed. And like, here's a statute. Here's what we think we can do. And here's your authorities. There is always like the statutes are always written with just and particularly with the intelligence community with just enough wriggle room that it leaves it up to the lawyers to interpret. This goes back to Snowden as well. Take Clapper. Clapper lied to Congress. 100% lied to Congress. Why do you think other than the fact he's part of the club? Why do you think he wasn't prosecuted? Well, it's because lawyers got together when the Patriot Act was passed and said here's what we think. Here's what we think this all means. This is the statute. This is why our authorities. This is what we can do. And the lawyers from the agencies went to the oversight and said, this is what we think we can do. We think we can collect all that metadata. We think we can collect all this information. We think that gives us the authority to do all that. Reason Clapper is not in trouble is because the legislature branch was in on it. Right? So it's all a big club and we're not part of it. Is that an answer, I guess? Yeah, because what I was getting at is even if it's hypothetically on paper, you know, all these agencies are going to report to her. If someone that they don't like comes in there, they're going to treat it like a mushroom, feed it shit, keep it in the dark. And how it's toasty guy, we're going to go to every single compartmentalized station of all these different agencies and be like, so what are you guys working on? You can't do that. So this is where I was cynical coming in on [BLANK_AUDIO] To the new administration with when when Trump too was coming in I was a little cynical on the Tulsi Gabbard position because I'm like How why would the bureaucracy give her anything? They know that she's in there to like reform them They won't and you're right to be cynical and I'll give you another example. So why'd you join up? I joined up because it was one solid chance and so far the CIA and CIA and my apparent my Experience had failed on all those fronts and Gabbard Gabbard's unique. So Gabbard is unique animal being brought into the administration It's sort of like Jo Ken She was not part of the government during the whole COVID debacle. Okay, so she doesn't have any of that baggage So she comes in clean on that Also, she wasn't part of the government during the whole January six bullshit. Okay, so she doesn't have any of that baggage She is quite literally not carrying any of the stuff That makes you question all these other knuckleheads that are part of the government who made decisions like she's It's not the right word but clean on that front. Yeah, I don't have to agree with everything that she's ever said and I don't but I saw Gabbard as somebody who And I still do Somebody who wants to do the right thing and has does not have all the baggage that some of these other losers have so um I guess you know you have high expectations for folks and and I had high expectations for director Gabbard But I didn't put myself in her shoes when I was upset That we weren't getting everything done by high expectations though based on the beginning if you're answer though Could that be like hey, we're gonna move the ball 1% here and that's way better than the zero percent that's been moved for a long time I was hoping for more than one percent. Okay, but you understand what I'm saying. I do you weren't sitting there going We're gonna change half the game. No no not at all, but We had been given authority Authority to pursue and make sure that President Trump's eos were actually being executed. Okay, and so that That authority allowed us to get access to the information we needed allowed the Trump Russia collusion stuff And I think that was a wake-up call because when director Gabbard this is just my personal opinion I don't think The IC was ready for Gabbard when she showed up. They were still a little scared of her Because there is statutory authority and there is a gray area on how you interpret it And when we first started I think she did have Oh have the agency a little bit on their back heels, but then they got their footing and they remembered. Oh, that's right We're you know, we've got all the deep-state people. We can make this happen We can stop this. We'll send you the report. We want to send you and the ones we don't we want to send you Yeah, and so like by statutory authority Depending on how you read it She has control of all the IT systems in the intelligence community that she knows of that she knows a very good point that she knows of because There's not like some super user at the agency who has access to every single compartment She doesn't know the guy at NSA that invented Bitcoin. Yeah See that's good job. You slip that one in I didn't that was not an agreement So no she doesn't know that guy You try to get me in trouble. What I'm trying to do. It's one here for all right. It makes me like you more So the she doesn't She was in a losing position But she fought to the very end and I don't view what she did any less honorably than what Joe Kent did okay, and um, but if If they had stayed for some other reason other that like they're like Austin around and I'm gonna make some stuff happen Even if Trump doesn't like I'm gonna well, that's subversive and the same thing on my side I was saying that a group of us like folks from feds for freedom in general the folks that I'm now surround myself with They were very Pleased even if they didn't agree with Joe Kent on Nobody said well that guy clearly is just hates Trump nobody read that statement people at least the people around me Brilliant statement he put out nobody read that and said boy that guy's a subversive asshole. Uh, no No, and in fact the response that came from the administration was so bad even the folks who I know that are in favor of The Iran war and I know people who are I'm I'm not uh, I was told no more foreign wars. Mm-hmm sort of what I voted for yep We're not voting herself out of this problem um They saw that response and they're like what is he doing? Why on God's green earth? What do he attack this man meaning Trump? Why would he attack? Joe Kent um, and That response it's the dumbest thing you could do it was so dumb also because Joe Ken is a real Marcus Aurelius. He's a better man than me. He knew it would be coming and he said that And every step of the way in a matter what the attack has been he's never gotten angry He responds to everything he will I mean it'll go respond every tweet if he has to but he does it in the most Bit by bit case by case way. Hey, I see why you're saying that. This is why I think it And like it I will say this when I knew it was coming But when Trump like hit hit him over his wife like a week or two later His deceased wife It's disgusting. I saw read when I saw that and I don't know how Joe like good for him man Yeah, no, I'm the guy who would send the angry email and tell him to go fuck off. Yeah, yeah So good on him. He's a bigger gentleman than I would be um and To really I really want to hammer this home We need Joe Kent's we need people who Act on whether you agree or disagree we need people to do what he did because Deep down in the recesses of the deep state the bureaucratic Governance there are people who agree with him, but they don't know what to do and they don't know what right looks like That's right and so for me I was like holy shit that that is that is what right looks like and um I know for a fact that That act resulted in people within the federal bureaucracy saying you know what I'm gonna make sure that all the facts are being pushed up As far up as possible and I'm talking about like festival freedom has people at department of state department of war CIA NSA NGA. They saw it and they said we are not going to sit idly by and not provide information that is truthful and It's guys like Joe Kent that catalyze that And it's it's only folks like that thing like I can't catalyze that kind of reaction No, it's gonna be like oh Jim's complaining again. Let's uh Let's do the right thing right Well, you know, this has been in the back of my mind Throughout this conversation then you even said something maybe 10 15 minutes ago Where you were referencing it a little bit or on the on the outside of it, but let me start by asking it this way What was your opinion of Edward Snowden in 2013? Uh, I thought he was a traitor. Mm-hmm. Okay. That's the truth I don't the stories I've heard about Edward Snowden inside the building and I They're all second third hand and they're all from people who uh Who Are normies. Let's just call them normies. Okay They have those huh. Yeah, we got tons of normies. Uh, I used to be in the same context. I was so happy when I was a normie Uh Witting normies are unwitting normies. I was an unwitting normie for a long time. Okay. You know, thank god. We're here for democracy um So I was an unwitting normia slow learner um Let me let me talk about it this way. Let's do a thought experiment Let's imagine. So I'm talking about using systems that are in place administrative systems in place To uh express your discontent with something your employee employer disputes or whether or not you think something illegal is happening Fraud waste abuse I think it's hugely important we use those systems And I don't know Edward Snowden's full story. I don't know if he used any of those systems some of those systems But let's do a thought experiment. Let's say he did he used every Available administrative dispute complaint Available to him And he did it by the book He uh, he went all the way through the process and he even got to the point where he goes to the uh inspector commute or sorry the uh ICIG so the inspector general for the whole community He lodges the complaint. He says I think this is credible and urgent and I want to report it to the senate select committee And I want to report it to the house permit select committee on intelligence He does all that Now during the pro this is a long process by the way, so you're probably first of all you're probably filing some complaint with OGC where you're like hey listen this doesn't look good. I'd like to talk to you about this Uh, then you start maybe with office of privacy and civil liberties since it's a metadata issue and collection on America Questions uh, you start filing these complaints It goes to the process you're talking months and if you're lucky months and months and months months. And he's like, this is wrong. Let's fix this. He gets the point where he's like, I want to report it to Congress and Senate. We just talked about this. Why didn't clapper get arrested or whatever for lying to Congress? And the guy who asked the question, by the way, I forget who the Congressman was, but he was on that committee where he had been briefed on this before that hearing and knew that the answer was a lie while it was a lie and didn't stop him. Right. So Edward Snowden would have been doing it all alone. And he would have, he would have experienced a shit ton of ass paint through the whole process. And then he would have been like, but I know it's right. So I am going to report it to Senate and Congress and would have gone there and done nothing. Done nothing. So he would have never been rewarded with some kind of justice at the end of the day. That's right. Okay. So he does all that. He's not rewarded with justice, but he's doing the right thing and he's using the process. Again, the process is broken. I've said it and this is not going to make it easy for me to justify why we need to use the process. But I would want him to use the process. That said, knowing what we know now and knowing only what I know about Edward Snowden's second third hand, he would have been fucked either way. Okay. He would have been fucked either way. So, you know, it really comes down to details. I don't, I don't have access to like the whole file on Edward Snowden and what he did or didn't do. But the truth is he probably would have been fucked either way, whether he used the system or not. You have watched my show. I've said that phrase so many times. Okay. Okay. No. I watched. I didn't catch the snow and stuff, but I've got the 14 or so. Yeah. So you nailed it. Yeah. So, okay. Well, now, now you're going to ask me when did it change? When did it change? And why would you advocate using a system that would have fucked you either way? Hundred percent. Fair questions. When did it change with Edward Snowden? I'm not sure like at the time I started actually going through the system myself and working the system and seeing how the process works. I was able to view Edward Snowden as not just somebody who my normally friends said was a trader. I viewed it as, okay, I don't know what he did or didn't do behind closed doors. I don't know his full file, but I do know he would have been fucked if he had used the whole system. And so it changed about the time. And again, this is the sad part. It only changes when somebody experiences their own pain point. And also like, like it or not, I hope that helps. I hope it helps. Like, I'm telling you, it's not flattering to me to say, hey, I didn't really learn until somebody kicked me in the nuts. No, but it's human. And I'll defend this because it's just something anyone can fall trapped to regardless of what they do. But there's a phrase I use a lot that I'm very self-aware of. And it's one of my favorite things I say because God damn is it true. It is really, really dangerous to fall down the slippery slope of saying, if I were blank, then I would definitely blank when this situation is a very serious situation. You don't fucking know till you're in it. And that doesn't mean you right away write off things when someone really does something where it's like, man, I really think that was the wrong decision and say, well, you just don't know. I'm not saying like it needs to be an extreme, but there always has to be that doorway of like, hmm, at least the understanding that that's a really tough spot to be in. And I can't say for sure how I would have handled that. So am I going to take this big rock and throw it as hard as I can at another glass house from my own glass house? Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I expected you to ask me that question about Snowden, not because I caught it on one of the other episodes, because I had never been asked about Snowden until 2023. Uh-huh. I went to Freedom Fest in 2023. Longer story, but I met what's his name? Winston Marshall, banjo player. Oh, yeah, the dude from my fucking conference. Yeah, I met him. First thing he asked me, because I was already like, you know, I had a resume out there. I was looking for work. I didn't know what I was going to do. Looking for work, I can move some band and shit. Like, uh, yeah. No one ever, no one ever described me as a musician. Um, and so the first thing he asked me was like, oh, what do you think Edward Snowden? And, you know, I remember laughing about it, because like, we're hired because we're supposed to be able to think on our feet quickly come up with decisions quickly. And I've, I just completely, for, oh, you can't talk about Snowden. It was 2023. I'd already been, I have a shit beat out of me, from the agency. And I was still like that, that visceral, I don't know how to talk snow, because I'm a little boy, why are you asking me that? You just start short circling. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like, something's, it takes a while to, uh, de-institutionalize yourself. Ain't that interesting? It does. It does. And now that you're outside of it for the first time, technically ever. Yeah. Not a long period, right? It's been three months. It's got to be strange to think back to the things that you just were like locked into, right? It's such a high place. We should be able to talk about Edward Snowden and what the implications are. We should be able to talk about, um, you know, whistleblowers have come forward, whether, whether they did it right or wrong, okay? Whether they use the system or not. Um, my point is, a lot of these people came before us, the people you've put on the program. They did it all by themselves. They had no support. Right. Um, the only reason I'm not just moving on after all of this is because we've had a ton of whistleblowers hit us up. And they're asking for help. And I'm not going to give names. I'm not going to talk about it because they, you know, please, if you're, if anyone hears this and wants to do not send us classified at all, you're going to get us in trouble. But we've had a bunch of people. In fact, whistleblowers that are out there now, they were a part of fence for freedom from the very beginning. Guys like Kyle Serafen, FBI, Steven Friend, FBI, Guarittle Boyle, FBI, I, I sort of count myself lucky to have these surly, uh, refuse nicks showing up at her doorstep saying, hey, we agree with you. We believe that, we believe that, um, what happened was wrong. And, um, I think one of the things that I've had the pleasure of working on, and again, when we started fence for freedom, it, it's just, it's all volunteer. Like the whole thing was volunteer. So we can take in these whistleblowers, we'd link them up with, uh, most of them are not sick. For the most part, all of them are not successful. But we link them up with legal services. Um, if they need us to quietly, uh, carry unclassified information to legislative offices, we've done that. Um, we've done it because it's the right thing to do. Um, they come to us for help. And I'm not done helping yet. I'm like, when I made the comparison to Don Quixote, sometimes you just got to swing at windmills, even if you know it, it may not be successful. What I think is valuable is like, we've seen now individuals make it through. And now we've got a group of people. And they're in every part of the federal government. And we're all cross talking, uh, when a problem comes up, we've got check. We're crossed on. We're like, how are we going to deal with this? What is the mechanism we can use to stop this from happening? Because it's not because we're trying to be subversive. Because we want the federal government to represent the American people. Is there any way to actually accomplish that though without coloring outside the lines at some point? And maybe in answering that question, just to be clear, so people understand you now not view Edward Snowden as a traitor and understand what he did? I understand what he did. I don't know his full file. So if there was some traitorous act, I have no idea about it. But from what I know, assuming there wasn't, assuming there wasn't, no, he would have been fucked either way. Okay. And I know that's a qualified statement, but I found nothing. I have to be very precise. I found I've experienced now, uh, through trial and error, when you're fighting to get truth to policymakers, truth up the chain of command, say the things you want to say, if you're not very precise, they're going to destroy you for no reason other than they just, they hate what you have to say. So on your own stuff though, you know, could you understand why some people out there might be thinking you might reach a point or maybe you're already at it where you do need to color outside the lines, meaning like, and again, I'm not trying to get people in trouble right now. I know. I know. Personally telling them to send classified information or whatever, but I'm saying like, it might take something like that for you to actually get some of the hurdles jumped that you want to jump. No, I hear you. So the whistleblowers who come forward, um, we're learning quite a bit about how to handle these things and the, the alternative outlets to get things done. Um, you know, we've had people come forward, say I want to go to the press. And that's happened. And I have told people, this is my honest opinion. If you wanna be a whistleblower and you wanna report wrongdoing, don't do it. And I'm being serious, my first advice to them when they come forward is like, don't do it. Like, unless you are ready for this, do not do this because we can be in your corner. Unlike, the government has all these mechanisms in place. - That's a good sell. - They have all these mechanisms in place to help you out. Let's not helping you out. It's helping the system out. If you come to us, we will help you. We will be the coach in your corner. You can get in the ring, okay? We're gonna, you know, patch your head, make sure you got water. And if you're getting beat up between rounds, we're gonna, you know, do whatever you gotta do to fix you up, but you have to take the punches. So if you wanna do it, this is on you and you need to know that up front. And I'll give you a bunch of examples of people we know. First hand, that have got the shit kicked out of them. So if you wanna do it, my first advice is don't. Don't come back in a couple of days and talk to me again. If they come back in a couple of days and they say, yeah, we wanna do it and I wanna go to the press. First of all, that's dumb. Not because, not because the press can't fix things. Actually, and we can talk about the press. - Oh, you know all about that. I do. - Yeah, you know, I use press to fix shit. - You could, the press is a way to do it, but the problem is, and I've said this before, it's Russian roulette, 'cause the press is controlled. Okay, there's not a free press. Like that last, like you've got all these systems in place. The last final, you know, if you wanna do the right thing, some people say, okay, well, let's go to the press and I'm gonna tell all. Okay, if you go to the wrong person from the press, they might call your agency back, 100%. Okay, and I tell them that too. Like, hey, listen, I am not gonna stop you. That's what you wanna do. I don't, I don't advise it. And it's not because, hold on, and it's not because I'm scared, and it's not because I think that, you know, how hot's wrong to do that. It's because you would definitely be destroyed, and if you wanna do it, you can do it, but you're gonna pay a price. It's gonna be bigger than if you tried using the system first. So my advice is try and use the system first, because at the end of the day, if you go to the press, or if you decide, like, in my case, and by the way, I went to our oversight committees. In my case, Rand Paul is not oversight for the intelligence community. It's part of the reason the CIA went apoplectic. You wanna use another outlet, like his GAC, the House Security Government Affairs Committee. I encourage people to exo, before they make that decision, which, by the way, is against the law, you better try and exhaust everything else out. But people have come to us and said, "I'm just gonna go to the press." I'm like, "You sure?" It's also a great psychological sell in your park, too, because they come to you and you say, "Don't do it." That's a challenge. That makes me wanna do it. That is not, it's like, "I'm gonna, don't come. "Do not, I'm gonna come." You know what I mean, if you ever see that meme. I have, I have, yes I have. No, you're right, there is a sell with that. It's not intentional. I'm doing it sincerely because people have been destroyed. And I've seen it firsthand. I've seen it firsthand. Take a look at Stephen Friend. Stephen Friend, that's right. FBI whistleblower almost got a job back. He did go on a podcast and say some things, but FBI whistleblower, Garrett O'Boyle. - What happened to Stephen? Did he go to jail? - No, no, no. He didn't. He's been financially ruined by this. Now, he still gets to go to sleep at night knowing you did the right thing. - Yeah, that's huge. You gotta be able to look yourself in the mirror. - Well, that's a thing, like, it's also addictive when you start doing the right thing. When you realize, "Hey, wait a minute, "I'm doing the right thing. "This is a good thing." - Your soul is cleansed. - It feels good. And it gets easy, like at first, this whole, not a philosophy that I have about not being a was, it was hard at first 'cause I was like, "Ah, yeah, do I send a email? "Do I really send an email to the coup?" The number three in the agency. Every time you do it, it gets a little easy. - It gets a little easier. - And every time you see other people do the right thing, it gets a little easier. Again, going back to Joe Kent. So you're right, bring it back to like, do you go to reporters, one of these whistleblowers, I would never encourage anybody to go to this path because there is a cost. I don't think if you'd go to this path, you should whine about the cost. And it's particularly if you're with the CIA. Because if you're with the CIA, well, particularly because what is the benefit of you going, I was hurt by it. It's like saying, I joined a gang and the gang treated me like a gang member and I'm mad. Shut the fuck up. Okay, if you're gonna do it, just do it and you know what's coming. You gotta know what's coming. And we've got a bunch of people now who have worked this system. And I'm sticking around with I still don't really like the name, that's for freedom. But it is the name, it sounds like Glowies, but we've got a bunch of people who are doing the right thing. - Real quick, and we just take a quick bathroom break and pick us up, this important point. All right, before we get into this point about the media, I do wanna say we're a little over two and a half hours in right now. Normally this would be, I'd be delaying your train and we'd be sitting here for six and a half hours a day and doing two. I got my monthly allergy shots this morning though. So I'm like a little bit slower today and bang up. So if you're cool with it, what I'd like to do is bring you back in a month or two to go through a lot of the open loops that I know people are thinking out there that we got off today or didn't go into, is this all right with you? - Yeah, and sorry, I tend to do that. So I've been more organized, maybe you'd. - No, that's all good. That's what a well-trained spy does. They change the loop and change the narrative sometimes in a conversation. - Yeah, Kathy, just pull the string. - That's right, that's right. But we'll get you back in here to be able to go through a lot of this things and details that you got access to that we are not gonna get to today. But we were on this point about the media and one of the things you said is that the free press is not free. That was like a direct quote, which is news to none of us. Out there, but I think about this. - I think it is news to a lot of people. I think there's a lot of people out there that turn on Fox News. - The Boomers? - Yeah. - Well, yeah, they don't count. - Well, everyone else I'm saying, we love our Boomers to watch this show 'cause they actually understand what's going on. But to a lot of people, like that's not news to us. That said, I think that there's a real infallibility complex that exists with an independent media, which includes podcasting and everything to where they think this won't happen to us or something like that. This is something I think about all the fucking time. I'm worried if I already see it happening all over the place. Is that a reasonable fear that places like CIA and other agencies obviously around the world or within this country are gonna look towards things like independent media and say we're gonna make that our new mainstream? - I think, I wanna make sure I understand your point here. The real concern is that the CIA's gonna infiltrate this independent media phenomenon that's occurred over the last maybe 10 years, could we say? - Yeah, it's a strike zone of flex. - And that somehow that independent piece that we finally got, maybe with podcasters, maybe with whatever else is out there, it's gonna disappear. Mike. - Yes. - Okay. Yeah, I think that's a fair concern. And again, if you had asked me this 10 years ago, I would be like, what are you talking about? We don't play games with the media, like the US media. We don't do those sort of things. That's illegal. Why would we do that? - You would have really said that. - I probably would have. I probably would have. And it's because the, like, when we do risk mitigation, we do the Washington Post test. So the Washington Post test is what happens if this operation ends up in the Washington Post? Like, okay, what's gonna go down? Now, originally, when that got, that got termed the Washington Post test, it was about sources and methods. So, like, we can't have sources and methods. Like, what if our sources get killed? I think over time, just like everything else, it got less about sources and methods and more about embarrassment. Okay, so you've got this risk mitigation measure. Well, now, you don't worry about the mainstream media. You're worrying about all of these independent outlets that are out there that, what if they find out about some big screw up? Or, you know, was 40 million gold bars or whatever it was, 30 million. And in my experience, particularly of late, there are media outlets that seem to be mouthpieces for the intelligence community and the government, okay? And you can't, like, even if you don't have inside knowledge once you start seeing the pattern over and over again, you're like, Yeah. Well, take even my, my hearing, and this is not me, like, please don't take this as me tuning my own horn. But like, when have you ever heard of an operations officer? Okay. Somebody who runs operations going out and sitting in front of Senate and saying those things. It's, I don't know if it's ever happened before where they've come out and said, I'm, you need to know this. Nobody in the mainstream media covered that at all. Okay. Nobody. There was no mainstream media that covered it aside from Fox News. Okay. Yeah. Fox News. Not great either. No. Um, and uh, so how does that happen that there can be media blackouts? How can that happen? Unless somebody's telling them you can't cover that. We don't want you to cover that. And so. Okay. You don't have to have insight knowledge. You don't have to know for sure that there's some relationship going on. Um, I sat with Tucker Carlson. Right. And he said, I know for a fact it occurs. I mean, he didn't tell me how he knows. And it's none of my business if he's got people telling him that, but I can watch a pattern. And the pattern is right now, if, if something negative is about Department of War, Department of State, CIA is not going to show up in these outlets. You know, the only outlet, I think it was the Wall Street Journal covered my, uh, had an editorial about it, um, I think. And don't quote me on that. So if you can have blackout, uh, well, the blackout doesn't just happen. It's not like they don't want news. They don't want to sell newspapers or sell soundbites. Am I answering your question? You are. And I'm thinking of another, layer to add to this. Sure. The people that are consuming CNN and Fox news from left to right. The average age four years ago, five years ago was like 68. So now it's like 72, 73. It's phasing out. This is my point over time. The people that consume independent media of any kinds from Tommy G making documentaries to me doing a podcast. That audience is growing. And that the new audience that comes in when they go to college and stuff like that, like, they're replenishing, if you will, right? Meaning it's getting way bigger. So when you go out and you do that thing, there is a media blackout on the mainstream side. You're right. Yeah. But you walk out and then you talk to Tucker and then you're talking to me and you're going to talk to other people as well. And I'm just using you as an example because you're sitting here. But like that's going to get a lot of places. People will clip this up. They already clipped up Tucker's for sure. And it goes on short form all over the place. So yes, you're getting blacked out in the old school metrics with the lost cause, the boomers, if you will. But everyone else that's movable and shapeable, you're not blacked out on. So I, you know, and I'm playing this, I'm not doing this to put on a tinful hat. I have to think like this. I have thought like this for a long time now because I've had a chance to come up higher and higher to 30,000 feet in the air and look at how my careers played out and seen the steps along the way and people who showed up. Then I'm like, that's interesting now. It wasn't interesting. Then now it's interesting now. And I'm looking at this live and I'm saying, guys like you, when you're walking out of these agencies or whatever, what better way then to say, I play for your team, then say, look, they're blacking me out in the mainstream media that you don't trust. So we can now poison the well of independent media. Yeah, that's a fair, fair, that's a fair concern. Okay, so let's play this out a little. I'm not a good actor. I'm coming onto programs to, you know, color views and you should be asking that question. And so how do you, how do you protect against that? There's no good answer. One of the protection is the decentralized nature of podcasting, okay? You know, over time, I do think there's a wisdom of the masses as well, like over time, if they start seeing that the person who's coming out and wants to cause problems for this community, this, this, this new thing, this is more decentralized. So it's a lot harder to poison the well. Like, you know, ABC, CBS, you know, Fox News, CNN, you had this limited group of outlets. I think it's harder. I think different people are going to ask different hard questions in different outlets. And if you show up at one podcast and you're a bad actor, they're going to ask you some questions and maybe you'll fumble it, you know, and after a while, you're going to fumble on the same places. It's not a great answer, I guess. It means that everybody has more personal responsibility to actually be just, not just the audience, but the folks, the podcasters like yourself that have built something special. Man, it's going to be harder as time goes on because it probably will happen. And you probably will need to be very discerning on who you come on and be willing to continually reassess as more information comes out. Hey, was that person who showed up two years ago? Was that person here to to create a problem? I don't know. Yeah, you are. And I'll give you I'll give you a direct example of one I think about with this because, you know, there's things that are clear now. But Nick Shirley, you know, who that is? I do. The Minnesota guy, right? Yes. Yeah. So Nick's a nice enough kid. He's young. He's green. I don't know it. Like, I have to be honest. I don't know a ton about it. I do. I do. I do know I was happy to see that fraud wasted abuse was being exposed to Minnesota. It also got astro turf, though. So let me give full context here. Sure. I was the first podcast Nick ever did when no one knew who he was. Really? And let me tell you how innocent that was and how it came up. My buddy, Brandon Buckingham, who's been on my show. He's on episode 200. He called me up. He's a YouTube documentary and does amazing work. He called me up Memorial Day weekend, 2024. I said, Hey, I did a video in DC did a little collab work with this young kid Nick. He's really nice. I just met him. We did a video. He's really hard worker, which is entirely true. And, you know, I think you should have him on because he's going to be big. That's okay. And Brandon to be clear is like the most independent guy there is just to be very clear about that. So it's okay. So I bring him on and nice enough kid. But right away, I could see this kid at the time he came on June, 2024. And I'm like, this kid is green as fuck. And my guy is a test. When he left, this was my opinion. It's not talking behind his back. I'm obviously saying it publicly now. And I'm like, this is a really manipulable kid. For sure. I was retarded when I was 22. In fact, I was retarded when I was 27. He's 22 at the time. And so hard worker goes around. He starts blowing up and everything. And then, you know, I had concerns with, as an example, he calls himself a journalist. But then he posts excited videos where he's going in and briefing the president. Journalists don't brief a politician. Journalist question. Yeah. A politician. You know this one. And so privately, I had no problem when people would ask me, this is exactly what I would say. I'd say Nick's a really nice kid. He does some good work. He's young. And he thinks he's a journalist. I do take issue with him calling himself a journalist. He's a commentator. He has a point of view. When the fraud story happened, which was based on some truth for sure, it got astroturfed. I have never seen a story. It was impressive what he found. But that was retweeted by the entire right wing machine. It's now come out publicly that people with the administration were using this as an opportunity to get it into the atmosphere and everything. And he got used. And I do believe that there's people who call him waiting and say he's like an agent and stuff to be clear. I don't really talk with Nick, but I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I don't think he is. When people look at that though now, and they see that Trump announces the Greenland thing, and within two minutes of his true social going up, Nick Shirley's releasing a video of him doing an ice bath in Greenland with a bunch of his fellow Americans. Do you understand what people look at this and say, fuck, the game is up. How is this different than, you know, the guys on the payroll doing COVID death counts on CNN in 2020? Yeah. Yeah. I might do see exactly what you're saying. I don't know if I have a good answer for you on it. I guess for me, you got to take each individual who's coming on individually. And again, it's putting it all back on you. It's putting on your audience to make a decision for themselves. When people come on, I look at what is the cost for that person. And I always tend to believe folks maybe this is wrong too, where it looks like there's probably going to be a cost associated with speaking to independent outlets. I hope I'm answering your question. I think I am, but there's no good answer. And the answer is discernment. Right, but do you think it's more, let me make it more, a little more binary here. Yeah. Is it more common, whether you're talking on mainstream media, independent, any form of media, a manipulation that occurs? Is it more common for the agency to utilize the agency, the powers to be, to utilize the useful idiot scale or the winning participant scale? And so let me just, and I'm just using this as an example, because I just gave the Nick example and I'm not going to put my opinion on it or anything. But do you think Nick is more likely literally working for the team, and he is fully aware of that, or is he just a very useful idiot at this point? So what's the cost, useful idiot cost less? Okay. You know, like, and you're going to go for, I don't mean low cost and like financial, but what's the cost, the risk? Useful idiots are much better than on team, whatever. Because on team, whatever, that means that they know something, some secrets that are meant to be kept. And the more people that are in that secret, the harder it is to keep it. So useful idiots are very, they're called useful idiots because they're useful. And so I think that if you're going to, if you're going to go about this, the more useful idiots you have, the better. You get more done. And it's low cost because like when somebody comes and says, oh, I think that guy's working for the government and be like, he's not like, well, why would you think that? And just from my experience inside the bureaucracy, I think we had sort of mentioned this already. You know, it's worse than you think because it's not a conspiracy if it's culture. You can't vote out culture. And if the culture is the institution, I said, we're going to do this. And I'm going to justify it because I've had years of justification that have led up to this. Those are useful idiots too. So if you're already using that model internal to the bureaucracy on why not just use it? How do you possibly, if it's that deep rooted though, on the inside and then the levers that are used on the outside. Remove the outside because they have no, whether you're waiting or a useful idiot, they have no effect on how things can be handled internally. Let me stop you right there on that. Actually, you do. So every time you bring somebody out and you highlight whether it's useful idiots doing things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I should have said that better. Yes. But I'm saying like we can move public opinion. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it's not the public who gets to hit the red button in there, right? Right. Right. So for people out there thinking based on hearing guys like you talk and other people talk, holy shit, this, he's saying it's even worse. It's not just a conspiracy. It's the fucking culture. And they go just hit the red button and get rid of it. Do you understand why they say that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the easiest thing to do if you don't like something is just make it go away. Just get rid of it. Clear it off the table. Okay. But here's the problem. And this is, maybe this is my own sort of institutional blinders. Maybe it's my own philosophical blinders. I always worry about like what's going to replace it. I'm a conservative. Okay. I've always been a conservative with a, you know, I voted for Ross Perot because I thought four trillion in debt was stupid jokes on me. It's 40 trillion. But, you know, okay, let's just wipe it off the table. First of all, how are you going to do that? Won't ever happen. But hit the red button, get rid of all of it. What replaces it? And I'm not, I'm not just like, for example, for wins sort of thing like, hey, should we just get rid of the CIA? Let's use that as an example. Okay. If you had asked me that a long time ago, I'd be like, what are you talking about? Now I'm like, I'm not saying we should get rid of it yet, but I am saying we should strip it down to its bolts and we should examine every single piece of it. We need another church committee. We need to go bolt by bolt through that thing and decide what is worth keeping. And part of it probably is my own, just my own beliefs. I'm a conservative and conservatives believe institutions are important and they don't want to destroy institutions. Okay. People can judge me on that. That's just, I worry about a place without some structure right or wrong. But I'm at the point now where I'm like, yeah, let's strip things down to the bones. I'll strip everything down and we can take a hell. We'll pull the paint off. We'll do everything. Look what happened at church though. Yeah. I'm not church committee is nuts. No, but I'm saying he was literally spent out of office by dark money in his next election cycle because he did that. Yeah, I mean Thomas Massey. There you go. So like, don't be wrong. I'm on team Massey too. We can talk about Epstein if you want. But we're going to do that next time. Okay. You know, your question is like, why not just hit the red button? I think a lot of people are getting there and it's dangerous to me to hit the red button. That means you've decided that there is nothing else you can do. Whoa. It's, it, it leans into that. There's some people out there and I've heard them say, well, this is leading towards violence and, you know, history has proven that violence does solve things. Okay. And I'm, I'm sure you're saying, I'm sorry. I'm drawing a parallel here. I shouldn't. You know, you start going down a road. You're like, get rid of everything. It's probably my own, hang ups, I guess. I worry about what, what replaces it. And if that makes me a bad person, I guess I'm a bad person, but I am of the mindset that boy, it's so deep right now. It's culture. It's culture. And there's solutions, but it's not like a red button solution. The solution is like, there's a brownstone institute. Have you heard a brownstone institute? Sounds familiar. Formed during COVID. I read them their products religiously and one of them talk about, you talk a lot about institutional capture. Okay. They've coined a term and boy, I hope I don't screw that epistemological, whatever. Epistemic capture where it's not just like the institution, it's like the whole education system and the mode of thought that goes into it. I think that's probably pretty accurate. And so you're like, well, if it's that bad, why not just hit the red button? Well, it doesn't, it won't fix it. It won't make it better for us. It won't, and I can't, I know, I sound like some, you know, naive polyanna. No, no, I understand why you're saying what you're saying, because realistically, I may have an intense hatred for a lot of what these places have become and to be clear, I do. But if like, let's say you did the fun option, you just burned it all down in one night, you know, and suddenly the next day we didn't have every three-letter agency there is, it might be, if you did it that way, you would never get around to the other side to actually survive through this period because you might just be dead overnight. Yeah. It's a shitty place to be. So I am in agreement that no government agency deserves any trust whatsoever right now. 100% on board with that. Like, when they come out and say, hey, you're not a horse, don't take Ivermectin, or they come out and say, or I come out and say, hey, there's a problem with the whole gain of function research that's going on in the ties with the ICI, come out and say that publicly. You shouldn't believe us. We haven't earned trust. In fact, we've just continually lost trust. But I'm not at the point where I'm ready to say the red button option for every agency and department that's, you know, part of this mess. And maybe it's fair. Maybe you ask me this in two years, maybe I'll have a completely different view on it. But as of right now, I think we should strip things down to the bones. I think the only way to hold the government accountable is to make the government much, much smaller. And I mean firing a lot of people. A lot of people. How does that? So just in theory for people to understand what that would do. When you say fire a lot of people, ideally, you're talking about identify two different types of things. I'm putting words in your mouth. So correct me if I'm wrong. People that are redundant in jobs that don't matter and on one end. And then also people that have gotten into positions that are extremely corruptible and they become corrupted. Yeah. Okay. Both of that is true. But I think we've actually tested this out already. During COVID, at any given time, there's only 50% of the people in the office at any given time, if they had to go into the office. Okay, so we were running on all cylinders with 50% of the people. By that math, we could probably lose 50% of the people, you know, in certain agencies and departments, that's how it was running. We did get a window into how all these agencies were doing. They moved out of the building and did work from home with a lot of agencies and departments. And, you know, productivity, you know, there's questions about productivity for people working from home or not working from home. I don't know the answers to that. What I do know is they found new efficiencies to help get things done with fewer people who were out because they've been quarantined. So, we've already proven we can get by with a whole lot less government workers. And, um, I'm organized with a bunch of government workers who actually agree that like, yeah, you know, if you want accountability, you can't have this Byzantine labyrinth of bureaucracies and I call it, I've been calling it a gain of function government because we have tweaked this stupid thing over and over like the Constitution is contract law. If it's not in the contract, you don't get to do it. It's how contract law works, okay, but over time, we've tweaked it, we've messed with it because we think, oh, if we do this one fix, this one, this will make it all better. This, I'll tell you what, Department of Labor will be perfect after this. Mm-hmm. Well, we tweaked it so far that we've got this manipulated mess that doesn't respond to any kind of cajoling from the legislature, from the executive branch, even litigation doesn't work. So I'm not saying we should burn it down, but I'm certainly not advertising for keeping it. Um, I hope I answered your question. You did. You did on that one. Are you optimistic about America 50 years from now? Huh. I was ever asked me that. I'm generally an optimist, but no, um, boy, no, I'm not, um, I, you know, part of the reason I've been fighting so vociferously with this group of other government employees who are nobody's like me. I mean, we're just part of the machinery is because I look at my son and I actually could view a day where his life is worse than mine was. Not that mine was bad. Mine was a good life, but the whole point of having kids and propagating is you hope to God, God with a big G, that their life is going to be better. And I'm looking around at a, at one point, there was a, we might have to show our papers to eat at a cafe or get groceries. If that could happen in the United States, that tells me that we are, we're spiraling, we're circling the toilet and, um, that's not good. Let me take a look at like broken promises from this administration, like I, I won't lie, I was excited that Trump got elected and I had differences with what he wanted policy wise. It didn't care because he was the greatest disruptor we've ever seen, ever. The problem is he's not a finisher, okay? So, uh, I want the greatest finisher we've ever seen and we're not getting it. We're not getting it. He lied, he either lied or he just, I don't know, we're going to really get into this next time. You're here for sure. So we'll have a chance to fully litigate that, but it, it, it is interesting. Even if you really disliked his first term and didn't agree with his policies and shit like that pre-COVID, because I've always said that's not to excuse how things were handled there, but like, I truly believe that shit show would have happened to any president. And it's like, it kind of is what it is. But if you just look like January 2017 until March 2020 and think about that time, it wasn't the worst thing you've ever seen. Like just objectively. Right. Regardless of what your politics are. Yeah, he was chaotic. Yeah, he tweeted way too much. Yeah, you know, there, there's, I have policy differences with him and everything, but like, I could point to way worse times like with, with, with how things were going administratively down to the people and what the economy was and this, that and the third. This time, you know, I've likened it this way. The Biden administration was drunk and asleep at the wheel and it was four years that it just, it seemed like every time they could say something wrong, they chose to say something wrong. But it was almost like imagine just leaving the water on, letting the water run and leaving your house for three weeks, okay? Yeah, exactly. This administration is like breaking the pipe and leaving your house for three weeks. That's two different sides of the same fucking problem. Yeah. And like, if, if you suspected, there was a unit party before this, there is no way anyone with two eyes and ears and, you know, there's no way you can, you can not escape the fact that we, we don't have some two party system that you're going to vote for this side or vote for that side. And again, I don't want to be like somebody who says, don't vote. I actually don't. I, I want you to vote. The problem is we aren't going to vote our way out of this problem. It requires a lot of personal responsibility at this point. And when I mentioned before that I've heard people talk about violence, I'm like, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, okay? I've been to some third world locations. I was in Liberia for a while. You know, they had a. Oh, shit. Yeah, I was there during the Ebola crisis, a while back. In 2014? Yeah. And the government buildings and the buildings in the city of Monrovia are riddled with bullet holes from a war that occurred like a decade prior, okay? That was still there. People have no idea what they're talking about when they say prepare for violence. And we're too soft as a society right now to really understand what that means. Completely agree. And so please, let's. and again, I get it. History has proven time and time again that violence solves problems all the time. When you. I almost talked to you earlier when you said that. Are you making a distinction though when you say that? Yes. Meaning violence solves problems through war, but maybe not necessarily through well-intentioned people's revolutions? I'm not advocating for it. What I'm saying is when you choose violence, you will solve a problem. Like some side's going to win at the end of the day. And for now, okay, the cost of that is just stupid. And we need to do the one thing, and I said this once before, but we need to do the one thing that's never been done in history. We are spiraling right now, and when you ask me, I wish you hadn't asked me that, but I'm glad you did, I guess. I am not optimistic about 50 years from now, and I'm not optimistic because I have people legitimately people I like and respect who say there's a possibility of violence. If they're saying it out loud, if they're instantiating that, there's a possibility of violence. And we cannot. We need to do the one thing that's never been done in history and solve something without violence for once. Like let's try and make this work, please, because you've got things so vicious on either side of this fake divide, okay, this fake divide between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. Up down. Yeah, that's all bullshit. And other people have made us hate the other side. I have conversations with people, I'll tell you a little anecdote, I had a friend, I'm not going to call him a friend because he was never actually a close friend, but he was somebody I knew from high school. And I was trying to center myself, you know, this has been a discombobulating half decade for me. Like, you know, everything I thought I was, I wasn't anymore. And so I was like, what can I do to sort of recenter myself? And there was a guy I knew who was a musician, a musician when I was a kid, he's been tiring, he's been toiling away, he's my age, give or take, a little bit older, doing the rock and roll thing, playing music, love is music, absolutely adore it. If you were to ask me whether we agreed on anything whatsoever, no. Like he is on the complete opposite side of everything I believe in, philosophically. But we grew up in the same suburb in Cleveland, you know, no one ever described me as musical, I mean, I was in a musical with a, that was Baby John and West Side Story. There you go. There you go. You know, and like he was, he was one of the main, I mean, he's a real artist, a musician. And I gave, I wanted to reconnect with something that would center me, that would bring me back to the, like, like it or not, the place where you grew up, the people you grew up with. You might grow distant from them, but there's like a shared bond. And like if you can reconnect with some of them, sometimes it is a healthy thing. Hell yeah. Sometimes. that always, that maybe not on Facebook, but I mean like in a real sense. - Yeah, in a real way. - So I took the time out of a, I gave him the most valuable thing I had at the time, which was my time. He's in another state, far away. And I made the time to try and catch his shows. Now again, we're not talking about a rock star. We're talking about a guy who is a real artist 'cause he's a struggling artist. And I have a feeling that, you know, years from now when he's long dead, people might go back and listen to what he created and be like, "This is something special." He stopped talking to me. As soon as he found out where I was working and what I was doing right now for this administration. Or I was dumbfounded that I had made real effort. Like I had, how many adults, how many 50 something year old adults say, you know what I'm gonna do? Make effort to do something different and just connect with somebody that I know we disagree on like everything. But he's, he's somebody I knew as a kid. And like there was no, like I didn't talk about politics or anything, I didn't like, I gave him, yeah. And that's where we're at right now. That's where we're at right now. And it like I hate to admit it. It actually hurt my feelings and I'm a grown man. - Listen, there's, and I'm sorry that happened to you, there's still shit that happens like that. And you know, you have to have at the same time the courage to be able to give opinions regardless of where they land politically. Sometimes they're not even political and not worry about some of the fallout from people who don't wanna hear them. - Yeah. - And it's just, it's a reality of human nature. And I hope that guys like, you know, your friend there can wake up to the things we do agree on. Because unfortunately we've set the bar so low at this point that there is some, and I don't mean it this way, low hanging fruit. I don't know, rape, genocide, masturbolence. - Right. - That everybody who's normal can agree on and those are the things we need to coalesce around. You had yeagly on here. - Mike A. - Yeah, okay. We could talk about that too. Like, we have a surveillance problem. And the tools that empowered us after 9/11, smarter people than me were saying, "Hey, we're gonna watch out. "These tools will be turned against us." And, you know. - Yeah, where were they? - Some of them did say it. I was not one of them. I was like, good thing we got this 'cause we got some retribution to take care of. Okay? Like, I know, like, I'm sorry, this is-- - I appreciate your confession. - You know, like, I was like, hey, we got it. We got some come-up and-- - I suppose you use your sins now or something? - No, no, I'm talking to a priest about that. But, you know, we got some come-up ands to take care of. And that was how I felt back then. And, you know, everybody learns fast. Some people learn faster than others. But, you know, this surveillance state thing, it's all based on tools and the techniques that were supposed to be employed against foreign terrorists who want to harm us. And then, you know, smart people said, I don't know if we should be doing this. - It's the best cover for the terrorists at home. - Yeah. Yeah, domestic terrorists who're talking about? - No. No, the people who would never be labeled that who think that they're the good guy, but they're not. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Oh, boy, there's a lot to unpack with that. But, you know, some of the stuff, I believe, that director Gabbard released had to do with this whole labeling people domestically. - Sure, yeah, that's a separate issue too. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - I meant that more symbolically, dude. - All right, let's have you back in a month or two. - Sure. - And we can really dig into it. - I'm not wasting your time, am I? - Not at all. - Now, this is very, very fascinating. - Shotgun blast right now. Take a look at what we've said and we can cover the things that I haven't. - Hell yeah. - Yeah, there's a lot on the bone. There's a lot on the bone that we didn't talk about. Like you said, you even brought up the Epstein thing and that's certainly something to talk about. - I definitely want to talk to you about Epstein. - Okay. - And no, if we're off. - No, we're still on. - You're still on? - Yeah, we're talking. - Yeah, yeah. I definitely want to talk about Epstein. - Okay. - Because I've already heard journalists out there saying, hey, it's not as big a thing as you think. And you're like, what? It's the most, it is, what's his name? And I love Matt Tai-Ebi. But he replaced Walter Kern with a guy named Michael Story. - Ah, that's it. - Michael Tracy. - Michael Tracy. - Yeah. - Michael Tracy. Sorry, sorry. And I tried really hard because I love Matt Tai-Ebi. He reminds me of, like. - I don't know what happened to him on this. - I don't know either. But he's always reminded me of that older brother who like, take you and go, listen, I'm going to teach you how to smoke a bowl. I'm going to teach you the etiquette on smoking bullets. Puff, puff, pass. No more, puffs, pass. Okay, because if you do more than that, it's in polite. Everybody gets a turn. And so, like, and then he brings that guy on. I'm like, this is the most important story that has ever hit in recorded history. You just stop, stop with this. Okay, he sure looks like an intelligence asset to me. Okay, we need to talk about states involved. We need to talk about what the implications are. Why haven't we seen any action, FBI, DOJ, CIA? 'Cause there is a foreign nexus and Intel foreign nexus, okay? And I don't want to go into sources and methods, obviously, 'cause I don't want to get in trouble. But I guarantee you, I could, in a matter of months, pull together an investigation at the CIA that is completely foreign-focused that would get at some key questions. And the real issue, too, is it goes back to my problem with this culture thing and guardrails and, you know, the deep state, for sure, you look at Epstein's clients list 'cause it's a client list, okay? Is bullshit that they're talking about where, no, I don't know. Not clients, you know, just visitors. I don't know what the fuck they're calling 'em. - A lot of visitors. - A lot of visitors, people live right next door, too. And so you start looking at that and you take a look at these visitors. I guarantee you, these foreigners. I'm talking about foreigners. I'm not talking about the Americans, the foreigners. Either they showed up at some point in intelligence collection and someone ignored it or they didn't. Both are bad answers, if they didn't. - Bad intelligence. - Then you suck at your job, okay? Because you look at the list of people that are foreigners and if they've got any kind of connections to key government targets or key, like, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, we can cross that one off. We'll look at the other one for sure, yeah. - All right, that was a great little, we're gonna leave people on that 'cause we're gonna, the next conversation, we will get deep into that. And like I said, today I just kind of wanted to let you state your case, like who you are, let people get to know you, put it out there. I think you did a really good job with that. And now, next time we can dig through the details and some of the stuff you got to look at that, in some cases you've already talked about publicly, which I think if that's for all the right intentions, that's very brave of you, because these are some serious, serious times and serious, serious topics. - Yeah, I appreciate it. - All right, well, thank you for doing it, Jim. We'll do it again soon. - Okay, sounds good. - Everybody else you know what it is, give it a thought, get back to me. Peace. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. Thank you.