Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

June 19, 2023 - The David Knight Show

03:05:41

The David Knight Show - 06/19/2023

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Thank you.
	Using free speech to free minds.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	The David Knight Show
	The David Knight Show
	The David Knight Show
	you. Joining us now is Paul Charest.
	He has a previous book, The Army of None, about artificial intelligence.
	He is a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	His book, Autonomous Weapons in the Army of None, was an award-winning study.
	He is Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for New American Security.
	And this book, which is a real page-turner for something that is...
	Heavy into technology, but also politics.
	It covers a wide range of areas, and I've got to say, I really did enjoy it.
	It's a massive book, but I did enjoy reading it.
	The book is Four Battlegrounds, Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
	Thank you for joining us, Mr.
	Shari. Thank you so much for having me.
	Really appreciate it. Well, thank you.
	I want to focus at the very beginning of the book, and this is one of the things that hooked me.
	This book is about the darker side of AI, and that's what I want to focus on.
	Too often we get this Pollyanna vision.
	version of the future, you know, and everything is going to be just shiny new toys and technology.
	But the reality is a little bit concerning, isn't it?
	I thought it was interesting that you began the book with a talk about an AI dogfight.
	That is, and again, there's a lot of great anecdotes through this, which makes it such a good book to read.
	Tell people what was happening in DARPA's ACE program, that's Air Combat Evolution.
	Yeah, thanks so much.
	Well, I'm glad you enjoyed that one.
	I thought it was really exciting to learn about.
	I talk at the opening of the book about DARPA's ACE program, Air Combat Evolution, and the DARPA Alpha Dogfight Challenge.
	So the ACE program is designed to create an AI agent that can go into the cockpit to assist human pilots.
	And the Alpha Dogfight Challenge that DARPA did a few years ago, taking a page from AlphaGo that beat the best humans at Go, was designed to beat a human in dogfighting in a simulator.
	And there's a lot of caveats that apply from a simulator to the real world.
	It's not the same. Right.
	But nevertheless, a big challenge because that's a very difficult environment for humans.
	You're maneuvering at high speed, requires quick reflexes, situational awareness, anticipating where's the other pilot going to go.
	Yeah, let me interject here and say, you know, one of the things that surprised me about that was that because of technology, typically missile technology, right, you don't have dogfights anymore.
	But that's really a measure of pilot skill is how they were using that.
	So tell us how it went. That's right.
	Pilot skill, and in some ways, pilot trust.
	Pilot trust in the AI, right?
	If the AI can do dogfighting, then it's going to help pilots trust it more.
	So in this competition, a number of different companies brought their AIs.
	They competed against each other.
	Now, the winner was a previously unheard-of company called Heron Systems, beat out Lockheed Martin in the finals.
	And then their AI went head-to-head against a human experienced Air Force pilot, Totally crushed the human.
	15 to 0, human didn't get a single shot off against the AI. And the thing that was most interesting to me was the AI was able to make these superhuman precision shots when the aircraft are racing at each other hundreds of miles an hour, head to head, that are basically impossible for humans to make.
	So the AI actually was not just better than the human, but was fighting differently than the human.
	Yeah, and as you point out in the thing, typically we've all seen dogfights in movies over and over again, even in Star Wars.
	The whole thing is to maneuver around and get behind the guy and take the shot from behind, but it operated differently.
	What did the AI do? So for humans, exactly.
	They want to maneuver behind, get into the 6 o'clock position behind the enemy, and then get a shot off.
	But there are these split-second opportunities when the aircraft are circling, and they're nose-to-nose, and there's just a fraction of a second where you could get a shot off when they're racing at each other head-to-head.
	And the AI system was able to do this.
	It's a shot that's basically impossible for humans to make.
	It's actually banned in training because it's risky for humans to even try because they risk a collision when the aircraft are racing at each other head to head.
	But the AI was able to make that shot, avoid a collision.
	And the really wild thing is AI learned to do that all on its own.
	It wasn't programmed to do that.
	It simply learned to do that by flying in a simulator.
	Wow. So it's basically playing chicken with the other plane and then taking a kill shot and getting out of the way.
	Not getting out of the way.
	That is pretty amazing. Pretty amazing.
	Now, of course, you point out in the book that it has complete situational awareness, which is something that helps it.
	But later in the book, you talk about poker, and I thought that was very interesting because for all the years, I haven't been following...
	All the different games stuff that's been happening.
	You know, we had all these competitions where you had computers against chess players and against go players and all the rest of this stuff.
	But I remember at the time, the early days, when I was looking at that stuff, they were saying, well, the real thing would be poker because in poker, you don't have, uh, you don't know the world, the entire world situation.
	You don't have complete surveillance of everything that's there.
	And now, as of 2017, you talked about what happened with poker.
	Tell people where AI is with poker and how it got to that situation.
	Exactly. So poker is a really exciting challenge for AI. It's really difficult because it's what's called an imperfect information game.
	There is this hidden information that's critical to the game.
	So in chess, in Go, the AI can see the entire board.
	You can see all of the pieces and where they are.
	But for poker, the most important information, your opponent's cards, is hidden from you.
	And so human players have to make estimations.
	What do I think this other player has based on They're betting and based on the cards that have come out so far.
	And it's a really hard problem for AI. It is yet another game that has fallen to AIs.
	And I talk in the book about Libratus, the first AI that was able to achieve superhuman performance in head-to-head, Texas Hold'em, and then Pluribus, which actually could do this against multiple players, which is way harder from a computational standpoint, because now there's way more factors.
	Yeah. And the really wild thing to me about this was that when you think about what it would take to achieve superhuman performance in poker, you think you would need something like a theory of mind.
	Understanding, okay, this other player, what are they thinking about?
	Are they bluffing?
	Turns out, actually, you don't need any of that.
	You just need to be really, really good at probabilities.
	And the AI is able to do that and to beat the best players in the world.
	Wow. I'd like to see it do a game of Blackjack 21.
	Definitely be banned at the...
	That'd be an easy one for it to do that.
	But yeah, that is interesting. And you tied that into your experience in Iraq, I guess it was.
	Maybe it was Afghanistan, but imagine Iraq with IEDs and how people would try to guess which path would be least likely to hit an IED. Talk a little bit about that and how the application...
	Of its ability to scope stuff out and probabilities in poker, how that applies to a real-world situation like that.
	Yeah, so I tell the story in the book about sort of what is, you know, how might these tools that are valuable in poker be used for warfare in a variety of ways?
	And in fact, the company, the researchers rather, that built the Libratus, the system that achieves superhuman performance in poker, they now have a defense startup and they're doing work with the defense department, trying to take this technology and apply it to military applications.
	So I talk about some of the things that I saw in Iraq during the war there where you're worried about IEDs, roadside bombs, being on the side of the road, and I would have discussions with other soldiers about, okay, what's the strategy here, right? Do you swerve from side to side to keep them guessing where you're going to be?
	Do you drive down the middle? If you see a pothole, do you drive around the pothole to avoid it because there might be an ID hidden in the pothole?
	Or they know you're going to drive around the pothole and then if you go around it, there might be a bomb on the side of the road and you should drive through it.
	And there's not a good answer to these.
	That's right. That soldiers talk about when they're in a war and trying to figure out what to do.
	But one of the things that's really compelling about this technology is it might give militaries the ability to be more strategic.
	And instead of apply sort of like, you know, just guesswork, which is basically what we were doing, to then apply a little more of a rigorous strategic approach to keep the enemy constantly guessing.
	It's interesting, you know, in your book, you point out how the AI in some of these war games was super aggressive, always on the attack, never tired, never exhausted.
	My son said in Terminator, the Terminator would block blows from humans.
	An actual AI wouldn't do this.
	It's not a threat. It would take the blow and immediately kill the person.
	You know, but it is very different in the way that it fights.
	And people are saying this is...
	It's going to change everything as it gets onto the battlefield, isn't it?
	Well, that's what's amazing is, you know, I talked about how this AI dogfighting agent fights differently than human pilots and uses different tactics.
	That's true across all of these games.
	So the AI system that plays poker actually uses different betting strategies than human poker players.
	That's also true in chess, in Go, in real-time computer strategy games like Starcraft 2 and Dota 2.
	We have these simulated battlefields with different units.
	And there are some commonalities actually across how the AI systems are different than humans across all of these games.
	And so one of them is that in some of these computer games where these AI agents are fighting against the human units, the human players talk about the AI's exhibiting superhuman levels of aggressiveness.
	That they constantly feel pressured all the time in the game.
	Because there'll be these little skirmishes among these units.
	And then for humans, the battle's over and they have to turn their attention elsewhere.
	And then they look to a different part of the game and they figure out, okay, what am I going to do over here now?
	And the AI can look at the whole game at the same time and it doesn't need to take a break.
	It doesn't need to turn its attention somewhere else.
	So this is really significant effects from Warfare.
	Because when you look at how real wars unfold among people, there are lulls in combat.
	The enemy has to take a rest.
	They have to sleep.
	They have to eat. They have to go reload their ammunition.
	They have to focus their attention and say, okay, what are we going to do next?
	The AI doesn't have those challenges.
	It's not going to get tired.
	It's not going to be emotionally stressed.
	And so we could see not just the AI is changing the tactics of warfare in the future, but even the psychology.
	Wow. Yeah, you go back and you look at World War I, the trench warfare, you know, people waiting long periods of time, and then, you know, I've heard many people say, you know, war is these long periods of boredom where nothing happens and then sheer terror, you know, that type of thing.
	And even going back to the Civil War, I mean, they would even fight seasonably, right?
	You know, would take the winter off or something like that.
	So the pace of all this stuff has been accelerating, but now...
	With AI involved, it really puts the pedal to the metal.
	And I want to talk about the four different battlegrounds here and a little bit about deep learning.
	But before we do, you've also talked about the ethics of some of these things.
	Things like, will it surrender?
	It sounds like it's pretty aggressive, and will it recognize surrender, I should say.
	Will it recognize surrender, or will it just keep coming?
	And that's one of the ethical issues about this.
	I mean, what do we do in terms of trying to keep control of this, even on a battlefield, so that it doesn't get out of control and just keep going even?
	Does it recognize that it wins even?
	Right. And this is a central problem in AI, whether we're talking about a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bing or a military AI system, where the consequences could be much more severe.
	How do we make sure that these systems are going to do what we want them to do?
	How do we maintain control over them?
	Some Chinese scholars have hypothesized about this idea of a singularity on the battlefield.
	At some point in time in the future, where the pace of AI-driven combat exceeds humans' ability to keep up, and militaries have to effectively turn over the keys to machines just to be effective.
	And that's a very troubling prospect, because then how do you control escalation?
	How do you end a war, right, if it's happening at superhuman speed?
	Yeah, yeah. And there's no answers to that right now.
	That's the thing. Yeah, this is hanging over our heads.
	And this technology, again, it's, you know, we can't have an AI gap.
	So everybody's working along these lines.
	It's one of the things that reminded me as I read your book.
	Reminds me of Michael Crichton and the reason that he wrote Jurassic Park was to awaken people to how rapidly genetic technology was changing and the fact that people were not talking about it in terms of how to control this or the ethics involved in it.
	It's just like, can we do this, you know, and just run with it?
	And it seems like we're getting in that situation with this as well.
	Let's talk again before we get into the four battlegrounds.
	The whole idea of swarms of hundreds of thousands of drones, as my son said, nothing good ever comes in a swarm.
	So this aspect of it.
	Have you ever read the book Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez?
	It was back in 2012.
	It's kind of the theme of that, where they had come up with swarms.
	Are you familiar with that? I am.
	It's been a while, but yes, that's a great book, yeah.
	So where are we in that kind of scenario where you've got this massive swarm of killer drones that are communicating with each other?
	We don't have to get into how they communicate, but it basically is kind of following on an insect model.
	Is there a defense against that?
	Is that something that is in his book?
	Essentially made ships obsolete, made all the conventional weapons obsolete, and the military-industrial complex had to reset the board and make all new weapons, and they liked that.
	Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we're not there yet, but I do think it's coming.
	So right now, today, drones are largely remotely controlled.
	There's a human on the other end, if not directly flying the drone by a joystick, at least telling the drone where to go, giving it the GPS coordinates, and then the drone goes there.
	And generally speaking, there's like one person to one drone.
	But that's limited because that means that for every drone you put on the battlefield, you need a person behind it.
	And people are expensive.
	People are limited. And so this idea of swarming is that now you can have one person controlling many drones, tens, hundreds, thousands of drones all at the same time.
	And the human obviously is not telling each drone where to go.
	They're just telling the swarm what to do.
	So telling the swarm, go conduct reconnaissance.
	Or look over this area, find the enemy and attack them.
	Or it could be for logistics, right?
	Resupply our troops, give the troops the ammunition and supplies that they need.
	And the swarm figures all that out on its own by these individual drones, or they could be robotic units on the ground or undersea, autonomously coordinating with one another.
	It is likely to be a major paradigm shift in warfare, a huge shift in what militaries call command and control, the way that militaries organize themselves.
	So we're not there yet. Most of the systems today are pretty remotely controlled, little bits of autonomy, but that's likely the path that this is taking us, and it's going to transform warfare in very significant ways.
	Yeah. Yeah, you talked about earlier, when you talked about the ACE program that DARPA had, Combat Warfare, Of course, DARPA runs these contests all the time.
	I think the first one they had was autonomous cars.
	But they've had some, one of them, Intelligent UAV Swarm Challenge.
	Tell us a little bit about that and how that turned out.
	So we're seeing the U.S. military and the Chinese military invest heavily in these new types of experimentations and demonstrations.
	So the U.S. has done a number of swarm demonstrations where they'll take swarms out to the desert somewhere and drop them off of an airplane and swarming drones and have them coordinating together.
	China's doing the same.
	So they're taking a page from what the U.S. is doing.
	They're often following up with experiments of their own.
	And the really difficult thing for the U.S. military is this technology is so widely available.
	So, for example, we're already seeing drones used in Ukraine, commercially available drones.
	There are some military ones coming from Iran and Turkey, but also commercially available drones like you could buy online for a few hundred dollars.
	And civilians are using them.
	They're using them to assist the Ukrainian military.
	And in some cases, we've even seen artificial intelligence integrated into these drones.
	So AI-based image classifiers that can identify tanks, for example, and find them using AI. And so just the widespread nature of AI and autonomy is a real challenge for militaries.
	Think about how do you control this technology?
	Huge problem for the U.S. military because all of the U.S.'s advantages are negated when anyone else has access to this.
	Wow. Yeah, and it's kind of interesting that they're being used for, you know, mainly reconnaissance.
	Like we saw, you know, that was one of the key things that early planes were used for in World War I was mainly reconnaissance.
	Before that, they had, you know, reconnaissance balloons and Civil War and that type of thing.
	Then eventually they start dropping small munitions and then it's on, you know.
	And so it's going to escalate much faster with that.
	One of the things that you've talked about...
	Is, again, in terms of the AI running away from us, you talk about a flash crash of stocks.
	Talk about what that would look like with a flash war.
	You know, we've got circuit breakers for the stock market.
	You know, what do we do for that again?
	You know, what is the problem? Define the problem.
	Right. So, you know, the essence of the problem is how do you control operations going on at machine speed and in a competitive environment?
	So we envision what this might look like in warfare.
	So our machines are operating at machine speed faster than humans can keep up.
	Their machines are doing the same.
	They're interacting. We're not going to share our algorithms with adversaries.
	They're not going to share their algorithms with us.
	There's this potential for these unexpected interactions.
	Things to spiral out of control.
	Well, we've seen this. Actually, we've seen this in stock trading where there are algorithms executing trades in milliseconds far faster than humans can respond.
	And we've had accidents like these flash crashes where the algorithms interact in some unexpected way with market conditions and these rapid movements in the price.
	And the way that regulators have dealt with this in the financial system is they put in these circuit breakers you talked about.
	They take a stock offline if the price moves too quickly in a very short period of time.
	But there's no referee to call timeout and work.
	So who's the regulator?
	There's nobody. And so if you're going to have some kind of human circuit breaker, that's something that militaries have to do on their own, or they have to work with competitors to agree to do that, which is needless to say, that's really hard to do.
	Yeah, not too likely to happen.
	That is very concerning.
	Again, as you point out, it's a great analogy in the stock market.
	We've already seen how that works, but there is no referee in a war.
	Talk a little bit about the non-belligerent use of artificial intelligence other than as killing machines.
	So, AI is a widespread, multi-use technology.
	We're seeing AI integrated into any aspect of society, in medicine, in finance, in transportation.
	One of the really troubling applications that I talk about in the book is the use of AI for domestic surveillance.
	dream implementation of this inside China, where half of the world's 1 billion surveillance cameras are in China.
	Yes.
	And the Chinese Communist Party is building up this really dystopian model of this tech-enabled authoritarianism.
	Because if you've got half a billion cameras, how are you going to monitor that?
	We'll use AI. And they're using AI for facial recognition, gait recognition, voice recognition, tracking people's movements, in some cases for really trivial infractions.
	Facial recognition being used to go after people for jaywalking, using too much toilet paper in public restrooms, but also, of course, to go after political dissidents and to clamp down on control that the Chinese Communist Party has, and to repress its citizens and minorities.
	Hang on right there. I want to show people this little clip.
	I know you can't see it there.
	This is actually a China restaurant.
	And in order to get toilet paper, the guy has to go up to a screen, and it gets a facial scan of him.
	And then it spits out just a little bit of toilet paper.
	But that's the state of where this is.
	I mean, this is...
	That's kind of where it hits the fan, isn't it?
	I mean, it's even for that.
	And perhaps they're going to grab his DNA. Who knows?
	This is the toilet paper.
	You talked about going to China.
	And I don't know what year you went to China.
	It was a very different situation from when my family went about 2000.
	What was it? 2005, 2006.
	And now you talk about what it's like coming into the country.
	What do they do when you come in to the country now?
	Tell people. Sure.
	So I did several trips to China just before actually COVID hit, was able to get in there before all the restrictions came down, and got to see firsthand how a lot of AI technology is being employed by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil its citizens.
	So one of the first things that happens is you get your face scanned when you come through into the country, and it gets recorded in their database.
	Now I'll point out that also happens at many border checkpoints here in the U.S., Yeah, it's rolling out the TSA now, yeah.
	That's right. So when I came back through Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., also got my face scanned.
	Now, what are some of the differences, right?
	So same technology, but it's being used, same application, that is to check that people are who they say they are, but under very different kinds of political structures and governance regimes.
	So here in the U.S., there are laws that govern how the government can do that.
	They're set by the elected representatives, by the people.
	There's also a lot more transparency here in the U.S. The first place I learned about this wasn't going through a checkpoint in the U.S. It was reading about in the Washington Post.
	So the fact that we have independent media in the U.S. also, you know, a way to have more checks and balances and government power and authority, none of which exists in China.
	And that to me just really highlights it's not about the technology.
	It's about how we use it.
	And are we going to use it to protect human freedom or the Chinese model to crush human freedom?
	Yes, it's hard power versus soft power.
	Soft power is going to be coming from our dedication to the rule of law, to individual liberty, to those types of things.
	And the problem is that it's getting to the point now where if they want to collect your facial information in order to fly, They may tell you all about it, but if you don't want to have your facial skin done, maybe you won't fly, and that'll be your choice. You don't get to fly, but we'll tell you we're going to do this.
	And so it's that kind of level of coercion that kind of has the pretense of choice with it.
	I'm very concerned that we're just a couple of half steps behind the Chinese, and that most people in this country, as well as elected representatives, that most people are sleepwalking through it.
	Most elected representatives don't really have it on there.
	What they're looking at.
	But talk a little bit about what is happening in the area that they are so focused on, the Uyghur area, and as they are looking at that particular population and how they weaponized it there.
	So China in particular, the most sort of extreme version of this techno-dystopian model that China's building is in Xinjiang, where China has been very active in repressing the Uyghurs there as part of a mass campaign of repression against them, including imprisonment,
	home confinement, and then throughout the area and the major cities, a series of police checkpoints that dot the cities every few hundred meters that check people via facial recognition, gate recognition, That scan their phones, that use biometric databases, all to track the movements of these citizens and where they're going.
	So, for example, if someone, you know, drives through an area, a camera checking the license plate on the car, and then sticking that to other data like the person's face or their geolocation data for their phone, and saying, okay, you know, is this a person who owns the car?
	And if not, bam, you get flagged.
	And the government's going to come take a look at you and It's all part of this model the Chinese Communist Party is building to control every aspect of its citizens' movements.
	Because if you can control how much toilet paper people are using, then you're not going to have people rising up against the government.
	That's right, yeah. And of course, as I've said, we look at central bank digital currency.
	That gets us there really fast.
	But these other aspects, constant surveillance, geospatial intelligence, even being used to anticipate where people are going to go, anticipatory intelligence.
	Talk a little bit about that, what people typically think of as pre-crime for a minority report.
	talk about how they are pulling all this data together, data mining it, and making decisions about what you're going to do in the future and who their suspects are going to be.
	That's right.
	So So one of the things that they built is a platform for looking at people's behavior, tracking it.
	China's put together a social credit system, scoring people based on activities that they're doing, including sometimes trivial infractions, like not sorting the recycling.
	That might get you docked points to try to shape people's behavior.
	And then also trying to anticipate where they might find something that looks suspicious.
	So if someone books a hotel room on their credit card in the same city that they live in, that gets flagged by the police.
	And the new police cloud database that many police departments in major cities and provinces are building in China, where they'll say, okay, well, that's suspicious.
	What are you doing? We're going to look at you looking at geolocation data.
	So if they see a person is going to be in an internet cafe, The same time as another person, multiple times during the week, they're linking these people and saying, okay, what's going on between them?
	Trying to ferret out any kind of behavior that the party might see as a threat to it.
	Yeah, and that's the thing that's very concerning.
	And of course, the reason you're talking about this is because it's artificial intelligence that allows them to be able to make these correlations and to sort through just a staggering amount of information.
	If we go back and we look at the Stasi, they were keeping track of everybody.
	And you point out that they put in some Han Chinese in the Uyghur area to be informants.
	But that's nothing compared to all the biometric surveillance and the artificial intelligence and how they can put that stuff together.
	You know, they had so much information.
	Everybody was spying.
	More than half the people were spies and informants on the other less than half of the people.
	And yet they didn't have a way to put that stuff together.
	That's the kind of leverage that this technology now gives to dictators, right?
	That's what's chilling about it.
	It allows this surveillance at a scale that's not possible with humans.
	And it's not just that AI can be used for repression.
	Lots of technologies can be used for oppression.
	A police baton can be used for oppression.
	It's the fact that AI can enhance the system of oppression itself and further entrench it so that it's even harder for citizens to rise up against the government.
	So it's not that the Chinese Communist Party is just using this to, you know, Crack down and find the dissidents if there's another Tiananmen Square protest in the future.
	I walked through Tiananmen Square, surveillance cameras everywhere, as you might expect.
	I estimated about 200 cameras across the square at every poll, watching every single movement.
	The goal really for the party is making sure that the dissidents never even make it to the square.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I imagine if you did something there in Tiananmen Square that indicated that you were concerned about that, that would really put you on their list for sure.
	Talk a little bit about Sharp Eyes.
	This is something that came out about 2015.
	I remember when this program came out.
	Talk about the Sharp Eyes initiative in China.
	So China's been steadily building components of this digital infrastructure to control its population.
	So one of the first components of this was the Great Firewall, firewalling off information inside China.
	There's a propaganda component of this.
	But increasingly, with programs like Skynet and Sharp Eyes, China has been creating the physical infrastructure as well.
	So not just controlling information, but now controlling physical space.
	So Sharp Eyes is a massive government program to build out surveillance cameras in every aspect of China so that every single place is covered.
	Bus stations, train stations, airplanes, hotels, banks, grocery stores, every kind of public area is surveilled so that any place someone goes inside China, there's a camera watching them and tracking their movements.
	And you mentioned Skynet.
	You mentioned in the book that they didn't name it after the Terminator, but it's kind of a transliteration of what they've got.
	But it's essentially going to be the same thing, I guess, once they hook it up with some military equipment.
	Let's talk about the four battlegrounds, because that's what your book lays out, and your book is set up primarily for people who are in the military, I think, to look at where we are relative to China in terms of—you don't really talk that much about Russia.
	Russia, you do have a quote at the beginning from both Xi Jinping and from Putin about the importance of artificial intelligence, but the real threat seems to be coming from China in this.
	And so you look at this from a power standpoint, and you talk about four different areas.
	Talk about the first one, data.
	Sure.
	So how can the U.S. stay ahead of China in this really critical technology Well, data is essential.
	Data is essentially the fuel for machine learning systems.
	Machine learning systems are trained on data.
	Now, it's often said or people might have this impression that China has an advantage in data because they have half a billion surveillance cameras.
	They're collecting data on their citizens.
	When I dove into this, my conclusion ultimately was that that's not true, that China doesn't have an advantage in data for a couple of reasons.
	One is that what matters more than the population size of a country is the user base of these tech companies.
	So China's got bigger population than the U.S. or Europe.
	There's more people. They're going to collect more data on their citizens.
	But U.S. tech companies aren't confined to the United States.
	So platforms like Facebook and YouTube have over 2 billion global users each.
	Whereas, in fact, China's WeChat was only 1.2 billion users.
	And other than TikTok, Chinese companies have really struggled to make it outside of China and break into the global marketplace.
	So that's an area where the population turns out to be not really an advantage for China.
	In fact, the US probably has advantages in global reach of these companies.
	Another reason why people think that China might have an advantage is because the Chinese government's doing all the surveillance.
	Well, it turns out that the Chinese government doesn't let Chinese companies necessarily do that same level of surveillance.
	So the Chinese Communist Party is actually pretty restrictive of who gets its spying powers.
	They don't want Chinese companies to have the same spying powers that they do, and they've been passing consumer data privacy laws.
	So even though there's no regulations inside China on what the government can do, there actually are passing regulations on what Chinese companies can do to Chinese consumers.
	So those same spying powers don't necessarily exist on the corporate side.
	Whereas, of course, in the U.S., U.S. consumers have actually acquiesced a fair amount to this sort of model of corporate surveillance of U.S. tech companies hoovering up lots of their personal data without a lot of pushback, grumbling, but there's no federal data privacy regulations.
	And that's the key thing.
	We've said for the longest time, if it's free, you are the data.
	You're the product, right?
	Your data is the product.
	And that really underscores how much better they're able to get that information from people just by providing a free product and we give them all the information about ourselves.
	That's right. So we actually are giving up a ton of information voluntarily, at least to companies, if not to the government.
	And so I'm not sure that China actually has an advantage here.
	I think both countries are going to have access to ample data.
	The more important thing is going to be building pipelines within companies or their militaries to take this data, to harness it, to clean it up, to turn it to useful AI applications.
	Yeah, talk a little bit about how that is used by AI, why data is so important.
	As you mentioned, people said data is the new oil or whatever.
	Because of machine learning, tell people why there's so much concern and emphasis on the quantity of data that they've been able to collect about us.
	How's that used? Yeah. So as I'm sure people are aware of why we're having this conversation, part of it is this huge explosion in artificial intelligence in the last decade.
	And we've seen tremendous progress through what's called the deep learning revolution.
	So not all of AI, we talked about poker, it doesn't use machine learning, but a lot of the progress right now is using machine learning and a type of machine learning called deep learning that uses deep neural networks.
	Which are a connectionist paradigm that are loosely modeled on human brains.
	And in machine learning, rather than have a set of rules that are written down by human experts about what the AI should do.
	And that's how, for example, like a commercial airplane autopilot functions.
	A set of rules for what the airplane should do in any given circumstance.
	Machine learning doesn't work that way.
	And instead, the algorithm is trained on data.
	And so people can take data of some kind of behavior and then train this AI system, for example, on faces, right?
	If you have enough pictures of people's faces and then they're labeled with those people's names, you can feed that into a neural network and it can learn to identify who people are based on really subtle patterns in their faces, the same way that we do, really subconsciously, not even thinking about it.
	We can identify faces.
	And the thing is you need massive amounts of data.
	So AI systems that do image classification, for example, that identify objects based on images, use databases with millions of images.
	Text models like ChatGPT or Bing use hundreds of gigabytes of text.
	In fact, a good portion of the text on the internet.
	And so having large amounts of data and having it ready to train these systems is really foundational to using AI effectively.
	One of the examples that you have is being able to distinguish between an apple and a tomato.
	Talk a little bit about that. So if you think about a rule-based system, the old model of AI, how would you build a rule-based system to tell this between an apple and a tomato?
	So they're both round, they're red, sometimes green, they're shiny, maybe they have a green stem on top.
	If you're trying to tell the difference to someone who's never seen one before, that's actually kind of tricky to do.
	But they look different, and in fact, a toddler can tell the difference to them if they've seen both of them.
	And it turns out that building a rule by system for AI to tell the difference is really hard.
	But if you feed enough labeled images of apples and tomatoes to a machine learning system, it can just learn to tell the difference.
	The same way that humans do based on all of these subtle cues about the texture and the shape and how they're different.
	And so that's a great example of these kinds of problems that AI is really powerful for using machine learning.
	Yeah, you know, when we look at generative AI, the AI that people are using so much for artwork and that type of thing, and you compare it to the chat programs that we've seen and the real colorful episodes that people had as they were working with it, you know, it's the same type of thing, essentially.
	They're able to create this interesting artwork because they've got so many different images that they have seen and just pull these elements together.
	But that's exactly what they're doing with the chat when it goes off the deep end as well.
	They've had all of this massive amount of conversation and scripts or whatever, novels.
	And they're able to pull that kind of stuff together just like they pull together the interesting elements of artwork to make something that's different.
	Isn't that a good analogy?
	Or what'd you say?
	Oh, absolutely.
	They're doing essentially the exact same thing, just one with images and one with text, where we've seen this explosion in generative AI like ChatGPT, like these AIR generators.
	They're really, really powerful, and they're not actually sort of copying and pasting from the database.
	What they do is they have a model that's trained on these massive databases of images or text.
	And then what happens is they build a statistical model of statistically associations of text or associations of pixels and what an image looks like.
	And then with a prompt, if you're talking to, say, ChatGPT or to Bing, you start having a conversation, you give it a prompt, and then it's going to spit back a response.
	And almost all of the really weird stuff that these language models are doing, when you think about it, it's modeling something that exists on the Internet.
	So these models, you know, they can get argumentative.
	They're arguing with users.
	They're trying to deceive them.
	You know, in one case, the model is telling this user that it's in love with him and he should leave his wife.
	Well, all of it seems like really loony behavior, but there's all that stuff on the Internet.
	Yeah. Like, there's all sorts of weird, wacky things on the Internet.
	So it's learned, based on this text on the Internet, those kinds of behaviors.
	And then it's no surprise that it spits them back at us when we prompt it to do so.
	Yeah, even coming up with a kind of HAL scenario like from 2001.
	I was watching these people on the cameras.
	They didn't know I was watching them on the cameras, that type of thing.
	Yeah, it strikes me as we're talking about the importance, and I don't really understand how these machine learning models work.
	I mean, I've just come after this from a procedural standpoint, you know, in engineering and programming.
	So I don't really understand how these things can assimilate this and build these models from looking at, you know, pictures, a lot of pictures of tomatoes and apples and everything, but they do it somehow.
	But the key thing with all this appears to be the data.
	And so I was wondering, because I've been wondering why There's so much fear and concern about TikTok with various people.
	And I know part of it is that, you know, it's going to be easier to scrape this data off of...
	If they own the platform, they can get the data more easily than they could if they were just trying to scrape it off publicly because everything on Facebook and all the social media is out there publicly.
	But the key thing about this, I imagine besides...
	Getting information about interesting individuals might be the larger access to having that big platform of data because you're talking about feeding as kind of a strategic resource for nations, the fact that you can get this stuff from Facebook or other things to feed into your artificial intelligence.
	Is that part of it, you think, with TikTok?
	Absolutely. Data is part of it, and then the algorithm behind TikTok is another big part of it.
	So TikTok looks really innocuous.
	I do think it's a major threat to U.S. national security, not because the platform itself is a problem, but because the ownership is a problem, because the company's owned by a Chinese company that's ultimately beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
	And so one of the problems is that the app could be used to take people's personal data.
	So it's on your phone.
	Your phone will sometimes ask for permission.
	Oh, this app can access other information about you, your location, can access other apps.
	And, you know, I'll be honest, like myself, maybe a lot of people just, okay, allow, sure, right?
	But then all of a sudden that app's grabbing all sorts of information.
	Maybe your contact list.
	Maybe it's grabbing your geolocation.
	Maybe it's seeing what you're doing with other apps.
	And it's sending it back.
	And in the case of TikTok, if the Chinese Communist Party says, we need access to that data, the company has no choice.
	If they say no, they go to jail.
	So when the FBI told Apple, you need to unlock this phone, Apple fought the FBI. They fought them in court, and they fought them in the court of public opinion.
	And neither of those things exist inside China.
	A Chinese company can't Right.
	Yeah. Right.
	So for all these platforms, they're feeding you information based on this algorithm saying, okay, we think you should look at this information.
	And companies are all very opaque about this.
	They're not very transparent about what's in the algorithm.
	There's been a lot of controversy about many of the US platforms that maybe they're pushing people towards more extremist content.
	The problem with TikTok in particular is that this algorithm could be a vehicle for censoring information.
	And in fact, it has been.
	And in fact, there's been leaks coming out of TikTok that shows their internal censorship guidelines.
	That's been leaked. We've seen it.
	We've seen extra guidelines.
	And TikTok has said they would censor political content.
	So anything about anything that might be offensive to the Chinese Communist Party, something about the Tiananmen Square massacre, That's censored.
	And so that's a real problem we think about.
	This is an information environment that Americans are using.
	This would be like the Chinese Communist Party owning a major cable news network in the United States.
	That's a real threat to U.S. national security, and we have to find ways to address it.
	Sure. Yeah, it's kind of like what we saw with the Twitter files.
	You know, we saw how at the beck and call of officials and government that they would censor or they would give them information on people.
	And of course, we see the same thing when we look at 5G. You know, they're concerned about Huawei because the Chinese government is going to use it to surveil us.
	But again, our government is going to use the other 5G that's made by our companies to surveil us as well.
	Talk a little bit about, you know, while we're on data, The issue of synthetic data, because I thought it was interesting.
	As I mentioned earlier, you know, the first competition that DARPA had was the self-driving cars.
	And in your book, you talk about the fact that Waymo, the number of miles that they've driven, and then how they've synthesized this data.
	Talk a little bit about that. Sure, so synthetic data is AI-generated data.
	That could be AI-generated text, like it comes out of ChatGPT.
	It could be AI-generated artwork.
	But it's also a tool that companies can use in building more robust AI systems.
	Self-driving car companies, for example, are collecting data driving on the roads.
	They have the cars that are driving around with all the sensors and all the cameras, and they're scooping up data as they're driving around.
	But they're also using synthetic data in simulations.
	So Waymo's talked about they're collecting data on roads, but they're also running simulations.
	I think they've done 10 million miles On roads, collecting up data, and I think it's 10 million miles a day they've said that they're doing in simulation.
	So they're able to supplement with many orders of magnitude more because they can run these simulations at accelerated speed.
	And so now if there's a situation they see, you know, there's a car, there's a new situation on the highway they've never seen before.
	Car cuts them off, does something weird.
	They capture that data, they put it in a simulation.
	Now they can rerun it different times of day, different lighting conditions, different weather conditions.
	And all of that can make the car more robust and more safe.
	So it can be a really valuable tool as a supplement to real-world data.
	Or in some cases, just as a complete replacement.
	And this is what the Alpha Dogfight did.
	That AI agent was trained of 30 years of time in a simulation.
	So synthetic data in a simulation teaching it how to perform a task.
	That's interesting. And, you know, when we look at it, you point out 10 million driving miles every single day, 10 billion simulated miles as of 2020.
	And yet, you know, we look at this and some skeptics of AI are talking about the fact that we've gone through a couple of different waves of AI where everybody was excited about it and then things didn't pan out and it dropped off and we're now like the third time of that.
	We've just had Waymo lay off 8% of their labor force, and they're having a problem with it.
	It was in San Francisco, I don't know if it, I think it was Cruz, maybe not Waymo, where their vehicles all went to one intersection and blocked it.
	You know, so, you know, there are certain hangups like this that are happening, but even in San Francisco, where Waymo is headquartered, they were all very upset about the fact that the cars are moving slow, they're having difficulty, you know, if you've got a situation at a four-way stop or something, they have difficulty.
	Difficulty negotiating with the humans as to who's going to go next, and so they just sat there.
	Talk about that. Is that showing a real Achilles' heel for artificial intelligence, what we're seeing in a self-driving car?
	Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been talking about all the amazing things that AI can do, but it's worth keeping in mind that a lot of the things we're talking about are really narrow, like playing Go or poker or even generating art images, and humans have the ability to perform all of these different tasks.
	Humans can write an essay.
	They can make a painting.
	Maybe not a great one, but they can do it.
	They can use a camera to take a picture.
	They can get in a car and drive.
	They can make a pot of coffee.
	They can have a conversation. We can have some special purpose AI systems that can do some of those things, but the AI systems are really brittle.
	And so, you know, if there's something that comes up that's not in their training data, they might do something super weird.
	And that's a big problem for self-driving cars because you need a self-driving car that's good, not just some of the time, not just 80% of the time or 90%, but the right that's good all the time, that's safer than humans.
	I think we'll get there eventually, but we're seeing the self-driving cars, how hard that is out in the real world in an unconstrained environment.
	And the human brain, for now, remains the most advanced cognitive processing system on the planet.
	And so when we think about using AI, there are going to be some tasks where we might be able to use AI instead of people.
	But people are still going to need to be involved in all sorts of aspects of our society because humans have the ability to take a step back, look at the bigger picture, understand the context, apply judgment in a way that even the best AI systems can't do.
	Yeah, and you know, when you look at it in terms of the self-driving car, you know, you've got the different levels of driving ability.
	Five is fully autonomous.
	Four is, we're doing most of it for you, but if it's an emergency, we're going to kick control back to you.
	Of course, that's a really dangerous one because typically at that point in time, the person is fast asleep or playing a video game or whatever, and it's like, you know, here, take this.
	Take the wheel right now.
	And so, you know, when we see that, I would imagine that's really the big issue.
	You know, we started talking about the dogfight.
	I imagine that's the really big issue with the pilots.
	You know, it's like, oh, okay, now we're in a tight spot here.
	It's up to you now. I can't handle it.
	I'm going to kick it back to the pilot.
	I mean, I'm sure that's the issue with them as well, right?
	That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem because right now, you know, if you have this AI can do some things but not everything, how do you balance what the AI does and what the human does?
	And what we often do, which is a terrible approach, like you're saying, is we can have the AI do as much as it can and then we expect the human to fill in the gaps.
	Mm-hmm. And that leads to situations that are just not realistic for humans.
	So the idea that someone's going to be sitting in this car, going on the highway at 70 miles an hour, not paying attention because the AI's driving, and then in a split second, the human's going to realize, uh-oh, something's wrong.
	I need to take control, see what's happening, grab control of the steering wheels to the car.
	It's not realistic. Humans can't do that.
	And so we need a model for human machines working together that also works for human psychology.
	And in fact, one of the things that this DARPA program is doing with putting an AI in the cockpit is looking at things like pilot trust.
	And in fact, what they're doing is now they're taking these AI systems.
	They're out of simulators.
	They're putting them in real-world F-16 aircraft.
	They're flying them up in the sky.
	The AI is doing maneuvering of a real airplane.
	And that itself is challenging, moving from a simulator to the real world because the real world's a lot more complicated than a simulator.
	But they're also looking at what's the pilot doing?
	So they've instrumented the whole cockpit, and they're looking at things like tracking them.
	What's the pilot looking at?
	Why is the pilot looking at the map and thinking about the higher-level mission, which is what we want the pilot doing?
	Or is the pilot looking at the controls, trying to figure out what the AI is doing, looking out the window, because the pilot doesn't trust the AI? And getting to that level of trust, getting to that seamless coordination between humans and AI, is going to be really important to using AI effectively.
	Let's talk about the other three battlegrounds.
	We talked about data. The next one is compute.
	Tell people what that represents.
	So compute means computing hardware or chips that machine learning systems run on.
	So machine learning systems are trained on data.
	They're trained using computing hardware or computing chips, sometimes massive amounts of computing infrastructure.
	And for a large language model like ChatGPT, it's trained on hundreds of gigabytes of text, often trained for thousands of specialized AI chips, like graphics processing units or GPUs, running for weeks at a time, churning through all this data, training them up. If data is a relatively level playing field between the US and China, In hardware, in computing power, or it's sometimes called compute, the U.S. has a tremendous advantage.
	Because while the global semiconductor supply chains, they're very globalized, they fall through a number of countries, and in fact, the most advanced chips are not made in the U.S. Zero percent of the most advanced chips in the world are made here in the United States.
	They depend on U.S. technology, and they're made using technology, tooling, and software from U.S. companies, and it gives the U.S. control over key choke points in the semiconductor supply chain.
	And the U.S. has used this to deny China access to semiconductor technology when it was strategically advantaged to the United States.
	The U.S. did this to Huawei when it turned off Huawei's access to the most advanced 5G chips.
	They weren't made in America, they were made in Taiwan, but they were made using U.S. equipment.
	And so the U.S. said, using export control regulations to Taiwan, you're not allowed to export any chips to China of this certain type to Huawei that are made using U.S. equipment.
	And now the U.S. has done this actually across the board.
	Biden administration put this out in October.
	Very sweeping export controls to China on semiconductor technology and the most advanced AI chips.
	And then on the equipment, and this is really critical, for China to make its own chips, holding back China's own domestic production.
	Yeah, that's changed quite a bit since I was a young engineer.
	We had, you know, the state of the art in terms of...
	Geometries, they were unable to domestically here.
	The company I worked for was unable to do it here.
	All of their yield was coming out of Japan.
	They were able to do it. But we had, in terms of commodity products, that had already been seeded 40 years ago to offshore sources.
	But we had kind of a lock on CPUs and things like that.
	That now has changed, as you pointed out.
	And I was surprised to see that in the book, that pretty much all the sophisticated chips are coming out of Taiwan.
	You said Taiwan has 90% of the most advanced chips in the world made in Taiwan.
	And so that's one of the things that we're looking at here with China and Taiwan.
	That is extremely important and why I think that's going to be a source of conflict, flashpoint, all the rest of the stuff, why we're seeing this tension build up there as the Chinese are moving towards Taiwan.
	It's because of the advanced chips there and how it is really kind of at the center of the state of the art of the semiconductor industry, whereas we've just kind of got a few choke points here and there in the semiconductor industry.
	They've got the big foundries as well as the most advanced foundries there, right?
	Absolutely. So 90% of the world's most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, as you said.
	And that's a real problem when we think about security of supply chains, because Taiwan's an island 100 miles off the coast of China.
	The Chinese Communist Party has pledged to Absorbed by force if necessary.
	So Taiwanese independence protecting Taiwan is critically important and finding ways to ensure that China doesn't engage in that military aggression as important political and economic and military reasons.
	Yeah, yeah. And that's important to understand as people look at this conflict building up, the strategic interest that the U.S. perceives in this.
	And as you point out, I thought it was kind of interesting, you know, looking at Moore's Law, very familiar with that, the computing that the...
	That the chips would increase an exponential rate doubling every couple of years, but you pointed out that there's another law that I had not heard of, Rock's Law, that semiconductor fabrication doubles every four years, and that computer usage,
	because of all this deep learning stuff, It's doubling every six months, so it's outpacing it, but the cost of the semiconductor manufacturing facilities is causing an amazing concentration because of the capital cost involved in putting up these state-of-the-art facilities and foundries.
	That's right. So the technology that's used in making these most advanced chips is simply unbelievable.
	It's some of the most advanced, difficult technologies on the planet.
	And as the costs continue to go up, so a leading edge foundry might cost anywhere from $20 to $40 billion to build that foundry.
	Using the most state-of-the-art technology, what we've seen, of course, as a result of these market pressures and rising costs is the number of companies operating at the leading nodes of semiconductor fabrication has continued to shrink.
	And so we've seen at the most leading edge now, it's now just two companies, really, TSMC and Samsung.
	On the equipment side, there are some companies that have a sole monopoly.
	So for the equipment that's used to make the most advanced chips, there's one company in the world, a Dutch company, ASML, that makes the equipment needed to make those chips.
	And these concentrations of the supply chain give the US and allies unique elements of control over who gets access to this critical resource, the computing hardware that's needed for the most advanced AI capabilities.
	And of course, this complicated, complex distribution of the supply chain is very worrying as we move towards the future.
	The lifestyle that we have and the things that are just strung out all over the planet And it is truly amazing to think about how that has happened with globalization.
	You know, you got one company in this country and another one in another country with a different aspect of it.
	Talk about talent.
	We're just about out of time.
	Talent and institutions.
	But let's talk a little bit about talent, because China had the Thousand Talents program, and we saw this manifest itself.
	And a Harvard professor during the concerns about bioweapons and other things like that.
	Talk a little bit about the U.S. versus China in terms of talent.
	Yeah, so the last two battlegrounds are human talent and institutions, the organizations needed to import AI technology and to use it effectively.
	And the U.S. has a tremendous advantage over China in human talent because the best AI scientists and researchers from around the world want to come to the United States, including the best scientists in China.
	So over half of the top undergraduates in China studying AI come to the U.S. for their graduate work.
	And for those Chinese undergraduates who come to the U.S. for graduate school, who study computer science, do a Ph.D., 90% of them stay in the U.S. after graduation.
	So the best and brightest in China are actually coming to the U.S. and they're staying here.
	And that draw of top American universities and companies as a magnet for global talent is a huge advantage that China cannot compete with.
	You've got an anecdote about China and their chat program.
	Talk about that, the China dream.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah.
	So, you know, one of the chatbots in China, a Microsoft chatbot called Chowice, said on a Chinese social media platform, someone said, well, what's your Chinese dream?
	It's a phrase used by Xi Jinping to talk about sort of their version of like the American dream.
	And this chatbot says, well, my Chinese dream is to go to America.
	And they're not like that.
	They probably censored that chatbot.
	Yeah. See, I think that's why, you know, when you look at soft power, I think that, you know, having a climate of liberty and freedom and prosperity, if we can maintain those things, that really, I think, is upstream, you know, our overall system.
	And that's really what concerns me when I look at talent, when I look at what is happening in universities and other things like that, because we're starting to lose that kind of freedom.
	But talk real quickly, before we run out of time, a little bit about institutions.
	So institutions are the last key battleground, and it's institutions that are able to take all of these raw inputs of data, computing hardware, and human talent, and turn them into useful applications.
	So if you think about airplane technology, airplanes were invented here in the United States.
	By the time you got to World War II, they gave the U.S. no meaningful advantage in military air power.
	All of the great powers had access to aircraft technology.
	What mattered more was figuring out, what do you do with an airplane?
	How do you use it effectively?
	The U.S. Navy and the Japanese Navy innovated with aircraft carriers, putting aircraft on carriers, using them in naval battles.
	Great Britain, on the other hand, had access to aircraft technology, but they squandered that advantage and they fell behind in carriers, not because they didn't have the technology, but because of bureaucratic and cultural reasons.
	And so finding ways to cut through government red tape, move faster, innovate, be agile, are really essential if the U.S. is going to stay in the lead and maintain an advantage in artificial intelligence.
	It's been fascinating talking to you.
	We could go on a long time about this, but again, the book is Four Battlegrounds.
	The author, as you've been hearing, is Paul Charest, also the author of Army of None, and I don't know what that was.
	Thank you so much, Mr.
	Shari. Thank you. Appreciate you coming in.
	Thank you. Thanks for having me.
	Thank you very much. You're
	listening to The David Knight Show.
	A friend of mine said, you need to get to Rudy Giuliani.
	Giuliani's getting all kinds of people pardoned.
	And the sad truth is, and I hate to sound crass, but pardons were for sale in the Trump administration.
	That's right. So, I reached out to a guy who I know who works for Giuliani, and I said, you know, listen, I'm really interested in a pardon.
	Here's my story.
	Here's who I've spoken to.
	I've got Tucker Carlson helping me and a couple of other people, Alan Dershowitz.
	And he said, well, as it turns out, we're going to be in Washington next week, so why don't we all get together?
	I said, great, I'll meet up with you anytime you want.
	And he said, and I should have known from the beginning this was a problem.
	He said, well, we've got to meet before two, because Rudy's usually so drunk by two that he can't get any work done.
	And I said, okay.
	So we met at noon at the Trump Hotel.
	And it was Giuliani, his number two, my lobbyist, and me.
	And so, we're talking about, you know, the weather, and the bar is really nice, and oh, there goes, you know, Matt Gaetz walking into the bar.
	And I said, so, about the issue of this pardon...
	And as soon as I said it, Giuliani says, I have to hit the head.
	And he stood up and he walked away.
	And I looked at his number two and I said, what just happened?
	And he said... You never talk business with Rudy.
	You talk business with me, and then I pass it to Rudy.
	Like it's the Sopranos, right?
	Exactly. It literally is.
	Yeah. So I said, all right, I want a pardon.
	I need a presidential pardon, and I just can't seem to get any traction.
	And he said, well, Rudy's going to want two million bucks.
	And I said, two million bucks?
	First of all, I don't have two million bucks.
	And even if I did, I wouldn't spend it to recover a $770,000 pension.
	And he said, okay, well...
	It's two million. And that was the end of it.
	And Giuliani came back from the men's room.
	We shook hands and I walked out and that was the end of it.
	Well, it turned out he had been doing this with a lot of people.
	And I saw later in the New York Times, there was an article about his divorce, which I think is his...
	His fourth divorce.
	But he said that he's a member of 17 country clubs and that he needs $6 million a year to maintain his current lifestyle.
	So this is what he was doing.
	He was just trying to gouge people as best he could at the end of the Trump administration because he had gone all in on Trump.
	And he knew that if Trump were to lose the election, he was done.
	Right. And that's exactly what's happened.
	Giuliani, you know, he's going to end up selling single cigarettes on the street corner.
	Maybe hair dye. If this goes any longer.
	Maybe he could get a hair dye sponsor.
	That's right! You know, I used to have this problem when I would start sweating when I was lying and my hair dye would run down my face.
	But with this new improved brand, this is why you choose this brand.
	This never happens to me again.
	That guy is absolutely an amazing clown.
	And of course, you know, he was just he was grifting everybody.
	This whole stop the steal thing was such an amazing.
	Yes. Joining us now is John Kiriakou, somebody that I've had the pleasure to talk to many times, very knowledgeable about a lot of things, a guy who had the integrity to blow the whistle on torture because it was wrong, torture that lied us into the Iraq War, lies about weapons of mass destruction.
	He was the only one who was punished for the torture because he blew the whistle on it, not because he did it.
	People who did it got away scot-free.
	As a matter of fact, Gina Haspel was Trump's CIA director who did the cover-up.
	But he's joining us now.
	He's very busy. I really do appreciate him coming on for this pre-recorded interview.
	He's got a weekday radio program from noon to 2 in Washington, D.C. on the radio.
	You can also find it on Substack.
	He's got a Substack account there, John Kiriakou.
	That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U. And the show is Political Misfits.
	Thank you for joining us, John.
	Thank you, David. It's such a pleasure to see you again.
	It's good to talk to you. It's been a while.
	And I wanted to get you on because, you know, we've talked a couple of times about this whole Rudy Giuliani thing.
	And I'm sure that your phone's been ringing off the hook the last couple of weeks about this after this lawsuit.
	Because the same thing happened to you, and you've now had a confirmation from this woman in the lawsuit that Giuliani was selling pardons for $2 million.
	To your knowledge, she said she's got tapes about this stuff.
	To your knowledge, does she have any tapes about the bribery aspect of it?
	There's allegations of sexual misconduct and things like that, but is there any existing tapes about the bribery part?
	That I haven't heard.
	And, you know, we should probably say at the outset, too, that What this woman is saying in the lawsuit, well, she's saying a lot of things in the lawsuit, but one of the things that she's saying is that Giuliani had bragged to her that he was splitting this money, these $2 million sales of pardons with Donald Trump.
	And there's no evidence at all that that's the case.
	He certainly never said to me that he was going to split $2 million with Donald Trump.
	Yeah, that's why. When I looked at this, I thought, you know, if she can substantiate this with recordings of this, if she can substantiate that, that would be, I think, perhaps the most damaging of any of the allegations against Trump right there.
	That's huge. I agree with you.
	I agree with you. It would be such a clear felony that it would be the end, really.
	For any politician or Or current or former president to sell something like a pardon would be the...
	And so it surprises me.
	Because I can understand why the conservative press would not talk about it.
	But I would have thought that there'd be all this rampant, you know, oh, I think we got him again, you know, that you see all the time from the mainstream media and the left-wing press.
	I would have thought that this would have been a feeding frenzy to try to get information about it.
	But it was just a little blip. And it just kind of disappeared.
	My take on it is that I really do think...
	That they want him to get the nomination.
	That's just my take on it.
	I don't know what you think. I think that there's something to that.
	Yes.
	You know, I don't want to get us too far off the topic, but in the in the what was it?
	The twenty twenty two election, the Democrats took a lot of heat for funneling money to the most conservative Senate candidates and gubernatorial candidates in the country.
	And that enraged a lot of of people farther to the left than the DNC.
	But their point was that they were willing to take a shot to to to help the most easily attacked candidates win Republican nominations.
	You know, Interfering in each other's political parties is just not democracy.
	It's one of those sad situations in this duopoly that we have.
	The two sides of the same coin.
	Of course they're going to donate money to each other's extremist candidates.
	That's what makes this world go round.
	That's right, yes. And it's what gets us in the kind of situation that we're in.
	Although there seems to be a lot of agreement on things like foreign policy, and I want to get your take on what is happening in Russia, because we keep seeing escalation after escalation after escalation, and many of us are just sitting here on the sidelines wondering how this is all going down.
	I'd kind of like to get your take as to how you see this ending.
	They're doing everything to make it clear that That this is an existential fight for Russia.
	I had an interview many years ago with Alexander Dugan, and he's been saying this since Yugoslavia and that type of thing, that NATO is coming for Russia, and they're doing everything they can to validate that assumption.
	Now with the F-16s that are there, I don't really know how effective those are going to be as weapons.
	But it's a constant escalation.
	We have the drone attacks. How do you see this playing out?
	Do you think that Russia is going to settle for taking the eastern part of Ukraine and kind of having a neutral buffer?
	That's what some people who said, maybe we could have peace if that were to happen.
	Is this going to result in the kind of regime change that they're looking for?
	Or are we going to wind up in some kind of a Dr.
	Strangelove nuclear war? What do you think?
	Or something else? This is a very complicated situation.
	You know, I had occasion to meet last Friday with a very senior Russian government official, very senior, like cabinet level.
	And he laid it out very plainly, very clearly, that Russia is enormous.
	It spans 11 time zones.
	It has 200 million people.
	It has an army that's something like five or six times the size of Ukraine's army.
	And while we in the West joke that that the United States is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, that's exactly what the Russians intend to do.
	They'll fight the very last Ukrainian.
	He said the bottom line is the United States can send whatever it wants to Ukraine, missiles, planes, ammunition, patriots.
	You know, it makes no difference that Russia will win, whether it takes a year or 10 years or 100 years.
	Russia will win because it can't lose.
	It can't lose because Ukraine is an existential threat on multiple occasions since the Clinton administration.
	go. The United States has promised Russia that NATO would not expand to its borders.
	And then the United States went on to lobby for Poland joining NATO, for Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to join NATO. Romania, which isn't on the border but it's pretty darn close, joined NATO. We've allowed and supported Montenegro, for example, and North Macedonia.
	What national interests do we have in those countries?
	That we're going to go to the defense of Montenegro and North Macedonia?
	Come on. Kosovo being next?
	Like, how many times are we going to tell the Russians that we're not a threat to them, which is just to protect us, and then we push right up to the border?
	They just don't understand it and they don't believe us.
	You know, in the Clinton administration, I was still in the CIA during the Clinton administration, and there was a lot of talk of the Russians joining NATO, right?
	Because the Soviet Union had fallen, the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist, and our fight was, at the time, we said it was going to be against Muslim extremism, This is in the days just before and during the creation of Al-Qaeda.
	Maybe farther out, it might be China or North Korea.
	But as far as we were concerned, we had no problem with Russia.
	They were a Christian country.
	They're white, frankly.
	And so they were easier to deal with, let's say.
	Now those are a problem for the current administration.
	Being a Christian country and a white country, that's a black mark against the current administration we've got now.
	But yeah, for the longest time, I think they realized what the real agenda is, that it is an existential fight.
	But the U.S. is not even trying to hide that anymore.
	You know, you've got Lindsey Graham and other people, they're making it very clear this is about regime change.
	And I thought it was very interesting.
	What was your take on the Wagner Group when you had Bergozan after the fall of Bakhmut, and he had a lot of harsh words for Russia, for the Russian bureaucracy.
	He said they were throwing sand in the gears as they were trying to do this.
	I thought that was pretty amazing that he was able to say that and still be at large.
	Evidently, the Wagner Group is very, very important to the war effort, right?
	It might be a little bit less important than it was six months ago, but without the Wagner Group, the Russians could not reach into other parts of the world, like Africa, for example.
	You know, the French were thrown out of most of the Sahel countries over the past couple of years, and they've been essentially replaced by the Wagner Group.
	The West refused to help the Democratic Republic of Congo hold off the...
	who have attacked it from the east.
	And it was the Wagner Group that stepped in to help the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
	And the DRC doesn't have money to pay them, so they gave them mineral rights.
	Mineral rights.
	Can you imagine?
	This is exactly what we're going around the world trying to secure.
	And the government just gave them to the Wagner Group because they came to assist.
	So, yeah, the Wagner Group is very, very important.
	And I wanted to add something, too.
	I spoke with a friend of mine today.
	He was on my radio show today.
	He's an American citizen.
	He's got his own radio show from New York.
	And he tends to be pro-Russian.
	And he wanted to see the situation on the ground for himself.
	So he went to the Donbass.
	He just got back a couple of days ago.
	Was promptly put on the Ukrainian kill list, which we can get to in a moment, using...
	U.S. taxpayer money.
	They put an American citizen on the kill list, post his picture, his home address, and his cell phone number.
	But anyway, he said that one of the things that struck him the most, well, two things that really struck him.
	One was that Ukraine is shelling the Donbass 24 hours a day, artillery, and hitting civilian targets.
	Now, this is something that we criticize the Russians for all the time, because when you attack a civilian target, that is a war crime.
	That's right. Quite clearly a war crime.
	It's a violation of international law.
	And we criticize the Russians every day for hitting civilian targets in Ukraine.
	But the Ukrainians are also hitting civilian targets in Donbass, and yesterday and the day before in Moscow as well.
	Why aren't we criticizing them for that?
	You can't target civilians, period.
	It's against the law.
	And it should be against the law for everybody, number one.
	Number two was when people say on Twitter that the Ukrainians have Nazis that are fighting for them.
	Not neo-Nazis.
	Actual Nazis.
	You tend to get your account suspended for saying that on Twitter.
	But he said that all around Donbass...
	There are tables set up where Ukrainian Nazis are selling Nazi paraphernalia, Nazi memorabilia, to raise money for the Ukrainian war effort.
	Well, why isn't that being reported?
	I have another friend who said that on Twitter and had his account suspended.
	We can't say there are Nazis in Ukraine.
	You can't say that Nazis are fighting on behalf of the Ukrainians.
	But that's the truth.
	It's documented.
	That's what the Azov Battalion is.
	It's a Nazi battalion.
	But we don't talk about things like that.
	And we don't talk about the fact that this has been going on for a very long time, the shelling of the civilian areas since the CIA coup that happened back in 2014.
	When we look at this going forward, how do you see this playing out?
	Because, as you said, Russia is so large.
	And I've been saying this.
	Gerald Slenty is on frequently.
	We've been saying this. It's like, you really think you're going to run down the Russians?
	How did that work for Hitler?
	How did that work for Napoleon?
	These guys are not going to give up.
	They'll never give up. And they're larger.
	And so how do you see this playing out?
	This is going to go nuclear. Let's just put it that way.
	Yeah. This may not be such an original thought, but I'll tell you what this senior government official told me.
	He said, the United States hates the idea, but the Chinese, the Turks, and the Brazilians are all pushing to be mediators.
	And he said, eventually, we're going to get to a point where the American taxpayer is going to be sick and tired of paying for all this.
	Where enough Ukrainians have been killed that we'll finally get to the negotiating table.
	The United States hates the idea because it's not the United States that would be the one to broker the peace.
	The Chinese just had great success between the Iranians and the Saudis and between the Saudis and the Yemenis.
	The United States certainly doesn't want to see Chinese success between the Russians and the Ukrainians.
	But we've thrown our...
	I was going to ask you about that.
	You know, you have had a lot of experience in the Middle East.
	And look at the fact that, you know, China brokered this agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have been, you know, at each other for a very long time.
	I don't know the roots of that. You probably do.
	But, you know, why didn't the U.S. ever do that?
	Do you think the U.S. even wanted to have that happen or would they rather for these different factions to be fighting each other?
	That's my suspicion. Oh, you know, forgive me for being crude, but I'm going to state a geopolitical fact right here.
	And it's going to be a little blunt for the diplomatic world.
	But our relationship with the Saudis is very, very simple to explain.
	We buy oil. They buy weapons.
	Period. We don't like each other.
	We don't like to be with each other.
	But that doesn't matter.
	Because we buy their oil and they buy our weapons.
	Well, now they're not going to need all the weapons that they normally buy from us.
	Or maybe they'll buy some from the French.
	Or some from the British.
	Or maybe some from the Chinese.
	Which would really upset us.
	But the fact is that peace is against U.S. interests in the region.
	After 9-11, David, we transitioned into a full-time wartime economy.
	And if we were to...
	To declare peace anywhere and not be able to sell those weapons and weapons systems, we'll move into recession.
	And we just can't risk doing that.
	And so war is good for us.
	War all around the world is good for the U.S. economy.
	We're used to it, right?
	We've all eaten from that same trough, so to speak.
	And people, at least here in Washington, don't want to see that end.
	That's right. Yeah, and of course they would love to see this extended going into China.
	I had an interview with Paul Charest, who wrote a book, Four Battlegrounds.
	And I really wanted to talk to him about artificial intelligence, because it was primarily about artificial intelligence.
	But the four battlegrounds were different aspects of technological competition with China.
	And it kept coming back to China, China, China.
	I thought I was going to read a book about...
	Our official intelligence, and it became because he's working with the military-industrial complex.
	It was all about how China was the target with all of this.
	And, of course, I think that has a lot to do with the fact of why they're going after Russia first, because it's not just that they want to have regime change, but they want to get rid of Russia as a military power because they don't want to have to fight Russia and China at the same time.
	Would you say that's correct? Absolutely correct.
	This Russian government official asked me the other day for my own off-the-record opinion of something that can be done to improve relations between the United States and Russia, even in wartime.
	And I told him that two things came to mind.
	I said, even in wartime, the CIA and the FSB, used to be the KGB, Can cooperate in three areas, even during wartime.
	We can cooperate on narcotics trafficking, right?
	93% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan, and most of it goes to Russia.
	Russia and Iran have the highest rates of opioid addiction on the planet.
	So number one, counter-narcotics.
	Number two, counter-terrorism.
	We both hate the Chechens.
	We both want to crush whatever Al-Qaeda morphs itself into on any given day.
	Number three, counter-proliferation.
	Nuclear proliferation is as much a threat to the Russians as it is to us.
	We should be cooperating on those three things.
	And I said, second, your excellency, I understand that you have laws just like we have laws.
	But whenever you arrest an American citizen who happens to be doing whatever it is he or she happens to be doing and charge him with espionage and then just hold him or her until there's a prisoner exchange, that's a bad look in the United States.
	And he said, do you know how many Russians are in jails and prisons around America?
	One thousand.
	Really?
	Do you think that the United States government ever offers to release any of those one thousand prisoners?
	And I said, I understand that.
	And it's wrong. But I'm telling you, the American people don't know that.
	And if they knew it, they wouldn't care.
	And so when you arrest Brittany Griner or Paul Whelan or anybody else, like this kid from the Wall Street Journal, it's a bad look.
	You should release them.
	Yeah, that's right. Well, it's a bad look when we have our surrogates arrest people like Julian Assange, isn't it?
	And you know, that's one of the things that got us on the...
	Rudy Giuliani when we talked about it before.
	The fact that, you know, this is a real existential threat to free speech.
	And I know that you've gone to Australia.
	You've talked about this there.
	And you've also mentioned the fact that there was a very, there was essentially a very specific term that they used to refer to Julian Assange as a hostile non-state intelligence actor.
	Tell us the implications of that label on Julian Assange and who used it.
	Mike Pompeo used that.
	And David, as soon as the words came out of his mouth, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
	And it was funny to me because so many of the mainstream media just...
	Either ignored it or made a fleeting reference to it.
	Oh, he said Assange is a hostile non-state counterintelligence actor.
	Those were very carefully chosen words.
	Because... Whenever the United States, whenever the CIA carries out a covert action program, it has to brief the Congressional Oversight Committees, and it has to tell at least the gang of four, that's the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, this is what we intend to do, this is what the potential for blowback is, and this is why we're doing it.
	It's what we want to see happen in the end.
	But If the covert action operation is counterintelligence in nature, they don't have to brief the committees.
	And the thinking behind that is counterintelligence means foreign spying.
	And maybe the committees are spying on us, right?
	Maybe Senator so-and-so or Congressman so-and-so is a spy for the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Israelis, for that matter.
	And so you don't brief them.
	Well, the plan was, according to Yahoo News, which interviewed 36, count them, 36 current and former CIA officers.
	The plan was...
	Wow.
	lucky enough fortunate enough to get onto a russian diplomatic plane to shoot the tires of the plane out in what would be an act of war yeah at the very least a major international diplomatic incident to disable the plane and snatch him off of it to kill him then wow now why did that why did Who got in the way of that?
	Or was it just lucky events?
	It wasn't clear.
	I speculated in an interview early on that Donald Trump's second national security advisor, General...
	I forget his name now already.
	There were so many of them. He went through a lot of people.
	He was like The Apprentice. He went through a lot of people.
	The one that replaced General Flynn.
	Anyway... Was it McMaster?
	My guess... I don't know.
	Sorry, go ahead. My guess is...
	For any covert action program, you have to get the approval of the National Security Advisor.
	It's more complicated than that.
	You have to get the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department to sign off.
	When OLC approves it, it goes to the Attorney General.
	From the Attorney General, it goes to the National Security General Counsel.
	If he approves it, it goes to the National Security Advisor.
	And once everybody's in agreement, it goes to the president for his signature.
	And my guess is, when it finally got to the National Security Advisor, he said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
	We're talking about assassinating an Australian citizen, a Five Eyes citizen, who up until that point had never been charged with a crime.
	That's right. We're not going to do this.
	And I think that he was the adult in the room who just finally put his foot down.
	Well, that's good. Yeah, in terms of people who have not been charged with a crime, in terms of pardons, you know, I think about...
	Ross Ulbrich with Silk Road.
	And of course, RFK Jr.
	has said he would pardon Julian Assange and that he would hinted that he might be pardoning Ross Ulbrich as well.
	What's your take on RFK Jr.
	in terms of what's going on with Ukraine?
	And especially since you were in the CIA, his certainty that the CIA killed both his dad and his uncle.
	Well, I'm proud to say that I've struck up something of a friendship with RFK Jr.
	I have a great deal of respect for him.
	And let's put vaccines aside, because at least on the left, that's the go-to attack against RFK, right?
	That way you don't have to say, well, you never run against an incumbent president, even if he suffers from dementia or can't put his pants on.
	They just go straight to the vaccines.
	And I raised that with him early on.
	I said, you're going to have a problem with Democrats on the vaccine issue.
	And he said, look, the truth is, my kids are vaxxed.
	My wife is pro-vaccine.
	He said, my beef was with Dr.
	Fauci enriching himself and with the fact that people were forced to vaccinate their children, even though there was evidence that That vaccines could cause autism.
	At the very least, he said, let's investigate this.
	But nobody wanted to even talk about it.
	So he said, the way I'm going to present it on the campaign trail is that I am anti-Big Pharma.
	And Big Pharma has been, in part, the ruination of this country.
	And I said, that's the way to go.
	That's right. RFK is very...
	How should I say it? RFK is adamant on some of these issues.
	Number one, on whistleblowers.
	He very generously, without being prompted or asked by anybody, he very generously tweeted that he would pardon Julian Assange, Ed Snowden, Tom Drake, Daniel Hale, the drone whistleblower, and me.
	It was an incredibly generous thing to do.
	And let me ask you... No two million.
	He doesn't want two million.
	But not for two million.
	And let me ask you rhetorically, how many votes is that going to win him?
	None. How about zero?
	It'll probably lose him votes.
	But he said it's the right thing to do.
	And so he said he would do it.
	On Ukraine, and broader than Ukraine, on these bigger issues of war and peace, he is...
	100% behind the rule of law.
	And the rule of law is also very clear on war.
	It says that you cannot attack another country unless that country has attacked you first.
	You cannot move into another country unless that country has attacked you, or unless you are invited in by the other country, or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council.
	So why are we in two dozen countries around the world?
	That's right. Why are we in Syria, for example?
	That's right. A lot of people were concerned about, amazed to say, well, we got, you know, we had a shelling and we had a civilian that was killed in Syria and the oil fields.
	It's like, what are we doing there?
	When do we put boots on the ground?
	Do you know when we put boots on the ground?
	I don't remember the press release about that.
	Do you? No, but I remember in 2014, John Kerry, as Secretary of State, trying to justify why we were there, and a journalist saying, but wait a minute, it's a sovereign country.
	Bashar al-Assad, whether you like his politics or not, is the internationally recognized president of that sovereign country.
	has not invited us in and the United Nations has not said that we could put boots on the ground there.
	And we did it anyway.
	Yeah.
	Why?
	It truly is amazing. So, yeah, let me ask you, you know, since you're in contact with RFK Jr.
	and I'm not, one thing that I would like to know, since I am a climate skeptic and he has said in the past that he would jail climate skeptics, you know, and I know that, you know, he said a lot of stuff about free speech.
	Question is, has he changed his position?
	I think he ought to say if he's changed his position and why, because maybe he's the target of this and he's lived through this.
	That would be the obvious explanation if he's changed, but it seems to me like he needs to say that.
	I agree with you. He needs to say it.
	He's become much more of a free speech absolutist over the years.
	And he believes that literally everybody should have their say.
	So long as you're not encouraging violence against somebody or shouting a fire in a crowded theater, as the old saying goes.
	But yeah, I think he's evolved on that issue.
	And you asked me a moment ago about his position on CIA involvement in the In the assassination of his uncle.
	We actually spoke about that.
	And I said to him...
	He told me a story that I'll tell you in a second.
	And I said, you know, that story is of historical importance.
	You need to publish that.
	And I mentioned it to Jefferson Morley, who's probably the country's leading scholar on the JFK assassination.
	And he said he had heard a variation of that story, which fascinated him.
	He thought it was important, too.
	RFK told me that on the day that his uncle was killed, November 22nd, 1963, he was in something like fifth grade.
	And his mom drove to the local public school in McLean, Virginia, where they lived, and picked him up early and took him home.
	And he said when he got home his father was in the driveway speaking with John McCone who was the director of the CIA at the time.
	John McCone and the Kennedys were very, very close.
	McCone had been appointed by John Kennedy as the CIA director, and almost immediately after he was named to the job, his wife died of breast cancer, and he was distraught.
	And the Kennedys, frankly, were afraid that he might harm himself.
	And so they invited McCone to have dinner with them every single day.
	And when the weather was nice, McCone would go to the house.
	It's called Hickory Hill in McLean.
	He would swim in the pool, and then they would all have dinner together at 7 o'clock.
	So he said his dad was in the driveway speaking with McCone, and he overheard his father say, tell me your people didn't do this.
	And McCone said, I don't know who did this.
	Hmm. Bob said, he didn't say, of course my people didn't do this.
	It was probably the Russians, or it was probably the Cubans, or, you know, a lunatic.
	It was what he didn't say.
	He didn't say anything that.
	He said, I don't know who did it.
	And, you know, Oliver Stone's a friend of mine, and he used to needle me quite often in very harsh language, I might add, which is his way of doing things.
	Because I said to him one time, I made the stupid mistake of saying to him, you know, I think we should look at the mafia, too.
	We should look at Santo Traficante Sr., who, when told that Kennedy was killed, responded, we finally got the son of a bitch.
	Well, who's we?
	And we know that Jack Ruby, through his contacts in New Orleans, was connected to the Traficante family.
	So I said, oh, maybe we should look at the Mafia.
	And he was adamant that, no, it was the CIA. Well, you know what?
	I've finally come around to that view.
	I don't think it was an order from the top of the CIA down, go kill the president.
	But I think that there were angry and violent elements of the CIA who had been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, who were in leadership positions at the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs, That likely had something to do with it.
	And of course, the CIA is like any other very large bureaucracy.
	It's not monolithic, right?
	It's got different factions in it.
	Absolutely right. And that's something that so many people don't understand, especially back then.
	This is 15 years.
	Well, not 15. It's 12 years before the creation of oversight committees.
	So the CIA had to answer to literally no one.
	They did whatever they wanted, whenever and wherever they wanted.
	And who was going to call them on it?
	Kind of interesting background.
	Well, while we're talking about, before we get on to some other things, too, because I want to get your take on DeSantis and Gitmo and some things like that, because that disturbs me.
	But going back to some of these seminal conspiracies that many of us believe are more than theories, what is your take on 9-11?
	What do you think with 9-11?
	Well, you know, I was just, not only was I in the CIA on 9-11, but I was assigned to the Counterterrorism Center.
	And I've always been adamant that 9-11 was carried out by Al-Qaeda.
	Now, that is not to say that we weren't purposely asleep at the switch.
	You mentioned the CIA not being a monolith.
	The FBI is the same way.
	Most Americans underestimated the depth of hatred that the CIA and the FBI had for each other.
	Hatred to the point where, as Americans now know, they kept information about the threat from each other.
	For example, the CIA knew the identities of the hijackers.
	But thought that they could recruit one or more of them and so didn't tell the FBI. Well, the FBI knew that the hijackers were in the United States and thought they could recruit one or more of them and so didn't tell the CIA. And so they're working independently of one another and it was a perfect storm that allowed them to carry out this operation.
	Now, The Bush administration, we know, had made a policy decision to not focus on terrorism.
	They were focused on China.
	Both Dick Clark, the counter-terrorism czar at the NSC, and George Tenet, who was CIA director, said in their memoirs that they were shouting from the rooftops about the Al-Qaeda threat.
	I know that that's true, because I heard them shouting.
	It's all anybody ever talked about at the CIA, was this big one's coming, and we don't know when, we don't know where, but boy, we know it's going to be big, and we can't figure it out.
	I don't want to sound like a kook or anything, but when you look at the Dick Cheneys of the world and the people under Dick Cheney and the people who had supported and funded the George W. Bush campaign, they were all tied to the military-industrial complex.
	And it's no secret now that 20 years after 9-11, we have the highest concentration of millionaires anywhere in America, right here in Washington, D.C. And that all comes from defense contracting.
	So I think that they made a policy decision to just pretend that everything was fine, pretend to look long-term at the Chinese as our existential threat, and allow 9-11 to happen.
	Yeah, you know, when I look at it, I don't really know what happened on 9-11.
	I just don't believe any of the official stories like the magic bullet with JFK. You know, the aspects of the third building that was not hit and the three skyscrapers had just come down their footprint.
	Early video from the Pentagon that didn't show the kind of, didn't show plane parts, didn't show, you know, had a very small hole in it.
	All that type of stuff.
	Things that I look at it, you know, the old, whenever anybody asks me about 9-11, I say, well, you know what?
	Arthur Conan Doyle had his character Sherlock Holmes say.
	When you rule out the impossible, what's left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.
	And so it seems like when I look at this stuff, that's my answer to it.
	It's like, I don't know what happened, but I certainly don't believe the government's official story on that.
	Let's talk a little bit. Yeah, go ahead.
	One thought there, too.
	Part of the government's problem is that nobody believes what the 9-11 Commission came up with.
	And it's because the 9-11 Commission, just like the Warren Commission before it, had its hands tied before it even held its first meeting.
	For example, when you don't allow the commission's members, who are some of the most highly regarded, brightest people, and most highly cleared people in all of government, you don't allow them to speak to the CIA officers, who were the ones supposed to be working to disrupt this attack.
	Then what do you hope to gather from that?
	So, you can't believe anything they say.
	I will add one thing.
	I was confronted by a nun recently who yelled at me very pointedly because she said it was a missile that hit the Pentagon.
	And I said, sister, I said, what do you say to the thousands of people who were stopped in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic watching the plane fly into the Pentagon that morning?
	One of whom is a friend of mine who was the head of security at the Commerce Department.
	And she said, I think that they believe they saw a plane, but it happened so quickly and they weren't driving like this looking for a plane.
	They were listening to the radio or looking at traffic or trying to make a turn or whatever.
	It happened so quickly they didn't realize it was a missile.
	And I said, but then sister, what about all those people who were on the plane?
	And she said, I believe that they were bused to a military base and executed.
	And I said, well...
	Yeah. Well, one of the things that I find interesting is the fact that you've got the Pentagon, which has got to be one of the most heavily surveilled areas anywhere in the world, and there's no existent video of a plane or missile or anything coming in.
	Yes. Do you find that interesting?
	The Russians said afterwards to our ambassador that they had a very hard time believing that we did not have surface-to-air missiles all around the Pentagon.
	Mm-hmm. What were you people thinking?
	What do you mean you don't have surface-to-air missiles?
	And we don't.
	We never have. Yeah, but they've got cameras.
	They've got cameras everywhere. And there were cameras at adjacent places that they confiscated.
	Let's talk about DeSantis.
	Yeah. The torture that's there, that you talked about, that's there at Gitmo.
	And there's now been some statements made from some prisoners about his time there.
	I think that's something that's going to resurface during this campaign at some point.
	Allegations from one prisoner saying, I recognize that guy.
	He was there while he was being tortured, and he's joking and laughing at these other people.
	What's your take on that?
	I think there's something to that.
	You know, it's human nature for some people, many of whom I worked with at the CIA, to have wanted to sit in on some of these torture sessions just to say that they did.
	Something to tell their children or their grandchildren.
	You know, back in the day, we caught the bad guys and I went in and I watched them get the information from them.
	It's sick. It's not something you and I would do.
	But there are a lot of people who would do it.
	Like I say, I worked with a lot of them.
	And when we get reports, like we did from this one Guantanamo prisoner, who otherwise would never have had any idea who in the world Ron DeSantis was, but then recognized his picture as somebody who had not just sat in on the torture session, but who was a representative of the Judge Advocate General at Guantanamo at the time.
	I think it's something that's worthy of investigation.
	And you know, it's funny. DeSantis, to the best of my knowledge, has never denied doing it.
	His denials are non-denial denials, where he says things like, I won't even give you the luxury of an answer that's so preposterous.
	Okay, well you didn't say no.
	All we're asking is to say, that never happened.
	I didn't do it. The information is incorrect.
	He's never said that.
	That's a ridiculous question.
	I refuse to answer it.
	What are we supposed to conclude from that?
	I think he did it.
	And like I say, we know that there were CIA people, FBI people, military people.
	This has all come out in just the last five years or so.
	Who, even though they weren't authorized...
	To be in the room when the torture was taking place, found themselves in the room anyway.
	Yeah, absolutely. What is your take on his position in terms of foreign policy?
	I mean, we pretty much know where people like Nikki Haley stand, Pence stands, and all the rest of us.
	Your take on that in light of his involvement in Gitmo?
	One of the things that I really love about the Trump-era Republican Party is the return to its anti-war roots.
	This is the Republican Party of the 1930s and early 1940s.
	This is something that the Republicans used to have as a major plank in their platform about foreign entanglements.
	We never get anything positive out of a foreign entanglement.
	I will say, though, that if you recall, DeSantis made a mistake when he first announced his candidacy.
	The mistake being he momentarily, fleetingly expressed support for the Ukraine war.
	And then everybody jumped on it.
	And it was as though he said, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be against that.
	And then he went back to his opposition.
	Like I say, I'm glad to see that this is no longer the party of Dick Cheney.
	I think Dick Cheney has done a national disservice of historic proportions by bogging us down in some of these forever wars.
	And by convincing a lot of the American people, whether they're Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, that it's our job to be the world's policemen, whether we're asked to be or not.
	I'm glad to see that the Republican Party has moved away from that.
	The Democrats now are the ones that push forever wars.
	It's a role reversal.
	That's right. Yeah. And ramped it up.
	And you mentioned earlier about drugs and where we could come together on this, but it's kind of interesting that the heroin supply and other things like that went down after we got out of Afghanistan because it was booming the whole time we were there.
	We were probably.
	David, may I tell you something about that?
	In 2011, I was the chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
	And I went to Afghanistan to do a formal report, a committee report on heroin trafficking.
	And I asked the military to fly me down to Kelmand province to a village called Lashkar Gah, which is literally physically in the center of heroin poppy country.
	For as far as the eye can see, it's nothing but heroin poppy.
	And I very naively, we drove out to this village and I said to a poppy farmer, and I said, listen, let me ask you a question.
	Instead of heroin poppy, why don't you grow things that have two growing seasons, like onions or pomegranates or tomatoes?
	Why do you grow heroin poppy?
	And the translator translated my question, and he goes like this.
	Like, he was so frustrated.
	And he says, look, the Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were hiding, I could grow as much poppy as I wanted.
	And now you come here and you tell me 10 years later, I can't grow poppy?
	And I said, what Americans told you you could grow heroin poppy?
	And the military escort that I was with says, we gotta go.
	It's too dangerous here.
	We gotta go. And they physically pulled me into the jeep and we drove back to the helicopter and flew back to Bagram Air Base.
	Wow. That's how I reported it.
	Yeah. Nobody cared. Well, you know, we had Geraldo Rivera go to the fields and show that the soldiers were guarding it.
	And the excuse that they gave was, well, these people need to be able to earn a living.
	And it's like, since when are you concerned about that?
	We've got a massive welfare state here in the United States.
	I would think that if you were at all concerned about drug supply, you'd just put these people on welfare.
	They don't have a problem bringing citizens from other countries and putting them on welfare.
	Just give them money and tell them. We've done that in the past.
	That's right. And I said to this colonel that was my escort, the lieutenant colonel, Why do we have all these American military people down here?
	There's nothing down here but poppy.
	And he said, oh, it's to protect the farmers.
	I said, so they can grow their poppy.
	He said, no, no, no.
	The Taliban comes around and gives them sacks of poppy seeds and says that if they don't plant the poppy, they're going to come back and kill their families.
	I said, that's nonsense.
	In the year before the 9-11 attacks, you know how much heroin poppy Afghanistan produced?
	Zero. There was no heroin poppy.
	They started doing that when we took over Afghanistan.
	Yeah, yeah, and got record crops out of it.
	Before we run out of time, you've got a couple of very interesting books that I know that my audience would be interested in.
	Surveillance and surveillance detection.
	He did that in 2022.
	Another book that came out, and these have both come out since I've talked to you.
	How to Disappear and Live Off the Grid.
	Let's talk about that one first, because we just had CBS recently putting out a report talking about how easy it was to take down the entire electric grid here.
	I think what they came up with, they said, well, all you have to do is take down nine substations and you can black out the entire country pretty much.
	Is this predictive programming for us?
	And of course, getting off the grid, that may not be our decision.
	Somebody else may be making that decision for us, right?
	Yeah, it may not.
	It's hard to live off the grid, but it's doable.
	You have to change your lifestyle.
	You have to get used to life without a cell phone.
	You have to get used to life without the internet.
	Maybe you even have to come up with a fake name.
	And sometimes in not so legal ways.
	I mean, you can certainly change your name.
	You can move out of the country.
	You can go down to Baja, California, as my friend Jesse Ventura has done.
	He lives literally off the grid for six months out of the year.
	I have great respect for that.
	He has incredible self-discipline.
	I don't know how he does it.
	He's down there right now. Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, and it's going to be, I think as people look at this, my audience, I think they're going to be looking at this, kind of tying it in with the surveillance aspect of this.
	Because I think everybody's very concerned about this absolute obsession that not just our government, but every government on Earth seems to have in terms of giving everybody an ID and a cell phone and tracking and measuring every single thing that we do, the CBDC that's coming out, the smart cities, the 15-minute cities. They want to get us under a complete control grid.
	And, you know, I reported a story this week about a school system in Dallas that is now using artificial intelligence to create a behavioral profile of all the individual students so that it can notice when they have deviated from their baseline behavioral profile and flagged them for whatever reason in a kind of a pre-crime thing.
	I was like, why are we trying to create?
	What kind of a society are we trying to create?
	I think you can see that In the schools, as they've gone through this progression of a police state with metal detectors and constant surveillance and police in the school system, and now with this artificial intelligence, you know, data mining the stuff and creating a profile for the kids, we see this coming in every direction.
	When you talked about in your book, Surveillance and Surveillance Detection in 2022, Were you talking about something more along the lines of that or more along the lines of somebody putting a tail on you, like the FBI or something like that?
	I addressed AI in the book, later on in the book, but this was mostly about keeping yourself safe from tails.
	I said, maybe you're a cheating husband or a cheating wife.
	Maybe you're being cheated on and you want to do surveillance rather than counter-surveillance or surveillance detection.
	So I went through each...
	issue from both perspectives and tried to put it all in one place.
	Then I finished the book with exactly what I was taught at the CIA, how to do it and how to prevent it.
	And I start off the book by saying, just as an example, I was assigned to a certain country post 9-11.
	You know what it was, but they wouldn't let me say it.
	And one day I left the small guest house where I was staying, and I noticed that there was a motorcycle being driven by a guy in a red motorcycle helmet, and he was trying very hard to stay in my blind spot.
	And the reason why this was a little troubling to me was I don't even know where you would get a motorcycle helmet in this country.
	They have hundreds of millions of people.
	It's the first time I ever saw a motorcycle helmet.
	So I speed up.
	I slow down. The guy's staying right there in my blind spot.
	And then when I got to the diplomatic quarter, he split off.
	I worked 14 hours that day, 15 hours, and it was dark by the time I left.
	And I get in my car and I start driving in a kind of a windy, twisty way to see if I'm being followed.
	And sure enough, there he is again.
	Now, the definition of surveillance is multiple sightings at time and distance.
	So you see them multiple times at different times and at different places.
	I'm under surveillance.
	I was nervous about it all night.
	So the next day, I woke up at 5 o'clock in the morning.
	I checked under my car with a mirror to make sure there were no bombs under there.
	I looked up and down the street.
	I didn't see anybody. 5 o'clock in the morning, I get in the car, I start going back to the embassy, and there he is again.
	And he's on me. So I waited for the security officer to arrive, told him what happened.
	We went to see the station chief, and the chief said, after I explained everything, he said, well, you know what you have to do.
	And I said, yeah, I know what I have to do.
	And he said, you never had to do that before, did you?
	And I said, no.
	Never found myself in that position.
	And he said, well, don't worry about it.
	We're going to have a team. They're going to be there to help you.
	Sign out a gun from the armory.
	I said, I know. I got it.
	All day long, these guys are telling me, don't worry, buddy.
	Don't worry. We're going to be out there with you.
	We've all had to do it.
	Don't worry. And I wanted to throw up all day because I'm going to kill this guy if I see him this afternoon.
	That afternoon, I had a meeting at a joint safe house that we shared with The local intelligence service.
	And at the end of the meeting, as I was walking out, I had second thoughts.
	And I stopped and I said, General, let me ask you a question.
	Are you following me?
	And he said, No.
	Why? And I said, Because I'm under surveillance.
	I'm positive I'm under surveillance.
	And if I see this guy one more time, I'm going to kill him.
	And I never saw him again.
	And later on, we learned that they were all sitting around one day talking about me.
	And one of them said, you know, he is such a nice guy.
	And somebody else said, yeah, nobody's that nice.
	He's probably pretending to be nice to trick us, and he's probably spying on us.
	I wonder what he's doing when he's not here.
	And so they picked the worst possible surveillance officer to surveil me to see what I was doing in my time that I wasn't working with them.
	And I was going to kill the guy that afternoon.
	Wow. You just never know.
	It's like Rowan Atkinson, you know, the spy.
	The spy who gets the job by default.
	That's an amazing story.
	But I'm sure, you know, that book and...
	Yeah.
	That is, I think, an overwhelming concern of everybody as we look at the obsession of governments in every country.
	You know, and I have people.
	And we're not the worst.
	Yeah.
	We're not the worst.
	It's worse in, certainly in the UK.
	Every square inch of the UK is under surveillance.
	It's worse in China.
	It's worse in Israel.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's bad here, but it's going to get a lot worse in China.
	It's worse than the UAE. I was in the UAE in their command center one day, and they had 100 screens, right?
	More than 100, all over the wall.
	This is a system built by Siemens, specific to Dubai.
	And while we were watching the screen, we saw a taxi hit a light post.
	Well, before the taxi driver could get out of the taxi to call 911 or 115, which is their equivalent of 911, we had already sent an ambulance because we watched it happen.
	So before all the guys on the phone, the ambulance is already arriving.
	Wow. Complete and total blanket surveillance.
	Yeah, yeah. And of course, with artificial intelligence, we'll be able to, you know, do individual profiles on all of us, the pre-crime stuff that is there.
	It's very concerning, especially when we look at the long history of this.
	And, you know, people like...
	James Clapper, who famously said they're not doing it intentionally.
	They've been doing geospatial intelligence intentionally for a couple of decades now, at least, having big conventions about it that the mainstream press never covers.
	Speaking of that, if you've got just a couple of minutes, you had a recent op-ed piece on Consortium News where you talked about Havana syndrome.
	Is it paranoia or reality?
	Tell us your take on that.
	You know, I used to think that Havana Syndrome was relegated to the realm of the mentally ill.
	And then people who I know and respect started coming down with some of the symptoms.
	So I decided to do something of my own investigation.
	I wanted to write about this.
	And I interviewed people from NSA and from CIA and I interviewed psychologists and psychiatrists.
	And I've come to the conclusion, and I think it's pretty well documented, that there is science behind this.
	Something's happening out there.
	Now, I don't know if...
	I'm not a scientist, and so I can't really speak as to directed energy weapons, although we do know that our government and others have experimented with directed energy weapons.
	I don't know if the Pentagon is beaming them at innocent civilians walking down the street.
	I don't want to believe that that's the case.
	But like I say, people who I respect...
	I have documented traumatic brain injuries that just can't otherwise be explained.
	Now, I don't believe that the CIA sneaks into your bedroom at night and they give you a shot and you're unconscious and they put a chip in your head.
	I don't believe that. And I believe that a lot of mentally ill people think that they are subject to directed energy attacks.
	But there are others where the evidence kind of points in that direction.
	You know, it's kind of interesting, going back to the Navy Yard shooter, I don't know if you remember that, but there's a guy who shot him.
	Sure do. I have a cousin who was in the building at the time.
	Wow. And when he died, you know, he had carved onto the stock of his gun, my ELF weapon.
	And that kind of rang a bell with me because of a...
	Of a paper that was done by Michael Aquino, a guy who worked for the NSA. He went on Oprah Winfrey talking about his temple of set.
	He has some kind of satanic temple or something.
	And he wrote a book called Mind Wars, and in that he talked about using ELF. So I was just wondering if anything, and that was pretty old.
	That was back in the 80s that he did that.
	And so I thought that was kind of interesting.
	I didn't see, you did mention extremely low frequency radiation and things like that.
	There was also a Navy scientist, and he discovered, his name was Alan Fry, and he discovered the Fry Effect.
	um have you ever heard of that the fry effect yes and so that's when i and that i when i was looking up the savannah syndrome that's when i found the fry effect and it seemed to kind of line up but your take on it was that you know there are definitely people who are more susceptible to emf type of radiation right yeah
	you know this is something that i found that um a lot of people who go into what's called the the radio quiet zone which is an area in um in western virginia and west virginia uh this is where we have these enormous uh space telescopes and enormous dishes that are trying to listen to signals coming from other galaxies.
	There's no cable TV. There's no satellite TV. There are no cell phone towers.
	There's just nothing.
	And when people who suffer from these kinds of ailments, these Havana Syndrome type ailments go there, They feel better.
	And so I wonder, I speculate in this piece, that perhaps for some of them, they're just unusually susceptible to radio waves and low frequency emissions, things that the rest of us just don't.
	Yeah. Just don't feel.
	Because, you know, at any given time, we're bombarded with, you know, a million different waves that are just flying through the air.
	Oh, absolutely. And a lot of people believe that that's something that's responsible for an increase in certain chronic diseases or long-term things.
	That's right. And all of us, we just are not susceptible to it.
	I've seen a video that people have taken of pulsing EMF, and they have a bunch of bugs on a leaf, and the bugs are jerking all in unison, you know, so they would pulse it.
	So they could sense it as well.
	That's one of the things that concerns me about 5G. And other technologies that will come along after it.
	6G is a completely different thing.
	But 5G, they're rushing this out.
	I've seen pictures of them in New York City putting these antennas right next to people's windows.
	And the people called up and they said, hey, this is right next.
	They wake up one morning and there's this big antenna, this alien trifit or something, and it's right there by their window.
	So this is right by my toddler's bed.
	And they say, well, sorry about that.
	And then they say, and there's a label on it that says, don't put this within 10 feet of people.
	And so they send a technician out and you remove the label.
	I don't really care what the health effects are.
	Seriously? Seriously. Yeah, that was reported in the New York Post, I think.
	And there was a series of stories as they started putting them up.
	It was a couple of months ago. And they really don't seem to care about the health consequences like we saw with the vaccines and other things like that.
	They've got an agenda. They're going to rush that thing through.
	And then the other side of the 5G thing.
	Is the surveillance state.
	They need that in order to have the broadband data that they can broadband to do the kind of surveillance and real-time analysis of that.
	And that's really the thing. They don't really care what happens to us as long as they get their ability to spy on every single thing we do.
	That's something that really concerns me.
	Do you remember when you could take the battery out of your cell phone?
	Yeah, that's right. Yeah, well, you can't do that anymore.
	And the Washington Post did a study not too long ago where they did a route around the city with a cell phone, and then they did the same route around the city with a cell phone off, and then they did the same route around the city with a cell phone on, but with location services off.
	And all three times, the phone tracked their movements within three feet.
	Wow. Within three feet.
	They should have tried that, putting it into a sleeve to shield it.
	I would be interested to see if it could still do it with that, if there's something internal there.
	I would imagine it's got to have some kind of radiation there.
	That would be the other experiment to do with it.
	Well, it certainly is interesting to talk to you always in such a broad range of things that you've been involved in.
	And again, your show is from noon to 2 o'clock.
	People can find it on Rumble.
	And tell us the name of the show again that they can look for it on Rumble.
	It's called Political Misfits.
	Political Misfits. And I also post a link to it every day on Substack.
	John Kiriakou. John Kiriakou.
	That's K-I-R-I-A-K-O-U, right?
	Thank you, sir. Great.
	Thank you so much for taking the time.
	I know how busy you are. Thank you, John.
	It's always a pleasure to see you.
	It's always great talking to you.
	Thank you. Bye-bye. And by the way, we didn't go into the Havana Syndrome.
	I think most of you may know about that, just in case you don't.
	These are people who are working at the U.S. and Canadian embassies in foreign countries.
	They started having ringing in the ears, cognitive dissonance, very disabling mental capacities.
	Something far beyond temporary cognitive dysfunction.
	It was permanent and disabling in many of their cases.
	So thank you for joining us.
	Yes, always interesting to talk to John Kerry.
	The Common Man. .
	They created common core to dumb down our children.
	They created common past to track and control us.
	Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
	And the communist future.
	They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
	But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
	That is what we have in common.
	That is what they want to take away.
	Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
	They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
	It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
	Please share the information and links you'll find at thedavidknightshow.com.
	Thank you for listening.
	Thank you for sharing.
	If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.
	The David Knight Show dot com.
	Welcome back, and our guest is Joseph Freed.
	He has an MBA from Case Western Reserve, as well as many years as an auditor for Ernst& Young.
	Then, back in 1983, he formed his own firm.
	He's had a 40-year career doing this.
	He's done a lot of audits, as well as he is an AI CPA authorized peer reviewer for dozens of other audit firms.
	In 2003, he had a book.
	His first book was How Social Security Picks Your Pocket.
	We know that certainly is the case.
	2008, after that financial crisis, he wrote a book called Who Really Drove the Economy Into the Ditch?
	But now he has a book that is about the election from an auditor's perspective, and And so we want to talk about what went wrong, but we also want to talk about some solutions.
	So joining us now is Joseph Freed.
	The book is Debunked, an auditor reviews a 2020 election.
	You can find that on Amazon.
	And is there any other place that people can get that?
	Thank you for joining us, Joe. Is there any other place that people can get that book?
	Amazon or Barnes& Noble, either one.
	David, thank you very much for having me on.
	I sure appreciate it. Well, it's good to have you on.
	Let's talk a little bit about the Dominion issue.
	I have focused way before this happened.
	I was talking about Smartmatic and Dominion and ESS and Hart and all these other electronic voting machine things.
	And I said it gives us a unique kind of vulnerability that is even worse than if you've got the old classic voting machines that they would typically put in the trunk and drive around.
	I said they have all these different levels of vulnerability that you can see when the CIA gets hacked, when the Pentagon gets hacked.
	Don't tell me that these things are not going to get hacked.
	Don't tell me that they can't easily be manipulated from the inside.
	And if you do that, it is a lot of opportunity for corruption.
	And then, of course, where you come in, which is the auditing aspect of it.
	Talk a little bit about that and the difficulties that we have just from an auditing standpoint to know if an electronic voting machine has been hacked.
	Well, let me just preface it by saying when I heard Sidney Powell first talking, I said to myself, this lady might be 10 or 15 years behind the times because things have changed in the last five or six years dramatically with the mail-out ballots, the mail-in ballots, And with not only a lack of ID, but the six swing states I looked at, for the most part, scrapped the signature testing.
	So my theory is, why would somebody bother with the cyber stuff in this era when...
	Well, let me give an example.
	Nevada... Three months before the election with Trump and Biden, they gutted their regulations.
	Harvesting has no limits in Nevada.
	It can be done anonymously.
	It can be done for money.
	A guy theoretically could just walk in with 500 ballots and say, sign them all, because they don't catch those signatures.
	And there's reasons for it.
	I articulate those in the book.
	Their method is ridiculous.
	And there was an informal test done, by the way.
	A very clever reporter for the Las Vegas Review Journal conducted a test.
	And now it's just an informal test.
	But eight of nine bad signatures went through.
	He had his friends write their own.
	To keep it legal, they signed the ballot envelopes, but they traced it in his style so that they knew it was not their normal writing.
	They all went through anyway.
	But there were actually reports, and that's in my book, There was a mail carrier who said, I'm looking at thousands of these ballots sitting here.
	What is going to become of these?
	They were finding them on floors.
	They were finding them on mail areas of buildings.
	So, I guess what I'm saying is...
	You mentioned when you said they had mail-out ballot elections, and I've called it that.
	I said this was a mail-out election, where they mailed out so many ballots that they had no control over.
	People were getting multiple ballots.
	You might be somewhere that was close to two jurisdictions.
	You get a ballot from both jurisdictions.
	And that was the thing. It was completely out of control.
	And the... The electronic voting thing has been there for a while.
	Decades we've talked about the vulnerability of that.
	And I had said in the 2016 election, I said, well, I think the next one's going to be a hacking fest.
	But it changed because of the lockdown.
	And that was one of the things that I've been saying all along is that because they did the lockdown, because we had a lockdown election, because of Trump claiming it was a pandemic and we all had a lockdown, That was the fundamental issue right there, was doing this, you know, by mail, and of course that ties into all the ballot harvesting and things like that, but there's no way for people to be able to verify those things, right?
	Well, some of it, though, is so obviously phony.
	Like in Michigan's a great example.
	Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson mailed out 7.7 million ballot applications that had never been done before in Michigan.
	There was no basis in the law to do it, but the courts backed her up.
	But the point I'm trying to lead to is, it's not like people to get a ballot would go up face to face and cough in somebody's face.
	This was all done remotely anyway.
	It's not like, what was the reason for this?
	You either did it through the internet, or you did it through an email, or you did it through a text message.
	She had no basis to do that.
	Then, you know what she did?
	She followed up immediately by declaring that all her staff were to presume signatures were valid.
	Right. So that's telling the fraudster, oh, there's lots of ballots around here.
	By the way, less than half of them were actually used.
	So there was 3.4 million extra ballot applications floating out there.
	And she's telling fraudsters, by the way, if you sign them, we're going to presume that it's legitimate.
	That's totally unnecessary.
	She used COVID as an excuse, but there was no basis, in fact, for that.
	And they all do that. And I've been involved with third-party politics, where you have to get signatures to get on the ballot each time.
	You know, they'd have some high threshold of retention, ballot retention, so that if, you know, you had to get, like, say, maybe 10 percent of the vote for governor or for president to stay on the ballot, very difficult for a new third party to do.
	So every time that didn't happen, you'd have to start all over again and do the signatures.
	They go over them with a fine tooth comb.
	And, of course, we have seen this as well in terms of just like the recall election of Gascon and L.A.
	They said, you know, they went over the signatures of the fine-tooth comb and threw them out.
	So here in this state, they say, we'll just assume all the signatures are valid and we won't even bother to look at all of them.
	That's the kind of fraud that we're seeing.
	But let me ask you this. Of course, you know, as you point out, the ballots are controlled on a state by state basis, right?
	Yep. And so at the beginning of all this, two days in, there was this lie that was going around from Steve Buchenich about how it was a sting and how there were blockchain watermark ballots that were out there.
	And I said, everything about this is wrong.
	The states are in control of the ballots.
	There's not any ballots being shipped in from the federal government.
	There's not any technology to put blockchain watermarks on all these things either.
	So all that was incredibly off the mark, wasn't it?
	Yeah, I think I know that.
	I forget his name, the guy you're referring to.
	Well, there were suspicious things, but not necessarily...
	Yeah, I know what you're saying.
	I know in Fulton County, they did have some whistleblowers who said, wait a minute, we saw...
	A lot of ballots that looked strange, that they didn't look like they had ink, but they looked like they were printed with toner.
	But this was in a single county.
	It wasn't a national thing.
	That's right. And the ballots differ from state to state, and the ballots are officially in charge on a state to state basis.
	Yeah, I just wanted to clear that up.
	So let's talk about...
	The ballot harvesting.
	We hear so much about ballot harvesting, and we hear that Trump wants to do ballot harvesting now.
	And you've got an op-ed piece you wrote, Should the GOP Really Do Ballot Harvesting?
	So tell people what ballot harvesting is first.
	Well, ballot harvesting, the distinction between a good ground game, which is perfectly fine and legal and has been done a long time, and harvesting is you never...
	With a good ground game, you don't get your hands on somebody else's ballot.
	You keep your hands off of other people's ballots.
	They put it in the mailbox, they put it in the election center, or they put it in the drop box.
	There are, and by the way, even if you take the 10 closest states in the last election, in all cases except for one, harvesting is still illegal.
	Which is a good sign in a way because when I say still for the most part, what I mean is there are minor exceptions.
	Like in some states, you can harvest three ballots.
	In other states, you can harvest the ballots of family members.
	In other cases, you can do it for somebody disabled in your family.
	But there are minor exceptions.
	These are not like you take 500 ballots and you stuff them in a box.
	Right. Let me just insert here and say, when I talk about the vote-by-mail election, how that turned everything upside down, I had somebody contact me and say, look, I'm disabled.
	I always do. So I said, no, we're not talking about that.
	You know, a kind of absentee ballot that is driven by a process where you request it and they send it to you and there's some handshaking and stuff like that happening, and it is a small number anyway.
	That's not the issue.
	The issue was this lockdown election and how this became essentially the major way that everybody voted.
	Well, here's the problem for Republicans.
	This is why I strongly advise them against it.
	I'll start with the last one first, because that's the big one.
	They'll be prosecuted.
	Republicans forgot what's happening right now in Manhattan, where we have a prosecutor who is elevating a bookkeeping mistake, because whether you call a nondisclosure agreement nondisclosure expense or legal expense, in this particular case, there was no tax implication.
	This was not anything more than a ministerial Clerical error.
	Or maybe deliberately to conceal something embarrassing, but it wasn't malevolent.
	And he's trying to elevate that And tie it into a federal crime that he doesn't have jurisdiction over to get a Republican.
	At the same time, he's taking serious crimes and de-escalating them or diminishing them.
	That's right. Yeah, we don't have a Justice Department that's fair anymore.
	They're going to escalate it because of political connections.
	They're going to escalate the minor situations into major felonies and vice versa, right?
	Can you imagine how the media would have fun catching a Republican harvesting ballots?
	If he did two ballots, they would make it the biggest story of the week.
	And Republicans seem to think, you know, this is what happened, by the way, with January 6th to a large extent.
	People don't talk about this.
	But a lot of Republicans saw that Summer of Love that had just taken place.
	Seven months earlier, there was a horrible, if you want to call it an insurrection, at the White House instead of the Capitol.
	And a lot of, I suspect that there, and I wasn't there, but I suspect that a lot of Republicans were saying to themselves, we're going to show those Democrats, they think they can go rioting, we can be tough too.
	They didn't understand the double standard that was going to come down on them.
	Well, I'm here in Tennessee, and so we just had this situation where, you know, we had some legislators lead a mob.
	They were pushing and shoving other legislators, trying to keep them from getting into the chamber.
	Then when they got into the chamber, these Tennessee three got up there and took over the whole democratic process.
	And then look at the way this has been portrayed.
	You know, this is some kind of anti-democratic thing, and the Tennessee Three have been brought into Biden's White House and celebrated.
	They're not being put in a jail and tortured, you know, like the January 6th people.
	They have had similar things happen as well in Kentucky.
	You know, you had the trans activists took over their legislature the same week.
	So, yeah, there is obviously a tremendous double standard, and you're right.
	If the Republicans want to go in and do some of these things that are really questionable, and I think that they're corrupt, and I think you probably agree that as well, they'll look the other way when this type of corruption is being done by them, but they're not going to look the other way when it's done by Republicans.
	They're going to make it look like criminal activity, and it's not that hard to make it look like criminal activity, because I think...
	Basically, ballot harvesting is designed to be criminal.
	You see, that's the thing.
	There's no incentive to do harvesting unless you do it on a big scale.
	But let me tell you the other...
	All right, so I started with that one, which Republicans better remember, that they'll be prosecuted.
	But here's some other reasons.
	They're not going to be good at it.
	Because if you really look at where the harvesting takes place, it's among the homeless.
	I mean, homeless can vote 20 times because they're in one parking lot.
	And there are cases where there are 1,000 or 2,000 people with the same address.
	And the Democrats always say, well, yeah, but those are homeless people.
	They have a right to vote, too, you know.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	But the trouble is, a month later, they're all in a different parking lot.
	And somebody's going around registering them again.
	So But who owns the homeless?
	They're all in the Democratic strongholds, those homeless.
	They're not in the Republican areas.
	The Republicans aren't going to recruit those people.
	And there's other factors.
	A big element, I don't want to get my mailman mad at me, but mailmen are...
	Implicated in harvesting.
	And there's been, I think in that article I may have cited John Levine, I think it was, of New York Post, who read a great, you know, he got a great story.
	He found an anonymous harvester, big-time harvester, working for the Democrats for 20 years, and he talked about how he had mail carriers, plural, in his work crews.
	And if you think about it, why not?
	Who can do it better?
	Here's a mailman, he's going on his route, and he says, oh, I've got this apartment here, and there's five ballots going to the same place, and I know that, oh, there's only one that's valid.
	I'll take the other, and I'll make $10 on each one.
	I got $40 just on that one.
	Newman? That's like Seinfeld, right?
	Newman, the mailman, he's not going to determine who's going to be president.
	Another area are the nursing homes, because, you know, the disabled, demented patients are taken advantage of sometimes, and nurses tend to lean.
	They're not super liberal, but they tend, if you look at the voting records, they do lean to the left.
	So I'm just saying, is that even going to work well?
	Forget it. Instead, try to expose, and you can expose the Democrats.
	You know how you do it? Offer rewards.
	Big money cash rewards.
	I know some people will fight it and they'll say it's intimidation.
	But first of all, I start with a public announcement.
	You can do this six months in advance of the election.
	You put out public announcements saying, don't hand your ballot to anybody.
	In our state, that's against the law.
	And you don't want to be participating in it.
	And your vote may be altered.
	Then you also back it up with cash rewards.
	If you hear of this, There's a $10,000 reward for the conviction of somebody who is harvesting ballots illegally.
	And it's almost always illegal, like I said, except for minor exceptions.
	So that is the way, I think, to go, to expose.
	Then you have the problem, well, who's going to prosecute it?
	Because the Democrats don't prosecute their cases.
	One of the things I put...
	You know, there was a great...
	The public...
	Information Legal...
	I forget it. It's PILF. It's P-I-L-F is the acronym.
	As in PILFER? It sounds like PILF, but it's PILF. And they did a great study in Florida a couple years ago where they found that there were 156 referrals made for election fraud.
	David, do you know how many of those were followed up on and prosecuted in any way?
	Let me guess. Zero, probably, right?
	Zero. Yeah. No investigations.
	They ignored it. Now, thank God that we have a Florida governor now who has formed an election force.
	That's great. And they're doing magnificent work, by the way.
	Don't believe those left-wing summaries.
	Go to their report in January of this year, of 2023.
	And after just five and a half months, the Florida investigative force for elections put out a report.
	And I'll tell you something.
	They've done magnificent work.
	And they've got a big blockbuster, I think, coming up.
	There's in Orange County, which is Orlando.
	There is a black Democrat former candidate who is blowing the whistle.
	She says for multiple years, I think decades even, there's been a scheme going around where people have been hitting black residents and buying their ballots.
	And they're working on that case.
	So there's some big potential cases, but in most parts of the country, those cases are totally ignored.
	Do you think that... In Detroit, in Fulton County, in Manhattan, they care about those.
	They'll ignore those cases.
	So I guess I was leaning up to that.
	I was saying expose the harvesting, and then you've got to find a prosecutor who will take it seriously.
	If you can't find a prosecutor, one thing I've just started to get onto is the power of the sheriff.
	The county sheriff has tremendous power.
	And they did, the sheriff in Racine, Wisconsin, is the one that blew the whistle on the nursing fraud.
	It's major nursing fraud there in the 2020 election.
	And I didn't know this.
	I'm just telling you what I've learned fairly recently, that a sheriff is, first of all, he's an elected officer.
	He's answerable to nobody except the people of his district.
	That's right.
	And he's usually established his position in the Constitution of the state.
	So he's got a tremendous amount of power.
	And so people, and already Democrats, are trying to mobilize a counteroffense here, saying, Governor so-and-so, you need to...
	Reign in this rogue sheriff here or something.
	But I don't think they're going to find it easy because, like you say, they're set in the Constitution with certain privileges.
	It's a very powerful position, and I've been saying because I'm fed up with...
	I've been telling everybody, pay attention to who your sheriff is.
	And we saw this, I've been saying that for years, we saw this very clearly during the lockdowns of the pandemic and everything.
	They could make it a lot worse, or they could nullify even these rules that were coming from the state governor, and it's the sheriffs that can do that.
	No, we're not going to enforce that.
	We're actually going to protect people.
	I talked just earlier in this show about We're good to go.
	We can do things like that.
	It's a lot of power as a sheriff.
	They can investigate, and they have the ability to have those police actions.
	The other part of this that we look at, and it's been there for a long time, and when I looked at all these different aspects of fraud, and of course, In North Carolina, where I used to live, they had, still do I think, the longest voting period of anybody.
	They had no IDs, and I've told this story many times about a friend of my brother-in-law's who went to vote on election day, and all you have to do is give them a name and an address, and they'd look it up and say, you've already voted, and so is this other person at your address, and he goes, wait a minute.
	That's my mom. She's been dead for years.
	And so that's the kind of fraud that happens.
	You need to be able to vote early and vote often with these people.
	So there's a lot of things that have been there for a long time that are very simple, and they don't want to fix them.
	You know, at the time, we had Republicans in charge.
	These are rules that were put in by the Democrats, long voting periods and no ID and stuff like that.
	But we had a completely Republican legislature, Republican governor.
	They didn't want to change any of that stuff.
	Yeah, the Republicans were really slow to the dance here.
	And one of the biggest, you know, in retrospect, someday I think people will look back and say Trump's biggest accomplishment might be that he's fighting the election.
	I know there's mixed opinions on this.
	But somebody had to sort of wake the Republicans up to the fact that, shake things up, that you have to start paying attention to these processes, because we were like frogs in a warm pot of water that was getting hotter and hotter, and we were falling asleep.
	I mean, you've got to wake up.
	Yeah, everybody goes to sleep when there's a Republican in charge.
	They think they're in charge.
	Who is actually in charge, you don't see.
	But when they think that the Republicans are in charge, they go to sleep.
	Talk about why there weren't any convictions, in your opinion, for the election fraud.
	You know, they didn't do too well in courts.
	We had the courts throwing it out, saying...
	As a candidate, you don't have standing to look at all this stuff.
	I've looked at this for the longest time, and I was saying when this was all happening, why do they keep going to the courts?
	I mean, certainly you would expect the courts would give them a hearing.
	They did over the 2000 election, we had the hanging chads and all the other kind of stuff.
	That went all the way to the Supreme Court and did it pretty quickly.
	But this was distributed over several different states.
	So it was different in that regard.
	But they just got shut down everywhere.
	And so I looked at four states and they had razor thin margins.
	And I said, so why don't they take their case if they've got a case that they can prove fraud?
	Why don't they take it to the state legislatures that are Republican in those four states that Republican legislatures, razor thin margin that went to Biden.
	And in two of the four states, they even had Republican governors.
	And I thought, why don't they take it there?
	Because the state legislature can send a different slate of electors.
	And if they had done that, then, you know, as Thomas Massey said, if they'd sent two different slate of electors, if one of them had come from the State Board of Elections and the governor, and another one had come from the state legislature, we could have a discussion as to which one of those groups we want to recognize.
	But it had to be sent officially, and nobody pretended to send another slate of electors.
	I think you're alluding to the independent state legislature theory, but don't you think, and I know you're an attorney, so I defer to your judgment.
	No, I'm not an attorney. Oh, you're not?
	No, no. Oh, I thought you were.
	No, I'm an engineer, but...
	Oh, okay. Well, that's better.
	I'm glad to hear it, Dave.
	I feel better. But, you know...
	I think that that theory has not been tested at the Supreme Court level, but it may be soon.
	As you probably know, the Supreme Court is considering a case.
	I think it had to do more with redistricting, but it may have implications for the election of whether a state, the legislature, could take control.
	I don't think...
	But in the aftermath of 2020, I mean, I think there would have been pushback so fast.
	Oh, yeah, it would have gone.
	I'm just saying that that might have been one way they could get it to the Supreme Court.
	Right.
	If you could convince the state legislature, look, you know, here's our proof.
	We got some fraud here.
	They say, all right, we're going to send a Republican slate instead of a Democrat slate.
	And then, you know, if Thomas Massey, Pence and other people look at it and say, well, this is one we're going to recognize.
	And the Constitution says that the state legislature will set up the terms for the for the electors or whatever.
	Then the court would have had to have heard that and would have had to weigh in on that, I think.
	And and look at that.
	They may not have looked at the evidence.
	They may just have looked at the point of law and said, well, you know, which are we going to recognize the state board of elections?
	Are we going to recognize the legislature?
	But I thought that they had a case there.
	But why do you think that they didn't?
	You know, well, you know, of course.
	When I first heard the independent state legislature theory, I thought it was kind of extreme and wacko, and I've come to believe more and more in it, and I actually think it could be a very positive thing, and here's what I mean. What turned me around was seeing the Pennsylvania and the Wisconsin Supreme Courts.
	They made decisions so unbelievably abominable that I'm thinking, they basically threw their states to Biden.
	And I'm thinking, and I'll back that up real quickly, Pennsylvania...
	Trump finally won the right to have observers after going to the court a couple times.
	At the lower level, he won the right to have observers within six feet of a table processing ballots.
	And the Supreme Court said, no, no, no, you have to stay back 15 to 18 feet.
	In Philadelphia, the red part of the state, you can have close observation, but you can't have close observation in Philadelphia.
	Now, what kind of Supreme Court does that?
	And then they, I think we said already, when the signatures, when the book bar, the Secretary of State, wanted the signatures to not necessarily be used, the Supreme Court...
	Takes it a step further and says, oh no, you can't use those signatures to match anything.
	So Pennsylvania's got no standards at all.
	They gutted their election.
	And in my opinion, by doing that, they made it an invalid certification.
	So when I see these Supreme Courts like that, and the one in Wisconsin, I won't digress to talk about that, but that was just as bad.
	Mm-hmm. I'm thinking, well, why should seven people on a state Supreme Court be able to throw an election like that?
	Why not have it so that you have the legislature step forward and say, we voted, the majority of our legislature says...
	That's, you're not following election law.
	The Supreme Court of Wisconsin or Pennsylvania says, yes, that is our election law.
	You take it then up the road, up the federal court system.
	So you go, I don't know, I'm not a attorney, but you start at the lower levels and work all the way to the federal, because that's basically what happened with Gore v.
	Bush, right? Well, you know, you have a divided government.
	You have a separation of powers, and that's true at the state level.
	And so you have the governor, you have the courts, you have the legislature.
	And then you've got the Constitution that says the legislature shall make the rules.
	That's the only guidance that we've got about that.
	But if you had a disagreement between the State Board of Elections, which is there on the governor's side, and you've got a disagreement with the legislature, that sets up an interesting checkpoint of powers that might get you into a deeper discussion that sets up an interesting checkpoint of powers that might get you into a
	But let's talk a little bit about, since your book is about auditing and you're an auditor, debunked and auditor reviews the 2020 election, let's talk a little bit about the impossibility of auditing and the things that have been done to keep you from being able to do a real audit.
	Yeah.
	Well, election people don't even know what an audit is.
	They think it's counting.
	Counting is the end product.
	We start with a risk assessment.
	We look at the external threats.
	In the case of the election, there were a lot of those.
	There were all those 19 bellwether counties that didn't go the right direction.
	There was all these signs, and everybody's heard those.
	Trump got so many extra votes over the previous election.
	That normally means he wins.
	Those are external threats.
	It's valid to consider them.
	They're certainly not proof or even evidence of fraud.
	That's for sure. But those are the external threats.
	There's internal threats we look at, too, which might be like a complicated Dominion machine that nobody has a right to look at because of proprietary restrictions.
	That would be called an internal threat.
	Mm-hmm. And we look at those threats and we say how significant they are.
	And then we say, well, what kind of internal control system does the election center have to fight those?
	Like, do they, for example, rigorously, well, first of all, do they have ID? No, they don't have ID. Right.
	Do they check signatures?
	No. For the most part, the six-week states did not check signatures, and I could go down the list.
	I won't waste your time on it.
	So their systems were terrible.
	I mean, just terrible systems.
	You know what really riles me?
	I'm sure you know John R. Lott, Jr., the PhD who works on election issues, and he said, He put out a great study a couple years ago comparing, well, basically what the 47 countries of Europe do.
	And every single one...
	Last year it was all but one.
	Part of Britain did not have ID required, but now they even moved to it starting January 1st of this year.
	Every single one of the 47 have ID, and I believe it's all but one is photo ID. And it's really crazy because they're so focused now to an extreme of having biometric identification.
	They want a global digital ID. They wanted vaccine ID and passports and all the rest of the stuff, but not for voting.
	That's not suspicious at all, is it?
	When you've got to do it to cash a check or whatever.
	I mean, everything except for voting.
	You want to fly on a plane?
	You've got to show me your ID, you know?
	Well, you want to hear a real hoot.
	The Democrats always act like their people, voters, can't figure out how to get ID. It's going to be too confusing for them.
	That's right, yeah. In Georgia, Georgia, from 2016 to 2020, their rejection rate for bad ballots dropped to 1%.
	So, if this is it in 2016, it's 1 18th as much in 2020.
	But, here's what's really significant.
	That's the statewide.
	Fulton County, the stronghold for Democrats...
	That's in Atlanta, right? It's near Atlanta, right.
	It dropped to just 14% of the state rate.
	So those marginalized citizens who don't know how to do anything, they were seven times smarter when it came to filling out their ballots, apparently.
	Seven times smarter than the rest of the state.
	Right. It's so obvious what happened there.
	They were just letting all the bells slip through no matter what.
	Signed, unsigned, any defect, didn't matter.
	No address, didn't matter.
	You know, when I was in Texas, I did a report there about the State Board of Elections and the guy that was running it had worked at the Rose Law Firm, you know, where Hillary Clinton was.
	And they brought him back, and he was brought back by a Republican.
	I think it was Rick Perry who brought him back because they had a long list of Republican governors.
	But he came back under Rick Perry.
	And every election...
	He would tell every one of the counties, don't keep an image, a facsimile image of the ballots.
	Get rid of all those things.
	And in the Constitution, it said that they had to keep them.
	But he would send it out every election and say, don't retain those things.
	So we don't even have anything to look at.
	Let alone, you know, and that's what is happening in most cases, right?
	There's not anything that you could go back and even take a look at.
	As you're pointing out, you've got different risk assessments, internal and external, and you would audit things like that.
	But I mean, even if you wanted to go back and do a recount, you know, they don't have the stuff where you can get an honest recount.
	Well, you know, I digress a bit.
	The next step after you do all that analysis is that then you'd plan some tests.
	But I want to say something.
	In some cases, you stop right there and you never go a step further.
	In other words... I give this analogy sometimes.
	Imagine you have a pizza shop where they have no record system, but they have a big cardboard box in the middle of the room.
	And they sell some pizza, they throw $20 in the box.
	They need some sauce, they take some money out and buy some sauce.
	And all year long that's going on, and at the end of the year they say, hey Joe, we need our financial statements audited.
	No, it's not auditable.
	I don't care what you do.
	We don't count anything.
	I don't care how much money is in that box because it doesn't mean anything.
	That's really what you had with these six swing states that I looked at.
	And It's meaningless when you have no ID and you have no real signature standards.
	And let me say one more thing while it's on my mind about signatures.
	Even under the best of circumstances, signatures mean nothing.
	There's a test I cite in another article.
	It's something else I'm about to write.
	Where they compared how well professional signature examiners do to non-professionals, and non-professionals are what we have in our election centers.
	The non-professionals had a failure rate of 38%.
	And you know how they failed?
	They said the professionals tend to focus on...
	The differences between two sets of signatures, the non-professionals tend to focus on the similarities, so they tend to have these level one mistakes where they over-match.
	They think that everything's matching when it's not matching.
	So signatures mean nothing.
	Yeah, so when you look at this thing and the record system is so messed up, you would, as an auditor, you would just say, well, that's it.
	There's nothing that can be done.
	Yeah, that's right. But if you did say, well, all right, I can work with this, then you'd beat the heck out of those transactions.
	You'd be getting a thousand of this type of ballots.
	You'd be retesting signatures, right?
	You'd be actually...
	And by the way, the very best test, the test that I recommend for Republicans to use...
	Use canvassing of residences, not of people necessarily, but of residences.
	So, in other words, you select like 800 houses.
	This will ferret out the harvesting.
	You select 800 houses in a systematic way, so it's representative of the whole county.
	And you knock on doors, and you have a list of all the people who supposedly voted by mail according to the county, because you can get that list.
	So you say, well, according to the records, you voted by mail in the last election.
	Is that true? And you're going to get a certain, I guarantee you, a certain percentage will say no.
	But it's very important to do it right away before memories fade.
	You want it accurate. If you wait six months, people will legitimately forget what the heck they did.
	So you've got to do this like in the days following election.
	But that's what the cyber ninjas wanted to do in Maricopa County, by the way.
	Remember that audit? Mm-hmm.
	But they were blocked, big time.
	Carolyn Maloney, Jamie Raskin, Merrick Garland, all came down on them with both feet and said, no, you will not.
	It's intimidating. Even though this is months after the election, it's intimidating to voters.
	To be fair, if you want to get it representative, you're going to have to go to the graveyards as well, right?
	You're going to have to pull them as well.
	Let's talk, though, about what we've talked about what's wrong.
	Let's talk about what needs to be done on the theory that the Republicans would be interested in doing it.
	Okay. Well, I've got to ask a question.
	Are we talking about Republicans are in control or the Democrats are in control of the state?
	Well, let's say the Republicans are in control of the state.
	What needs to be done? Okay. We can talk about both of them, but let's start with the Republicans.
	Okay. Yeah. Obviously, you want to get the ID in there.
	You want to ban harvesting completely.
	Mail-in ballots, okay, but you got to have a reason, like you're disabled or you're traveling.
	So these are just reasonable things.
	You can still keep signature standards as an addition to the ID requirement, but that's all, you know, just as an addition.
	Let's see, I would have a uniform...
	Shorter voting period?
	Would you put that in there? Yeah, I was just about to get to that.
	I was going to say a uniform period for voting, with a uniform cutoff as well as a start, too.
	And as for the machines, I would never allow a vendor to say, you can't...
	Look at our machine, its proprietary secrets.
	You know, I would make that, when you bid out those, if you're going to use the machines, frankly, I don't even think some of these counties need to have machines at all because, you know, counting isn't such a big, hard process.
	So, all these are big adding machines.
	They're very expensive and complicated.
	Yeah, when you look at the, they have people who go around and look at the slot machines in the casinos, and I don't know how far they're able to get in there, but I imagine it's probably not nearly as sealed off, black box, as it is for the voting machines.
	Probably not. Yeah, they compare with these things.
	But yeah, I would look at it.
	I mean, my ideal solution would be just hand ballots.
	Everybody votes on one, maybe two days, and you've got a holiday, you know, so that you've got...
	Because I understand that some people, if you make it on one particular day, some people can't get off of work.
	So you make it two days. You make it a weekend or whatever.
	You give people a holiday, and everybody votes at the same time.
	I always talk, Joe, about the...
	Situation when the American government ran an election in Iraq.
	They had it on the same day.
	They didn't have a good way to ID people, so when you vote, you get your thumb painted purple and you couldn't wash it off, right?
	And that's how they kept people from voting multiple times in different places.
	So they know what it takes to have an honest election, and the State Department will typically look, this is another thing, I don't know, in terms of, In terms of the exit polls, the State Department will look at the exit polls in a country's elections and what was officially reported, and if they see more than a 5% difference there, they'll say there was fraud.
	But you never see, you know, we have one agency that does all of the exit polls, and it's pooled for all the media.
	And they'll give them demographic crosstabs, and they'll say, well, you know, this many people who are white or this many people who are black or Male and female or, you know, the one-armed people, they voted for this candidate or that candidate, but they'll never give you the total because they don't want you to compare the total to what was actually reported, the exit poll total versus the official poll total.
	Well, you were saying if there's a discrepancy of so much in the exit poll, you know, that reminds me of something, too.
	Remember, I was talking about Georgia and how they dropped from the 1 18th of the rejection rate of 2016.
	You were saying, what would you do to make better controls?
	I put a provision in any change in rejection that goes that big triggers an automatic audit.
	Yeah. That was 78,000 votes in Georgia.
	That election was only 11,800, the margin.
	And you've got 78,000 changed just by rejection rates, by, in other words, the discretion of the people counting the ballots.
	That's not an election.
	That's just baloney.
	I mean, and then in Fulton County, it was even more.
	You know what it dropped to?
	If you compare the state 2016 rate to the Fulton County, 1%.
	One hundredth and twenty-eighth.
	It's hard to even say, but imagine 128 parts, it dropped to one of them.
	That's so obviously fraudulent that, you know, people don't want to hear that word.
	They say, that's not proof. You know, no court's going to say that.
	It's proof to an auditor of something seriously wrong.
	That's right. Seriously wrong.
	But do you want me to get into what to do with the Democrats?
	Yeah, let's keep going with that, yeah.
	So we got that for the Republicans.
	And I would, you know, my preference would be to see hand-counted, hand-ballots, and to have, as you pointed out, a close observation where people are watching it.
	That's the way they do it in Europe as well.
	I remember when they had Brexit, and they were counting ballots, and you had people who were, you know, standing over them, watching this stuff, not standing over them, but, you know, close enough, five or six feet away from the table, that they're not going to interfere with them, but they can see everything that's going on clearly.
	You know, that reminds me of something, too.
	That's another change I would make is have a bigger period between the election and the certification.
	Because the standards we have worked when people walked in, 90% would walk in, they signed their name in front of somebody, and...
	It was pretty quick.
	It really was mostly just counting.
	Now it's more than counting because you've got all these baloney ballots coming in, unsigned, no ID. You've got to examine them.
	I mean, frankly, the whole system's atrocious, but it takes time.
	How is anybody going to launch a lawsuit or an investigation in two weeks or something?
	Some of the states have incredibly short periods.
	It varies a lot with the states.
	Yes. Anyway, all right.
	The Democrats are in control.
	This is tough now, and there's no easy solution.
	But first of all, you have to have some very tough-skinned observers, including a lot of lawyers, Going to these districts because it was sad.
	I felt bad for the people.
	I mean, in Detroit, in some of those, there were several areas.
	Fulton County was one.
	Detroit was another. There was about four or five cities where those people needed helmets.
	They were being abused.
	Terribly, you should see the hundreds.
	One of the things Sidney Powell did right, she did a lot of things wrong, but she had like a hundred affidavits and unfortunately all her crazy talk about certain things distracted from it, but she had a lot of testimony under oath from people,
	or affidavits I should say, under oath from people Citing the same thing, that they'd throw out a Republican observer and the whole room would cheer, including the paid workers.
	And there were racist comments made about them.
	And they were really intimidated.
	And that's got to stop.
	But anyway, the first thing is tough, thick-skinned observers.
	Next thing is documents.
	Start requesting the vital documents.
	With your right to know, your freedom of information, whatever the terminology, right away, before the election's even over, like, put in your request, we want the chain of custody documents.
	You know, in Arizona, 740,000 ballots were not covered with any chain of custody document.
	I mean, you're taking it out of faith.
	Wow. $740,000.
	And that's a verifiable fact, thanks to Verity Vote in Pennsylvania.
	They did a great job on that.
	So... So that would be the second thing, is to get those important documents.
	And the third thing, which should start right away, is the canvassing.
	If you can find a tough auditing firm, and I have to admit, auditors tend to be little worms, as the image says.
	I don't think there was.
	You know, if I weren't retired, I'd have a hard time writing this book because my clients would be attacked.
	They would be told, hey, why do you have this horrible election denier doing your books for you?
	Why are you doing that?
	He shouldn't do your audit. He's a monster.
	So they don't want to get involved.
	Even the big firms, you know, they just don't want to get involved.
	But if you can, if you can't get them, get some very credible retired people with great, you know, great images and integrity so that nobody, because they will be attacked.
	But they've got to knock on those doors and ask people about that voting.
	That's the only way to attack the harvesting and the phony ballot through the mail votes.
	Right. Well, that's the same kind of thing that we saw throughout this pandemic.
	You know, if you've got a doctor who's got a different opinion from the official narrative or whatever, they get attacked.
	They lose their job.
	They lose their career. They lose hospital access.
	And this is one of the really, I think, frightening things that's happened to our society.
	It really is a totalitarian approach.
	You know, people understood that you, in the days of Solzhenitsyn, you know, if you criticize the government, You're going to lose your home.
	You're going to lose your job. You're going to lose everything.
	That's what they're doing to people.
	And if each of us stand down because of those threats against us, that's when we lose.
	We only can get through this if we stand up one by one.
	And I know a lot of courageous people have done that in different places, but that's not what most people do.
	They will succumb to that kind of pressure just because we saw the mandates and everything.
	Well, writing this book, I mean...
	My first, the first two months, I just tried to grab all the information I could because I saw it disappearing.
	I mean, because, you know, YouTube started striking everything off.
	Yeah. And it's terrible.
	I mean, a lot of, I imagine there's a lot of people who don't realize what's going on because they're not trying to get that.
	I mean, if you want... It's like, what were they saying on Twitter that after Elon got it, he discovered there was all this child porn going on and stuff, that that was okay, but on the other hand, talk about vaccines or talk about elections was banned from Twitter.
	I mean, it's a crazy world.
	That's right. Oh yeah, and it's all that way.
	Okay, so what else to do?
	If you can, do an audit.
	Now, nobody's going to let you do an audit, but unless, skip back to your comment about the legislature, they might have the authority, and they did, for example, in Arizona, have the authority to have Dr.
	Shiva Ayyaduri, I don't know if that's a name you've heard.
	Yeah, I've interviewed him, yeah.
	Yeah. Okay. He's a brilliant man.
	I mean, he just proved that the Arizona audit was a fraud.
	I mean, he proved it.
	Because he assembled a panel of six people, three professionals, three non-professionals, to examine 499 sample signatures, compare them to the registration, and they found 12% didn't match.
	12%. That is extending it out to the mail-in population of Maricopa County.
	That's 204,000 votes in an election decided by 1 20th as much.
	10,000. Wow.
	So 20 times more.
	And you know what? I could almost hear it in my head what the Democrats would say.
	They said, yeah, but Joe, those would be cured.
	That's their word du jour now, is curing ballots, which is the phoniest thing.
	They think that you could, well, let's say you cure 90% of them.
	You still have 20,000 phony ballots in an election decided by 10,400.
	I mean, there's no way that was a solid election.
	It should have been certified.
	And I never will go to the point of saying Trump won because, as I said before, to an auditor, If something isn't certifiable, you stop there.
	You don't say, but I think maybe it was this.
	Or maybe, you know, I can't really certify this, but I think they made a billion dollars.
	You don't do that.
	You just stop. And so I'm not going to say who won that election.
	People can make up their mind who are the ones cheating.
	But I'm going to say that, okay, what else can you do?
	The audit, if you can. And the last thing I think I'd recommend...
	some of this corruption can be ferreted out because you know something?
	Harvesting usually is a multi-person operation, and those people will rat.
	I mean, you're going around, and a lot of people know what's going on.
	The reason, remember I said, I told you about Orange County, Orlando, that black Democrat woman, and I say erase only because this was all done within the black community, and she was pointing that out.
	She said this was a black thing that they were targeting black voters, and that's why she didn't feel she could win in an election there.
	This has to be stopped, but there was a lot of people who knew about that, a lot of people.
	And believe me, if you dangle a $10,000 reward, some of those people would have stepped forward years ago and blown the whistle on it.
	Oh, yeah, I agree.
	Yeah, the thing is, though, that reward is going to have to come from the legislature, and even then they're going to get sued by the Justice Department or something like that.
	Because if you go back and you look at the amazing case of this guy who was convicted of trying to manipulate the election because he put a joke meme up there, you know, oh, by the way, don't forget to vote on Wednesday type of thing, right?
	And the other side, again, as you're talking about, don't try what the Democrats do because you had Democrats who were doing the same thing Nobody even said anything about it, but this guy puts it up and they call it election interference and convict him on that.
	So if you put up something there and say we're going to run a reward, they better come through the legislature or they're going to come after any individuals of that.
	It truly is.
	We're in the final stages of an unbelievably corrupt and totalitarian government.
	That's the real takeaway from all this stuff.
	I mean, we've had so many...
	You know, we've had so many problems with elections for such a long time.
	And as I've told people, you know, the corruption in elections begins with a two-party system that determines who even gets on the ballot and who gets to have a debate.
	And now we've just had both Trump and Biden say, no, we're not going to have any debates this time.
	So it's amazing.
	Before we lose time here, again, the book is Debunked and Auditor Reviews the 2020 Election.
	And people can find your articles at Western Journal.
	Is that correct? They're at Western Journal.
	They're at American Thinker.
	I have at least as many there.
	And I have a Substack account.
	It's joefre.cpa at Substack or something like that.
	Okay. They can find you on Substack as well.
	Great talking to you. Thank you so much, Joe.
	Appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. The David Knight Show is a critical thinking super spreader.
	If you've been exposed to logic by listening to The David Knight Show, please do your part and try not to spread it.
	Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread farther.
	People have to trust me.
	I mean, trust the science.
	Wear your mask.
	Take your vaccine.
	Don't ask questions.
	Using free speech to free minds.

▲