Danny Jones Podcast - #302 - Cult Investigator: Satanic Rituals, Scientology & Israel-Palestine | Lawrence Wright
Aired: 2025-05-12
Duration: 03:13:04


=== Scientology in My Backyard (09:12) ===

[00:00:07]  Mr. Lawrence Wright, it's really a pleasure to have you on here.
[00:00:10]  It's been a long time coming.
[00:00:12]  I've been watching and reading your work for a very long time.
[00:00:16]  Not a very long time.
[00:00:17]  I think the first time I discovered you was in 2015 when Going Clear came out, the documentary on HBO.
[00:00:22]  And I was sort of blown away because this place is right in my backyard.
[00:00:26]  I sure is.
[00:00:28]  And I kind of grew up around all of it because I spent a lot of my youth in downtown Clearwater running around with my friends.
[00:00:35]  And, you know, just, you know, goofing around.
[00:00:37]  And I was born in Morton Plant Hospital, which is basically right across the street from the Flag Building.
[00:00:42]  That's right.
[00:00:43]  And I kind of never really dug too deep into them until I saw your film.
[00:00:48]  And then I was just like blown away that this was all right here this whole time.
[00:00:54]  Yeah, it's the headquarters.
[00:00:56]  And, you know, back when L. Ron Hubbard had taken to the high seas to avoid subpoenas and finally decided to come back to America and he sent a delegation around looking for the right place and they settled on Clearwater.
[00:01:10]  And they wouldn't tell anybody at the time what they were.
[00:01:16]  They were some sort of vaguely Christian organization, just let the word out.
[00:01:21]  But when people in Clearwater found out, they were pretty upset.
[00:01:25]  And he was buying up a lot of the real estate downtown, which is still a part of the church catalog.
[00:01:32]  It's a fascinating story.
[00:01:33]  I mean, Scientology had kind of put this electric fence of legal threats and reputational threats around their story.
[00:01:47]  And so the other writers had taken wax at it.
[00:01:52]  But I still felt that there was a great story on the ground to be told.
[00:01:56]  And it was a fabulous story.
[00:02:00]  I was, even despite all the, you know, we're going to get you sort of stuff that comes along with dealing with Scientology, it was always just a great story.
[00:02:11]  And so, you know, you're always grateful as a writer to have that opportunity.
[00:02:16]  It's funny, just recently I was having a conversation with my brother in law, and he works for one of the biggest Scientology owned companies in downtown Clearwater.
[00:02:24]  It's called Know Before.
[00:02:26]  It's like an antivirus software for computer software.
[00:02:31]  And he's like, it's all Scientology owned.
[00:02:33]  And all of the higher end executives, like all the executives on the executive floor, they're all Scientologists.
[00:02:40]  So there's like a Scientology floor, and then there's like a civilian floor.
[00:02:45]  And it's like him and all of his buddies will always joke like under their breath or like make fun of the Scientologists.
[00:02:51]  And, like, you know, it's kind of like this weird dichotomy of these people all working together in the same building, but you're, you know, you're inside of a cult building.
[00:03:00]  Like these people are all in this cult.
[00:03:02]  And I was like, wow, that would make such a great TV show about it.
[00:03:05]  It would be like the office meets like some sort of like, like cult science fiction, you know, reality show or something like this.
[00:03:15]  And I was asking him, I was like, because we were in a restaurant right across the street from where he works.
[00:03:18]  And I was like, I'm like, how do you know?
[00:03:21]  I'm like, do you know, but just by looking at somebody, if they're a Scientologist?
[00:03:23]  He's like, oh, yeah, 100%.
[00:03:25]  And I was like, how do you know?
[00:03:27]  He's like, just look into their eyes.
[00:03:29]  And you can see, you can tell by just looking into their eyes.
[00:03:31]  It's like almost robotic the way they look.
[00:03:34]  And sure as shit, I was like looking around.
[00:03:36]  He's like, there were like five people in that room at the time.
[00:03:38]  He's like, there's one guy in here.
[00:03:39]  It's definitely a Scientologist.
[00:03:40]  See if you can figure it out.
[00:03:41]  And I looked around and sure as shit, I nailed it.
[00:03:43]  I was like, definitely that guy.
[00:03:45]  Well, I don't have those powers.
[00:03:49]  You see a lot of people.
[00:03:50]  It's such a wild phenomenon.
[00:03:51]  The Sea Org, which is their clergy, you know, dresses in naval outfits.
[00:03:55]  Yeah.
[00:03:56]  And so you see a lot of that in Clearwater because that's their base.
[00:04:00]  Is that the vest?
[00:04:01]  Like the vest around the white shirt?
[00:04:04]  Yeah.
[00:04:05]  Oftentimes, more, you know, what looks really very much like a military uniform.
[00:04:12]  Yeah, okay.
[00:04:13]  The Sea Org is, you know, when you sign up for it, you know, you sign off for a billion years of service.
[00:04:18]  Right.
[00:04:19]  And because of the idea that you get reincarnated and a billion years in the time span of eternity is just a small sacrifice.
[00:04:29]  Yeah.
[00:04:31]  I've thought a lot about this, and it seems like it's, you know, obviously there's a ton of terrible things about Scientology, right?
[00:04:39]  Like the harassment campaigns they go on and the outright slavery that they participate in with having their Sea Org members.
[00:04:52]  And the most gruesome thing is the cadet farm or the cadet organization where they have all the babies in there that are just like not taken care of.
[00:05:01]  And I think, um, It was one of the women in your documentary who was John Travolta's friend, like John Travolta's handler, I guess.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, Spanky.
[00:05:10]  That's right.
[00:05:11]  Yeah.
[00:05:11]  Her baby was in there and she found her baby in there, was like covered in fleas and like not fed, sick, fever.
[00:05:18]  That is probably the most gut wrenching aspect of what they're doing and of your documentary, I think, personally.
[00:05:27]  But, you know, if that stuff wasn't a part of it, I feel like this is just no different than any other religion other than the fact that it's more modern and we know the guy that created it.
[00:05:38]  Lived in modern times in our lifetime, and it's got a way better marketing plan.
[00:05:43]  Yeah, you know, I don't have anything against Scientology except for the human rights abuses that we're talking about.
[00:05:51]  And I, you know, I think John Travolta and Tom Cruise are great stars.
[00:05:57]  I'm grateful for their talents, but I hold them responsible for bringing so many people into Scientology and knowing they have to know, you know, the depredations that are visited on people in the Sea Org. and also the child care thing, the way that families are broken up and so on.
[00:06:16]  These are terrible things to do to people.
[00:06:21]  And a lot of Scientologists don't know or don't want to know what's going on inside the Sea Org.
[00:06:33]  There's several different places where the Sea Org tends to headquarter.
[00:06:39]  And most people will say, well, But it's given me something really valuable.
[00:06:48]  And usually that is a sense of being skilled in a particular area or connections.
[00:06:56]  And with the most conspicuous thing is the actors that are involved.
[00:07:02]  They don't have another Tom Cruise.
[00:07:07]  Elizabeth Moss is a second generation Scientologist, so she wasn't drawn into the organization she was born into it.
[00:07:19]  You know, actors, that's one of the things I learned when I was working on this is a lot of them, like Tom Cruise, you know, they drop out of high school, or he didn't drop out, he finished, but, you know, they go into, they go to Hollywood when they're really young.
[00:07:36]  And imagine you get out of high school, I'm going to be an actor, I'm going to be a movie star, I'm going to go to Hollywood.
[00:07:44]  Meantime, your friends are in college, they're studying, they're getting their medical degree or whatever, they're going on with their life.
[00:07:52]  And you're standing in line for a role, one in the background, somebody in a crowd scene or something like that.
[00:08:05]  You're desperate to break it and you don't seem to have any choice.
[00:08:09]  And then along comes a person with a brochure handing him out to all these would-be movie stars saying, how to get an agent, you know, come to the Celebrity Center, you know, we'll show you how.
[00:08:23]  And this is like a message from God, you know, this is somebody's going to help me get an agent or, you know, how to get insurance.
[00:08:32]  And, you know, these kinds of things that freelancers like actors are desperate for.
[00:08:37]  So once into the Celebrity Center, they're given a menu of different programs that you can take there.
[00:08:46]  And, you know, people like, well, Jerry Seinfeld.
[00:08:50]  You know, he attributes some of his early success to taking, I've forgotten which program it was, but it felt, you know, that it gave him more confidence.
[00:09:01]  And, you know, a lot of actors have been through and never got very deeply in it, but did taste it.
[00:09:12]  And most of them will tell you that it did them some good.
[00:09:16]  Did you lose any friends making that, writing that book or making that?

=== The Courageous Source (06:29) ===

[00:09:19]  Film, or were there any people like in your life that maybe you didn't know were Scientologists?
[00:09:23]  That kind of just like disappeared one time, and when I was in college, I was living in an apartment with my girlfriend at the time and downstairs there was a little Scientology org.
[00:09:38]  It was tiny, you know, and I had heard of it, you know, but this was back in the middle 60s, long time ago, and so Scientology was totally new and They showed me the, I forgot the name of the little lie detector.
[00:10:01]  The e-meter?
[00:10:01]  The e-meter, yeah.
[00:10:05]  And I was intrigued, but I wasn't, I was also a little suspicious.
[00:10:11]  But anyway, they were a good neighbor.
[00:10:12]  I'd sometimes go downstairs and, you know, hi, how you doing?
[00:10:16]  You know, that was, but that was my only introduction into Scientology before I actually, decided to write about it.
[00:10:25]  And, you know, I've written about a lot of religions over my long career.
[00:10:30]  And I'm always intrigued by the fact that, you know, reporters tend to pay a lot of attention to politics.
[00:10:39]  And, but my observation is that you can be, you can have really strong political beliefs that don't affect your behavior at all.
[00:10:48]  And I'm sure everybody knows those people.
[00:10:50]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  But if you have strong religious beliefs, They tend to govern your life.
[00:10:57]  And I think it's a mistake to avoid that subject.
[00:11:03]  A lot of reporters think it's impolite, prying into what people believe.
[00:11:09]  And yet they'll readily ask, are you a Trump supporter or something like that?
[00:11:13]  But they won't ask, are you a Mormon?
[00:11:18]  It seems impolite and also pathetic.
[00:11:22]  Reporters typically are very skeptical.
[00:11:24]  And religion is one of those areas that we tend to.
[00:11:28]  tend to put some distance between us and that.
[00:11:32]  So because I was interested in religion and had been very religious when I was a teenager, Scientology was always on my scope.
[00:11:46]  But I needed an excuse to write about it.
[00:11:50]  And I thought about when John Travolta's son died, if you remember that.
[00:12:02]  He was very ill.
[00:12:03]  It was apparently some kind of environmental toxin that affected him.
[00:12:08]  And there was a Scientology treatment that was employed.
[00:12:15]  And I don't know if the boy could have been saved otherwise.
[00:12:23]  But anyway, he died.
[00:12:25]  And I thought, well, maybe he will leave the church, and that would give me an excuse to talk to him.
[00:12:32]  And I mentioned it to my editor.
[00:12:35]  at the New Yorker, and he said it was too tabloid, which I thought, you know, yeah, but it's still very interesting, you know.
[00:12:44]  And so then Paul Haggis dropped out of the church, and Paul Haggis was a two-time Academy Award-winning writer and director, and he had been in the church for more than two decades.
[00:12:59]  And he dropped out very quietly.
[00:13:02]  He wasn't talking about it, but I thought, You know, most of my readers would look at Scientology with kind of a sneer on their face.
[00:13:11]  You know, it's like, I would never believe that crap.
[00:13:14]  You know, you'd never get me in it.
[00:13:16]  And what was interesting to me about Scientology, it was deeply appealing to a lot of people.
[00:13:24]  And for the Hollywood types, I didn't see that it was giving them any advantage.
[00:13:32]  It was like the opposite.
[00:13:33]  It was like a public relations martyrdom.
[00:13:35]  You know, that they were people thought, what's wrong with Tom Cruise that he's in Scientology or any of the other stars?
[00:13:46]  So what is it that would take someone as talented and interesting as Travolta or Cruise or any of the others?
[00:13:55]  What would it take to have them enlist in this organization and adopt these beliefs that seem so weird?
[00:14:08]  Paul dropped out.
[00:14:09]  I was working on something else.
[00:14:13]  I finally decided, well, I'm going to ask anyway.
[00:14:17]  So I found the number for his business manager and I said, hello, this is Lawrence Wright with The New Yorker and I'd like to talk to your client about his decision to leave the Church of Scientology.
[00:14:28]  Are you kidding?
[00:14:29]  Get the fuck off my phone.
[00:14:31]  And click, you know, that was the entire conversation.
[00:14:37]  But the next day I got Paul's email address and I wrote him a letter and said, well, I have to.
[00:14:41]  spoke to your business manager and he said this wasn't the best time to talk.
[00:14:46]  But if there's ever a time where you would like to discuss your, as I said, intellectual and spiritual development, I'd be honored to do that.
[00:14:56]  And 20 minutes later, I get a call, a text, very flattered, let's have lunch on Tuesday.
[00:15:02]  And he was in New York, so I flew up and we had lunch.
[00:15:06]  And then he wanted to smoke a cigarette, and so we went out on the street.
[00:15:11]  And I said, well, you know, this is going to be apropos of your decision to leave the church.
[00:15:15]  His eyes got wide, but he continued to talk.
[00:15:18]  And it was like nine months later, so deep into this story, he finally admitted it had never occurred to him.
[00:15:25]  It'd be about Scientology.
[00:15:26]  He was just so flattered the New Yorker was going to do a profile of him.
[00:15:29]  So I felt, I totally understood and felt a little sad that that happened.
[00:15:37]  But on the other hand, he was a very courageous source.
[00:15:40]  And he went through a lot of shit, as did many of the sources that I spoke to.
[00:15:46]  And, you know, I spoke to hundreds.

=== Instant Access to Truth (03:01) ===

[00:15:49]  And, you know, it's a difficult decision when, you know, you're facing a an organization that's quite famous for its retribution.
[00:16:02]  To decide that it's so important to talk to a reporter that you'll face that.
[00:16:08]  And of course, the more that you talk to, the more we'll talk to you.
[00:16:12]  And there's strength in numbers.
[00:16:14]  I think that played a role in the access that I finally got.
[00:16:18]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:16:19]  It's amazing to me how I know they were raided by the FBI once.
[00:16:24]  I think that was in the early 90s, right?
[00:16:27]  And it's amazing to me that they have not, the FBI has not shut them down.
[00:16:30]  Is that Because they got that religious exemption and they're quote unquote a religion now?
[00:16:35]  Yeah.
[00:16:36]  So, you know, it gave them an enormous amount of leeway.
[00:16:41]  So that designation they got from the IRS when they basically assaulted them with lawsuits and brought the IRS to its knees.
[00:16:52]  Brought the IRS to its knees and got the IRS to basically wipe out a billion dollars in back taxes.
[00:16:59]  Yeah.
[00:16:59]  That somehow makes them exempt from all of this.
[00:17:04]  Unbelievably horrifying humanitarian atrocities that they're carrying out on their headquarters with children and people paying them basically no money, making them scrub toilets and all this stuff.
[00:17:19]  Yeah, it's the First Amendment, freedom of religion, along with press and speech.
[00:17:25]  So it's a very powerful concession.
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=== Sarge as Confessor (04:23) ===

[00:18:50]  It's linked down below.
[00:18:51]  Now back to the show.
[00:18:53]  And, you know, if people say it's a religion, how do you contradict that?
[00:19:03]  You know, it's odd because L. Ron Hubbard, the founder, would say it was not a religion.
[00:19:10]  It was a scientific approach.
[00:19:12]  approach to spiritual enlightenment.
[00:19:16]  But now it's a religion and with all the protections that the Constitution awards for that.
[00:19:23]  Is it true that he famously said something on his deathbed or something like that about this was all some scheme to make money?
[00:19:31]  Yeah, well, it was I know I'm like butcher.
[00:19:36]  Sarge, I'm trying to remember Sarge's last name.
[00:19:41]  Oh, yeah, Sarge, the guy who he asked him to get rid of his body or something.
[00:19:46]  Right.
[00:19:48]  When he was in his last days, when Hubbard was in his last days, he was at this little horse ranch in Southern California.
[00:19:55]  Uh, next adjoining Kenny Rogers Ranch um, but um, oh wow, he was in disguise, he was in hiding and he was very ill.
[00:20:06]  And um, he fouth sarge, fouth.
[00:20:11]  Uh, he asked sarge to make him an e-meter that would actually electrocute him.
[00:20:23]  And um, and this is the way he wanted to go out, and he was living on this little Blue Bell Bus, I forgot the name of it.
[00:20:34]  And Sarge was racked with guilt because he had essentially pledged his life in the service of this man.
[00:20:43]  And so he did make him an e-meter that was essentially tied to an automobile battery that was just enough to give him a real shock but not kill him.
[00:21:00]  But he did die a couple of months later.
[00:21:05]  Was it anything related to that or no?
[00:21:06]  Yeah, I wouldn't want to say that Sarge killed him.
[00:21:11]  I think that it was a terrible shock.
[00:21:13]  It might have affected something.
[00:21:17]  He did talk.
[00:21:18]  He used Sarge as a kind of confessor.
[00:21:21]  He talked about how he wasn't going to return and that he was going to circle this star for eternity.
[00:21:30]  You know, it's interesting at that point, I don't think he was talking to anyone else in any way with the same degree of intimacy and sorrow that he expressed to Sarge.
[00:21:48]  I had heard that Sarge had this information, and I was at this retreat with former Scientologists, and I asked Sarge if he would talk to me.
[00:22:03]  scared and conflicted.
[00:22:09]  It was, you know, of all the people that I talked to, he was the one who actually knew that Scientology had been proved false because the founder had confessed to him.
[00:22:29]  And so it was a very interesting, powerful interview.
[00:22:34]  Is that quote in the doc like L Ron Hubbard's actual quote to what he said to him?
[00:22:38]  I don't remember the quote uh, but he he talked about.
[00:22:43]  You know he disavowed much of what he right he had said before.
[00:22:47]  That church doesn't believe that happened but um, you know, I got it on film, did you?
[00:22:56]  What kind of um backlash or intimidation tactics or or any sort of threats did you personally get when you made this?
[00:23:04]  Well, first of all, let me say that you know what happened to me and then later Alex Gibney, who directed the documentary, doesn't compare to what happened to our sources.

=== Jonestown Tragedy (16:09) ===

[00:23:14]  Right.
[00:23:15]  And for me, you know, I had Tommy Davis was the spokesperson for Scientology when I started the story.
[00:23:28]  And he had pledged that he would take me through Scientology.
[00:23:35]  You know, he was really excited.
[00:23:36]  It was going to be like the, I think it was Labor Day weekend.
[00:23:40]  It was a three-day weekend.
[00:23:41]  And so I flew out on Thursday.
[00:23:44]  then Friday expected to hear from him.
[00:23:47]  This is after the film?
[00:23:48]  No, it's before.
[00:23:49]  This is when I'm first interviewing.
[00:23:50]  And finally, on Monday afternoon, after I'd been in the hotel for three days, he and his girlfriend, later wife, Jessica Feschbach, came to my hotel and said, we're not going to talk to you.
[00:24:09]  You could have told me that on the phone.
[00:24:12]  Anyway, they finally did come.
[00:24:18]  along with three lawyers to talk to me at the New Yorker after we'd sent in our first tranche of queries.
[00:24:26]  They demanded it be an email.
[00:24:28]  So we sent 960 questions, fact-checking questions, and there were more after that.
[00:24:35]  And suddenly, you know, here come this Scientology delegation, and they have brought along, I don't remember how many binders it was, but it stretched for seven or eight feet.
[00:24:52]  And the, you know, longer than this table that we're at, you know, it was an impressive amount of literature, all designed to respond to these questions that we had.
[00:25:04]  And what was the assumption, I think, was we're going to drown them in information.
[00:25:10]  But you can't drown a reporter in information.
[00:25:14]  It's like pouring water on a fish.
[00:25:16]  What is he going to do with it?
[00:25:17]  He's just going to swim in it.
[00:25:20]  And my editor looked at it and he said, you know what you got here, you smuck.
[00:25:24]  You got a book.
[00:25:25]  I said, I know, they're very kind to me.
[00:25:28]  So that happened.
[00:25:31]  The article, there were constant legal threats.
[00:25:37]  One of their lawyers had been a federal prosecutor and they brought some high power into the room.
[00:25:48]  We were always aware of the threat that we were going to be sued and it never happened.
[00:25:56]  It never happened in the United Kingdom where we also sold it and they have these very aggressive libel laws there and it didn't happen there.
[00:26:07]  It didn't happen with the series, with the television movie.
[00:26:14]  So it was all empty threats.
[00:26:17]  But there was the private detectives.
[00:26:23]  That was, in my case, kind of a joke.
[00:26:28]  He followed me around, but I rarely go anywhere.
[00:26:32]  But if I had a speech or I'm in a band, sometimes he would come to my gigs, which I was always grateful for.
[00:26:38]  You knew who he was.
[00:26:39]  Yeah, he came and identified himself one time at one of my gigs and asked me to sign his book.
[00:26:46]  What?
[00:26:48]  Hi, Lawrence.
[00:26:48]  I'm the Scientology PI to follow you around.
[00:26:53]  Can we sign my book?
[00:26:54]  Yeah, well, the other thing that, you know, they.
[00:26:59]  You know, the New Yorker around Valentine's Day every year has this anniversary issue.
[00:27:04]  We just published our 100th anniversary.
[00:27:07]  But there's always this Victorian gentleman with the monocle and the butterfly on the cover.
[00:27:13]  and his name is Eustace Tilley.
[00:27:17]  And they made a, the Scientologist made up a mock New Yorker with me as Eustace Tilley looking disheveled and just out of the gutter and then out of the top hat I was wearing because Paul Haggis and they passed him out in front of Times Square at an office and they, you know, and it's a treasured artifact in my collection.
[00:27:40]  But that, But the harassment that the sources got was very personal.
[00:27:48]  And, you know, they were followed.
[00:27:50]  They were, you know, garbage was emptied.
[00:27:53]  They were spied on constantly.
[00:27:54]  They were harassed, threatened.
[00:27:58]  And, you know, they paid a price.
[00:28:04]  One, you know, when the movie came out, we put it in theaters for a couple of weeks.
[00:28:11]  And in Austin, where I live, a woman came out of the theater and she was so worked up.
[00:28:18]  She drove her car through the front door of the Scientology building in Austin, which is right across from the university.
[00:28:25]  Jesus.
[00:28:26]  And she didn't stop there.
[00:28:28]  She just drove around knocking over shelves and, you know, decks and desks and stuff.
[00:28:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:28:33]  She did a thoroughgoing job, and I had to issue a statement disavowing violence in any form.
[00:28:39]  But they closed it down for a long time.
[00:28:43]  Now it's back and revivified.
[00:28:45]  But, you know, people were upset about what they saw in that doc.
[00:28:53]  Yeah, there's a lot of folks around this area who are former Scientologists that have built their own YouTube channels.
[00:29:00]  There's one guy named Aaron who lives around here.
[00:29:03]  He has a great channel called Growing Up in Scientology because he grew up literally with his parents.
[00:29:07]  They were Scientologists.
[00:29:08]  He grew up working in the Sea Org and all this stuff.
[00:29:11]  Now he's amassed this incredible following of basically just talking about all the things that are happening constantly in Scientology.
[00:29:21]  And it seems like there's just this crazy.
[00:29:25]  Resurgence of stuff online and YouTube of new age younger folks investigating Scientology and like walking into the building and interviewing the lady at the front desk and and uh you know trying to investigate all these recent court battles.
[00:29:42]  There's this other guy named Grant Cardone who's this big um celebrity internet figure um who's like into real estate and like you know brags about all the jets that he owns and then you know films himself walking around the flag building you know over there and um.
[00:29:59]  You know, there's just so much like scandal and just crazy stuff happening involving all these like big figures and Scientology and the people investigating.
[00:30:10]  There's like a new Scientology documentary that comes out on YouTube every week, it seems like.
[00:30:16]  So it's to me, it's just bananas how this organization can continue to survive and thrive for this long with the way that the media landscape is evolving and everyone talking about it.
[00:30:31]  Well, They have a lot of money and they have a lot of lawyers and you know that they don't have a lot of members and they don't have the kind of Celebrity profile that they they enjoyed for so many years so I would you know but of course they're so secretive about their membership and their budget and everything.
[00:30:55]  It's only estimate but you know people report that you know nobody's in those buildings and you know I I don't wish harm on Scientology.
[00:31:09]  I just wish that they would reform their practices where their most ardent members are concerned.
[00:31:17]  What do you think?
[00:31:19]  David Miscavige, the new leader, he has done like two interviews in his life.
[00:31:23]  Is that right?
[00:31:24]  Yeah.
[00:31:25]  Did you ever, did you actually try to reach out to him?
[00:31:28]  Yeah.
[00:31:28]  Or did you just think that's futile?
[00:31:29]  Yeah, the private investigator that was trying to get to me wanted an interview of me.
[00:31:39]  And I said, oh, sure.
[00:31:41]  I'll do that if you'll let me talk to Miscavige.
[00:31:43]  Oh, my God.
[00:31:44]  You know, what are you talking about?
[00:31:45]  And the church was outraged, you know, that I would ask such a thing.
[00:31:49]  And I said, well, you know, the deal's on the table.
[00:31:52]  And it's been on the table for decades now.
[00:31:54]  I mean, you know, he's never wanted to open himself up after he had a, you know, a colossal fail, you know, when he had that big interview with, was it Ted?
[00:32:13]  ABC, I think it was.
[00:32:14]  I've forgotten.
[00:32:15]  Way back in the day, right?
[00:32:16]  Yeah.
[00:32:16]  But it was merciless.
[00:32:19]  And he came off really poorly.
[00:32:23]  So I think this publicity strategy is don't let anybody talk to him.
[00:32:28]  Yeah.
[00:32:29]  Yeah, there's something about, like, just like watching your documentary and watching that big ceremony they put together in Los Angeles after they won the war against the IRS.
[00:32:40]  And just the way he struts around, the way he walks, the way he.
[00:32:45]  Shakes people's hands.
[00:32:46]  It's just like, whoa, this dude is like really putting on a performance.
[00:32:50]  He's really putting on a show.
[00:32:54]  And then I saw another thing recently that I wasn't aware of that there's like somewhere down the street in Clearwater off of like Highway 19 or something.
[00:33:05]  There's this huge apartment complex, this like rundown apartment complex, which allegedly is the spot where all the Sea Org members live.
[00:33:13]  And they turned.
[00:33:15]  Basically like one bedroom apartments that might be the size of this room right here, and they basically have six or seven people living in each apartment, like shoulder to shoulder on cots, which is crazy that that's allowed.
[00:33:30]  Yeah, they're trying to undo that in prisons now.
[00:33:33]  So uh, maybe the last repository of the confined dormitory?
[00:33:39]  They're trying to undo it in prisons?
[00:33:40]  Yeah there's, you know, giving more cell space and stuff like that.
[00:33:44]  Oh yeah, you know it's.
[00:33:46]  It's A lot of times when the violence occurs in prison, it's in those dorms.
[00:33:53]  Right.
[00:33:55]  Yeah.
[00:33:56]  But anyways, I heard that Miscavige was living on that property, on that apartment complex property.
[00:34:01]  He probably has an apartment somewhere there.
[00:34:04]  Yeah.
[00:34:05]  Or maybe in the old hotel.
[00:34:07]  I imagine he stays around here in this area.
[00:34:11]  Or L.A., maybe.
[00:34:12]  Yeah.
[00:34:13]  Well, he has residences in different places.
[00:34:18]  Yeah.
[00:34:19]  It'd be interesting to see how long this thing survives.
[00:34:21]  You know, and like and like you spent a lot of time, you've done lots of investigative research on cults, right?
[00:34:30]  Like, well, the only other, what I would call a cult that I spent time on was the Jonestown cult, Jim Jones.
[00:34:42]  And that was the hardest story and the most wrenching story I ever did.
[00:34:49]  That was, how long ago was that?
[00:34:52]  That was in the Jonestown thing was in like the, was that the early 90s?
[00:34:57]  Yeah, but it was, excuse me, my story was apropos of the Branch Davidians.
[00:35:03]  Oh, yeah.
[00:35:05]  And when the Branch Davidian, just before the apocalypse, my editor then was Tina Brown, and she asked me to go to Waco, you know, and cover it.
[00:35:17]  And I said, Tina, there are more reporters than Branch Davidians in Waco now.
[00:35:21]  And I just don't see joining the.
[00:35:25]  pack.
[00:35:26]  But I don't know if you would remember this, but there was a moment before the tanks started poking holes in the building and sending in tear gas and so on.
[00:35:45]  David Koresh sent out a lot of the children.
[00:35:49]  And there were, I don't know, just one or two vans with these kids.
[00:35:57]  through the military line, the ATF, the FBI, the press, and then out of the property into a world they didn't know.
[00:36:08]  And they were leaving behind everybody they knew.
[00:36:12]  And their faces were so forlorn.
[00:36:15]  I just remember they were passing the news cameras and they just lost little kids.
[00:36:22]  And I thought, well, that must have happened.
[00:36:27]  Before, and so I started researching and it turned out that there were survivors of the Jim Jones suicide massacre and three of them.
[00:36:41]  That well, there were more than that, but there were three who were the sons of Jim Jones.
[00:36:47]  Two of them were adopted and one, Stephen Jones, was his natural son, and they happened to have been in Georgetown Guyana, playing basketball with the national team and leaving their families in the jungle, in Jonestown, in the Guyana jungles.
[00:37:11]  And so I got in touch with Stephen and they had never talked about it.
[00:37:21]  It had been 15 years since the Jonestown debacle.
[00:37:30]  business in Waco brought it all back for them.
[00:37:33]  So I went to, you know, they all, all three boys lived in the Bay Area, and I had these intense conversations with them.
[00:37:45]  One of them, Tim, he was a big guy.
[00:37:50]  He could curl 100 pounds in either arm.
[00:37:53]  And he was, you know, very obviously tough guy.
[00:37:59]  But, He hadn't, since Jonestown, he hadn't been able to get on an elevator.
[00:38:04]  He had tried to get on a plane, but he made it turn around, which, you know, it never happens unless Godzilla tells you.
[00:38:11]  Right.
[00:38:12]  But so he was wounded.
[00:38:18]  And he agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it in a public place so he wouldn't cry.
[00:38:26]  And he wanted to bring his wife along because he was only going to tell the story once and he wanted her to hear it.
[00:38:32]  So we went to this nice restaurant somewhere around the bay, and after like 10 minutes, he was sobbing and pounding the table, and the waiter made this huge loop away from the table.
[00:38:46]  Everybody in the restaurant was riveted and looking at their food.
[00:38:53]  And he told the story of he was the one who was chosen to fly back into Jonestown and identify the bodies of 900 people.
[00:39:04]  His wife and children, his parents, his birth parents, his adopted parents, his friends, everybody he knew.
[00:39:13]  His children.
[00:39:14]  He had children he had to identify.

=== Controlling the Believers (04:07) ===

[00:39:23]  I was never more impressed with the power of belief that it would lead to such a colossal tragedy.
[00:39:36]  And were they supposed to be there?
[00:39:38]  Yeah, they were.
[00:39:39]  And their attendance at the basketball game was very controversial in the Jonestown community.
[00:39:46]  And these boys, they were young men when I talked to them.
[00:39:53]  They bear a lot of guilt because they feel that had they been there, they might have been able to stop it.
[00:40:00]  But I think that's not true.
[00:40:03]  I mean, I don't think it was stoppable.
[00:40:08]  For months, Jones had been training his followers, having these white nights, as they called it, where they would drink what they thought was cyanide in a Kool-Aid.
[00:40:20]  That's where the phrase comes from drinking the Kool-Aid.
[00:40:25]  Then they'd be fine.
[00:40:27]  But in this particular case, Congressman Leo Ryan had just flown down from San Francisco because some of his constituents were worried about relatives that were in Jonestown.
[00:40:38]  And he was killed by some of Jones' followers.
[00:40:43]  Oh, my God.
[00:40:45]  And so it was too late at that point.
[00:40:47]  And Jones knew that trouble was coming his way.
[00:40:53]  And he didn't want to die alone, so he wanted everybody to die with him.
[00:40:59]  He was shot to death, and I guess he refused to take the cyanide.
[00:41:07]  Yeah, who shot him?
[00:41:10]  I think it was this woman that was one of his mistresses.
[00:41:15]  What do you think it is about the human mind that creates people like Jim Jones?
[00:41:24]  or not necessarily about the human mind, but maybe it's probably something about people's upbringing and their development.
[00:41:32]  And like, how do you, how does nature create a Jim Jones type character?
[00:41:38]  Well, the longing for power is a very human quality, and it manifests in different ways.
[00:41:48]  You know, he was a powerful speaker.
[00:41:53]  You know, he had a way of being, you know, extremely compelling presence.
[00:42:01]  Very dramatic looking man.
[00:42:02]  He was part Cherokee and had very dark complexion and dark eyes and, you know, handsome in a rugged way.
[00:42:13]  He also was a conniver and he would fake healings and things like that.
[00:42:22]  I think all of this is with the idea of controlling other people.
[00:42:27]  I think there's a you see it in politics.
[00:42:33]  I mean, it's not just religion.
[00:42:36]  And you see the longing to exercise control over other people is very powerful.
[00:42:42]  And if you have the capacity that he had to be so compelling as he was, then his only goal was to increase his control.
[00:42:54]  And that was why he moved his whole church out of San Francisco to the jungles of Guyana.
[00:43:02]  And they did it overnight.
[00:43:04]  You know, people would wake up and they'd find their spouse gone or, you know, parents had moved away.
[00:43:09]  I mean, it was all secret and done, you know, with amazing uh security, and they were flown to Guiana, a place that most of them couldn't even put on a map, and um, and then, you know, they lived out their final days in this jungle so dark you have.

=== Death Row Parallels (05:05) ===

[00:43:30]  You have a way of uh, of navigating your your way through these, the darkest stories of human history.
[00:43:37]  Actually, i'm doing a story now that is, You would think, is dark, and it is dark, but I'm looking at religion in a different way.
[00:43:48]  There's the story that I wrote in the New Yorker in their 100th anniversary just a couple of months ago that I'm making into a book now.
[00:43:58]  Oh, really?
[00:44:01]  I was walking with a friend, and she was talking about her mother, who's in the Catholic prison services, and spent time talking to women on the death row in Texas.
[00:44:13]  There are seven.
[00:44:14]  women on death row.
[00:44:16]  And she talked about these nuns that came to visit them every month.
[00:44:24]  And I thought oh, these are the young nuns?
[00:44:27]  There aren't very many young nuns.
[00:44:30]  Right, they're mostly older.
[00:44:33]  The average age for a nun in America is 80.
[00:44:36]  Right.
[00:44:37]  But this is a new order called Sisters of Mary Morningstar that Pope Francis ordained.
[00:44:45]  And they live in Waco.
[00:44:47]  Oddly enough, not so far from the remains of the Branch Davidian compound.
[00:44:53]  But the sort of hero in my book is this Catholic deacon named Ronnie Lastovica, who's a cattleman, and he lives in Belton, Texas.
[00:45:08]  And, you know, a real Texas figure, but, you know, he's a very pious Catholic.
[00:45:14]  And his bishops said he wanted him to start ministering into the women's prisons there.
[00:45:21]  five, I think, in Gatesville.
[00:45:25]  And four of them are women's prisons and one men.
[00:45:28]  Huntsville has most of the men.
[00:45:30]  But so he started interviewing the women who are ministering to the women on death row.
[00:45:38]  And it occurred to him that there were some women who lived very similar lives.
[00:45:44]  So he drove over to Waco and knocked on the door of the convent.
[00:45:48]  And bear in mind, these nuns, although they haven't taken a vow of silence, essentially they're silent and praying all day long.
[00:45:58]  And although they're not cloistered, they don't go out very much.
[00:46:02]  So Ronnie knocks on the door and says, you know, sister, there's some women who could use your help.
[00:46:10]  And, you know, they're living in community, but they don't know how.
[00:46:14]  And you've got, you know, ancient monastic traditions about how to live together.
[00:46:20]  And I think you could help them.
[00:46:21]  And, oh, okay, well, where are they?
[00:46:25]  Well, they're on death row.
[00:46:27]  Oh, we don't get out much, you know.
[00:46:30]  So these women, their average age is mid-30s.
[00:46:34]  And so if there's a future of Catholicism, you know, I think they're going to be a part of it.
[00:46:39]  But they were terrified, but they felt obligated because Ronnie had asked and it seemed like something that they were capable of.
[00:46:50]  So they went to this highly secure prison.
[00:46:56]  And interestingly, the guards were a little scared of the nuns.
[00:47:03]  It's like they answered to a different order.
[00:47:07]  They were on their best behavior and a little awed.
[00:47:10]  And they're all in these gray habits.
[00:47:11]  They look what a riveting scene.
[00:47:15]  Yeah.
[00:47:15]  And they walk into the common room where the death row women are all dressed in white.
[00:47:20]  And the weird thing is they immediately embraced each other.
[00:47:25]  And it was true.
[00:47:26]  They have very much in common.
[00:47:29]  They each live in cells, as they're called in the convent.
[00:47:34]  They each arise around 4.30 in the morning and pray, and then they got crafts and stuff.
[00:47:39]  It's just very similar lies.
[00:47:41]  But one of the nuns said, also, you should understand that we are not beautiful women.
[00:47:47]  We don't use cosmetics.
[00:47:49]  We don't dress.
[00:47:49]  There's nothing to be afraid of us because we are plain.
[00:47:56]  And the women on death row had long since gone past the days when they were vibrant young women.
[00:48:05]  The years have taken a toll on them.
[00:48:07]  So I think they really felt a kinship.
[00:48:13]  And so I'm working on that story.
[00:48:18]  Yeah, that's an interesting thing about death row.
[00:48:22]  I mean, there's a huge percentage.
[00:48:27]  I don't remember the exact percentage.
[00:48:28]  Maybe, Steve, you can find it.
[00:48:29]  But of people that end up on death row who are innocent.

=== Innocent on Death Row (02:04) ===

[00:48:36]  And it's like, a big to-do to get any sort of look over or like a redo of their conviction or like a relook at like looking at their DNA.
[00:48:51]  Cause I know the DNA, they get the DNA wrong a lot or like for whatever reason, these whoever gets these convict, the prosecutors who get these convictions and the judges and they just, there's this reluctance to admit that they got something so.
[00:49:13]  Something so serious like this is wrong.
[00:49:17]  Well, there's one woman on death row who is actually innocent.
[00:49:23]  Some people struggle to fall asleep.
[00:49:25]  Others struggle staying asleep.
[00:49:26]  And then you have people like me who constantly wake up throughout the night with their thoughts racing.
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[00:49:57]  Most saffron supplements don't work because they contain cheap, unstandardized saffron cut with fillers or low potency extracts, delivering weak, inconsistent doses.
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[00:50:16]  Trademarked saffron, standardized and concentrated to only the active ingredients, proven to enhance sleep, mood, and relaxation.
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[00:50:33]  After taking evening bean for some time now, I'm not waking up throughout the night, and I'm waking up in a much better mood with far more energy.

=== Melatonin and Execution (15:27) ===

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[00:51:04]  Now back to the show.
[00:51:05]  And her name is Melissa Lucio.
[00:51:07]  And she was convicted of murdering her two-year-old toddler, who in fact had fallen down the steps.
[00:51:15]  And that's what was the reason that she eventually died.
[00:51:19]  She had like a brain hemorrhage.
[00:51:22]  Oh, God.
[00:51:22]  But she was convicted by this prosecutor in Brownsville, Texas, who was running for Congress.
[00:51:31]  And he was essentially working for the cartel.
[00:51:34]  And he was selling sentences.
[00:51:36]  And Melissa didn't have any money.
[00:51:39]  So it would look good on his record if he had a death conviction for a child abuse case.
[00:51:46]  And so he was hiding evidence, eyewitness testimony from her own children who saw the little girl fall down the steps.
[00:51:58]  And that wasn't admitted in the trial.
[00:52:01]  Her defense attorney had just applied for a job with the district attorney.
[00:52:06]  And his wife was working for the judge, so it was a very comfortable scene in Brownsville.
[00:52:11]  Oh, my God.
[00:52:14]  The prosecutor eventually went to prison himself.
[00:52:17]  He was sentenced for 13 years for fraud and served, I think, five of those years.
[00:52:23]  But Melissa was finally demonstrated to be innocent because of all these factors.
[00:52:33]  And once the fact that, you know, the eyewitness testimony was allowed in the court, it became very clear that she would never have been convicted.
[00:52:43]  And yet, even now she's on death row because the Court of Criminal Appeals is twiddling its thumbs, waiting to decide, you know, should we free this one?
[00:52:54]  Because of what you say, there's this sense that if the jury spoke and said she's guilty, then, you know, we have to move heaven and earth to actually change that.
[00:53:04]  And that there's another woman, Brittany.
[00:53:08]  Holberg, who was convicted of murdering this 80-year-old man in Amarillo.
[00:53:13]  She was a prostitute at the time.
[00:53:17]  But it was a gruesome 45-minute struggle between the two of them.
[00:53:24]  And in a capital case, there are several things.
[00:53:33]  You don't get executed just because you murdered somebody.
[00:53:36]  It has to have an additional factor.
[00:53:38]  It has to be a child.
[00:53:39]  It has to be process of a robbery or, you know, or process of escaping from prison, you know, there are like 10 different things.
[00:53:49]  Anyway, a jailhouse snitch.
[00:53:53]  They put a woman in the cell with Brittany, and then she came out and said that Brittany told me she enjoyed killing him and that she was going to do it again and that she stole all this money.
[00:54:03]  And so that eventually got to, you know, the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas.
[00:54:12]  and the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
[00:54:17]  Her conviction has now been vacated, but it will be challenged by Texas, I'm sure, again.
[00:54:25]  But in my opinion, when you use a jailhouse snitch who was paid for her testimony, I think that should retrial it.
[00:54:37]  Oh, for sure.
[00:54:37]  100%.
[00:54:40]  I have a good friend who is a local lawyer around here, and he takes a lot of crazy, crazy cases.
[00:54:51]  One of his first cases, actually, that really put him on the map was a boat captain who was driving a boat from Columbia to Tampa with, I forget, 100 tons of cocaine on it or whatever.
[00:55:05]  And the guy was sentenced to life in prison and he got him off scot free.
[00:55:10]  Didn't spend a day in prison.
[00:55:12]  The guy, he actually let this guy stay in his house during the whole trial because he had nowhere to stay.
[00:55:16]  He was poor.
[00:55:18]  And essentially, the story was the cartel boarded a ship on the way to Tampa.
[00:55:22]  And held a gun to his head, said, You're taking all this cocaine to Tampa, or we're going to kill you and your whole fucking family.
[00:55:27]  So he took it to Tampa.
[00:55:28]  You know what I mean?
[00:55:29]  And that's my friend.
[00:55:31]  His name is Bjorn.
[00:55:31]  He's the lawyer.
[00:55:33]  He was explaining to me.
[00:55:34]  And since then, he's been taking hundreds of cases very similar to this, where essentially the cartel will take these poor people like the boat captain or just pawns in this whole game and make them transport all this stuff.
[00:55:54]  And if they don't do it, they threaten to kill their family.
[00:55:56]  And the only people that get in trouble are these people that are put in these situations, these poor people who have no part in the money-making of the cartel or all the death that happens with the cartels.
[00:56:05]  And these kingpins, these high-level guys, they are just untouched.
[00:56:10]  And they never see a courtroom in their life.
[00:56:13]  And the point I originally wanted to make about this lawyer friend of mine, Bjorn, was he.
[00:56:24]  Enjoy that magic mind.
[00:56:25]  It's delicious.
[00:56:28]  He took a case with a convicted murderer who was on death row for basically he was a truck driver who was on death row for killing a prostitute at a truck stop.
[00:56:42]  And I was interested.
[00:56:46]  This was back in the day when I was making documentaries.
[00:56:49]  And I thought this was a fascinating case because Bjorn thought that he was innocent.
[00:56:55]  because of some of the, it's a little bit foggy, but there was no conclusive DNA testing to prove that he did it.
[00:57:02]  He claimed he was innocent, right?
[00:57:04]  And the family of this prostitute, they wanted this guy to be murdered.
[00:57:10]  They wanted him to be executed.
[00:57:11]  He was on death row.
[00:57:11]  He's been on death row since like 1990.
[00:57:13]  And this was, we filmed this probably in 2015.
[00:57:18]  So long time he's been on death row his whole life.
[00:57:22]  And we went out, we traveled out to this little town in the middle of Florida.
[00:57:26]  I forget the name of the town, but it's one of the last places.
[00:57:29]  It's one of the only places.
[00:57:31]  I think one of the two prisons in Florida where they still execute people.
[00:57:35]  Middle of nowhere, spooky town.
[00:57:37]  And we got there right at sunset and we were filming and there was this big field with TV reporters.
[00:57:45]  And on one side of the field and it was cordoned off with like a caution tape was this group of people who were supporting the guy who was about to be executed.
[00:58:00]  And about 100 yards away, there was another boxed off little area with all the people who were family members of the woman who died or friends of them, about an equal amount of people.
[00:58:12]  And we were going back and forth interviewing both of them.
[00:58:15]  And it was just the most insane experience to hear both of their sides.
[00:58:19]  I mean, on the side of the people that were trying to stop the guy from being executed, were two of the people there had just gotten off death row after spending their entire lives on death row and being exonerated after finally getting their case pushed through.
[00:58:34]  And also seeing Bjorn, the lawyer, who was really emotionally invested in all this, and the TV cameras were all over him, and he was beside himself during this whole process.
[00:58:45]  And the guy.
[00:58:48]  The guy who was convicted for murder, who was on death row, he was strapped to the table on a gurney getting ready to be lethal injected.
[00:58:55]  And they have like this theater in that room, right?
[00:58:57]  Where they pull the curtains back and like certain people, like the lawyers and like some of the family can be in this theater while they watch the person be executed.
[00:59:06]  And I guess they had the guy strapped to the gurney for like three hours while they waited for the court to give the decision whether they were going to, the Supreme Court, whether they were going to stay the execution or not.
[00:59:17]  So like this guy strapped to this table for Hours waiting for the verdict to come down from the Supreme Court, and we're all.
[00:59:23]  And this didn't end till like three or four in the morning.
[00:59:25]  Wow.
[00:59:27]  And eventually, I think they ended up executing him.
[00:59:30]  And uh, it was just the most bizarre experience.
[00:59:33]  Like, it's like it was for me, like the experience was like it's amazing that we're living here.
[00:59:40]  This was like 2015, and like the way the world has evolved, we're still like in this, we're so primitive in some of this, in this sense, you know, yeah, that that you know, we're still.
[00:59:53]  We still can't figure out if people committed a crime or not.
[00:59:55]  And we're like, we have the fact that we have movie theaters for people to watch people be executed is just bizarre.
[01:00:02]  I compare it more to a peep show.
[01:00:05]  You know, the old times carnival thing, you know, where you'd have a curtain move by.
[01:00:09]  Right, right, right.
[01:00:11]  It feels more.
[01:00:12]  And also, it's prurient, you know.
[01:00:18]  But on the other hand, I'm opposed to the death penalty.
[01:00:24]  I wasn't until I. got into the story.
[01:00:27]  It just wasn't important enough to me and I'd seen a lot of people in prison that I'd never wanted to see get out of prison and I thought I'd save my charitable concerns for other projects.
[01:00:39]  But seeing how justice is administered in Texas and it's probably no worse off than many states, you just can't know for certain.
[01:00:53]  But you can put a question to a jury fairly or unfairly.
[01:00:59]  And often, you know, different lawyers would get different results.
[01:01:03]  Well, is that justice?
[01:01:04]  You know, different juries would make a difference.
[01:01:06]  You know, it's an imperfect game.
[01:01:11]  And the process of appeals, when there really is a cause to appeal, is, you know, it's very difficult to undo a conviction.
[01:01:22]  Yeah, just the slow bureaucracy of the court system.
[01:01:25]  Right.
[01:01:29]  Yeah, I can imagine.
[01:01:29]  I mean, you would I could see how it would just be so easy to lose hope if you got stuck in that.
[01:01:33]  Oh, sure.
[01:01:34]  You know, you also worked on a Wild story about satanic ritual abuse.
[01:01:44]  Oh, yeah, which ties into all this crazy stuff.
[01:01:49]  I I was in therapy back.
[01:01:53]  This was like in early 90s and I loved my therapist.
[01:02:02]  They were such dear, intelligent people.
[01:02:06]  And because I was an investigative reporter, you know, they said, well, you know, we've been seeing a number of patients, you know, basically young women who in therapy are having these flashbacks, recovered memories of satanic abuse.
[01:02:30]  And a lot of times they have multiple personality disorder.
[01:02:35]  Huh.
[01:02:36]  And then they said, and Satanists are responsible for more than 50 murders a year in Austin.
[01:02:42]  Satanists.
[01:02:43]  Yeah.
[01:02:43]  How do you define a Satanist?
[01:02:45]  That would be my first question.
[01:02:46]  Well, my first question was, you know, we don't have 50 murders in Austin a year.
[01:02:51]  Oh, wow.
[01:02:52]  You know, whether Satanists or not, that's more than we've ever had.
[01:02:57]  So, but I was intrigued.
[01:03:01]  And then there was a conference of police who were being, the lecturer was about, satanic ritual abuse.
[01:03:13]  And this cop who was going around the country with his slideshow said that Satanists were responsible for 50,000 murders a year in the U.S.
[01:03:25]  And once again, it was more than our actual total homicide count.
[01:03:29]  And these are cops.
[01:03:31]  They should be a little more skeptical.
[01:03:36]  But no.
[01:03:37]  And so I went to my editor, Tina Brown, at the New Yorker, and I was proposed to do a an article on multiple personality disorder.
[01:03:48]  And she was, oh, and I said, well, you know, and sometimes in therapy, they recover these memories of satanic abuse.
[01:03:55]  Oh, that's so hot.
[01:03:56]  That's so hot.
[01:03:57]  She was so thrilled.
[01:03:58]  Yes, yes, Larry, yes.
[01:04:00]  So I thought, well, how would I approach this?
[01:04:04]  So the internet was young at that point, but it was very useful.
[01:04:09]  And I could go through and find all these court cases.
[01:04:17]  of people who were suing their parents for abuse or their therapists or, you know, just there were hundreds.
[01:04:24]  And there was one case in which a person was convicted of satanic abuse and he had confessed.
[01:04:33]  And his name was Paul Ingram.
[01:04:34]  He was a deputy sheriff in Olympia, Washington.
[01:04:38]  I thought, well, if there's anything to this, that'll be it.
[01:04:41]  So I went to Olympia.
[01:04:44]  And what I found was that Paul's had a family of four and two girls and two boys and the girls,
[01:05:00]  one of them, Erica, had made the initial outcry and it got, you know, got into the sheriff's apartment where Paul was a deputy and so the assistant sheriff arrested him and they brought in his preacher who,
[01:05:25]  an evangelical preacher who told Paul that God will not let a false memory come into your brain.
[01:05:32]  And then they brought in a psychiatrist who hypnotized him.
[01:05:37]  And Paul had said, I know my girls wouldn't lie, but I don't remember it.
[01:05:49]  So to help him remember, the psychiatrist and the preacher sat there with the deputy.
[01:05:55]  and elicited these memories of satanic crimes.
[01:06:00]  And in the church that they were a part of, it's called the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, there was a lot of gossip.

=== False Memories Hypnotized (02:28) ===

[01:06:09]  You can imagine that something like this was just on everybody's mind.
[01:06:13]  And the preacher had access to the deputies and so on.
[01:06:16]  So there was information coming out.
[01:06:19]  And so that would generate new memories on the part of the daughters.
[01:06:24]  And then it would be reported back to Paul.
[01:06:28]  You know what they were saying, and he would come up with memories, but that they never had the same memory.
[01:06:34]  There were all these disparate move memories and the, you know, girls were talking about these uh, satanic fires.
[01:06:43]  You know.
[01:06:43]  They'd have these campfires, you know, and they would uh, the girls were uh, impregnated and then later nailed to a table and had the uh the, the fetus, withdrawn from them.
[01:06:57]  You know, uh and uh, that their neighbors had committed homicide and, you know, and it was bizarro stuff, you know, but the cops took it seriously.
[01:07:10]  They had helicopters flying around looking for, you know, where the fires might have been, digging up the yard.
[01:07:17]  And I asked the undersheriff, you know, did you find any bones?
[01:07:23]  Yeah, there was, well, there was, yes.
[01:07:26]  Really, what was it?
[01:07:27]  Well, it was an elk bone.
[01:07:29]  Obviously offering this as evidence, right?
[01:07:32]  And so.
[01:07:36]  But the thing was that Paul confessed and he felt like he must have done this.
[01:07:43]  And, you know, when the questioning was so bizarre because, so Paul, you know, he had two friends that were also implicated by the girls.
[01:07:56]  So when Ray or Jim, you know, would come in, what did they do?
[01:08:02]  Well, I think they must have raped my wife.
[01:08:08]  Okay.
[01:08:10]  And then what did you do?
[01:08:14]  Well, I would have gone back to work.
[01:08:16]  And it was all in this conditional tense.
[01:08:21]  It must have been this way.
[01:08:23]  I would have done this.
[01:08:25]  He never said I did it, but he confessed.
[01:08:29]  So he went to prison.
[01:08:31]  And at some point, I was in L.A.

=== The Foursquare Gospel Headquarters (02:08) ===

[01:08:38]  And I decided to go to the headquarters of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel.
[01:08:45]  It was a church that Amy Simple McPherson created back in the old days of Hollywood.
[01:08:51]  And so I was talking to the leader of the church, and I said, you know, that first outcry by this girl, Erica, happened, I think, at your summer camp.
[01:09:09]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:09:10]  One of our counselors led that.
[01:09:12]  And I said, is she here?
[01:09:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:16]  Paula, come on in the office.
[01:09:18]  So Paula, the evangelist who had been speaking at this church camp, came in and I asked her about the setting for this church camp and how many girls were there and what was her role and so on.
[01:09:37]  And she said, I would be talking to them and I would say, there's a girl in the room.
[01:09:48]  I can see her in a closet.
[01:09:50]  She's in a closet and she's so afraid of her father.
[01:09:55]  And she hears the footsteps coming towards the end.
[01:09:59]  Some girl cried out, it was me, it was me.
[01:10:02]  And, you know, a lot of hysteria.
[01:10:06]  And so at the end of camp, she says, I was preparing to leave.
[01:10:11]  And some of the counselors came over and said, there's a young woman who needs your attention.
[01:10:18]  And so Erica was actually a counselor at this camp.
[01:10:24]  You know we, we don't know what to do with her.
[01:10:26]  She's on the stage and she's just weeping.
[01:10:28]  And so the Eric Paula came over to Erica and she said, and I put my hand on her head and I prayed over her and I heard God say, you've been abused.

=== No Evidence of Abuse (15:49) ===

[01:10:46]  And then I said, and it's been happening for a long time and it's your father now.
[01:10:54]  This was a very religious young woman.
[01:10:57]  Erica was, and she was getting this message from God telling her that her father had been abusing her.
[01:11:05]  There was no evidence.
[01:11:06]  It never was any evidence of it.
[01:11:08]  It was only this transmittal, you know, the hand on the head and the message from God.
[01:11:14]  And it led to the ruination of Paul Ingram's life and the splintering of his family.
[01:11:23]  But he served years in prison.
[01:11:26]  And, you know, once again, the business of trying to roll back a conviction is extremely difficult, especially one that had been framed as child abuse with a satanic addition to it.
[01:11:38]  Is that them?
[01:11:39]  Yeah, yeah, that's the family before it became the what did he say about, like, what?
[01:11:46]  Did anyone ever ask him, like, why did you oh, yeah, I talked to him about it.
[01:11:51]  It's hard for him to understand because, you know, it seemed that he must have done something.
[01:11:58]  He was very guilty, and he's a fervent believer.
[01:12:06]  He trusted his preacher and the psychiatrist.
[01:12:08]  And, you know, these, these, you know, I, I know you do a lot of interest and have a lot of interest in UFOs and stuff like that.
[01:12:18]  But there was a study done in Georgia, which would not be allowed nowadays.
[01:12:27]  But a psychiatrist or psychologist had a patient and he told her, I'd like to do a little experiment.
[01:12:37]  And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to hypnotize you, and I'm going to put some suggestions in your mind.
[01:12:47]  It's not going to be true.
[01:12:48]  It's just, you know, just see.
[01:12:51]  So he hypnotized her.
[01:12:53]  And he said, you were late to our session.
[01:12:58]  What happened?
[01:12:59]  Which wasn't true.
[01:13:01]  And she said, well, I was driving along the road, and I saw a cow on the side of the road, you know, who was trying to give birth.
[01:13:09]  And she was really struggling.
[01:13:11]  So I thought I could help.
[01:13:13]  So I got out of the car and I went over to help her.
[01:13:17]  And he said, and then a light appeared.
[01:13:18]  And she said, and then a light appeared overhead and a spaceship came down.
[01:13:23]  And, you know, and she was abducted.
[01:13:27]  And he woke her up and he said, look, this is what you said.
[01:13:31]  Bear in mind, you made it up.
[01:13:34]  You know, I planted it inadvertently in your mind, but it, you know, just free yourself of this.
[01:13:40]  She couldn't shake the feeling that.
[01:13:43]  It was as real to her as any other memory.
[01:13:46]  And I think that's part of what was going on with Paul and to some extent with his children.
[01:13:52]  You know, they're fantasizing.
[01:13:56]  You know, they were charged with the idea that something happened.
[01:14:02]  And that phrase has done a lot of damage, especially in child abuse cases and the old daycare pursuits.
[01:14:11]  Remember the daycare hysteria?
[01:14:13]  You know, there was always, well maybe they didn't, you know, fly to Mexico and bury a giraffe, which was, for instance, in Austin.
[01:14:23]  That was one of the daycare stories.
[01:14:25]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:27]  Maybe that didn't happen, but something happened or these kids wouldn't be so screwed up.
[01:14:31]  So the jury would convict them on the something happened charge.
[01:14:37]  Yeah.
[01:14:37]  What was that story about the daycare?
[01:14:39]  The kid was telling their parents that they, like, flew to Mexico and buried a giraffe or something?
[01:14:43]  Yeah, a friend in Dan's daycare.
[01:14:46]  And, you know, it was just a a kind of neighborhood daycare.
[01:14:53]  During that time, there were a lot of these daycare cases arising, and some of the parents were concerned.
[01:15:00]  And so a mother asked, you know, her daughter, you know, had anything gone on in the daycare?
[01:15:11]  And I think the daughter gave, you know, responded to one of the suggestions, you know, well, maybe, or something like that.
[01:15:21]  It was hard.
[01:15:22]  So she called a psychologist, a local psychologist in Austin who I had interviewed.
[01:15:31]  And she assembled some other family members.
[01:15:37]  And they had, back then, they would have dolls that they used to illustrate, you know, where did he touch you here and stuff like that.
[01:15:46]  So these were parents and a psychologist interviewing very, very young children.
[01:15:54]  And I went to about an hour of trial of Fran and Dan.
[01:16:04]  I think they might have been tried separately.
[01:16:06]  I don't remember.
[01:16:07]  But there's a little girl on the stand sitting in her big sister's lap.
[01:16:15]  And the prosecutor, you know, honey, did Dan hurt you?
[01:16:22]  And she had a she said, no.
[01:16:26]  Did Dan touch you someplace?
[01:16:27]  You didn't?
[01:16:29]  No.
[01:16:29]  Your honor, may we have a recess?
[01:16:31]  And then it was, yes.
[01:16:33]  After the recess?
[01:16:34]  Yeah.
[01:16:35]  And it made me really scared to think that.
[01:16:39]  And I was just a spectator.
[01:16:42]  I wasn't on the jury.
[01:16:44]  And they might have heard other more compelling evidence, but they did hear evidence about how these kids were flown to Mexico and they were slaughtering wild animals and then flying back just in time to be picked up by mommy and daddy.
[01:16:58]  I mean, they served years in prison before they were exonerated.
[01:17:04]  Wow.
[01:17:05]  And, you know, it's a really dark mark on our culture that that kind of hysteria is allowed to proliferate.
[01:17:15]  And what year was that happening?
[01:17:17]  I don't remember the exact year, but the daycare cases all took place in the early, in the 90s.
[01:17:22]  In the 90s.
[01:17:24]  Oh, God.
[01:17:26]  Yeah, we had, I had a gentleman on here by the name of Whitley Streber.
[01:17:33]  Yeah, I've talked to him.
[01:17:35]  He lives in Texas.
[01:17:35]  Or he used to live in Texas.
[01:17:36]  Yeah, he lives in LA, I think.
[01:17:38]  He lives in LA now.
[01:17:39]  And he had a crazy story about a military school he went to when he was a kid.
[01:17:45]  And they said there was a lot of hypnotizing going on and a lot of like, Weird psychological experiments going on in there, um, where they were like putting kids in boxes and things and like experimenting with telepathy.
[01:17:58]  And he also, uh, explains the story, which he doesn't really talk about much anymore, but he was, he's done two separate radio interviews in the past where he's, uh, mentioned when he was a kid, he was flown down to Mexico as a part of some military experiment during the Cold War.
[01:18:18]  And, uh, allegedly, um, Him and the rest of these children were shown videos of people being like mutilated and like dead bodies.
[01:18:28]  And they were explained, it was explained to these kids that it was their fault that this happened to these people.
[01:18:33]  So it was some crazy experiment to induce trauma in children, to induce some sort of psychic or psionic abilities in kids.
[01:18:45]  Again, this is like the Cold War, it sounds like crazy woo woo stuff.
[01:18:50]  But this is the story that he told.
[01:18:53]  And he doesn't talk about the Mexico stuff anymore, but that reminded me of it.
[01:18:57]  And during that time in the Cold War, there was also a lot of crazy remote viewing type things that were going on, experiments within the intelligence community trying to figure out better ways to spy on the Soviet Union.
[01:19:14]  And they thought that this remote viewing thing could happen.
[01:19:17]  And there were people like Ingo Swan and Uri Geller.
[01:19:22]  Mm hmm.
[01:19:23]  Who, not Uri, but Ingo Swan and a bunch of the other remote viewers in this program called the Stanford Research Institute program were Scientologists, which is bizarre.
[01:19:38]  I recently had a gentleman on here named Jeffrey Mishlov who explained this all to me.
[01:19:43]  And I was asking him, like, why are all these remote viewers Scientologists?
[01:19:46]  It's so strange.
[01:19:47]  He's like, yeah, there was a lot of them.
[01:19:50]  Hal Put Off was another one.
[01:19:51]  And I asked this guy, Jeffrey Mishlov, I'm like, why do you think this was?
[01:19:56]  And he says, I think L. Ron Hubbard was on to something.
[01:20:02]  Well, I had a letter from Whitley years ago after I did that Remembering Satan piece.
[01:20:10]  And he said that he wished that I would write about him because he knows that there's something wrong with him.
[01:20:20]  And people think he's the village idiot.
[01:20:24]  But these are, just like I said about that test, these are real memories to me.
[01:20:32]  But I know that they can't be.
[01:20:35]  So please consider writing about me.
[01:20:39]  So I was tied up on something else.
[01:20:42]  And then Whitley came out with another book about abduction.
[01:20:49]  And we have a mutual friend, Jim Konecka.
[01:20:53]  And he and Whitley wrote a bestselling novel together.
[01:20:57]  They went to school together, as a matter of fact.
[01:20:59]  But they called it War Day.
[01:21:00]  It was a New York Times bestseller.
[01:21:02]  And so they were always in contact.
[01:21:04]  And Jim and I went to see Whitley at the bookstore when he was signing books.
[01:21:10]  And afterwards I said, Willie, you remember that letter you wrote to me?
[01:21:15]  And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
[01:21:17]  But, you know, that was before I found out about the implants.
[01:21:21]  So, I mean, I thought I've always been interested in why people, how it is that people fantasize these things.
[01:21:32]  I don't believe he's deliberately making it up.
[01:21:36]  But there's something wrong.
[01:21:39]  And it intrigued me.
[01:21:41]  But I also felt I felt he was too fragile to take on.
[01:21:49]  I'm glad I didn't write about him.
[01:21:52]  How long was that before the movie came out, the communion movie with Christopher Walken?
[01:21:58]  I don't know.
[01:21:59]  I don't remember.
[01:22:00]  Yeah, that was a long time ago.
[01:22:01]  Yeah.
[01:22:02]  But I can't believe, I mean, that's pretty wild that you can write something like that and then they'll make a freaking Hollywood movie with Christopher Walken playing your character.
[01:22:12]  You know, like I wonder what that does to you, what that does to your belief.
[01:22:16]  You know, like say, for example, that he, you know, he thought that these memories can't be real.
[01:22:22]  Something weird happened.
[01:22:23]  I don't know what it is, but I don't necessarily believe it.
[01:22:25]  And then some crazy blockbuster Hollywood movie gets made about it.
[01:22:28]  Well, it's reinforcing to make money out of something like that.
[01:22:33]  And so there's a disincentive to walk.
[01:22:35]  But at one point in his life, he wanted to break the spell and he thought that I could help him.
[01:22:42]  Yeah, he also writes a lot of very dark, dark fiction.
[01:22:46]  Right.
[01:22:47]  Stuff about vampires and werewolves and things like this.
[01:22:51]  Yeah.
[01:22:54]  I got to get leaked real quick.
[01:22:55]  Okay.
[01:22:55]  Take a quick break.
[01:22:56]  We'll jump back in.
[01:22:57]  All right.
[01:22:59]  While we're on the topic of all this satanic stuff, though, L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons, that story is fascinating.
[01:23:06]  It is.
[01:23:06]  Because Jack Parsons was really into all this satanic stuff, right?
[01:23:11]  And had some sort of connection to Aleister Crowley.
[01:23:14]  Is that right?
[01:23:16]  Yeah.
[01:23:19]  To some extent, he considered himself ordained by Aleister Crowley.
[01:23:24]  And Hubbard ran off with his girlfriend.
[01:23:27]  It was annoying to him.
[01:23:30]  Yeah, it was quite a scene on South Orange Avenue in Pasadena back in the day.
[01:23:37]  So Parsons, who was this, you know, JPL, he was the guy who founded JPL, right?
[01:23:45]  A legitimate high level rocket scientist.
[01:23:48]  Yeah.
[01:23:49]  Ends up like, how does a guy like that end up being like involved in all this satanic stuff?
[01:23:54]  And like, he wanted to, um, he wanted to like bring the antichrist, right?
[01:24:00]  Yeah.
[01:24:01]  I, that your question presupposes that a really smart person wouldn't go into all of this.
[01:24:09]  But the truth is that a lot of these people that a lot of Scientologists are really smart and very successful personalities.
[01:24:17]  It's, uh, it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence.
[01:24:21]  And I think to some extent there's a lot of fantasizing going on, which is something we've been talking about this last hour.
[01:24:30]  But if Jack Parsons can be accused of being a cultist, a fanaticist, he's exploring the universe, but he's also sort of exploring you know, the outer limits of human behavior.
[01:24:53]  And I, yeah, he was very proud of it.
[01:24:57]  I mean, he didn't hide it.
[01:24:58]  You know, he really had this, you know, sort of satanic temple.
[01:25:05]  And people were drawn to it.
[01:25:06]  And he legitimized it, too, by being such a prominent scientist and so on.
[01:25:11]  So I don't know.
[01:25:14]  He was, he wound up killing himself.
[01:25:18]  And that was kind of a sad end to his interesting life.
[01:25:25]  There's a spot in the Everglades, allegedly, that he had a site that he worked on.
[01:25:32]  Are you familiar with that?
[01:25:33]  No, I don't know about that.
[01:25:34]  There's this guy who does videos in the Everglades catching iguanas.
[01:25:39]  And there's this spot.
[01:25:40]  I can't remember the name of it.
[01:25:41]  Steve, maybe you can Google it.
[01:25:42]  But it's an abandoned, I guess, abandoned Air Force Base rocket launch area.
[01:25:49]  There's actual silos in there where apparently Jack Parsons used to work at.
[01:25:56]  And there's like.
[01:25:57]  He goes into the woods, into the Everglades, and he finds all these abandoned, overgrown houses with like pentagrams in there and all kinds of like dark satanic stuff, which is wild.
[01:26:09]  I didn't know that, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's just, uh, it's so strange to me.
[01:26:14]  It's just so because, like, being satanic is like, it's like being religious, you know, it's just like going the opposite direction.
[01:26:23]  Yeah.
[01:26:24]  Yeah.
[01:26:24]  You don't have to, you don't have to play it the whole video, but I was just wondering if you could Google where that, where Jack Parsons' place was in the Everglades.
[01:26:31]  Um, Are you religious?

=== Refuting Religious Belief (03:18) ===

[01:26:36]  No, I was religious as a teenager.
[01:26:40]  And the Methodist, so I was as religious as you get to be in the Methodist church.
[01:26:47]  But I was in young life and some of these Christian organizations.
[01:26:53]  And left it aside somewhere along in college.
[01:26:58]  But I've always been interested and attracted to religious ideas.
[01:27:03]  without actually being able to allow myself to believe in them.
[01:27:07]  So I can associate ideas.
[01:27:10]  I mean, you know, I think Jesus is a fascinating historical character and I think a wonderful model.
[01:27:17]  And so was he conceived by immaculate conception or, you know, did he go to heaven?
[01:27:26]  I don't, in some ways those things don't matter to me.
[01:27:30]  I think, you know, what Jesus would mean to me now is that I'd like to incorporate more of his His behavior into my own.
[01:27:39]  And I think that's something admirable.
[01:27:41]  And I feel that way about, you know, I don't know that much about Buddhism, but I'm intrigued by the lessons that people draw from those religious teachings.
[01:27:55]  Do you remember the point where you like stopped being really religious?
[01:28:00]  Was there like an exact point or was it just kind of like a story?
[01:28:03]  Well, there was this one moment.
[01:28:04]  I wouldn't say that it was the moment my life changed, but it was a moment.
[01:28:10]  In Young Life, we had these two leaders who were sexual magnets, Roy and Johnny.
[01:28:17]  Roy was, he played in the Rose Bowl.
[01:28:20]  He had a Rose Bowl on his finger.
[01:28:22]  He was a center.
[01:28:23]  He was, as you would expect, an impressive piece of meat.
[01:28:29]  And his wife, Johnny, was an airline stewardess and just as hot as she could be.
[01:28:34]  So for a lot of teenage kids, you know, these are appealing role models.
[01:28:46]  And of course, their marriage didn't last, as I understand it.
[01:28:50]  He ran off with one of the high school students is what the rumor was.
[01:28:56]  But there was a moment when I was – he was preparing us for the challenges of college, you know, and all the existentialists that awaited us.
[01:29:10]  And so I was supposed to play one of these snooty intellectuals who believed that God, you know, it was the watchmaker analogy, you know, he created the watch and wound it up and then left us to our own devices.
[01:29:30]  And so I made a very compelling case for that.
[01:29:33]  And he said, now refute yourself.
[01:29:37]  And I couldn't do that, you know, it just, because the way to refute that is simply through belief.
[01:29:44]  And I realized that I couldn't find my way there.
[01:29:50]  And that was a, You know, I had talked myself out of it.

=== Operating System of Mind (06:10) ===

[01:29:54]  The idea of God seems to be a fundamental part of the operating system of the human mind.
[01:30:05]  Yeah, I don't think it's.
[01:30:12]  I mean, it might be tied to the era that we live in, you know, I think, and it's also the culture we're in.
[01:30:23]  You know, I've spent a lot of time in. other countries where you don't have the diversity of belief.
[01:30:31]  You can only believe one thing.
[01:30:34]  You can believe it more or less, but there's this one thing, and it's Islam or it's Buddhism or it's whatever.
[01:30:40]  But in America, you can believe anything.
[01:30:42]  Like L. Ron Hubbard, if you don't find something, you just make it up.
[01:30:46]  You create your own religion.
[01:30:49]  We're, I think, a dynamic religious culture in our country more than any other country.
[01:30:57]  It's kind of a it seems like a kind of a double-edged sword, right?
[01:31:00]  Because America, there's no really like unifying identity to what it is to be an American, right?
[01:31:06]  Like we're such a diverse country with different beliefs, different, you know, values.
[01:31:14]  And some other countries like Israel, for example, or let's just say some Middle Eastern country, they're they would go as far for their, you know, so far for their beliefs in God to strap a bomb to their chest and detonate it.
[01:31:31]  Right.
[01:31:32]  And it's almost like the opposite here.
[01:31:34]  Right.
[01:31:35]  So it's like they have a very, very, from like a, even from, if you want to put it into like a national security frame, like, is it great that some countries can have this very strong unifying identity?
[01:31:56]  Is that good for a country in some sense versus us who, As a population, we don't have this cohesive glue that helps us all stick together.
[01:32:07]  But, you know, we have this giant military, this giant government, all this money, all these weapons, and all these things.
[01:32:14]  Kind of makes for a very interesting dynamic.
[01:32:17]  Well, you know, I take into account.
[01:32:20]  You're younger than I am and I had um the.
[01:32:23]  I always had an idea of being an American and um, the and is imperfect an identity as that is.
[01:32:32]  It was always something that was dear to me and as a reporter going into other countries where you know, you know you didn't have the freedom to speak.
[01:32:45]  You didn't have the freedom to think clearly on your own.
[01:32:50]  And, you know, you lived your life, if not in fear, then at least you lived it at a lower level than you might have had had you had your freedom.
[01:33:03]  And I often think that maybe other countries have a clearer idea about America than we do ourselves.
[01:33:09]  And there's a sense in which every country has a foot in America in some way.
[01:33:19]  It's like I think we understand so little about the world and it's like we're surrounded by this mirror glass where we just see ourselves.
[01:33:28]  But outside, they see who we are.
[01:33:31]  And oftentimes, I mean, I think invariably you go into a country and they'll have an uncle in America.
[01:33:39]  You know, there's somebody they know in America, someone they're related to usually.
[01:33:43]  They know a lot about what's going on with that person and they compare the life.
[01:33:47]  that they're living in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Thailand or wherever to the life their relative is living in Des Moines or Los Angeles and something.
[01:33:57]  So there's a constant point of comparison, which is America.
[01:34:00]  And that is a very powerful and very precious thing to have.
[01:34:07]  But we abuse it and we treat the rest of the world so poorly that I think people want the love and attention of America.
[01:34:20]  I remember when this was back in the 80s and I went to Nicaragua and the Sandinistas were in the middle of this revolution.
[01:34:29]  Yeah.
[01:34:30]  And I, it was the most anti-American country I'd ever been in at that point.
[01:34:35]  And it was very impoverished.
[01:34:38]  But I went to a baseball game with this, the mistress of one of the commandantes was my escort.
[01:34:43]  She was, she was a good number.
[01:34:44]  I'll tell you.
[01:34:45]  I bet.
[01:34:46]  And, you know, she, we had our bags checked and, you know, they pulled out this big.
[01:34:51]  Pistol out of her purse and I thought well, I'm gonna really behave myself.
[01:34:58]  And so we sat up in the stands above the commandantes and I looked down there and they were all you know.
[01:35:06]  They had their hands to their mouths and it looked like they were praying.
[01:35:10]  And I asked the escort, you know, can I get you a coke?
[01:35:14]  Because no, no alcohol served here, and sure.
[01:35:19]  So I went up and I ordered two cokes and they were.
[01:35:21]  It was.
[01:35:22]  The country was so poor, they couldn't afford paper cups.
[01:35:25]  So they poured the liquid into sandwich bags, little plastic, you know, sandwich bags.
[01:35:31]  So they weren't praying.
[01:35:32]  They were manipulating the liquid in the bag into their mouths.
[01:35:37]  And so as it happened, just a couple of weeks before I went to Managua, the Baltimore Orioles had come.
[01:35:51]  The Baltimore Orioles at that time had three Nicaraguan players, including their ace pitcher, Dennis Martinez.
[01:35:58]  And the legendary manager of the team, Earl Weaver, said, well, let's just go to Nicaragua and show off a little bit.

=== Silicon Valley Espionage (08:33) ===

[01:36:04]  So they flew the team and they had an exhibition game.
[01:36:11]  Nobody could stop talking about it.
[01:36:13]  They hated America, but they loved the Baltimore Oils.
[01:36:16]  And, you know, it was the most important thing that had happened since the revolution.
[01:36:21]  Wow.
[01:36:22]  And I think we forget the immense amount of power that we have over other cultures.
[01:36:28]  Although I think we're squandering it so badly these days that its value is disappearing.
[01:36:36]  The reason I bring this up is because I've been noticing a lot of reporting recently.
[01:36:44]  On people in Silicon Valley trying to like map Christianity onto everything that's going on in Silicon Valley, which in historically is kind of like an anti religious area, right?
[01:36:55]  Peter Thiel is one of the biggest people, right?
[01:36:57]  Peter Thiel's a really interesting guy.
[01:36:59]  He's a gay Christian billionaire who is, um, you know, one of the original investors in Facebook.
[01:37:06]  I mean, all kinds of you know, really big companies.
[01:37:09]  Um, he also is the owner of Palantir, which is a huge company that's.
[01:37:16]  Biggest client is the US military and intelligence services.
[01:37:20]  I think the CIA is using Palantir.
[01:37:23]  And this guy is putting on these crazy conferences in San Francisco, inviting people to these Christian conferences.
[01:37:31]  I think it was him and the guy from this company called Y Combinator, who is a big part.
[01:37:38]  It's like a kingmaker in Silicon Valley.
[01:37:40]  They fund a lot of startups.
[01:37:42]  And there's this church, I forget the name, there's this big church right in the middle of San Francisco.
[01:37:48]  They're putting on these big conferences and trying to really sort of push this push Christianity and religion onto all the people inside Silicon Valley to sort of give them some sort of purpose.
[01:38:06]  I don't know what it is.
[01:38:06]  I really can't wrap my mind around what's going on.
[01:38:11]  But, like, is it reasonable to suggest that if they were to push.
[01:38:18]  This religion onto a place like Silicon Valley and these places that are coming up with these new innovative technologies that are being used for different things around the country and around the world that are a huge part of our economy and our military and everything else.
[01:38:35]  Would that somehow strengthen us as a country on the world stage if we were more cohesively involved in a unifying religion?
[01:38:49]  Well, I don't think that we will be involved in a unifying religion.
[01:38:55]  We're fortunate that it's not as divisive as it is, you know, like in Israel and the Middle East.
[01:39:02]  Yeah.
[01:39:06]  My impression of Palantir is that I just read Karp's book, The Technological Republic, I think it's called.
[01:39:12]  And, you know, the main goal is, you know, he feels that the community, the Silicon Valley community has been created in America, but they don't feel allegiance to America.
[01:39:23]  And I think there's some merit in that.
[01:39:27]  And also, you know, it's been charged with, Palantir has, with helping the Defense Department.
[01:39:34]  But on the other hand, when your adversaries are Russia and China, you want to keep ahead of the algorithms.
[01:39:39]  So, you know, I'm not one that says, you know, what's interesting to me is, you know, they're developing very powerful tools.
[01:39:49]  But people with varying ideologies can use them for different purposes.
[01:39:54]  And, you know, we're entering an era.
[01:39:58]  where technology awards such unprecedented amount of power to small groups and even singular individuals.
[01:40:06]  And, you know, I wrote about terrorism after 9-11.
[01:40:09]  You know, these were guys who were using suicide bombers and stuff like that.
[01:40:13]  Bin Laden wanted to get a nuclear bomb, but he never could.
[01:40:16]  Right.
[01:40:18]  You know, nowadays, you know, the amount of power that Al-Qaeda or any group like that could assemble easily is just terrifying to consider.
[01:40:29]  I remember the day that I awakened to the drone thing was, you know, been more than 10 years, I guess, but somebody flew a drone over the White House fence.
[01:40:39]  And I thought, oh, my god, it's that easy, you know and, and it's, it is that easy.
[01:40:45]  And, of course, we know there are all these anti drone uh efforts right now uh, the Defense Department has been working on yeah, but swarms of don't drones which are being trained like to fly through a forest the way a flock of birds would do.
[01:41:00]  Right, it's uh right, that's one of the new Palantir things.
[01:41:03]  Yeah, it's really um, it's like spreadsheet warfare.
[01:41:07]  It's chilling and uh, you know, it's uh.
[01:41:11]  So, you know, Silicon Valley is, you know, government itself is losing its role in our society and it's being replaced by private industry.
[01:41:24]  Right.
[01:41:24]  For good or ill.
[01:41:25]  And you'll see good or ill.
[01:41:28]  You'll see both in massive amounts because there's a lot of fervor in Silicon Valley and in private investment in general.
[01:41:38]  And even the Defense Department I was talking to, one of the guys who procures weapons.
[01:41:44]  And what they do now, rather than imagining a weapon, you know, and then going out and bidding a contract, they go from shop to shop where people are developing algorithms and saying, you know, what do you have?
[01:41:59]  And it's kind of like shopping.
[01:42:02]  You know, maybe we could use that.
[01:42:04]  You know, there's not a design in effect.
[01:42:07]  It's all, you know, it's like vintage clothes shopping, you know, in my thinking.
[01:42:16]  And it's a good idea to keep on top of what's the latest.
[01:42:21]  Yes.
[01:42:21]  But on the other hand, it seems to be that there's no idea about what they actually need or want.
[01:42:29]  Yeah, it's interesting the types of characters that you can find in there.
[01:42:33]  Like, again, going back to Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, two very different people, right?
[01:42:38]  And one of them, he made Alex the CEO of his company.
[01:42:41]  They're both very, I think Alex Karp donated millions of dollars to Kamala Harris' campaign.
[01:42:46]  And then you have Peter Thiel, who is like one of the biggest backers of Trump and his vice president.
[01:42:53]  And, you know, Alex Carp proclaims to be this progressive guy, liberal person, but, you know, is also very much, you know, like a, if you could call him a war hawk, but he's a very like expansionist type of guy, right?
[01:43:07]  And I think he said in his, there was a New York Times article I read about him, and he said something like, something like, and I might get this quote wrong, but it was something to the effect of, the idea of taking lives and saving lives is really interesting to me.
[01:43:24]  It is interesting.
[01:43:25]  I hope that's as far as you go with it.
[01:43:27]  Right.
[01:43:28]  Just like, it's bizarre.
[01:43:31]  It is bizarre.
[01:43:32]  The idea of private industries taking control of some of this technology that can be used around the world in war zones and things like this or for espionage.
[01:43:49]  It's a terrifying idea to think about what would happen if some of these private industries.
[01:43:56]  You know, we're able to slip out of control of the United States government or the United States military.
[01:44:03]  Right.
[01:44:04]  And there's little question that'll happen.
[01:44:08]  I mean, in a globalized world, you know, where the market is, you know, you see, you know, the evasion of sanctions everywhere.
[01:44:17]  You know, I mean, Russia is getting pretty much all it needs, even though it's sanctioned.
[01:44:22]  You know, other countries are providing.
[01:44:24]  And it's, you know, once you develop these tools, there's little available to keep them in the box.
[01:44:34]  Yeah.
[01:44:35]  Yeah, totally.

=== Terrorist Control Risks (05:16) ===

[01:44:38]  So I want to talk to you about Looming Tower, and I want to get to your new book, too, The Human Scale, which was fascinating.
[01:44:45]  I wasn't able to read the whole thing.
[01:44:46]  I made it through the first seven chapters, though.
[01:44:48]  All right.
[01:44:48]  I'll just keep my remarks limited to the beginning.
[01:44:52]  No, no, no.
[01:44:52]  I want to talk about all of it.
[01:44:53]  I think it's fascinating.
[01:44:55]  But I want to spend a good amount of time on that.
[01:44:58]  But I wanted to ask you a little bit about Looming Tower.
[01:45:05]  After 9-11, did you decide to write about this?
[01:45:10]  Oh, on 9-11.
[01:45:12]  It was on 9-11.
[01:45:12]  Yeah, it was, you know, when the planes hit, it took out the phones in Manhattan.
[01:45:22]  So I texted my editor.
[01:45:26]  At that time, I was, you know, maybe thinking about leaving journalism and going into the movie business.
[01:45:35]  my relationship with the magazine was a little tentative and I wrote Remnick, David Remnick, the editor, and I said, put me to work.
[01:45:44]  And so that afternoon, the phones came back on, we had a conference call, and there were maybe a dozen New Yorker writers were scattered around.
[01:46:00]  Everybody was on a story or something.
[01:46:04]  Jane Mayer, I remember, in Washington and Jeff Goldberg.
[01:46:09]  And you could hear the ambulances headed towards the Pentagon and stuff like that.
[01:46:13]  Wow.
[01:46:14]  And I you were in Austin?
[01:46:19]  I was in Austin.
[01:46:20]  It was very frustrating because you couldn't fly anywhere.
[01:46:22]  You know, the planes were grounded.
[01:46:24]  And so I couldn't go to New York.
[01:46:26]  I couldn't go get into the story.
[01:46:29]  So I started searching on the internet and also asking friends, you know, is there somebody I can talk to?
[01:46:36]  And I interviewed some Muslims and dallas-Fort Worth and so on, but a friend had met this young man at a film conference.
[01:46:51]  He was a reporter and he was working for an investment magazine called Waters and he was supposed to have an interview on top of the World Trade Center in the Windows on the World restaurant on the 101st floor.
[01:47:11]  But for the first time in his life, he slept through a subway stop.
[01:47:15]  So he got off the subway and rushed back in the opposite direction, got to the World Trade Center.
[01:47:24]  Back then, you know, the World Trade Center had a bank of elevators.
[01:47:28]  There were more than 100.
[01:47:30]  And you had to go up a flight of stairs.
[01:47:34]  Right.
[01:47:34]  Escalator.
[01:47:35]  Yeah, they had the escalators that went up.
[01:47:36]  Yeah.
[01:47:37]  Yeah.
[01:47:37]  So he went up, got on the elevator.
[01:47:41]  And he was late.
[01:47:43]  He was a young man, so he didn't have a watch.
[01:47:45]  He just had his iPhone.
[01:47:47]  So he looked at his iPhone, and it was like 8.01.
[01:47:52]  And the elevator operator held the door for this woman who was walking across the lobby.
[01:48:03]  And, you know, his reporter really was, you know, let's go, let's go.
[01:48:09]  And she stepped onto the elevator.
[01:48:11]  He has an amazing memory.
[01:48:17]  And he looked down and he saw as she stepped on that she had a rose tattoo on her ankle.
[01:48:22]  And that made an impression.
[01:48:25]  And then the plane hit and so the doors to the elevator accordioned and and he walked out and he was it an earthquake, and nobody had any idea.
[01:48:38]  But there were pieces of plaster and stuff lying on the the floor of the lobby and some, he said, were like the size of a shoebox and some were the size like of an office desk, you know.
[01:48:51]  And so it was a weird landscape.
[01:48:54]  And remember he had to go up that flight of stairs or of escalator, but he saw outside a patio and he thought he was going out into the world, and so he stepped out into the patio.
[01:49:11]  This was like second second floor or something.
[01:49:13]  Yeah, it was a mezzanine or whatever right, and uh, he stepped out and he said there were hundreds of shoes and uh, and what looked like luggage?
[01:49:25]  But he realized they were human torsos.
[01:49:27]  And so he, his story about getting walking home to Queens became the bookend of the black issue of the NEW Yorker.
[01:49:38]  And I had been interviewing him and giving my wife the tape to type up.
[01:49:46]  And it was weeping and it was really a difficult time.

=== Interrogating Al Qaeda Member (15:41) ===

[01:49:54]  And one of my editors said, you've got enough, don't worry about it.
[01:50:01]  No, are you kidding?
[01:50:03]  This is it.
[01:50:03]  This is the story.
[01:50:05]  And then that night, David Remnick called and said, I want everything you can get from this because this is the bookend of the story, which I knew it had to be.
[01:50:15]  So after that, I was looking for a way to write about the story in a larger way.
[01:50:23]  But how do you take a catastrophe like that, some vast human tragedy, and shrink it down in some way to make it relatable?
[01:50:36]  I've always had this idea of what I call the donkey, which sounds like a deprecating term, but a donkey is a beast of burden, and it can carry a lot of information on his back, and it can take the reader into a world he's never been.
[01:50:51]  So I'm looking for that person.
[01:50:54]  And on the Washington Post site, I think I was looking at obits that were streaming online.
[01:51:02]  On the Washington Post site, I found this obituary for John O'Neill, who had been head of counterterrorism at the FBI in New York.
[01:51:10]  and had the warrant on bin Laden.
[01:51:12]  But he had been washed out of the FBI when he took some classified information out of the office to a retirement conference, as it happened.
[01:51:21]  So he took a job as the head of security at the World Trade Center.
[01:51:25]  So I thought, instead of getting bin Laden, bin Laden got him.
[01:51:29]  And I didn't know if he was a hero or a goat, you know, but he was a hell of a donkey.
[01:51:35]  And so that's how I got started on the looming tower.
[01:51:40]  My other donkeys were Ayman El-Sawafri, the number two guy, and bin Laden himself and Prince Turkey El-Faisal, who was the head of Saudi intelligence.
[01:51:48]  And through these interweaving biographies, I could tell the story of 9-11.
[01:51:55]  Wow.
[01:51:56]  And how, as far as like approaching a story like this, I imagine you had to find a lot of sources within the FBI and the intelligence community, right?
[01:52:04]  Yeah.
[01:52:04]  What was that like?
[01:52:06]  I was real fortunate.
[01:52:07]  It took a while for me to understand why I was so fortunate that the FBI, I had written a movie called The Siege that came out in 1998 and with Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis and, you know, a number of other fine actors.
[01:52:24]  And Denzel's job was the same as John O'Neill's.
[01:52:28]  And that was odd to me.
[01:52:31]  And then the movie was about what would happen if terrorism came to America as it had in London or Paris.
[01:52:39]  What if it came to New York?
[01:52:40]  That was the premise.
[01:52:43]  And then it came out in 1998.
[01:52:45]  And so it was three years before 9-11.
[01:52:48]  But it was eerie in many respects that these parallels were in the movie.
[01:52:54]  And so I felt having imagined the scenario that I wanted to find out what really happened.
[01:53:03]  And that's what led me on that odyssey to write The Lowing Tower.
[01:53:09]  And was it like when you were doing this research and talking to sources, I imagine some of these people were still actively working.
[01:53:17]  Oh, yeah.
[01:53:18]  Well, to get back to your question, I had to talk to the FBI.
[01:53:23]  And when I was writing the movie, I didn't get very much cooperation.
[01:53:29]  And suddenly it seemed the gates were opening.
[01:53:34]  And one guy I really wanted to interview was named Ali Soufan.
[01:53:38]  Right.
[01:53:40]  Ali, when I wrote the movie, I knew, I had heard about this Lebanese-American FBI agent who spoke Arabic and very few, I think seven in the whole industry, whole bureau spoke Arabic.
[01:53:56]  So he was an incredibly valuable source and asset.
[01:54:00]  And he was made available to me.
[01:54:04]  And that was a good sign, you know, because and then other agents that I was interested in were made available.
[01:54:10]  And then finally I figured out what was going on.
[01:54:13]  The CIA was trying to blame the FBI for 9-11.
[01:54:17]  And so I was, I became part of their defense.
[01:54:21]  And so practically anybody I wanted to talk to in the Bureau, I was able to talk to.
[01:54:27]  And the CIA, I talked to people in the CIA, but they weren't nearly as forthcoming.
[01:54:33]  But it, and then a lot of my questions had to do with the fact that.
[01:54:37]  Two of the hijackers came to America in january of 2000 you know like 18 months, 19 months before, before 9-11 and the CIA knew they were in America and didn't tell the FBI, and so they were trying to shove responsibility off of them and put it onto the Bureau.
[01:54:57]  And the Bureau was not perfect, but they didn't know that Al-qaeda was in America until the CIA came and told them in late august of 2001, a month before the actual tragedy.
[01:55:11]  So they didn't have the time to go out and find al-Qaeda.
[01:55:15]  The reason I'm convinced that the CIA ever came to tell the FBI is that they lost them.
[01:55:20]  You know, they didn't know where they were.
[01:55:22]  And so now they maybe had been planning in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence to turn these guys.
[01:55:30]  That's the theory of a lot of FBI guys.
[01:55:34]  But they couldn't turn them if they had disappeared.
[01:55:37]  And so they didn't see them again until they showed up on TV.
[01:55:41]  So the idea here with this internal rift between the CIA and the FBI is that John O'Neill and the FBI, Ali Soufan, they wanted to find the culprits and get rid of them or arrest them.
[01:55:56]  And the intelligence community, the CIA, they wanted to keep their distance and try to figure out their way to get more intelligence.
[01:56:04]  Right.
[01:56:05]  There was always a conflict in the mission of these two bureaus.
[01:56:09]  But that was compounded by personal animosity.
[01:56:12]  And, you know, one of the leader of the bin Laden unit in the CIA testified before Congress that one good thing happened on 9-11, John O'Neill was killed.
[01:56:25]  That's the level of their hatred.
[01:56:27]  And it got in the way.
[01:56:29]  You know, I mean, America could have withstood, you know, an attack of some sort.
[01:56:36]  But 9-11 was a trauma, deep wound in the country.
[01:56:43]  I still think that the CIA bears a lot of moral responsibility for that.
[01:56:50]  And so John O'Neill and, well, mainly I think Ali Soufan, they pretty much snuffed the whole thing out, right?
[01:56:59]  Well, you know, Ali was a unique individual.
[01:57:05]  Yeah.
[01:57:06]  You know, he had.
[01:57:07]  Super young.
[01:57:08]  He was very young.
[01:57:09]  He was the youngest case agent.
[01:57:10]  You know, I mean, he was in his 20s when.
[01:57:13]  He was case agent for 9-11.
[01:57:17]  And he's the guy that identified the hijackers.
[01:57:22]  And he didn't torture anybody.
[01:57:30]  He was a very clever interrogator.
[01:57:36]  For instance, he had a little snippet of some taped conversation between two of these al-Qaeda guys.
[01:57:45]  And so that's all he had, you know, in this one interrogation.
[01:57:50]  And he got a bunch of, he got a shopping cart, you know, with a bunch of similar shaped cassettes, you know, on there and make it look like he had this, you know, library.
[01:58:04]  And he walked into this interrogation and he just picked randomly, supposedly, this one tape and popped it in and played this bit.
[01:58:12]  And, you know, the suspect's eyes are like, oh, my God, they overheard my telephone calls.
[01:58:16]  And what else do they know?
[01:58:18]  And so he just spilled the beans.
[01:58:19]  There was no more beans.
[01:58:21]  There was one bean.
[01:58:23]  But it was just, it was clever interrogation of a little trickery involved, but no torture.
[01:58:31]  And he's the guy that pulled the FBI out of Guantanamo and said, we don't torture people.
[01:58:38]  And he was going to arrest the CIA operatives that were doing the torture.
[01:58:44]  He was prevented from doing that.
[01:58:46]  But he's a man of the kind of principles that we'd like for the country to stand for.
[01:58:51]  Yeah.
[01:58:51]  I'm sure you know John Kiriakou, right?
[01:58:53]  Yeah, not personally, but.
[01:58:55]  Right, yeah, his story.
[01:58:56]  I mean, he was the one who basically like blew the whistle on the whole torture program and what happened to him.
[01:59:01]  They sent him to prison and ruined his life.
[01:59:02]  Yeah.
[01:59:03]  Stripped him of his retirement.
[01:59:07]  So where did I want to go with this?
[01:59:11]  Bin Laden.
[01:59:12]  So I've had people on the show, including John, actually, who talk about how in the years leading up to 9-11, we had.
[01:59:28]  CIA people, paramilitary folks over in Khartoum in Africa and in the Middle East, basically tracking bin Laden's every move.
[01:59:36]  And in fact, there's this guy who, this guy by the name of Billy Waugh, who's like this famous CIA paramilitary commando, basically, who Annie Jacobson writes about in her book, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, who was like there tracking the guy and going on daily jogs around the mosque that he would be visiting every day in Khartoum.
[01:59:57]  He was taking photos of the guy, I mean, of bin Laden.
[02:00:00]  He would be like literally across the street from bin Laden taking photos of him around the clock.
[02:00:07]  And they couldn't get the, and then, the way I understand it is, um, they couldn't get permission to take out Bin Laden, even though they very easily could have.
[02:00:18]  And as far as your understanding why, why was that?
[02:00:22]  Well, at that time there were a couple of things going on.
[02:00:25]  Uh, Bin Laden was um sort of laying low and he spent, I think, four years in Sudan.
[02:00:32]  Uh, he wasn't active.
[02:00:34]  Uh, he was mainly.
[02:00:37]  Al-qaeda had become a kind of agricultural institution.
[02:00:40]  You know, he was developing all these seeds that he was very proud of and he was, you know, he had, may have owned more land in Sudan than any other individual.
[02:00:51]  And they played soccer and stuff like that.
[02:00:53]  So it wasn't, he was anti-American.
[02:00:56]  He was making noise.
[02:00:58]  But at this point, the king was trying to reconcile with him.
[02:01:02]  And he sent Jamal Khashoggi.
[02:01:05]  Jamal Khashoggi, yeah.
[02:01:06]  Yeah.
[02:01:06]  Who was bin Laden's buddy.
[02:01:10]  Although, you know, not a follower, you know, he was, but he was a friend of his and had spent time in Afghanistan with bin Laden during the Mujahideen days.
[02:01:23]  And Jamal was a reporter and he was a friend of mine.
[02:01:25]  Oh, really?
[02:01:28]  He was sent to Khartoum explicitly to get bin Laden to renounce terrorism and then you'll be welcome home.
[02:01:40]  Who sent him there?
[02:01:41]  The king.
[02:01:43]  And so the way Jamal explained it to me, he'd spent three days in Khartoum, and bin Laden was always very close to the point of renouncing terrorism because he was homesick.
[02:02:00]  But finally, he wouldn't cross that line.
[02:02:05]  So Jamal went home empty-handed, and at that point, the Sudanese decided to expel him.
[02:02:14]  and rob him of practically everything that he had, all of his possessions.
[02:02:21]  And I went to Sudan three times tracking that story down.
[02:02:27]  And the first time I went, I had been working closely with the Sudanese intelligence because someone had referred me.
[02:02:39]  And so they would drive me around and show me where Bin Laden lived and the mosque and where the soccer fields were and all this sort of stuff.
[02:02:47]  I said, look, I need to talk to somebody, somebody in Al-Qaeda.
[02:02:54]  And so one day I was in this, in my room in what they called cheerfully the Hilton.
[02:03:05]  And I'd have to flash back a little bit.
[02:03:09]  I had, the first time I flew to Saudi Arabia, I had a job there.
[02:03:15]  I'm mentoring these young reporters at this Saudi Gazette.
[02:03:22]  When I got off the plane, I was in terrible pain.
[02:03:25]  My back was really killing me.
[02:03:26]  And I, you know, for the three months I was there the first time, I couldn't raise my toes.
[02:03:32]  I was just, you know, it was a terrible sciatic pain.
[02:03:35]  So the next time I went back to Saudi Arabia, I took one of those exercise balls that, you know, you sit on when your back is pain.
[02:03:42]  And back then you didn't have the pump.
[02:03:44]  So you had to blow it up, you know, and then unblow it.
[02:03:47]  And so I flew to Khartoum with my exercise ball.
[02:03:50]  And so there was a knock at the door and the Sudanese intelligence officer was there and he had this guy with him.
[02:04:02]  And he wouldn't tell me who he was.
[02:04:05]  So come on in, and I offered the guy, the mysterious guy, the desk chair, and the intelligence agent lay down on my bed and went soundly asleep.
[02:04:19]  So it left me with this guy that I quickly discerned was an Al Qaeda member.
[02:04:26]  And so I sat down on the ball, and he was over there, and I started asking him questions, and he knew everything.
[02:04:36]  And I thought, Jesus, who is this guy?
[02:04:39]  And so I flew back to America and I researched him and I triangulated and I came up with Muhammad Loy Boyazid.
[02:04:55]  His Qaeda name was Abu Rida al-Suri.
[02:04:59]  And he was the guy who took the notes when Al-Qaeda was founded.
[02:05:03]  It's in his handwriting.
[02:05:05]  And I suddenly, holy shit.
[02:05:08]  I was talking to the guy that has been in Al Qaeda from the moment it started, and I didn't know that.
[02:05:15]  So I flew back to Khartoum, and he wouldn't see me.
[02:05:19]  And that was disappointing.
[02:05:21]  And so finally, he agreed if I came again, he would talk to me.
[02:05:26]  And so I flew back.
[02:05:28]  I said, Loe, you know, it's a lot of trouble coming to Khartoum.

=== Founding Father of Al Qaeda (11:46) ===

[02:05:36]  Why didn't you see me last time?
[02:05:37]  He said, Well, I didn't know how seriously to take you.
[02:05:40]  When we met the first time, you were sitting on a balloon.
[02:05:46]  So that's how I got into Al Qaeda.
[02:05:49]  Wow.
[02:05:50]  It was, you know, when bin Laden left Sudan, you know, there's a case to be made.
[02:06:02]  We should have just left him alone.
[02:06:04]  Because we helped bin Laden originally, right?
[02:06:07]  We helped him against the Soviet Union.
[02:06:09]  Yes, in that sense, we didn't directly give money to him, but we were fighting the same cause.
[02:06:15]  And so, you know, in that sense, we were allies.
[02:06:18]  But there was a myth that, you know, that we were underwriting him.
[02:06:21]  That never was true.
[02:06:23]  Nor would he even want it, you know.
[02:06:25]  Really?
[02:06:25]  Yeah.
[02:06:26]  I mean, he got plenty of money from Saudi Arabia.
[02:06:28]  He didn't need ours.
[02:06:29]  Yeah.
[02:06:31]  Bin Laden.
[02:06:32]  So the history of Bin Laden, he's interesting.
[02:06:34]  So his dad, his father made a ton of money working for the king of Saudi Arabia, right?
[02:06:43]  He got some sort of, he won some sort of contract to build some, like a huge road or something.
[02:06:47]  Well, yeah.
[02:06:48]  He was the major contractor in Saudi Arabia.
[02:06:51]  Up until that point, he had been working for an American company that was building, you know, roads in Saudi Arabia.
[02:07:00]  When that happened, there were practically no roads.
[02:07:03]  Right.
[02:07:03]  And there's a ridge of mountains that is right above the western.
[02:07:12]  shore of Saudi Arabia on the Red Sea.
[02:07:15]  And Jeddah, for instance, where I was stationed, was in that level ground below the level, you know, between the sea and the desert above this high palisade.
[02:07:31]  And it was a real challenge.
[02:07:37]  You know, the American companies walked away from the deal.
[02:07:40]  But, you know, the only way to get from Jeddah to Riyadh was, you know, some sort of camel trail or, you know, early aviation.
[02:07:51]  So Muhammad Bin Laden, the Father um, took on the challenge and, uh he, he went up, got up on top of the, this mountain palisade, and he pushed a goat over the edge and followed him down, marking the path that the goat took, and that's amazing.
[02:08:12]  Then that became the uh, the route of this very twisty turny highway that united the country.
[02:08:21]  And so he became a national hero.
[02:08:24]  And he more or less was responsible for the renovation of the mosque in Mecca.
[02:08:30]  And, you know, he was highly valued, famous character.
[02:08:37]  He died in an air crash.
[02:08:39]  And, but, you know, he left behind this.
[02:08:43]  53 kids, right?
[02:08:44]  Yeah, I think there were 56.
[02:08:46]  I think so.
[02:08:48]  And so there were.
[02:08:50]  You know, one of my best sources was Jamal Khalifa, his brother-in-law, but that's not an exclusive term when you have that many brothers and sisters.
[02:08:59]  And he was great.
[02:09:02]  It was an eye-opening experience.
[02:09:06]  Wow.
[02:09:07]  And going back, so 9-11 happens and we, like, or actually before 9-11 is when the United States intelligence community goes to the FBI and says, we know these people are in the U.S.
[02:09:24]  But we lost track of them.
[02:09:25]  Yeah, that's in August.
[02:09:26]  That's in August.
[02:09:27]  2001.
[02:09:28]  Right.
[02:09:29]  And did they, how long before that did they know that they were, like, for example, taking these like flying lessons over here in Florida, like down the street from where we are now, and being handled by these Saudi intelligence people?
[02:09:49]  It was episodic with the information.
[02:09:51]  It wasn't pulled together.
[02:09:53]  You know, there was suspicion, like in Arizona, there was an industrious. guy who found out about these Saudis who were in a flight school, but they didn't feel like they needed to learn how to land.
[02:10:08]  And it was a similar story with a guy named Massawi who was very flagrant and aggressive about getting to fly.
[02:10:22]  He wanted to fly Boeing planes.
[02:10:25]  It was suspicious enough that the local FBI chief reported it.
[02:10:31]  But was there ever the moment where somebody said, I'm getting a lot of reports of these guys who are Saudis who are trying to learn how to fly and not land?
[02:10:40]  Yeah.
[02:10:41]  That never happened.
[02:10:42]  No.
[02:10:43]  And there was also safe houses, I think, on the West Coast in California where some of these guys were staying, and there was Saudi official or Saudi intelligence people that were somehow connected to this.
[02:10:52]  These two hijackers that I told you about earlier who they arrived in, they flew in from Malaysia.
[02:11:01]  There had been a big meeting of Qaeda operatives, and from that meeting, they came to America.
[02:11:14]  And also from that meeting, there were some guys who would then go blow up the USS Cole.
[02:11:22]  So it was a high-level meeting of terrorists in Kuala Lumpur.
[02:11:27]  And two of these guys midhar and Hazmi, al-Hazmi, flew into LAX on January the 5th, I think.
[02:11:43]  And then on January 15th, the CIA found out about them.
[02:11:49]  So early on, and they were told by Saudi intelligence.
[02:11:54]  I interviewed Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said that he told the chief of station in Riyadh about these two al-Qaeda guys.
[02:12:06]  So the CIA found out about it, not through their own detection, but then was CIA working with Saudi intelligence?
[02:12:14]  Well, that's what I believe.
[02:12:16]  I think that – I mean, they were closely tied, but – and Turkey, you know, went to school for a while.
[02:12:27]  Bill Clinton, I've forgotten exactly what the – anyway, he was very close, you know, Saudi intelligence and U.S. intelligence were working.
[02:12:40]  together closely, but not as closely as they should have.
[02:12:46]  And when the CIA found out about this, by that time, these two hijackers, shortly after they arrived, they were greeted in a restaurant by a fellow Saudi who had just come from the Saudi embassy or consulate in LA.
[02:13:14]  Lo and behold, surprise, you're from my country.
[02:13:18]  And he sits down and tells them, well, you must move to San Diego.
[02:13:24]  I will help set you up.
[02:13:25]  And he does do that.
[02:13:27]  And they move down to San Diego.
[02:13:33]  And it's at that point that the CIA is beginning to take an interest in them.
[02:13:40]  We don't know.
[02:13:43]  To date, they haven't really divulged.
[02:13:47]  you know, what they did.
[02:13:49]  And I don't want this to die.
[02:13:52]  I want to see this information come out.
[02:13:54]  I mean, is this part of the report that was never shown, the part of the 9-11 commission that was hidden?
[02:14:00]  There's still stuff that's redacted about it.
[02:14:04]  And the 22 pages or whatever it was that the victims' families finally forced out of the CIA, it didn't cover all the material, but it did expose some very interesting stuff like the tests.
[02:14:20]  You know, they would, Saudis would be on airplanes and they would, you know, in one case, for instance, walk up and open the cockpit door.
[02:14:29]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[02:14:30]  You know, I thought it was a bathroom.
[02:14:32]  And, you know, they got so suspicious that the plane was grounded and they were interrogated and they said, oh, no, we're Saudis.
[02:14:40]  You know, we're very prominent.
[02:14:42]  Prince Bandar, who is the head of the ambassador to the U.S., is a friend of ours.
[02:14:48]  As a matter of fact, Bandar's wife was sending money to to the people that were – to the hijackers.
[02:14:56]  So – Really?
[02:14:58]  Let me try to get this straight.
[02:15:02]  She was sending money.
[02:15:07]  I'm afraid to get too deep into the well there because I'm not exactly money from her was given to the operative who was working with the hijackers or to them, the hijackers themselves, but I forget exactly how that worked.
[02:15:23]  But on these test runs, they were clearly planning. the operation as it was going to go down.
[02:15:33]  And, you know, where would we sit on the airplane and sort of how hard is it to get into the cockpit?
[02:15:40]  Well, not hard as it turned out.
[02:15:42]  Right.
[02:15:42]  And all of that came out in those pages that had been suppressed for no reason except to protect the dignity of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
[02:15:57]  My thinking about this is that I don't think that the Saudi King wanted to attack America.
[02:16:08]  And I think that when Prince Turkey divulged the presence of two Saudis to the CIA, he was doing us a great favor.
[02:16:23]  I'm sure that he thought that America would take care of this problem.
[02:16:28]  I also think that the CIA decided, let's let the Saudis handle this.
[02:16:35]  Uh, you know they, they can follow them, and then they, they have their means, they can turn them, and maybe that's out of our capacity.
[02:16:43]  So for that reason, they were just gonna lightly monitor the situation and expect that the Saudis would take care of the problem.
[02:16:52]  Has your, has your view or your thinking around 9 11 evolved or changed at all since you first wrote about it?
[02:17:00]  Because there's like, I mean obviously, there's like tons of different theories that float around out there about 9 11, like conspiracy theories that You know, Alex Jones is one of the biggest proponents of it.
[02:17:10]  How he called it out like whatever a year before it happened.
[02:17:14]  And there's documentaries that are out there that, you know, try to tie things like 9 11 to like look at Operation Northwoods.

=== Evolving 9/11 Views (14:47) ===

[02:17:22]  You know, it's the same concept, but, you know, years later and in a different context.
[02:17:28]  And, you know, like why there's tons of like legitimate questions that are asked about it from people that weren't really close to it.
[02:17:34]  I've noticed.
[02:17:35]  I've noticed that people that were really close to it are directly affected by it through family or, or, Friends, they are the ones that don't have patience to entertain any of that stuff.
[02:17:45]  But the people that are more disconnected from it, who maybe were in another part of the country or were born afterwards, who weren't directly really emotionally affected by this.
[02:17:54]  I haven't changed my view.
[02:18:00]  The first time I really ran into the denier thing, my friend Linklater, Rick Linklater, was having a party to.
[02:18:11]  Open up one of his movies, and I've forgotten which one it was, but he invited Alex Jones, who was, oh really a kind of non-entity, in in Austin at the time.
[02:18:22]  He had been on they.
[02:18:25]  We used to have this community TV station, you know, so anybody wanted to get on would do.
[02:18:30]  You know it was crazy.
[02:18:31]  Madeline Murray O'Hare, the atheist, had a show on it, and you know, and so Alex got a spot on it and he was.
[02:18:41]  He could talk really wildly and expressively.
[02:18:47]  Yeah.
[02:18:47]  And so Rick used him in a couple of his pictures as a kind of raving maniac who was sitting in the back of a cab sprouting all these conspiracy theories.
[02:18:58]  So the looming tower had just come out and I was, you know, I was at the party and Rick, he was a mischievous fellow, you know, he comes over and says, Larry, I wanted you to meet somebody.
[02:19:09]  And Alex, this is Larry Wright, you know, and I thought you guys might talk about 9-11.
[02:19:15]  So Jones starts.
[02:19:18]  off on what happened.
[02:19:19]  I said, gosh, that didn't, that's not true at all.
[02:19:23]  And, you know, like what, like what?
[02:19:24]  I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was, it was, you know, way off base.
[02:19:30]  And, and I told him what did happen and he, he turned around and walked away.
[02:19:38]  You know, I, but after that, whenever I'd make a speech about, you know, the looming tower, there would always be people in the audience that would, you know, what about this?
[02:19:49]  What about that?
[02:19:50]  And, you know what about the you know World Trade Center Seven, or you know why didn't this structure fall?
[02:19:56]  You know, it must have been dynamite in it.
[02:19:59]  If you look at it, it's clearly an explosion.
[02:20:01]  I mean, the thing is, it was a horrible tragedy and it happened, and and it was hard to believe that it happened.
[02:20:09]  So therefore, people wonder why.
[02:20:13]  You know, there must be some explanation for this, because this is something that surely one man in a cave couldn't have pulled this off.
[02:20:22]  And the truth is, one man in a cave did pull it off.
[02:20:29]  It's wild.
[02:20:30]  It really is.
[02:20:31]  Because there, I mean, there are a lot of crazy questions that are, you know, like why do they leave stuff out of the commission report?
[02:20:37]  Why were the black box and the plane, you know, never shut?
[02:20:40]  Why did the FBI cover that stuff up?
[02:20:42]  You know, we'll never know the answer to that.
[02:20:43]  I feel like we'll never.
[02:20:44]  I'd like for that to be fully.
[02:20:48]  You know, the only thing that we are missing here is the truth.
[02:20:51]  Yeah.
[02:20:52]  And, you know, I believe it's pretty clear what happened.
[02:20:55]  Yeah.
[02:20:55]  I.
[02:20:56]  I think the evidence that the CIA was in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence is not something that's been admitted.
[02:21:05]  But why not just go ahead and say it?
[02:21:07]  Because that's what I think really did happen.
[02:21:11]  But instead, they're stuck with no answer.
[02:21:15]  They can't tell you why they waited a year and a half to tell the FBI, which had the authority over terrorism in America.
[02:21:26]  That's what the whole plot of the siege was, my movie.
[02:21:30]  Yeah.
[02:21:31]  Was a rift between the CIA and the FBI over who is going to control terrorism.
[02:21:36]  And then it became true in real life.
[02:21:40]  Yeah.
[02:21:41]  And the way 9-11 changed everything, too, in America is bizarre.
[02:21:47]  Some of the things that were enacted as far as the TSA, the Patriot Act.
[02:21:53]  I had a guy in here recently, Tom Drake, who was a whistleblower for the NSA, who worked for the NSA.
[02:21:57]  His first day on the job at the NSA was 9-11.
[02:22:02]  You know, he was explaining to me the optimism of everybody in the NSA that day and how they were like just elated with the idea of implementing their new, the new, I forget the name of the software now, to where they could basically just do dragnet surveillance and collecting of data of all Americans.
[02:22:20]  And, you know, it's just crazy how our world and our country changed after 9 11.
[02:22:29]  When I talk to younger people about that question, I recount when I was in high school, I took a date to the airport in Dallas.
[02:22:40]  And it was a cheap date.
[02:22:45]  And, you know, we were young enough that, you know, it still was interesting to go to an airport.
[02:22:49]  And, you know, So we walked out on the tarmac and climbed into this 707 or something.
[02:23:01]  We sat in the first class seats and imagined the plane had just arrived from Paris and the stewardess, as we called them then, came and offered us a treat.
[02:23:12]  And so we sat there having a little party in the plane.
[02:23:15]  And then we walked into the FAA tower.
[02:23:18]  Yeah, come on in, kids.
[02:23:19]  And so we watched them land the planes.
[02:23:22]  That was America.
[02:23:23]  That was the freedom we had before 9-11.
[02:23:26]  And I'm fearful that that America is gone.
[02:23:31]  And it's gone from our memory.
[02:23:33]  And younger people don't realize what we've lost.
[02:23:37]  But if we've lost it and without the idea that we want to steer back to it, then we'll never get back to it.
[02:23:45]  Wow.
[02:23:46]  Yeah, that's something that young people don't have any comprehension of, you know, unless they hear stories like what you explained.
[02:23:54]  And like I was.
[02:23:55]  Too young to even, you know, I was in, I think I was in like sixth grade when it happened.
[02:23:59]  I remember vividly.
[02:24:01]  I remember, I don't remember like going through airports, but, but, you know, I remember that day and, you know, it's not encouraged now.
[02:24:06]  Right, right.
[02:24:09]  But so, so I want to talk about your new book and human scale.
[02:24:17]  And it's, it's all about, it seems like the timing is impeccable with you, with you coming out with these, these books, you know, not only with, with this one, which I think this, You turned in your draft for this, I think, right before October 7th, right?
[02:24:31]  Right.
[02:24:32]  And you had been working on it for how long before then?
[02:24:35]  Well, actually, a long time because it originated as a screenplay that never got made.
[02:24:43]  I think all my novels started out as screenplays.
[02:24:45]  But then I did a one-man show, which I called The Human Scale.
[02:24:56]  I did it in New York and in Tel Aviv.
[02:25:02]  What drew me to the story was I had gone to Gaza after 2009.
[02:25:13]  A young Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped by Hamas.
[02:25:22]  And Israelis never found him.
[02:25:26]  He was finally traded for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
[02:25:32]  And I was fascinated by that comparison.
[02:25:37]  How does one life equal a thousand?
[02:25:39]  That's what the human scale is all about.
[02:25:42]  So I did that show.
[02:25:45]  It was interesting doing it in New York.
[02:25:47]  There was a lot of anger.
[02:25:49]  You know, people, it's a sensitive subject, you know, when you talk about the Middle East.
[02:25:54]  Yeah.
[02:25:55]  And we had a sandwich board outside the theater and somebody kicked it all the way down the street.
[02:26:02]  In Tel Aviv, there wasn't anger, but there was a lot of grief.
[02:26:06]  And so it brought up feelings.
[02:26:10]  And I knew I was stirring something very deep.
[02:26:14]  And some years passed, but the story lingered.
[02:26:20]  And I thought, is there some way I can write about this?
[02:26:24]  Because I've spent so much of my career in the region.
[02:26:28]  I lived for two years in Cairo when I was a young man teaching at the American University.
[02:26:33]  And I've been back and forth to Israel and Syria and just everywhere in the Middle East and to Israel many times.
[02:26:43]  Always looking at people, trying to understand.
[02:26:47]  why this conflict is so durable.
[02:26:50]  I mean, I am the same age as Israel, which right, that's crazy.
[02:26:54]  Yeah, it's a young country, right?
[02:26:57]  But so this conflict has been going on my entire life.
[02:27:01]  And this is a life that has been lived through.
[02:27:04]  I've seen apartheid disappear.
[02:27:07]  I've seen the Soviet Union dissolve.
[02:27:08]  I've seen a black man elected president.
[02:27:11]  We went through Vietnam, Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan.
[02:27:14]  All that's part of the history now.
[02:27:16]  But this just keeps going on and on and on.
[02:27:19]  So why is that?
[02:27:22]  I thought, well, maybe I can do it as a novel instead of, you know, try to get inside the brains of these people, my characters, and see the world from their perspective.
[02:27:33]  Right.
[02:27:34]  And my feeling, I will always believe that peace is possible, but it's not possible if you're unwilling to see the world through the eyes of your adversary.
[02:27:49]  Right.
[02:27:50]  And that's what's happened in this case is that it's there's a loss of human feeling for your adversary.
[02:27:59]  And so I decided to create characters that would be interesting and appealing, but would be totally opposite sides.
[02:28:09]  And so the main characters, Yossi Bengal is the deputy chief of police in Hebron.
[02:28:16]  Hebron itself is a character because it's the most violent, hateful environment I'd ever been in.
[02:28:24]  And when I was there and february of 23, I was a source of peacenik, about the only peacenik in Hebron, Isa Amro, was taking me through the old town, old city of Hebron, which is mostly closed down by the Israeli police.
[02:28:47]  And he was assaulted right in front of me.
[02:28:50]  I mean, this big young soldier, they're all young, they're just out of high school, these soldiers, and policing another population.
[02:29:02]  Apropos of, let me say this, there was no provocation.
[02:29:06]  There was no provocation.
[02:29:09]  Issa was taking us on this tour.
[02:29:11]  It was me and Barbara Dubalouker.
[02:29:14]  I think it was a Bernatti's Belgian photographer.
[02:29:17]  We were going through and seeing this shopping street.
[02:29:24]  It was called, I remember when I went to Hebron the first time in 1997.
[02:29:33]  This shopping street was very alive, but there was a settlement just above it, and these little settler kids were throwing rocks down at the girls who were just coming out of school in their little school uniforms.
[02:29:48]  And then one threw a rock at me, and I was really pissed off.
[02:29:51]  I really wanted to throw that rock back.
[02:29:53]  I had a pretty good arm back then.
[02:29:55]  But I looked up, and I saw this Israeli soldier with his M16 who was protecting the kids who were throwing the rocks.
[02:30:02]  Oh, wow.
[02:30:03]  So cut to, you know X number of years later, I'm walking down that same street.
[02:30:08]  It's now totally deserted.
[02:30:10]  and all the shops are closed.
[02:30:12]  It has this mausoleum feeling.
[02:30:15]  And then suddenly this soldier appeared.
[02:30:19]  He had confronted me and Barbara earlier, but then he reappeared when Isa, who was not allowed to walk on that street because he is a Muslim, he rejoined us.
[02:30:31]  And the soldier, he was so angry at Isa for no reason.
[02:30:40]  Issa reminded me, I started my career at the Race Relations Reporter and covering the civil rights movement.
[02:30:48]  And he reminded me of the freedom bus riders and the sit-in people who knew they were going to get hurt.
[02:30:56]  And I just always admired that kind of courage.
[02:30:58]  I just didn't have it myself.
[02:30:59]  But Issa was one of those people.
[02:31:02]  And so Issa says, call your commander.
[02:31:06]  You're not doing the right.
[02:31:07]  He knew all the rules.
[02:31:09]  And it just pissed off the soldier even more.
[02:31:12]  But he did call his commander.
[02:31:13]  And he said that we have some liberals here.
[02:31:20]  Some liberals?
[02:31:21]  Some liberals.
[02:31:22]  And I said, wait, I'm from Texas.
[02:31:27]  I was trying to cool things off.
[02:31:30]  But at some point, he grabs Issa and takes him over to a bench and forces him down and stands in front of him with his crotch right in front of his face and his M4 dangling, bumping into Issa's legs.
[02:31:51]  Finally, the soldiers just exploded, and he grabbed Isa by the neck.
[02:31:57]  He's modest size, but he lifted him up, and he hurled him to the ground, his head missing a curb by like a quarter of an inch, and then wound up and kicked him so hard that he nearly fell over.

=== Violent Soldier Confrontation (15:37) ===

[02:32:10]  Other soldiers were around, and I just tried to calm the waters and say, this is going south really quickly.
[02:32:16]  And they were afraid of him, of this violent soldier.
[02:32:20]  And what struck me, so many things did, but one was, we were witnesses.
[02:32:26]  We're standing right there.
[02:32:28]  We're Westerners.
[02:32:30]  And Barbara is saying, you know, he felt so enraged and so empowered that, and he was circling around.
[02:32:38]  There was one other guy trying to keep him from finishing up the job.
[02:32:41]  And there had been a Palestinian assassinated by an Israeli soldier not far away who the guy was lying on the ground unconscious when the soldier shot him in the head.
[02:32:51]  Oh, my God.
[02:32:52]  So, you know, I thought that was going to be the conclusion of this, but fortunately we got Issa away.
[02:33:01]  But it caused me to go back and rewrite my novel.
[02:33:12]  And I realized that it was taking me into deeper water than I thought it was.
[02:33:21]  And then along comes october 7th.
[02:33:27]  And the draft that I had turned in ended in a war, but it was a war like the one that I'd seen before when I was in Gaza in 2009.
[02:33:40]  And it was devastating for Gaza, but it wasn't obliterated.
[02:33:44]  And so I had to go back and rewrite it again.
[02:33:49]  This time I was faced with this situation.
[02:33:52]  You know, this is such a deep wound.
[02:33:55]  And how can I ignore it?
[02:34:01]  Can I set it earlier in time?
[02:34:03]  Should I set it in the future?
[02:34:05]  And I thought, there's really no other alternative but to go right through it and have October 7th be the destination of this novel.
[02:34:14]  And so this, you know, Yossi Bengal is investigating the murder of his chief of police.
[02:34:21]  It's a heinous crime, and we think it's Hamas.
[02:34:24]  But into town comes a Palestinian named Tony Malik, who's American.
[02:34:32]  And he comes in at the wrong time, and, you know, he's arrested.
[02:34:38]  And they think he's probably the guy who killed the chief.
[02:34:42]  But then they discover he's actually an FBI agent.
[02:34:45]  And he had an appointment with the chief of police earlier that morning.
[02:34:50]  So these two guys, Yossi and Malik, are very similar in many ways.
[02:34:57]  And they have the same job.
[02:34:59]  But they're torn apart by history, ethnicity, religion.
[02:35:04]  You know, these are the forces that are pulling them apart.
[02:35:07]  And in short, they hate each other.
[02:35:10]  They have to, to solve the crime, they have to work together.
[02:35:14]  And this is in some ways a buddy movie, but it's set, you know, you see the world through their eyes and the eyes of other characters, like the figure that is loosely based on Isa, you know, is a peacenik who's trying to bring peace to the region.
[02:35:33]  And then there's Yossi's daughter, Sarah, who loves her father, but is so ambivalent about where Israel is going.
[02:35:42]  She's in the marches on, you know, that have been going on in Tel Aviv and elsewhere for the last couple of years.
[02:35:48]  So she's a part of that contingent.
[02:35:50]  So each of these characters represents a perspective, but I hope that they are fully imagined human beings.
[02:35:58]  So when you went about researching for this novel, did you go about it?
[02:36:04]  I mean, I assumed you just went about it in like this typical way you research for your nonfiction works, right?
[02:36:10]  Like you just investigated people.
[02:36:12]  How long did you spend actually going there and how many times did you go?
[02:36:17]  into Israel or into Hebron to like, did you extensively interview individuals?
[02:36:24]  Yeah, I, you know, see this evolved over a long period of time.
[02:36:29]  So I've been to Israel five times, I think.
[02:36:33]  Oh, wow.
[02:36:34]  And then West Bank three or four times.
[02:36:40]  Did you ever interview, I'm sorry to interrupt, I was going to ask if you ever interviewed any of Israelis intelligence people?
[02:36:45]  Oh, yeah, and they were very helpful, especially one who was in Shin Bet.
[02:36:51]  And, you know, it helped me because one of my characters is in Chin Bit and that's the domestic intelligence.
[02:37:01]  And, yeah, I, I, and I, there are American operatives who are with Arab background who have been very helpful to me corresponding to my Palestinian American FBI agent.
[02:37:19]  It's, yeah, you know, I've been very Fortunate with my sources, and they, you know, it wouldn't be the book that it is if I hadn't had the friendly advice of people on the inside.
[02:37:29]  Right.
[02:37:30]  I've talked to a lot of people on this show from the United States' intelligence community, and it seems to me like the writing on the wall is even if a lot of them won't outright say it, is there's a lot of a simple way to put it is that America's intelligence, CIA, and Israel's intelligence, the Mossad, don't get along.
[02:37:56]  for what it's worth it and that their intelligence, it seems to be the sentiment that their intelligence is far more, I don't want to say superior is the right word, but far more efficient for whatever reason.
[02:38:15]  I would imagine that it's, you know, the fact that, you know, they're surrounded by enemies and, you know, their ultimate goal is to, is to propagate the future of their race, right?
[02:38:32]  So they have, there's more of an existential threat there.
[02:38:37]  I have no question about it.
[02:38:38]  And, you know, that what the Israelis do is monitor and control.
[02:38:43]  And they have a vast population to monitor and control.
[02:38:48]  And they feel, I mean, both sides feel like this is an existential question.
[02:38:52]  Yeah.
[02:38:54]  Although it's not.
[02:38:55]  You know, Arabs and Jews live together very peacefully in Brooklyn.
[02:39:00]  There's just no reason for this except that this compounding series of traumas that build on each other.
[02:39:08]  There's a mythology that each nurses is that we're going to win.
[02:39:12]  We're going to push them into the sea or we're going to drive them over into Saudi Arabia and Jordan and somewhere, just clear the West Bank and then we'll have it all to ourselves.
[02:39:22]  That's never going to happen.
[02:39:24]  It goes back to my question about why it's so durable.
[02:39:35]  First of all, the enemies of peace.
[02:39:36]  Whenever something comes up and looks like peace, like the Oslo Accords or something like that, then you have suicide bombers suddenly appear and then you have Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated and so suddenly everything goes to shit.
[02:39:52]  And every time both sides, they fall for it.
[02:39:57]  They get enraged and they go back to war.
[02:40:00]  But it's all one war.
[02:40:02]  It's all the same war that's been going on since I was born.
[02:40:05]  There are periods where calm where they just rearm.
[02:40:09]  But essentially, it's the same old war.
[02:40:12]  And so with all the amazing intelligence that Mossad has and his capability in Shenbet and their ability to try to control this very restive group of people, they know that there is not a military solution.
[02:40:31]  In fact, one after another, the heads of Mossad have been public.
[02:40:35]  There's even a movie, a very insightful movie, where they're saying, we're doing the wrong thing.
[02:40:41]  We need to make peace with these people.
[02:40:44]  So it's generally known that there's not a military.
[02:40:49]  It's not going to be like World War II and the war is over and somebody won.
[02:40:54]  It's going to be something entirely different.
[02:40:56]  But it continues to be exactly the same thing.
[02:41:00]  And it seems like what has been going on forever is just like when Israel is demolishing Gaza and shooting kids through the heart.
[02:41:13]  And all these women and children are dying.
[02:41:16]  It seems like what they're creating is, and they're aware of it, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[02:41:20]  Yeah.
[02:41:20]  Right?
[02:41:21]  They're creating more extremists and more hatred for them.
[02:41:24]  The IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, says that Hamas is back to full strength, 40,000 warriors.
[02:41:31]  After all the slaughter, what they've done is create a mighty recruitment theme.
[02:41:38]  And that's always been the case.
[02:41:41]  It's not different anymore.
[02:41:43]  It's not different now.
[02:41:44]  It's just going to imagine if you are a young Palestinian man and you watched your family be killed or dispossessed.
[02:41:54]  See, that's why I think, you know, when you put that question on either side, right, what would you do if you were an Israeli or what would you do if you were a Palestinian?
[02:42:04]  It's a question that nobody wants to answer because they know the answer, right?
[02:42:08]  You know, the answer.
[02:42:09]  If you're like, I can, I can tell you, you know, having my own kids, if. some group murdered my child, my toddler, I would do the most unthinkable things to retaliate.
[02:42:24]  Yeah.
[02:42:26]  I think that's part of being human.
[02:42:29]  But it's also part of being human to try to find a way to restore justice and peace.
[02:42:36]  And that's what's absent right now.
[02:42:38]  It's all retaliation.
[02:42:40]  And it will be as long as we can see until people actually arise and demand peace.
[02:42:46]  Peace has a price, and one is to sacrifice that longing to kill and revenge.
[02:42:54]  I wrote a play and then a movie and then a book about Camp David, which was the Carter-Bagan-Sadat summit in 1978.
[02:43:08]  Carter came into office, and the first day in office, he told his vice president, my top goal is to bring peace to the Middle East.
[02:43:18]  Walter Mondale is the vice president.
[02:43:20]  He told me he panicked.
[02:43:22]  Is that what he's about?
[02:43:25]  Because it was like the ultimate.
[02:43:26]  You can't do that.
[02:43:28]  But Carter brought in the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who had been an assassin, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, who was a terrorist.
[02:43:41]  And Carter was a one-term Georgia governor.
[02:43:44]  And they sit behind trees in Camp David for 13 days.
[02:43:50]  Imagine three world leaders totally cut off.
[02:43:53]  And they come up with a peace agreement that has endured since they signed the paper in 1979.
[02:43:58]  Not a single violation.
[02:44:00]  So it's possible.
[02:44:02]  But if you look at then what happened to the peacemakers, Carter lost the election.
[02:44:07]  He was not reelected.
[02:44:08]  In fact, he lost the Jewish vote, first time for a Democratic nominee in modern history.
[02:44:16]  Menachem Begin thought, oh, I can do anything now.
[02:44:19]  And he invaded Lebanon for what he thought was going to be two weeks.
[02:44:23]  And they were in Lebanon for 18 years and and, and he was hated.
[02:44:30]  He was in isolation in his house.
[02:44:32]  There were kids for years.
[02:44:34]  You know, they were just like the chance about, hey hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill a day?
[02:44:40]  It was that kind of atmosphere.
[02:44:42]  So he died in in, in seclusion and in disgrace, and then Sadat was assassinated.
[02:44:49]  So that's what happened to the people who made peace, and I think that's been a lesson to the aspiring peacemakers, that there's a lot of personal risk here.
[02:44:58]  Wasn't the first president of Israel, I believe he might have been the first president of Israel.
[02:45:07]  Ben-Gurion?
[02:45:08]  No, before him.
[02:45:10]  He was, yes, yes, Haim Wiseman.
[02:45:13]  Yeah.
[02:45:15]  Wasn't he, he was like a Zionist who came in and thought that basically we need to come in here and make the Muslims love us.
[02:45:27]  Like we're going to bring in all this innovation and.
[02:45:31]  Treat them kindly and just make them to where they just can't turn us away because we provide so much and improve their quality of life so much.
[02:45:42]  And then after that, I think Ben Gurion kind of his view of it was like, no, that's kind of like a the way that he, I think the way, correct me if I'm wrong, but the way he looked at it was like, you can't look at that.
[02:45:54]  That's like pre 9 11, post 9 11.
[02:45:57]  Like, like he looked at like now that you have, you know, World War II and the Holocaust, you can't look at it like that anymore.
[02:46:04]  Now we have to look at it through the lens that they're looking at it now.
[02:46:06]  Yeah.
[02:46:08]  Well, they were at the, in the early days of the Zionist movement, you know, they, First of all, they wondered, you know, where should we go?
[02:46:16]  And, you know, there were Kenya was one of the, or Uganda, you know, at the time, and South America.
[02:46:26]  But always there was the idea of the Holy Land.
[02:46:31]  And that's in the first Zionist conference in Bern, Switzerland in the 1890s, you know, it was decided that's where we're going to go.
[02:46:43]  There were mixed thoughts.
[02:46:45]  Weissman was the optimist.
[02:46:48]  Ben-Gurion privately felt that the Arabs would never accept them.
[02:46:58]  And it's not as if they did a lot to try to help make them acceptable.
[02:47:05]  But at that time, the future Israelis would come and buy a lot of land up, and it was threatening to the native population and there were Arab riots and stuff like that.
[02:47:17]  So things got off to a bad start.
[02:47:19]  And then when Israel declared itself as a nation, you know, the Nakba, the expulsion of nearly 700,000 Palestinians, whether they were forced out or just simply not allowed to return to their homes, that was sort of the one moment, if I were to call history back and say, you know, there's just a small change I want to make in the role of human events and I'd just let them come home and try to work it out.

=== Palestinian Statehood Debate (15:22) ===

[02:47:48]  And, you know, the age of modern terrorism was born in that moment, too, because it was the Palestinian diaspora that led to the rise of, you know, these terrorist movements coming out of Palestine.
[02:48:04]  Now, the history of this is, I think, and maybe you can elucidate this a little bit better, but originally, I think the UN came in and said it's going to be like a 56-44 split.
[02:48:17]  Yeah.
[02:48:18]  between the Jews and the Palestinians, right?
[02:48:21]  And Palestine would be an international city.
[02:48:24]  Right.
[02:48:24]  And then I mean, sorry, Jerusalem.
[02:48:26]  Jerusalem would be an international city.
[02:48:29]  Oh, okay.
[02:48:30]  Yeah, because the rift over these holy places was very profound.
[02:48:36]  And so what could we do to take that off the table?
[02:48:40]  Well, we make it it's not an entity belonging to either state.
[02:48:44]  It's one where both can have their capitals.
[02:48:47]  Oh, okay.
[02:48:48]  And then down the road, it got it somehow got down to 20%, which is West Bank and Gaza, right?
[02:48:57]  To what it is today.
[02:48:58]  Well, even that is, you know, what's left of the Palestinian state is just enclaves.
[02:49:08]  And, you know, they're divided by different roads and walls and so on.
[02:49:12]  It's not contiguous with each other.
[02:49:13]  And, of course, Gaza is set apart.
[02:49:17]  So it's a different entity.
[02:49:21]  And another crazy thing about this whole thing is I think I heard you. explain this, but that the Jews in Israel and the Palestinians are genetically the same, right?
[02:49:33]  Their DNA and their heritage is essentially identical.
[02:49:37]  You mentioned Ben-Gurion, and Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was the second president of Israel, were living in Manhattan, in Lower Manhattan, at the turn of the 20th century.
[02:49:49]  And they wrote a book about the future of Israel.
[02:49:53]  And Ben-Zvi, in particular, had spent a lot of time wandering through the West Bank in these Arab villages, and he noticed candles in the windows on Friday night, and he noticed Hebrew in the cemeteries.
[02:50:07]  that what we call the Palestinians were really the remnant of the Jews who were not in the diaspora.
[02:50:14]  They just were always there.
[02:50:16]  They didn't come from somewhere else.
[02:50:18]  They were just the original inhabitants who had been Jewish, but over the years converted to Christianity or Islam, where if you converted, you didn't have to pay this tax that was on non-Muslims.
[02:50:33]  So that was a strong incentive.
[02:50:35]  And centuries pass, and they are a different people in some respects.
[02:50:43]  But he was right, because genetically uh, they're very, very similar.
[02:50:49]  They're both descended from the Canaanites and, you know, over time they may have differed a little bit, but not very much.
[02:50:55]  They're essentially the same people.
[02:50:56]  They always have been.
[02:50:58]  I thought when I went to do that one-man show in Tel Aviv um, and I had just read that book by Benzvi and Ben Gurion, and I thought well, maybe the Israelis don't know this, maybe I can to help them out, just saying, you know, you know, these guys are Jewish, right and right.
[02:51:19]  So it's true, they didn't know it.
[02:51:21]  But some people, when I pulled out my solution uh said yeah, we know that.
[02:51:29]  And that threw me off, uh and I, I did a little more research and I came upon this book, the need to have enemies and allies, by this Cypriot American psychiatrist named Vamek Vulcan, and he had grown up in Cyprus, which was inhabited by Greeks and Turks, who are historic antagonists.
[02:51:53]  And yet they were very similar people.
[02:51:55]  And you could tell them apart.
[02:51:57]  They both wore the same white garments, these tunics, white tunics.
[02:52:02]  The Turks would have a green sash and the Greeks would have a blue one.
[02:52:08]  You knew who was who.
[02:52:09]  They had different cigarettes.
[02:52:11]  On this basis, you were able to tell this is not me.
[02:52:15]  This is the other.
[02:52:16]  In Northern Ireland, the Protestants and the Catholics would paint their doors different colors.
[02:52:21]  to signal which they were.
[02:52:24]  The Hutus and the Tutsis, they were so alike, you had to ask which tribe you're in before we kill you.
[02:52:30]  So in every case, they were very, very similar people.
[02:52:35]  And yet oftentimes with civil wars, for instance, they're bloodier than other kinds of battles.
[02:52:41]  So why is that?
[02:52:43]  And Vulcan references this Freudian idea of the narcissism of minor differences, which is simply that people that are more alike are more likely to be at war with each other than people who are dramatically different.
[02:53:04]  You can accept the difference if it's obvious.
[02:53:08]  But if it's similar, it's the little things that separate you that can be really annoying.
[02:53:14]  And Freud's idea is it's those things about yourself that you don't like, that you see in someone else.
[02:53:21]  And you want to exterminate that thing that's in the other.
[02:53:26]  Oh, that's interesting.
[02:53:28]  You can almost see something like that bubbling up in America with like political differences in people that are the same, right?
[02:53:35]  Or religious differences.
[02:53:36]  You know, like the, you know, in Saudi Arabia and Iran have differences, but, you know, they're in the same religion, except one is Sunni and the other is Shia.
[02:53:46]  And, you know, that has been an ongoing civil war for a long time.
[02:53:50]  And yet, to the average American, you know, like when we invaded Afghanistan, one reporter went through the U.S. Senate and asked them, what's the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?
[02:54:00]  And not a single senator could tell you, but we're going to go to war.
[02:54:03]  And so, you know, it's, you know, those are minor differences.
[02:54:08]  What has been the response from people in Israel from this?
[02:54:14]  I got a wonderful review the other day in Jerusalem Post.
[02:54:18]  And beyond that, I haven't heard.
[02:54:21]  I don't know if it's for sale in Israel, but we'll see.
[02:54:27]  Yeah.
[02:54:28]  I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, but I've noticed online just recently, like obviously since October 7th and now, there is just so much debate happening in the U.S. surrounding this whole topic.
[02:54:44]  Well, it's been troubling to me to watch what's going on on the campuses, although it seems to die down a little bit.
[02:54:49]  But they were just replicating the anger and the hatred in the region instead of working for trying to create a solution.
[02:55:01]  But the anti-Semitism, Arabs think that anti-Semitism is a comical charge because they're both Semites.
[02:55:09]  And so it doesn't seem to apply to them.
[02:55:12]  But what we need is friendly help to try to.
[02:55:21]  My feeling is and I'm anybody who offers a solution to the Israeli Palestinian problem is naive, and so you have to say, you know, all right, I'm gonna be naive for a moment, but you have to go through that.
[02:55:38]  I think that the Israelis and the Palestinians have shown that they can't solve the problem, that they are in some way addicted to it, and so I think the world has to make a stronger case, take on more of the challenge.
[02:55:55]  And by that, well, what do I mean?
[02:55:58]  I'm not sure.
[02:56:00]  Most of the world has already identified Palestine as a state.
[02:56:06]  If you look at a map of the globe and it's countries that have already accepted Palestine as a state, all of Asia, all of South America, and much of Europe, but it's essentially the G7 countries, France, Germany, Australia.
[02:56:24]  US, Canada, Mexico acknowledges Palestine as a state.
[02:56:30]  Well, maybe that would be one thing is to unanimously say this is a country and Israel has to declare its borders, which it's never done.
[02:56:43]  We have to find a way to create two or one, I don't care, or confederation.
[02:56:50]  There are other solutions, but the occupation is what is shattering both societies.
[02:56:59]  And Israel has to stop occupying the country.
[02:57:02]  And they have to find a way to feel secure doing it.
[02:57:06]  So that's the challenge.
[02:57:07]  And I think the world can help with forceful diplomacy and vast incentives.
[02:57:14]  Yeah.
[02:57:15]  And, you know, when it gets to be more worth it to stop fighting, then maybe then we can find a way to talk about peace.
[02:57:25]  Yeah.
[02:57:26]  What do you make of, you know, a lot of people who are educated in this history far more than I am, some of them like to say that, you know, maybe if America wasn't so tied up with Israel and Israel didn't have such a strong influence over American politics and, you know, didn't have such a backing of America, maybe they would be more incentivized to come up with a solution.
[02:57:55]  It may be true, but, you know, the, the, With AIPAC and things like this.
[02:58:02]  Well, they're like 16 million Jews in the world.
[02:58:07]  And they're narrowly divided between the U.S. and Israel.
[02:58:11]  Israel has about a million more Jews than America does.
[02:58:15]  But the next population is France with 400,000.
[02:58:20]  So essentially, when we talk about the Jewish population, we're talking about the U.S. and Israel.
[02:58:26]  So no wonder we're more interested in Israel than other countries because they're far more I wish yeah.
[02:58:34]  If another historical thing, I mean, if we had more Jews, if Roosevelt and Truman had just opened the gates, if you go to any city, go look at the hospital wings and who's funding the symphony and the ballet, there's so many Jewish names there.
[02:58:53]  And they're just a very small percentage of the world.
[02:58:57]  They're 0.2 percent of the human population.
[02:59:02]  And yet they contribute so much to our society.
[02:59:06]  But it's, you know, now having taken the road to creating a state in the Middle East, Israel has to find its way to being a Middle Eastern country among its neighbors.
[02:59:22]  And I think that that was what frightened Hamas, was this agreement that seemed to be steering towards a conclusion between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
[02:59:35]  And if Israel and Saudi Arabia made peace, All the other Arab countries would fall in line.
[02:59:42]  They're tired of Palestinians and this whole drama.
[02:59:47]  They'd just as soon walk away.
[02:59:50]  And also some of the solutions are very threatening.
[02:59:54]  The idea that the Palestinians would be pushed into Jordan or Lebanon or wherever, Saudi Arabia, they don't want that.
[03:00:02]  They don't want to have that additional problem.
[03:00:04]  So suddenly Hamas feels that they've been dealt out of the game.
[03:00:10]  And so they've been preparing this attack for a long time.
[03:00:14]  And so that was the trigger.
[03:00:20]  Yeah.
[03:00:21]  And then you have, you know, them trying to, it looks like America is like gearing up to go to war with Iran, you know, when Israel, I think Netanyahu was, you know, in the 90s trying to get, trying to convince us that we needed to go to war with Iran and, you know, trying to back them, you know, in these wars and getting entwined.
[03:00:44]  These conflicts overseas that like seem to have no, no benefit for us to get involved in.
[03:00:53]  Yet we do yeah, and it's uh.
[03:00:56]  You know it's frustrating, it's frustrating to watch.
[03:00:58]  And then you have, like this lady who recently went in front of Congress some high level I forget who she was, I think she was supposed to be like an ambassador to the UN and she's getting questioned in front of Congress and she says uh.
[03:01:08]  So they asked her if she believes that Israel has a right to the West Bank based on uh, based on The Bible, or something.
[03:01:18]  And she was like, Yes, they have a, Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank.
[03:01:22]  Right.
[03:01:22]  Like that's like something that's absolutely insane to hear somebody say in front of Congress, like an actual high-ranking government official.
[03:01:33]  So does our ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
[03:01:38]  You know, in the Bible, God gives the promised land to Moses twice.
[03:01:45]  And the first time, it's a big, bigger parcel.
[03:01:48]  It goes from like the Red Sea to the Latani River in Lebanon and all of the West Bank and Jordan.
[03:01:57]  And then the second time, I guess God has reconsidered a little bit, and it's a smaller entity, mainly Israel and the West Bank, but also some other portions of what are now other countries.
[03:02:12]  And then Moses dies before he's able to come into the Promised Land, and Joshua is sent in to, God has told him to kill every living thing.
[03:02:26]  Not just people, just kill every living thing.
[03:02:29]  Wipe the tablet clean.
[03:02:31]  Now, if you're using the Bible or the Torah as your guide, you know, that's a pretty startling model to follow.
[03:02:42]  Yes.
[03:02:43]  And, you know, that's one of the reasons I felt, you know, that the genetic identity of these people is important because if God gave the gift to the Jews, The people that are called Palestinians are the original Jews.
[03:03:05]  And so, you know, they should be in on it.

=== Genetic Identity Truths (08:06) ===

[03:03:10]  But I don't know how many.
[03:03:14]  I mean, I've been in the settlements and, you know, there are fervent believers there, but there are also people there that, you know, they're getting tax breaks.
[03:03:25]  And so, you know, their rent is underwritten.
[03:03:30]  So they have other reasons to be there other than that God gave them that land.
[03:03:35]  Right.
[03:03:39]  It's fascinating stuff, man.
[03:03:42]  What else are you working on?
[03:03:43]  Do you have anything that you can talk about at least?
[03:03:48]  There's a story that I'm really enchanted with.
[03:03:54]  It's about these nuns that go visit the community on Texas Road.
[03:04:00]  I'm finishing that up.
[03:04:03]  Then I'm looking for the you're on fire.
[03:04:05]  Yeah, well, I'm working all the time.
[03:04:08]  But if I'm not working, I'm in despair.
[03:04:11]  So I have to work.
[03:04:15]  How do you decide what you're going to dedicate your time to?
[03:04:18]  Because when you're working on these projects, they take a long time to turn out.
[03:04:22]  That's the hardest question.
[03:04:23]  I think the hardest question any writer has to face is, what's the story?
[03:04:29]  What story do I want to tell?
[03:04:31]  Because it's not as if there's an absence of stories.
[03:04:34]  You pick up the paper and there's stories all over the page.
[03:04:39]  But what is it that calls to you?
[03:04:42]  that stirs something in you and says, I've got to do this.
[03:04:47]  And, you know, with the women and the nuns and this sort of thing, the moment I heard the story that, you know, there were nuns going to visit the women on death row, I was enchanted.
[03:05:00]  You know, I just said, this is fascinating to me.
[03:05:02]  And it is a wonderful story.
[03:05:05]  And there were awful parts of it, you know, the heinous crimes that some of these women have committed.
[03:05:13]  On the other hand, I think of it as being like it's about redemption.
[03:05:17]  And it's a quality that I'm curious about.
[03:05:21]  And so it gave me, it was one of those times when I just went home and started making calls.
[03:05:29]  I knew that was my next story, but it's rare that you have that, excuse me, immediate reaction.
[03:05:38]  And, you know, that you also have to take into account how long is this going to take?
[03:05:43]  Right.
[03:05:44]  And, you know, are you going to waste your time?
[03:05:45]  Right.
[03:05:46]  And time gets to be more precious the older you get and there's less of it.
[03:05:50]  So you have to think about, you know, If this is a five-year project, then will I ever do anything else or will I even finish?
[03:05:59]  Those are real existential questions that you're always asking, but you ask with increased urgency as you get older.
[03:06:07]  Yeah, it always is interesting to me how people like yourself who spend so much time on these complex, deep stories are able to manage their time and be disciplined enough to do their homework, right?
[03:06:24]  And make sure they're following up on every single lead.
[03:06:28]  you know, getting corroboration on things and trying to navigate, like, am I getting fed bullshit on this story or that story?
[03:06:37]  Or, you know, even you, like, working with intelligence community, the intelligence community and like, and like people in the government and stuff like that, like, you know, how do you know you're not just getting led astray on things?
[03:06:49]  And that seemed like a difficult thing to navigate.
[03:06:51]  It is hard.
[03:06:52]  But, you know, I insist that there is a way of getting at what is at least close to truth.
[03:07:01]  And the way I envision it is, first of all, you start a story and if it's going to be, let's say, Looming Tower, a big story, you know, how do I start?
[03:07:18]  You start by, you know, who's in the story?
[03:07:21]  And so you find out names of people that, you know, might be able to talk and you write them down.
[03:07:27]  I use a legal pad and write down the name on one of the 29 lines on the legal pad and then in the little inch and a half column on the left I write their telephone number and then I go talk to them.
[03:07:43]  And when I talk to them I take a highlighter and, you know, sort of run across.
[03:07:49]  So I've checked that one off.
[03:07:51]  But I always ask, who else should I talk to?
[03:07:54]  Right, and those are names I hadn't heard before.
[03:07:56]  So they go on that list and then I talk to them, who else should I talk to?
[03:08:00]  And that's the way that you know.
[03:08:02]  It sinks in the root skin, into the ground Eventually, you run out of names, and that's how you populate the universe of the story.
[03:08:12]  But that's the horizontal axis.
[03:08:16]  It's sort of the trope about journalism is you talk to everybody, but you can't talk to everybody, and not everybody wants to talk to you, but you talk to as many people as you can.
[03:08:29]  And in that case, I talked to 600 people, but it took me five years.
[03:08:35]  So it was a long time coming.
[03:08:40]  Some of those hundreds of people are just more knowledgeable, more fun, have better access, you know, and I go back to them again and again.
[03:08:52]  And that's, you know, the first, the horizontal axis is a seeking of consensus and the vertical axis is a seeking of understanding.
[03:09:02]  And so you're trying to get deeper into a story.
[03:09:05]  If you got, you know, like one of my sources in Saudi Arabia was, you know, bin Laden's brother-in-law, and he was married to four women, as was bin Laden at the time, you know, they had that option.
[03:09:21]  And I wanted to talk to her.
[03:09:23]  That was never going to happen.
[03:09:25]  But he offered to take my questions to her every fourth night when he spent the night with that wife, bin Laden's sister.
[03:09:34]  Wow.
[03:09:35]  And so she would respond.
[03:09:36]  She would never see a person like me, but she would, through the medium of her husband, who was very helpful to me, she would respond to those questions.
[03:09:48]  And so, you know, that was part of the horizontal axis.
[03:09:53]  I wanted to talk to her, but she could tell me things that other people wouldn't know, like how did bin Laden smell?
[03:10:02]  You know, he wore this sandalwood cologne that a lot of Saudis wear.
[03:10:08]  So, you know, those kinds of things are just, they're access to intimacy that gives plausibility to everything you write.
[03:10:18]  I admire that so much.
[03:10:20]  And I, you know, it's very few and far between that you meet people like yourself who go to like the primary, primary, primary sources of some of these things, you know, like boots on the ground, you know, firsthand accounts of what these people are like, what they believe.
[03:10:40]  And there's not much of that.
[03:10:43]  In the media today, more of it is just like the telephone game, like people talking about, let's, you know, our daily, I'm guilty of it too, you know, like a daily, like a talk show that you do weekly and you're having people that are coming in and we're talking about some reporting we saw in the New York Times or on some other publication that they maybe got it through somebody else and they got it through somebody else.
[03:11:07]  And it's hard to be able to have the determination and the belief in yourself.

=== Ground Reporting Matters (01:47) ===

[03:11:17]  to stick through something for so long and to do that kind of like boots on the ground reporting that you're doing.
[03:11:26]  And I hope more people can continue to carry the torch that you've been carrying for so long in the future.
[03:11:34]  Well, thank you.
[03:11:35]  I would like to encourage reporters and journalists or people that might be interested in it to give it a try because no matter who you are, being a journalist will open your eyes to other people.
[03:11:50]  and where they're coming from.
[03:11:51]  And it makes you more – it makes you wiser, I think, because you've learned how people differ and why those differences shouldn't be discounted.
[03:12:03]  And you also have to consider who would you be in that scenario.
[03:12:07]  All this is stuff that, you know, if you're sitting in an office and you're surrounded by people who are very much like you and, you know, have similar concerns, and you're not going to be educated about how the world works.
[03:12:20]  And even if it's just for a couple of years.
[03:12:24]  You know, it's a great way to grow into another person.
[03:12:31]  Well, thanks again.
[03:12:32]  I really appreciate your time.
[03:12:33]  Oh, thank you.
[03:12:34]  I enjoyed it myself and your new book, The Human Scale.
[03:12:38]  Yeah boom, look at that beautiful cover.
[03:12:40]  We'll be on i'm.
[03:12:42]  We'll link it below, but on your website or Amazon, what's the best place to buy it?
[03:12:45]  Yeah, you probably should go to Amazon or your local bookstore.
[03:12:48]  Okay fantastic um, Lawrence Wright.
[03:12:52]  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.
[03:12:53]  Oh yeah, we have Patreon questions.
[03:12:55]  Uh, we have a couple questions on our patreon for you from our uh, our beautiful patrons Supporters, that will do that as well.
[03:12:59]  Okay.
[03:13:01]  But that's the end of the podcast.
[03:13:02]  All right.
[03:13:03]  All right.
[03:13:03]  Good night, folks.