#145: CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou: “If they want you, they will get you”

28:01But the real power for you, which is why it hurt the most, is the fact that you were able to separate yourself from that and actually build a home and something that feels like the volume can turn down in your life, which has nothing to do with the money. And so I guess, do you think that that's an area where you guys would definitely disagree with your views? Yeah. Yeah. listen, Andrew simply doesn't know what he's talking about. It's not, it's not the money at all. Not from any angle. Yes, a majority of sources who agree to be recruited are doing it for the money. But there are many, many, many other reasons why people agree to be recruited.

28:42Many other reasons. Yeah. Yeah. With all due respect, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah. When you were, like, When you were in service and you were working with the CIA, was there any main things that caught you by surprise? Like before going into it and then you dive into the line of work that you were doing, like, is there anything that like really shocked you that like comes to your mind straight away? Really shocked me. Well, there were a couple of things, yeah, that really shocked me that I can't talk about. when I first joined as a junior, junior analyst, yeah, there were some things.

29:28I remember the first four, five, six weeks, I would just sit at my desk and say, wow. Like I had no idea. And then I say something in my first book when I switched to operations. I'm sitting on one side of a petition and I'm going through thousands of pages of operational files on Greek terrorism. And I'm going through this file, and I said, oh my God. And this voice from the other side of the partition, somebody I didn't know, says, you going through the Greek files? And I said, yeah. And he says, that's what everybody says when they go through the Greek files. And I was like, wow, man. Like that was some bad shit in the 60s and 70s and the 80s.

30:16So why are you not able to share what you read in the files? Oh, it's still, it's still, they call it currently and properly classified. Yeah. Okay. And so what's the main reason that a lot of the information is hidden? Like what is the main reason? Mostly to protect sources and methods. If there's a CIA source, especially if that source is still alive, you have to protect the identity at all costs. right right so so when the cia go and try and find the the the secrets and everything they're finding the sources certain people and oh yeah and to get the secrets out they need to oh yeah listen if if you're a cia case officer let's say and you need to penetrate you know isis you don't look like you could fit into isis so what you do is you recruit somebody who does fit in ISIS or maybe is already in ISIS.

31:09And that's how you get your information. That's how you disrupt the next attack. You have that guy working for you, coming out and reporting back to you. It's the same everywhere. You mentioned on the Jack Neill podcast that some of the different things that you saw, like drones that are in tiny little

31:31dragonflies and stuff. Was there any times where you were on missions where you felt unsafe with what some of the other countries were doing? That's a good question.

31:52Not really. In almost all the operations that I ever worked on, they were joint with liaison. So we were working together. I mean, some services, rather, are better than others. The Pakistanis weren't as technologically sophisticated as we were, for example. There are other countries I was working with where I just didn't trust them very much. And then there were some, especially in the Middle East, where we trusted each other with our lives. But no, I never felt like I was in danger because of the service. There were a couple of odd events, I guess. I was working jointly with one service, and it was supposed to be joint, and I left my hotel, realized I had forgotten my wallet.

32:45So when I got to the exit of the hotel, I turned around, went back up to the room. There's a guy in my room. He's got my phone unscrewed. I said, what are you doing? He says, fixing the phone. I said, there's nothing wrong with the phone. He says, now it works even better. I said, come on, you guys. We're supposed to be working together here. You're bugging my room? Why don't you bug the bad guy's room? And I was just, well, I finally got to the meeting. I was like, you have to stop. Either we're going to do this together or not. What were they doing to your phone? Bugging it. What does that mean?

33:16Putting a microphone in it. The guy on your team? Yeah. Damn. Talk to me about trust then. Do you find and build great trust with the people you're working with? Or is there a lot of skepticism? Well, with other CIA people, you mean, or foreign liaison? CIA people. Oh, yeah, yeah. You have to trust each other with your lives. You have to. Right. But then the foreign people, you obviously not trust. Yeah, you know, Ronald Reagan used to say, trust but verify. So you're going to trust the Brits, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders. They're the only ones that you trust for you. The only ones.

33:54Everybody else, you have to keep one eye open. Yeah. Yeah. so just before we recorded you mentioned that uh you know you had a hard time with one of your sons thinking that you put him in a sticky situation and it it it kind of like made the relationship struggle a little bit from from that was that one of those things that like was that one of those negative things that happened from from you being the whistleblower Was that one of the things making it harder for your family? Yeah, that was one of the things. I put a great deal of pressure on my family by doing this. I didn't realize it was going to be the major international story that it was.

34:39I don't think any of us did on either side, but it did. It took on a life of its own. And so it caused a lot of pressure and a lot of friction. Was it a very thought out decision, speaking up on it? Well, I mean, I considered it for a week. We talked about it for a week in advance. Should I do it? Should I not do it? And my wife and I. And I decided to do it. You know, in part, I did it for selfish reasons, for self-preservation, because a reporter for ABC News had called me and said that he had heard from a source that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah, this Al-Qaeda prisoner. I said, absolutely untrue.

35:24I never laid a hand on him or on any other prisoner ever. But then it became apparent to me that the source was at the White House, that the story was leaking from somewhere, that there was this torture program and that they were going to blame me. And I said, oh, no, you don't. And so I called him back and I said, I'll give you your interview. And I decided just to tell the truth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've said before, I wish I could say that, you know, I stood up for a moral purpose and I told them that, and that wasn't it at all. They were just going to try to pin it on me. And I was like, oh, no, you don't.

36:05I'm going to, I'm going to come out first with the truth and let the American people make their decision who they believe. And is there anything you can share that the CIA are doing that might be affecting just everyday people? Oh, I think that there are a million questions out there about tech. You know, post 9-11, the CIA got a congressional waiver to begin investing in tech companies, beginning with Palantir. CIA was the very first investor in Palantir. CIA has a venture capital fund called In-Q-Tel in which they invest billions of dollars or have invested billions of dollars over the years in tech startups so that they can use that tech in espionage.

36:48Well, is the tech being used against Americans? Ed Snowden says it is. Tom Drake says it is. Julian Assange says it is. You know, whistleblowers from the big tech companies, you know, Google and Yahoo and Twitter and Facebook and all these other ones. They say it is. I think it is. How do you think that plays out, controlling what we see online? Probably in part. But what is more frightening to me is that the CIA, NSA are not allowed to spy on Americans, right? It's even a part of NSA's charter that it cannot spy on Americans. And they do spy on Americans. Yeah. Do you think they cannot spy on Americans, but they can make you tick something that allows them to, like, you know how there's like pop-ups on Instagram or whatever, or just new terms and conditions or whatever, and then all of a sudden they're listening to every word you say.

37:48Do you think there's something involved with the CIA and the higher-ups that, like, is manipulating the way that they can like listen to everything. Like they're like, like listening to the phones. Well, we know from the vault seven revelations from 2017, Joshua Schulte, uh, is alleged to have, uh, sent the crown jewels of the CIA to WikiLeaks. And he says exactly that, that they are listening to us constantly. You know, just recently I was on the phone with a friend of mine and I was saying that, uh, I've gotten some death threats lately from some truly unhinged lunatics. And he said, oh, you should take a concealed carry course.

38:36I said, no, I've taken a concealed carry course and I had a concealed carry permit. But because I have a felony conviction, I had to give up my gun and I can only get it back if I receive a presidential pardon. Literally, as soon as we hung up the phone, every single ad on my Facebook feed was for a concealed carry class. Every single ad. So you know they're listening. They tell you in the terms of use that they're listening. But it's for a better advertising experience, right? At least that's what they want us to believe. Well, Joshua Schulte told us that the CIA is able to remotely take over control of your car.

39:17by hacking into his computer. Or it's able to turn your smart TV speaker into a microphone so that it broadcasts back to them everything that's being said in the room, even when the TV's off. And those are just two out of dozens and dozens of technical operations that he revealed to us. So no, I don't trust the CIA or NSA or the FBI or any of these other national security agencies to protect my civil rights and civil liberties. No. It's crazy. It does make me think around how you really can't trust anything that you see. And it's concerning the amount people take things as gospel and run with it.

40:05Well, I think it wasn't, I don't know the exact numbers, but like 50 % of the accounts online are bots. Right. 50%. something crazy like this. Yeah. And, and, and so then you just go, okay, like if I see something online, I've got to like look at it twice and maybe not take it as gospel and maybe do my own research and figure out why that's being presented to me in the first place. Because if they can, if they can listen to a conversation that you're having in real life and then moments later pop up a perfect ad and everyone listening to this has experienced this, pop up a perfect ad of that thing.

40:42whether it's swimming trunks or a towel or hand soap, whatever it is, watch me get all these right now. Yeah. Right. If they can do that, it makes me question what else they can do. How can they do that so quickly? Surely if they planned something or they planned a agenda that they're trying to push or whatever it is, they could probably get it on your phone relatively easy. Sure. And so then it does make me wonder. And you've seen investigative journalists experiment with phone tracking systems, too, where when you could take the battery out of the phone, they'd take the battery out of the phone.

41:20But the backup battery continues to send a ping showing your location. What's the point of taking the battery out of the phone if it's still tracking you? Wait, what's this? Can you explain this? Yeah, not the current phones that we have, but 10 years ago, you used to be able to take the battery out of the phone. right, if you wanted privacy. But there were backup batteries in phones. And so even if you take the battery out, the backup battery continued to send a ping showing your location. Who's it reporting to? If I take the battery out of the phone, that means I don't want the phone tracking me.

41:54But it continued to track. And now you can't take the battery out of the phone. Even when you shut the phone off, it continues to track your location. Do you think anything's changed dramatically since the CIA has started investing in big tech companies? I do. I do. When I was in the CIA, most of the spy gadgets that we used, we just bought on the open market. There used to be these shops in London, New York, and Washington called the Spy Store, the Spy Shop, one or the other. It was over on M Street, 18th. but it was it was cheaper faster easier to just buy something that had already been invented than it was to just reinvent the wheel from scratch and spend a million dollars in development now you just buy it off of I mean for a while we would just buy it off of Amazon well now with these partnerships with big tech the CIA's got its own you know satellites and all kinds of crazy advanced things a guy that I sat next to for years who I really I liked and respected deeply is now the director of technology for the for the whole cia managing these relationships that we have we that the that the cia has with uh big tech scary it it does where does it end yeah and then with ai and all the rest of it coming in you just go i wonder the amount of control maybe bustamante is believing because he needs to escape

43:27maybe the third world country so that we can maybe be hidden a bit more the first thing he had to do is heed the CIA training do not attract attention to yourself by getting rid of the sideshow bob hairdo and then maybe he can move overseas and not be so easily noticed do you think that's the thing why he got rid of the hair? yeah I do what do you mean? yeah you can't have hair like that in the CIA he did not have hair like that in the CIA don't attract attention to yourself if you're going undercover and you look like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons you're not doing cover very well

44:06sorry

44:17Sideshow Bob is crazy man but he looks like Sideshow Bob right Yeah. I mean. I'm waiting for him to break out into, you know, HMS Pinafore.

44:34Is there an actual beast between you two? No. No? I met the guy one time. We had a good debate. It was all in good fun. Yeah. We take a little poke at each other every once in a while. But he's a good guy. Yeah. No, he's cool. He was lovely inviting me to his home. And I appreciated it. It was great. Great. I want to talk about some of the massive world events that have happened and you've been experienced. You've experienced some of them. You've got insight on some of them. Some of them being during your time working with the CIA. If we go back to 9-11, where were you at that time? I was in CIA headquarters at the Counterterrorism Center.

45:14that morning the director of counterterrorism Kofor Black and I had a meeting at the White House with Condoleezza Rice scheduled for 9 o 'clock and so at 8.10 the driver called me to say that the car was ready they were waiting for us at the south at the south door I walked over to Kofor's office to tell him that the car was ready to take us to the White House and these are the days before you could watch TV on your computer. So Kofor's secretary had a little TV, like a five-inch TV on her desk, and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was burning. So I went up there and I looked at it, I said, what happened to the World Trade Center?

45:54And she said, a plane hit it. And I said, and I've said this before, because I'm so smart. I said, you know, that happened once before. In 1930, a plane hit the Empire State Building, but it was pouring rain. It was really foggy that day. It's so crystal clear today. How can you not see that you're flying into the World Trade Center? And just as I said the words, the second plane hit. And then she turned to me and she said, did you see that or did I imagine it? And I ran back to my office. I said, guys, two planes just hit both towers of the World Trade Center. I think we're under attack. Everybody ran up to Kofor's office.

46:33There were these TVs that were hanging from the ceiling. it was like CNN, MSNBC. I don't think there was a Fox News yet. There may have been, I don't recall, but BBC and Kanael Ploos and the Russians and the Chinese. And it was all the same scene. And then, you know, a plane hits the Pentagon and it's like, oh no, this is, this is what they've been talking about for months. We knew something was going to happen for months and we just didn't know where, where it was going to be. The conventional wisdom was that Al Qaeda was going to hit another American embassy overseas, take down a big embassy.

47:10We just didn't think it was going to be here in the United States. So, so you knew something was happening. On, on July 6th of that year, I've told this story many times, but on July 6th that year, totally, completely normal day for me. I was hosting a group of Middle Eastern intelligence officers at headquarters. We did this every day. You do a day full of briefings. You take them upstairs to shake the director's hand, get a photo op. You exchange gifts. You take them out to a fancy dinner that night. And the next day you do it with a group from a different country every day. So that day, and these are all like mid-level guys at the major lieutenant colonel level.

47:53So that day I was hosting them and I scheduled a briefing, a one-hour briefing with a very junior analyst on Al-Qaeda. So when it came time for the briefing, instead of this junior analyst coming, Kofor Black comes with the director of operations for the Osama bin Laden group. And I was so surprised. I jumped up. I said, oh, gentlemen, this is Kofor Black. He's the director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. And this is the head of operations. And Kofor sat down with his grave tone. And he said, something terrible is going to happen. We don't know exactly when or where, but we know it's going to be an attack on an unprecedented scale.

48:41We're hearing chatter coming from the Al-Qaeda training camps where camp commanders are talking to their students and they're crying on the phone and saying, I'll see you in paradise. We're hearing code words for a massive attack. The honey salesman's coming with vast quantities of honey. There's going to be a giant wedding, an enormous football match, all code words for an attack. He said, I'm begging you, if you have any sources inside Al Qaeda, please help us. And they just kind of sat there and looked at him. Nobody said anything. At the end of the day, I sent them back to the hotel told them I'd pick them up in two hours for dinner And then I went over to kofar's office to thank him for taking the time the guy's important He's meeting with the president every day and he's going to take an hour and come and talk to these guys So I said kofar.

49:38I have to ask you I don't work on al-qaeda Were you saying that just for their benefit or were you serious? And he said no, I was deadly serious Something terrible is going to happen And then two months later it happened I knew immediately it was what he was talking about. So there's so many different stories around 9-11 and so many different things of conspiracies and different things of what people think happened. For you, how much clarity do you have and how much confidence do you have in what actually happened? I'm confident. I don't believe it was the Jews, the Saudi royal family, the lizard people, Dick Cheney, the Bushes, thermite paint that was put on the wall in the 1970s.

50:38All the bolts were removed by Larry what's his name. No. Al-Qaeda did it. Damn. Hmm. yeah i i think it's just a fascinating one because if we tie back into how you see people being out of control the media especially if they can listen to us and they can push whatever they want it makes me wonder with how uh with the power of social media now like how much can they hide everything that they do because i guess if they can just flood your feed with whatever they want, how much can they hide all of their laundry? And how much can they just dissolve things? And you see this happen all the time, right?

51:25You see all of a sudden COVID's the biggest problem, and then next minute Black Lives Matter happens, and then all of a sudden COVID's irrelevant, and then this happens, and then Epstein. It's a wag the dog situation. It certainly can be. And then when you've got the law that banned propagandization of the American people effectively overturned in 2015, 2016, you're right. Of course, people are going to think there's a conspiracy. There could be. I think on 9-11, there wasn't. I think the only conspiracy was a conspiracy of silence. I think the Israelis probably had advanced warning that there was going to be an attack in the United States.

52:07That's why there were so many Israeli intelligence officers in New York that day. But they knew that if we were going to be attacked, we were going to go hog wild and just kill as many Muslims as we could, which is exactly what happened. You know, thus helping the Israelis. So I think that was a conspiracy. But yeah, I can see why people believe what they believe. I also continue to believe that they're wrong in their conclusions, but I understand why they believe so. What about Epstein? I mean, how long did you know? Did you know well before it all came out what was going on? No, no idea. No, never encountered the man, never heard his name.

52:56No, but I, for one, believed the conspiracies surrounding Epstein. I did not believe Pizzagate. I'll say that. And much of Pizzagate turned out to be true. At least with the release of this most recent tranche, it appears that much of Pizzagate turned out to be true.

53:18planet pizza, whatever it was called, comet pizza, whatever. There's no basement. There's no holding pen for children to be trafficked from Hillary Clinton. That was all silliness. But I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of what was meant by beef jerky and grape soda. You know, the beef jerky man's coming to teach us how to make the beef jerky. He's bringing really high quality beef jerky. He's going to show us how to prepare the beef jerky. He's going to dry the beef jerky. We're going to have the beef jerky set aside from everything else. Nobody ever talks about eating the beef jerky.

53:54And if you like beef jerky so much, why don't you just go to Walmart and buy it? Right? So what is it? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about children? And the reason why nobody's talking is because the statute of limitations has expired and it doesn't do them any good to talk. Why would they? But then there are other things in the Epstein files Catherine Rumler Who was the White House counsel The White House counsel And a woman whom Barack Obama described as his Most trusted aide First of all She was in constant touch with Epstein Calling him Uncle Jeff You know My best friend How?

54:42Why? And then repeatedly trying to introduce him to John Brennan, the director of the CIA. To do what? Why would she need to broker a meeting between Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile, and the director of the CIA? Yeah, we're never going to get answers. And then when the president says that he doesn't care what the law says, he's not releasing the rest of the documents. Remind you, the vote was 419 to 1 in the House and 99 to nothing in the Senate. He signed it and then said, eh, I'm not going to release this. What are you going to do about it? You're going to sue me? Go ahead and sue me.

55:27Why? To protect whom? So, I don't know. I believe that conspiracy. Yeah. I saw somebody just recently in the media criticizing Dan Bongino. I don't know Dan Bongino well. I've met him a couple of times. We probably disagree on most issues, but I've always found him to be an honest and direct person. And that's why even though I disagree with him on these major issues, I was actually very pleased when he was named the deputy director of the FBI because I believed that he wanted the truth to come out. And you remember in that last, sorry, you remember in the last press conference that he did with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the look on his face showed him to be furious.

56:19Furious. They're talking about the Epstein files. And he resigned soon after that. And now he says, well, his job at the FBI was make sure that the rules were followed and, you know, this, that. No, that's not at all what you said. You said you were going to release the Epstein files. That's what you said. And now you're like, well, no, I never said I wanted to release the Epstein files. What I said is I wanted, you know, the truth. No, no, no, no, no, no. So, you know, so many of us believe that this swamp was actually going to get drained. Everybody just became a swamp monster. Nothing was drained.

57:04Why do you think they amplified it to any degree in the first place then, if they had no intentions of releasing? I think that they did have intentions of releasing. And I think that what Marjorie Taylor Greene has told us is true, that so many important, powerful, famous people were involved. People who give millions upon millions of dollars to the two political parties that everybody was just like, oh, better not to rock the boat. Yeah. It's crazy the pull that one person had, though, on all of the people. It does make me wonder how that even played out and how that even... I really don't wonder about it.

57:45I don't. I'm 100 % confident he was an Israeli access agent. But with the release of this last tranche of 3 million pages, he appears to have also been working for the CIA, for the FBI, for the British MI5 and MI6, for the Germans. and he sought contact with the Russians repeatedly, but they couldn't come to an agreement. What do you think is the biggest concern for corruption in the future?

58:21You know, I think that the biggest concern is that the law is unevenly administered. So if you're one of the insiders, one of the swells, You can do anything you want. And the Supreme Court has essentially said, you know, corruption's fine. Go ahead and be corrupt. Any president can be corrupt. You can't prosecute a president for anything that he does while he's president. We've never had the Supreme Court ever say something like that before. And so now, you know, corruption is okay. Grifting is okay. Enriching oneself is okay. How do we make it back from here? Nobody in Congress has the guts to sponsor legislation or to pass legislation.

59:14And certainly no president would undercut his own position and his own authority. Not at this point. So I'm not sure how we recover from this. yeah what about like agendas and propaganda online and i know that propaganda is a bit of a weird word in itself but like it's clear that we see a lot of agendas online that are being pushed massively like for example like a a manosphere documentary will come out but they'll never release a feminism documentary as an example right that's just one thing like the the the stuff that's being amplified is it's clearly agendered um you know even i've had like someone that i was connected with who was more of like a he was he was more of like a news reporter but independent and he was blowing up in australia and he and he was making all this great content it was clear that he was writing and then boom a collaborated post with news.com.au and it's a completely different script that's clearly agendered.

1:00:22And I message him and I say, Hey, like, I know you didn't write this. And he's like, no, I'll be honest. I didn't. Like, it's clear that there's an agenda going on. What are your thoughts on, on that and how they're controlling a narrative with a lot of things that we're seeing online? Yeah, I think we're so far down that road that, uh, it's virtually impossible to get back. When I was a little kid, Walter Cronkite was the guy that most everybody watched for CBS News. There was talk of Walter Cronkite running for president or being chosen for vice president on an independent ticket because everybody in America trusted Walter Cronkite.

1:01:01And it wasn't just Walter Cronkite. It was, I mean, every network had these old men who had been working in journalism for decades and everybody just trusted them. You trusted them that when you tuned in for the evening news at 6.30 or 7 o 'clock, you're going to get it straight without any editorialization. And that's like laughable now, quaint, on both the left and the right. I'll give you two examples. And I've said this many times. I was a third generation Democrat. I left the Democratic Party years ago because to me it moved too far to the right on issues of war and peace, foreign policy.

1:01:46It's just a neoconservative, pro-war foreign policy. but because I was not an Obama supporter and because it was the Obama administration that went after me on MSNBC I was always, always referred to as John Kiriakou who styles himself a whistleblower very offensive who styles himself a whistleblower and then they were shocked that I wouldn't come on their shows I was like why would I you insult me every day and then you want me to come on so you I can be a punching bag for you that's not news so I refused and then on the right I was doing a podcast recently um at the home of the podcaster's parents very wealthy people, very highly educated.

1:02:49And one of them said, it must be nice to get out of that war zone for a day. And I said, what do you mean? Well, Washington, you know, the president had to call out the National Guard. It must be hell on earth down there. And I started laughing and she said, what? And I said, Washington's one of the safest big cities in the Western world. There's no crime problem in Washington. It's completely made up. It's just for the cameras. And these National Guard troops, they're only in the tourist areas where they get the most visibility. They're not in the drug dealing parts of the city. It's just for show.

1:03:26And they looked at each other like, we've been duped. Because every single night on Fox and OAN and Newsmax, it's like this hellscape that is Washington. And it's just not. It's just made up. You can't trust anybody. People ask me all the time where I get my news. And the answer is everywhere. You can't rely on one or two or 10 outlets. You have to read them all. And you have to become well-versed enough to know what to believe and why to believe it. So I always go through my list and people say, well, where do you get your news? I say I start with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the L.A.

1:04:10Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Times of London, the Guardian and the Greek press just because I'm Greek and I enjoy the Greek press. then I go to AP, UPI, Fox, CNN, a couple of others. And then I go to the alternatives, right? Reader Supported News, Consortium News, COVID Action Magazine, Dropsite News, The Intercept. And I just keep going. It takes me two hours every day just to skim the 25 different websites that I need to skim. And then if there's something that's particularly interesting, like a primary race, let's say. Then I have to go specifically to the political press and to the academic and polling press.

1:04:57And that's another hour. So it takes hours every single day just because you can't believe anybody and you have to come to your own conclusion. Damn. Do you find that that gets exhausting or is it something that you love doing? I've always loved it. Even when I was at the CIA, I could not wait to get to the office in the morning just to see what I had missed overnight. yeah so you mentioned before that you had people that were just basically hip piecing you just like as you're going out calling you names labeling you different things asking you to go on the show and then you're not obviously going on did you find that it was quite challenging being hated so much and being like in a really like was it quite isolating being told all these names and even your son getting mad at you, like all of this, like, did you find it was isolating?

1:05:52No. Why not? Because I had a core of people who could not have possibly supported me any more strongly. A lot of them being former CIA colleagues telling me, keep doing it. You're doing the right thing. I got an email the day after I blew the whistle from a retired deputy director of the CIA, of the whole CIA. And he said, you've chosen a difficult road. I'm glad somebody did. I only wish I had had the courage to do it myself. And I saved it as a souvenir to remind myself that I had done the right thing. You know, you and I were talking before we started filming about people's reactions to this kind of thing.

1:06:39And you just have to be confident that you're right. And knowing that you're right, you just let the chips fall and you get to see who's with you and who's not with you. And sometimes it's going to surprise you. But then you come out on the other side stronger knowing who your friends really are. Yeah. Yeah. Matthew McConaughey, I'd rather be hated for who I am than to be applauded for someone who I'm not. Amen. He's 100 % right. Yeah. I think I look at this right. And if we talk about real loneliness, real isolation, that's being liked for someone that you're not. Because you're getting praise for someone that deep down isn't you.

1:07:21So you don't even feel like people see you because it's not even you who you're showing. and I think you know as you're sharing that today like I had like a mini cancellation about a year ago and where I got flamed for all these different things and I remember I doubled down and and like called them all clowns I was like no I can't believe in what I said and I remember there was a a massive divide that came from it where people that was closest to me stopped answering my calls stopped liking liking my posts they stopped like they didn't want to be associated with me because they were fearful of what people were going to think if they were associated with me.

1:07:58Oh, I've gotten that. Yeah. And I just remember watching that and sitting that. It was a shame, but at the same time, there's a level of peace because I felt this weight off my shoulders because I was like, I've got nothing to hide now. No, and you don't have to be something different to different people. You can just be yourself. And then from that, what stemmed from it was this freeing nature of being able to just speak whatever was on my mind and whatever felt true to me. and that's what compounded everything because at the end of the day everyone that likes me knows who i am yeah because i'm being real yeah and then everyone that doesn't well we were never going to be close anyway because because because all i did was just share my thoughts and so it kind of like made the connections in my life stronger that were actually real and then faded the ones that weren't and i don't know i'm not sure if you relate to that at all is with when you had to come out?

1:08:50Very much so. You know, when I blew the whistle, I garnered a lot of support, even more, like significantly more when I got in legal trouble for it. But then when I started writing from prison, I started writing about a lot of civil liberties issues and corruption issues and stuff like that. I wrote one blog post that Ariana Huffington ran about pedophiles. And I said, you know now i'm living among them and i see that they're that they're beyond you know saving and that society needs to be protected from them there's no cure for pedophilia you're not going to give them therapy and then all of a sudden they're not going to be interested in you know having sex with children anymore and so i said that i've come to support something called um community confinement.

1:09:44So what they do is they put mobile homes on the grounds of the prison. And when you finish your sentence, you move into the mobile homes. So you're technically not in prison anymore. You don't have to stand up for the count times and stand in line for inspection and all that stuff. But you can't leave the grounds because society needs to be protected from you. and the people that wrote to me and said how dare you they've paid their debts to society and you're supposed to be a civil libertarian how dare you want to confine these poor men and it's like sorry i'm right you're wrong they can live in your house if you want them out there but i don't want them around my children yeah i think there's certain lines that can't be crossed and pedophilia and anything to do with that is one of those ones.

1:10:46Do you have any regrets? No. Why not? I can't imagine having regrets polluting my thoughts 24 hours a day. I made my bed. I am perfectly happy to lie in it. I accept what I did. I'm proud of what I did. and I handled the consequences. Thank God, knock on wood, things have turned around for me. But no, I won't allow myself to go through life with regrets. Nothing productive comes of that. I like that. What's your focus at the moment? Like in life, what are you optimizing for? I'm going to give you a different answer than I would have given you six months ago. Six months ago, it was about, you know continuing the fight for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties most important thing in my life and that's still very important but for for reasons that will never be clear to me i somehow hit the the youtube algorithm sweet spot several months ago and um i'm getting more coverage than i've ever gotten in my life and I've been able to actually make a living doing it.

1:12:00And so I'm 61 years old. I'm finally going to be in a position to buy a decent house to live in and to move on with my life and start to make plans for retirement and live happily ever after. So I'm going to continue to write books and give speeches and advise on films and television series and stuff like that. I don't even consider it to be work. I like it so much. It just, it's not work to me. I'm just going to keep doing it till I can't anymore. I appreciate you, dude. I feel like, uh, I just want to commend you even just your energy as the moment you walked in. You said bubbly, joyful and, and you got a great, great vibe about you.

1:12:46And, um, yeah. Um, I wish you all the best with everything. Thank you so much. It's great to meet you. Appreciate that. John Kuriaki. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Thank you. Appreciate it.