My Chat with Former Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Higgins (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_642)
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Summary
Jeffrey Higgins is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and retired DEA agent who served 25 years in the Drug Enforcement Agency. He was instrumental in capturing the world s leading heroin dealer from Afghanistan, Haji Bakshio.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, this is Gadsad. It's been a few weeks since my last guest, but I've got
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one of the rare guests this time around because I think I only have one other situation where
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I've interviewed a husband and wife team separately. I've had Brett and Heather Weinstein on my
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show, the evolutionary biologist, separately. And I've had my current guest's wife, her
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name is Cynthia Farahad. I've had her on twice and today I've got her lovely husband, Jeffrey
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Higgins. How are you doing, Jeff? Oh, thank you for having me. By the way, my wife could be here with
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me. It's not like we're having a problem. She'd be happy to appear with me. She's loved your show
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and you did such a great job interviewing her and everybody else that you've had on this. I gotta
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tell you again, you're one of the great voices for free speech in the world right now. And it's so
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it's so important. I've probably been following you for close to a decade. Oh my God. Thank you
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so much. Coming from someone of your repute, it actually means a lot more to me to have a fan such
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as yourself than the Stanford and Harvard professors. Because maybe one doesn't want to have the
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imprimatur of fellow academics these days because academia is going through a rough patch right now.
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But I just want to quickly tell people who you are. For those who don't know you, you've spent 25
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years as a law enforcement career. You're now retired. You're a retired supervisory special agent who was
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instrumental in capturing the world's leading heroin dealer from Afghanistan, Haji Bakshio. We'll talk
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about that. Now, by the way, I knew of you through your wife. But one day, about three weeks ago,
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I was watching the series Narco Terrorism. And it was the entire show was on the capture of that
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heroin dealer. And here comes this gentleman, you. I'm saying, I think I know this gentleman. So then
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I write your wife. I said, is this your husband? She's like, yes. And that's how I said, oh, I've got to
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have the great Jeff Higgins on. Let me just finish reading your bio. You were involved in
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counterterrorism. And then you're also an award winning and number one Amazon bestselling author.
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Some of your previous novels include the book Furious, another book Unseen. And you have a book
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coming out on February 29th called The Forever Game. Did I cover some of the highlights? Or do you
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want to add anything else to that, Jeff? No, absolutely. What a kind introduction. Thank you.
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All right. So what I thought we would do is just begin with your very alluring and exciting and
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intriguing law enforcement career. Just tell us what were some of the big highlights? What was your
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trajectory? And then we could drill down on that heroin dealer that you helped capture.
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Yeah, well, I was really fortunate. I had that 25 year career. You know, I started with the Hillsborough
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County Sheriff's Office in Tampa, Florida. And I mean, you know, at all level, I worked at all levels,
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really. You know, I've worked with local police around the world. I've trained police around the
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world. So I've been I've been fortunate to do some of the biggest federal cases. So it's it's it was a
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really interesting career. Ironically, I sort of got into it. I started as a reporter and I got into it
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because I was looking for something exciting. And I thought it would be good fodder for books. But
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turned into 25 years. Once once I was bitten by that law enforcement bug and actually doing some good
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in the world, it was really hard to get out of it. You know, how did you switch? How did you switch,
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say, from, you know, the sheriff's department where one can spend their entire career doing good things
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to going to DEA to doing counterterrorism? What's the what are the bridges that lead you to all of
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these different hats that you're wearing as a law enforcement officer? I think change is good,
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right? Like it's every now and about every five years throughout my life, I've changed jobs, even
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even if it was within the same agency. You know, so I started and when I was with the sheriff's office,
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I started in patrol. I got into my first shooting two weeks into the job, you know, that we would
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as a call for a like a loud party or as a barbecue. And we went to go talk to somebody and he murdered
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a woman right in front of us and then tried to shoot my partner and I shot at him. It's weird when I
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ended up being in a lot of shootings over my career. But like that first one, right, the first time you're
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doing something that you've only seen on TV, it's a little it's a little shocking and surprising.
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And I swear to this day, I saw my bullet like go right over his gun right over his hand.
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Wow. They say that's impossible, but I swear I saw it. But you have these weird, you know,
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physiological reactions when you're in like, like high, high tension in incidents like that,
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like your hearing shuts down, you get that tunnel vision, you know, where you can only see what's
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directly in front of you. But the more you do it, the more I guess normal it becomes. And so later,
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you just moderate your breathing and you just kind of get used to it.
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But statistically speaking, would it be correct to say that most law enforcement
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officers will go through their entire career without necessarily ever shooting their guns?
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Is that is that correct? Yeah, the vast majority. I think that I want to say it's like 20 percent
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over a whole career. And the number of people who've been in multiple shootings is like just,
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you know, in the single digits. That's a small percentage. But it depends on where you are.
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If you're in a little town someplace, you know, you're not using your guns so much, right? It's
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all informal policing where you're talking to people and doing conflict resolution and things.
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But I always chose to be in like, you know, the most impoverished neighborhoods, the highest crime
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places to actually do the job where it was needed. I mean, you're retired now. And in a second,
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I want to get to the capture of the Afghani heroin dealer, because that is truly an incredible story
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worthy of a of a movie. Do you miss that adrenaline? Do you miss that rise in cortisol levels and
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testosterone and the rest of the hormonal endocrinological system? Yeah, I'd be lying
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if I said I didn't, you know, it is it is sort of you get used to it. And I did a lot of, you know,
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kind of out there on pointy edge of the spear type of things throughout my career. And so yeah,
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there's a certain excitement to it. There's also a clarity to it, you know, when you're when you're like
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in combat with with bad guys, you know, it's those are the people you're hunting and there they are
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in front of you and they want to kill you and you want to kill them. And you know, there really is
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that that clarity of just just forgetting all the paperwork, forgetting all the nuance and gray
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areas. You're just you know, I kind of miss that too. Wow. Even when you're a cop, you're out on the
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street, you know, like you save somebody's life, you just save somebody's life, you know, there's no
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figuring out how is what I'm doing now going to like affect the mankind over the next 10 years or
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something it's right there in front of you. So you get that like immediate gratification, which is
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nice. So yeah, I miss a little of that. But honestly, a lot of the guys I worked with are
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died over the years, you know, both in the military, like we I was embedded with the special
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forces a teams and I was in combat with the seals. And, you know, I worked with, you know,
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our DEA fast teams and other DEA units around the world. And so at some point, you start getting that
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feeling like, you know, you can only you can only do this so many times, you know, I've had
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mortars landing near me, rockets going over my head, RPGs fired at me, people shooting
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at me, you know, like, eventually, it doesn't matter, like how good you are, there's so much
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luck that that, you know, that that really determines the outcome of those violent confrontations.
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Were you able to once you segued back to civilian life, and you retired, of course, many people go
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and I hope you don't want me asking this, but many, you know, active duty folks who then retire,
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whether it be in the military, or as, you know, law enforcement officers, will have all sorts of
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mental health issues. Were you able to evade all that? What are you saying, Ed?
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No, no, not that you're, not that you're, you have any problems, but you know, it's, you know,
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there's PTSD, there is all kinds of emotional trauma. I mean, you know, I spent, you know, after
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we escaped the Lebanese Civil War, I actually talked about this with the gentleman who killed
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bin Laden, literally, he was on my show, Robert O'Neill. And, you know, I was telling him that I
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had nightmares for about 25 years after leaving Lebanon, where it was always one of two recurring
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nightmares, I would either wake up, because I just realized that I ran out of ammunition as the bad
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guys are coming in, or that my gun jammed. And as I was telling him that story, he goes, Oh, we,
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we, we, many of us have had similar dreams. It's called the warrior dream. And so there's,
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there's always going to be a, a, a mental health related signature when you're going through these
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difficult situations. Did you experience any of that? Not really. I know it's a real thing. I
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definitely had those dreams. Like I think everybody in law enforcement over the years has had the dreams
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where their gun won't fire, or it's jammed, or it's coming apart, or you're trying to get it put
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back together in time, you know, these kind of just stress related dreams. But yeah, no luck,
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luckily, no PTSD, or at least it hasn't manifested yet. Let's see what happens during this show.
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Now, do you think that it is the fact that you've been able, able to be so fortunate as to avoid many
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of these difficult pitfalls? Is it just your unique disposition that allowed you to have the,
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the armament, the emotional armament to protect yourself? And, or is it that when you returned,
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there was a social network that allowed you to, to deal with some of those difficulties?
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Yeah. I mean, I think both of those things, right. It's hard to say when something doesn't
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happen, how do you prove the negative, you know, but certainly, you know, having, having support of
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like agencies and you're honestly, when you're in combat or, and the same thing was true when I was
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in patrol as a police officer, you know, at the end of the day, you'd get together and have a beer
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together and talk things out. And just that camaraderie and understanding that everyone's kind of going
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through the same thing is, is really helpful. I think, I think the longer you hold on to something
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that's bothering you, right. The, the worse it becomes. And that's when you start having these
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chronic problems, but if you just get it out or, you know, I, I'm not a person to hold my feelings
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in either. So I'll just tell people if something's wrong. And well, but by the way, I did exactly the
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same thing yesterday. You, you, I'm not sure if you saw it or not. We talked about this offline that
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I've been going through some difficulties with the tax realities. And I just put out a tweet. I knew
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that there'd be people who'd attack me. Oh, boo, who, who, who successful guy complaining that
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they're taking all your money. But I felt that psychologically, emotionally, it would do me
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good. Even if it's a, you know, very large platform that I have, it's as if I want people
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to bear witness to what I'm going through and just putting out that tweet around. I don't
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remember when it was maybe 11 o'clock at night or something made me feel better psychologically.
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No, absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with complaining about taxes or complaining about
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somebody punishing you for success, you know, and in a progressive system like you have,
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and like we have here, right. I mean, I'm in Virginia, you know, it's the same thing. It's
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just the better you do, the more they take. And you get to that point where it's, it's really hard
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to, and by the way, you can see this all over the place, right. Where else look at all the socialist
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countries, look at all the former Soviet bloc countries, right. Why work if they're just going to
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take it away? Why work if you're not going to get something in return? I mean, it's, it's just basic
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human nature. And I don't know how many times we have to see the same thing repeated before we stop
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doing it. I know. So I've, I've, I've used this quote before in several of my writings and you know,
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in my books, it's by a quote by EO Wilson, who's a, are you familiar with EO Wilson? Do you know the
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name? No, no. EO Wilson just recently passed away. I just finished actually his autobiography called
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The Naturalist. He's a, or he was an entomologist by, by training. He studied insects, specifically
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social ants. He was an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, a big intellectual hero of mine. And at
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one point when he was asked about the virtues of socialism and communism, do you think it's a good
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idea? His answer is absolutely brilliant. He said, great idea, wrong species. Because what,
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what he means there, and I think some of my listeners and viewers have heard me explain this
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before, but others not. So it's worth repeating. Social ants are perfectly suited for communism
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because you have a singular reproductive queen, and then you have a whole bunch of indistinguishable
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worker ants and soldier ants. And therefore this idea of we're all going to be indistinguishable
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from each other makes sense within that particular phylogenetic history of that species.
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Humans are not social ants. Some of us are taller, shorter, better looking, less better looking,
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more fortunate, less fortunate, harder working, less hard. So when you are imposing a socioeconomic
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political system to your point that is contrary to human nature, it shouldn't take a fancy professor
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to say it's always going to fail. And as you said, it has failed repeatedly, but usually the rebuttal
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is, well, because you haven't tried true socialism, true communism. If only the next round we implement
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the true one, then you will see that it truly is a utopia.
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You know, and as an evolutionary biologist, I'm sure you know this better than anyone, but
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actual happiness, like deep long-term happiness comes from bettering your environment and bettering
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yourself. I mean, you know, you're not built to sit in the mud, right? And get rained on.
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And so when you take that away, when you take away that ability to create, it just, it makes
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people deeply unhappy. And, you know, I worked in a lot of, in several former Soviet countries,
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you know, working with their police, working with intelligence. And, and, you know, I had one guy,
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I remember one, one was a Romanian police officer who told me how he, how he hated capitalism because
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now he had to work and his old job, he didn't have to get out of bed. He didn't have to do anything,
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you know, if it produced, but, you know, I would, I would rather have to work a little bit
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and have like five times the standard of living, you know, or have the ability to work harder to
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improve my life than, than, than not, you know what I mean? Just look at the people coming across
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the Southern border right now. Right. I mean, you have people, a lot of people, not all of them,
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but a lot of them are just fleeing economic hardship. You know, look at what happened to
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Venezuela. Look at what happens everywhere. Right. This system is dried. It's, it's insane that
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we're still talking about it. Did you see the, I just saw this clip earlier. I was on the
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treadmill trying to, uh, run away my existential frustrations at the taxation theft that I just
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experienced. Uh, did you see the, uh, the noble illegal immigrants who were just caught because
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they had beaten up some cops in New York city? Did you see their reaction as the camera caught them?
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Yeah, I did. These are, they, they was the mob beat up a bunch of NYPD officers and they were released
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on Nobel by the way. Like that's a welcome. But did you see when, after when they caught them
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or I don't know if it was before or after rather than exhibiting some contrition or shame or fear,
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or they were giving the finger to the camera. So imagine the chutzpah, right? That's the right
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term. And in Arabic, you'd say, what honey, right? It's this kind of, it's this F U that is really
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deeply felt right. So that there is no sense of shame. I come into the country illegally.
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I beat up your police officers. I'm now arrested. And my response is I give you the finger because
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I know there will be no repercussions to me. And society can't withstand that level of lunacy.
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No, it's a deep contempt for the society and it's, and we bring it on ourselves, right? People
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understand strength. They understand rule of law when you don't have those things. I mean,
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like you can't have, you can't have open borders in a socialist system, right? I mean,
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just the math doesn't work. This is, this is first grade math here. You know, I, my, my wife is an
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immigrant. My grandfather and grandmother came from Lebanon, by the way, I'm half Lebanese.
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Yeah, that's right. They came from a, they're in Brumana, which is in the hills above Beirut.
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And you don't speak Arabic because if I, if not, I'm going to break out the Arabic.
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You know, I'm smiling a little because my Arabic consists like 99% of profanity. And my,
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when my wife sees this right now, she's going to be holding her breath.
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So we'll, we'll, we'll skip the profanity, but I think I could imagine what some of those
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juicy lines might be. All right. Let's, I want to get back and then we can, we can go into all
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kinds of political stuff. And then I want to talk about your, your authoring career and your latest
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book, a lot to talk about, but tell us about that incredible story. Number one heroin dealer in the
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world, you were instrumental in capturing him. And as I was trying to prepare for the show,
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I think they might've even mentioned it in the narco-terrorism thing at the end.
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All right. So tell us the whole story leading up to his release.
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So I was, I was in New York and I went to Afghanistan because I was actually one of the
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first people to arrive at the North tower, the twin towers, when they came down on 9-11.
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It was myself and an NYPD officer and a Suffolk County district district attorney investigator
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were the first. And I, I kind of, I vowed on that day, standing in that rubble that I was going to
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go after terrorists. And so when DEA opened up its, its office in Afghanistan, this was in the end of
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2003, I volunteered and I became the assistant country attache there. So I helped stand up that
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office. So very early on, when we first got there, we were training the local cops. We were arming them.
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We were going on missions. We were, we were trying to trying to get them to, to be able to be some
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somewhat functional, right. To, to bring the rule of law from like teaching people, what is evidence
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to actually going out and targeting bad guys. And, and from those early days, uh, Haji Bacho's name
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was coming up. This is back in like 2004. He was, he was clearly the world's most prolific, uh, drug
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trafficker period, right. He dwarfed everybody else. Um, and so, you know, I w I was, I was integral in the
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investigation itself. Like I was, I was worked, I was, as I told you before, I was living with
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a special forces, the, the operational detachment alpha out in the Nangarhar province, which is by
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the Khyber pass on the border with Pakistan. And I was running sources there. So we'd go in for four
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months at a time and I'd develop sources and go out, put on local clothing and go out into, into the,
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uh, into the rural areas and set up meetings and gather evidence and then target these, you know,
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high value targets, put together criminal cases against them. And then when possible,
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extradited them back to the U S we actually did the first case where we, uh, we, the first
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narcoterrorism case, like based on our, the intelligence that we gathered over a couple of
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years, Congress passed the narcoterrorism law, the 21, uh, 960 a law. And so we, I was able to make
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the first arrest and the first conviction under that, uh, under that law, but Bacho the whole time we
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were out there was one of the, the, the biggest drug organization in the world. And a little
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secret. I worked for DEA, but I'm a, I'm libertarian and I actually believe in the legalization of most
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drugs, which, which you won't hear a lot, but you know, I've always targeted, uh, drug organizations
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and transnational criminal groups that were killing people and doing just horrific things,
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you know, and his certainly was like, like in this particular case, we had his people threatening to
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boil one of our witnesses in oil. We had, they had firefights with, with some of our police officers
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trying to kill people that were involved with the case. I mean, these are in, in places with no rule of
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law, you know, and, and like Afghanistan, it's, it's the war, it's warlordism, right? It's, it's
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the guy with the most people, the most soldiers and most troops. And, and someone like Bacho had
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influence and, and corrupted officials like all over the world. He, he distributed to 22 countries
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when, when, um, he ended up being picked up in Pakistan and then the Pakistan government delivered
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him to the Afghan police. And then we extradited him back to the United States. And so, and then I,
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I was, I did the trial with them with, you know, it was our special operations division with our
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Kabul country office and we, and, and our fast teams and everyone had contributed to that. So it was,
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it was a, you know, a lot of people over, over several years put together these cases, but in the end
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we convicted him on some just kind of basic one-on-one, uh, narcotics enforcement doing
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undercover buys with one of my sources and, you know, doing, getting him on the telephone and doing
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tapes and things like that. But I remember the gentleman who, you know, you, you had kind of
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dropped him off by his compound, uh, right. Uh, uh, I can't remember, was his name, was his name
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Muhammad? Yeah, they, they, they were all, so everyone was working under aliases because as you
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could even, by the way, even people testified under aliases in federal court because the, the threat
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against them was so great. I had a case before this one where one of my, uh, witnesses, uh, was
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murdered as soon as he went back to Afghanistan and then his brother was attacked. And, you know,
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I mean, so it's a really, it's a, it's a very real threat. And of course, now that we're not there,
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which is just tragic, we have, you know, all the police officers who worked with all the
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intelligence officers who worked with, they're all under threat as well. I've got, I saw pictures
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of a guy I indicted for terrorism in New York at the date, like in the days that we're, as we were
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pulling out, going, going house to house, looking for witnesses in some of these cases. I have one,
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one of my, one of my sources took a picture of him coming with the guy, come with the,
00:21:00.500
this Taliban commander coming out of his house. Wow. So do you, do you feel that, I mean, having
00:21:07.620
lived in that culture for however, how long did you spend in Afghanistan? So I was there from 2004
00:21:13.800
to 2010, not all the time, but a lot. Like sometimes I, some one year I went like for,
00:21:19.020
for three, four month deployments, almost, almost in a row. Initially I was there for about 15 months
00:21:23.980
straight. So I think I spent three and a half, four years over that period of time, actually in country.
00:21:29.120
Do you feel that, so I mean, there are, there are several causes as to why those societies fail. I
00:21:35.840
mean, we can argue that, you know, an Islamic theocracy is probably not the way to organize
00:21:40.460
society. But even if we leave that part aside, which is a big if, that's a, that's a big gorilla
00:21:45.980
in the room. But if we leave that aside, is the endemic corruption in these societies so enmeshed
00:21:53.040
within the DNA of the society that it's almost impossible to extricate yourself out of the death
00:21:59.760
spiral of those societies? Yes. But I think that's a symptom more than a cause. You know, I think at a
00:22:05.740
very basic, like philosophical level, you have to have property rights. You have to believe in
00:22:10.280
individual liberty. You know, you have to believe that individual life has value. You know, some of
00:22:15.360
these Judeo-Christian Western ideas have to be there at the very beginning, because otherwise, nothing
00:22:21.660
else makes sense, right? Right? If the individual, if there isn't some sanctity to the life of the
00:22:25.980
individual, and what they earn doesn't stay with them, of course, this is a tough conversation for us
00:22:30.520
to have today after you've done your taxes, you know, but, you know, this, without, without that, without,
00:22:35.160
without those philosophical underpinnings, and the economics that come along with, like, capitalism
00:22:39.760
and free markets, I think it's, I think it's, yeah, you're, you will inevitably have corruption,
00:22:44.260
because why not? Right? Like, what, what, what is, what is a counter argument for corruption,
00:22:49.420
if property rights don't really exist? Exactly right. Well said. Okay, so then you,
00:22:54.720
you catch the guy, you put the case together, he's convicted, sentenced to, I think, a pretty long
00:23:01.640
sentence, I don't know, 40 years or 30 years, what was the original sentence? I think the original one
00:23:06.540
was life, but it might have been, it was beyond his lifespan. Okay, there you go. And we charged him
00:23:11.840
with multiple things, and what, what, one of the charges was set aside, so the actual narco-terrorism
00:23:16.420
charge was set aside, the, the, the drug charge we charged him with, the undercover buys of heroin
00:23:21.320
stood, he was, he, he remained convicted of that, but he had to get resentenced, because they set one of
00:23:26.180
the two charges aside. The, the problem was, in the ledgers that we found, I mean, just the stuff that
00:23:33.160
we found and could prove, in one 12-month period, he, Haji Baccio distributed over 123,000 kilograms
00:23:40.400
of heroin, and just to kind of put that in perspective, that's 19.7% of the world's heroin
00:23:47.120
that was distributed that year, right, so almost 20% was this guy's heroin that I could prove, and I
00:23:52.080
know I don't, didn't have all the records, so he was by far the most prolific heroin trafficker in
00:23:57.720
history, probably the biggest drug trafficker period in history, and when he was resentenced,
00:24:02.540
he was, he was given, I think, a 10-year sentence, or whatever it was, for that drug charge, even
00:24:08.360
though nobody had ever been charged with more drugs, that, that, we introduced that evidence at trial,
00:24:14.060
not just the, the couple kilos, or we ended up buying four kilos of two different, two different
00:24:18.420
deals with him, and one of, one of those charges was dropped, and the other one he was convicted on,
00:24:22.820
but we showed what he did during that period of time, and I mean, during that period of time,
00:24:26.420
there were thousands of deaths, and hundreds of American soldiers were killed, and he was
00:24:31.060
directly supporting the Taliban, and he was, he was working with, with poppy farmers to grow poppies,
00:24:36.760
and encouraging them to, to deal in the heroin trade as a form of jihad, you know, so, I mean,
00:24:41.860
it was, it was more than just, here's a drug guy, right, like, I told you my feelings on drugs in
00:24:45.660
general, anyhow, but this was somebody who was directly supporting the Taliban, and we have, we had,
00:24:49.960
we had a witness who was, who was present when he was giving money to the Taliban, and providing arms to the
00:24:54.740
Taliban, you know, and so, it was, it, when, when he was not sentenced properly for the drugs, it was
00:25:00.360
obviously quite upsetting, um, when he went back, I'm sure he went back as a hero, you know,
00:25:06.460
so, what, what led to his release, how did that happen?
00:25:10.220
So, I have to be careful, because it deals with classified information.
00:25:13.320
Oh, okay, so, I don't want to get you in trouble.
00:25:15.860
No, no, so, yeah, I don't want to get in trouble either, so let me just put it like this,
00:25:18.780
another agency had some derogatory information about one of the witnesses,
00:25:23.000
and under U.S. law, anybody in the government who has anything that could be used to, like,
00:25:28.740
impugn character, for example, has to be turned over to the defense, but we didn't know about this
00:25:33.700
information until later, through further investigation of something else, and then we
00:25:37.720
turned it over to the defense, and we found it later, so we could have retried Hachi Bacho on those
00:25:42.540
charges, but, you know, witnesses were dead, people were hard to bring over, the trial itself cost,
00:25:47.420
you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and just the feasibility of retrying him was so slight.
00:25:53.720
So, it's just the tech, some technical issues that have nothing to do with big philosophical
00:25:58.680
deontological issues caused the guy to walk away, as often happens, right, you didn't read the
00:26:03.620
Miranda rights exactly verbatim, therefore, you can't admit the evidence, or whatever, like,
00:26:08.940
Yeah, unfortunately, the, you know, the material, which I won't talk about,
00:26:12.700
had nothing to do with this case, you know, so, and it wouldn't have had anything,
00:26:18.140
it wouldn't have affected a new trial at all, either, you know, but it was just, it happens,
00:26:22.440
but even with that charge being dismissed, and listen, I'm a big believer in individual rights,
00:26:27.300
and I'm a big believer in people being able to, you know, like, a government should turn over
00:26:31.840
everything, a government should be able, you know, so I kind of agree with all that. What I don't agree
00:26:35.840
with was the fact that this guy, who's responsible for 20% of the world's heroin that year,
00:26:39.900
got, like, a 10-year sentence, like, that's a problem.
00:26:42.820
Wow. Is he, is he, do you know at all if he's back to his old tricks, or has he retired in some
00:26:49.800
I'm sure he's back to, I mean, I'm sure he's sitting in Kabul right now, being fetid as a hero,
00:26:54.360
you know, I mean, when you, when you, when you, like, in the military was guilty of this over and
00:26:58.840
over and over again, they would, they would detain terrorists, and then, but they would have no plan
00:27:03.460
for them, right, so they would hold them for a period of time, and then they'd release them,
00:27:07.280
and it was so much worse than just never detaining them in the first place, because as soon as they
00:27:12.060
were let out and sent back to their village, they, they come, they come back as heroes, look,
00:27:15.680
they can't hold me, I'm, you know, I'm the Teflon Don syndrome, and so you got, you know, like,
00:27:21.260
so that's one of the reasons, by the way, I was, I was pushing judicial solutions in Afghanistan,
00:27:25.620
Afghanistan, the, the Khan Mohammed case was the first ever narco-terrorism case, and we were using
00:27:30.820
U.S. law to go after terrorists, right, who are, who are, you know, in the drug trade as a way to
00:27:37.400
support terrorism, and, you know, it's, it's, it is a solution, one of many, but we have to do
00:27:43.200
something, there had, there, we were so frustrated by, you know, catching people, this catch and release
00:27:48.620
of terrorists, there, there's a perceptual problem in the West, where people think, wow, if someone's doing
00:27:54.300
this horrific act, there must be a logical reason for it, and that's not true, when, when, when
00:28:00.220
someone's, you know, a radical ideologue, when, when, when someone has a religion pushing them to do
00:28:05.480
something, they're not thinking rationally, and, and I don't know how many times people have to tell
00:28:10.600
us what they want to do before you believe them, we're constantly saying what they don't really mean
00:28:14.600
that, and they do mean that, you know, so our approach to, like, you know, to, like, radical Islamic
00:28:20.220
terrorism, for example, because that's what I spent a lot of my career dealing with, it couldn't
00:28:24.280
be more wrong, you know, I mean, like, look what just happened in Israel, you know, it looked at
00:28:28.940
the, the most horrific acts, acts since the Holocaust, and, you know, and the, the leadership
00:28:34.500
of Hamas is telling you why they did it, and we're still looking, we're still making excuses
00:28:41.240
So you may or may not know this, but I mean, I've talked about exactly this issue at, at length
00:28:45.780
for several decades, culminating in, in this book, in the, the other book, in The Parasitic
00:28:50.240
Mind, I have a chapter, chapter six, which I titled Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome, where I
00:28:57.560
specifically focus on various manifestations of ostrich behavior, right, the, the metaphor
00:29:04.760
being that you bury your head in the sand, and you go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear
00:29:07.820
it, and exactly to your point, I actually list, I say, okay, well, here's the number of terror
00:29:15.380
acts that have been committed since 9-11 alone, by one religion, where they specifically state
00:29:23.420
that they are doing it for the religion, and, and now, by the way, that, that counter is
00:29:27.740
up to about 44,000 plus, since 9-11 alone, in nearly 70 countries, right, so you couldn't
00:29:35.100
make up data that would be as unassailable and as unequivocal as that, and yet, I then list
00:29:42.820
all of the Western intelligentsia offering the real causes for why these things happen,
00:29:50.360
and some of those, quote, real causes, and, and for those of you who are going to be listening
00:29:54.860
on podcast, real causes is in air quotes, are really, they come out straight out of my
00:30:01.120
satire, but regrettably, they're not satirical, so example, it's due to beard bullying, right,
00:30:07.420
so who, who, who amongst us didn't decide that if they were beard bullied, they would head off to
00:30:13.200
ISIS and join Raqqa, I mean, go to Raqqa and join ISIS to throw gays off rooftops, it's also due,
00:30:19.560
it may surprise you or not, Jeff, due to lack of art exposure, so for example, you know, you're
00:30:25.960
walking around some young Muslim guy in Brussels, and you're not being exposed to enough Chagall and
00:30:33.040
Dali and Renoir, and that's when you decide, well, listen, not enough art in my life, time to kill
00:30:39.620
the kuffar, right, so Bill Nye explained to us that the Bataclan attack in Paris was actually very
00:30:47.460
clearly caused by climate change, so when you have Westerners being willing to espouse such insanity,
00:30:56.720
is there hope for us, Mr. Higgins? Is there hope? You know, I'm a very optimistic guy, but
00:31:03.580
no, Gad, there isn't, I'm, I'm not in a good place with this right now, I mean, and the fact that we've
00:31:10.640
lost our ability to reason, I mean, that is really the biggest problem, like, you talk about it being
00:31:16.380
satirical, we're, we're, everything is satirical, now, you, you can't make up, like, the Babylon Bee can't
00:31:21.640
get far enough ahead of a story to make it satirical, the things people believe in the, in the lack of
00:31:27.080
truths, and I think it goes down to a, it comes down to a, like, a basic tribalism, you know, and it's so
00:31:32.620
anything the other side says, even if that was my opinion, five minutes ago has to be wrong because
00:31:37.720
they said it, and we're definitely, in the United States, at least, we're in that position right now,
00:31:42.320
you know, it's, it's, it's, it's whatever, whatever the Democrats say is wrong, whatever the Republicans
00:31:46.580
say is wrong, right, and, and there's, there has to be this objective stance, this, or,
00:31:51.640
or even the belief in objective reality, right, that we can measure things, and that something
00:31:56.120
could be wrong, or, or how about some nuance, how about this one politician is doing some good
00:32:00.960
things, but he's also doing some horrible things, how about that, that's a legitimate position,
00:32:04.540
but it, I don't, I know so few people who can actually do that, or so, so few people who can
00:32:10.120
actually break themselves from their entrenched positions, as if changing your mind, it somehow
00:32:16.600
makes you a lesser person, you know, and, and so if we can't have this debate, and now, of course,
00:32:21.640
thank, by the way, thank you, thank you, thank you, for what you're doing, because, like, these,
00:32:26.660
like, long-form interviews, the, the, the, you're, you're, you're really courageous, uh, stand for free
00:32:32.340
speech, I mean, this is, this is the whole ballgame, I mean, really, this is the whole ballgame, when
00:32:38.020
you're getting, you know, censored on people, you, me, a lot of people censored on social media, you
00:32:42.980
know, um, just literally, you can't break into mainstream media with certain ideas, when the government
00:32:48.380
itself, the CIA, the FBI in the United States are pressuring people to silence people with opposing
00:32:54.000
viewpoints to an administration, I mean, that is pure totalitarianism, right, and unless we can get,
00:32:59.580
unless we can have this, like, open forum of ideas, we'll never get to the truth, and when you, when
00:33:03.620
you, when you're even, when you start to self-censor, and we're there now, right, you're afraid to cancel
00:33:07.560
culture, that's, that's the beginning of the end, so, you know, honestly, the only way out of this, and I
00:33:13.340
said, there's no hope, there is, there's always hope, and right, and there's, like, everything's a
00:33:17.120
spectrum, and there's, the pendulum swings back and forth, but what you're doing is the way we get
00:33:21.320
out of this, you gotta, you gotta stop, we all have to stop demonizing the opponent of an idea, and
00:33:27.560
actually focus on the idea, right, and, and get away from all the logical flaws, and discuss it, and
00:33:33.300
then try to, try, and then we can compromise, then we can, we can agree to disagree on things, and, but
00:33:38.460
until we get back to that, and we were there, like, 30 years ago, I, I don't know what, I do know what
00:33:43.300
happened, but this whole politically correct cancel culture movement is, is destroying everything,
00:33:47.640
you know, sorry for the rant, but no, no, no, no, it means a lot to me, that's what the long form,
00:33:52.220
format is for, you, at the start of your response, you, you said about, you know, how people are unwilling
00:33:59.740
to change their minds, and so on, and it reminded me of a recent exchange I had, I was appearing on a
00:34:05.800
British psychiatrist's show, and he asked me a question, which, you know, in, in retrospect,
00:34:12.620
you, you'd think that many other people would have asked me, but I think he might have been the first
00:34:16.280
one to ever ask me that question, I thought it was a brilliant one, and it's going to speak to what you
00:34:19.480
were just talking about, he said, of all your years, as a psychologist, as a behavioral scientist,
00:34:25.220
as a professor, what has been the finding about human behavior that you found most surprising and
00:34:32.900
shocking, and so that kind of took me aback, because, you know, I've had a long career, there are many
00:34:38.100
things I could talk about, but what's the singular most surprising, and then I paused, and I said,
00:34:43.800
the inability of people to have the intellectual honesty to change their opinions, yes, you know,
00:34:52.040
it's once you are, and now, here, I'm going to get slightly academic, in chapter seven of the
00:34:59.140
parasitic mind, that the title of the chapter is How to Seek Truth, and I'm arguing that there is an
00:35:05.040
objective way to seek truth, but I start off with kind of a pessimistic outlook on that, I quote a, this
00:35:13.860
very long quote from a great book called The Enigma of Reason, by two French psychologists, where they argued
00:35:23.800
that our faculty to reason did not evolve to seek objective truth, but rather it evolved to win
00:35:34.160
arguments, and therefore, oftentimes, I can present you all of the evidence of the world, here, Jeff,
00:35:41.740
here is all of the historical, economic, political, philosophical, psychological evidence that suggests
00:35:50.680
that socialism and communism is doomed to fail, guess what, that evidence is not going to sway you,
00:35:57.900
because God forbid, you would ever change your opinion in light of incoming information, so I think
00:36:02.900
that's probably the thing that epistemologically makes me the most pessimistic, because sometimes
00:36:08.080
I start questioning myself, I say, okay, I'm putting all this effort, I mean, I know I'm flipping
00:36:13.180
some people, but those people are flippable, they're really hardcore, rigid ideologues, is there any
00:36:20.840
amount of evidence that I could ever offer them to change their mind, and regrettably, I think for
00:36:25.920
some of those folks, it's a resounding no. You know, I've heard even people that I used to respect,
00:36:31.780
like intellectually, who in recent years have talked about propagating lies, because, you know,
00:36:39.020
the end goal, the outcomes were too important to be left to chance, you know, and by the way,
00:36:44.680
so yeah, so someone who believes in like moral relativism, you just, you can't argue with that
00:36:49.020
person, there is no end to that, except for maybe over time, they'll realize how ridiculous what
00:36:53.420
they're saying is, but even that argument, right, that reason is there to win an argument,
00:36:58.760
you know, evolution would say no, you know, because you can win every argument and still end up dead,
00:37:04.380
you know, it's using reason to find reality is what helps us survive as a species, you know,
00:37:10.340
and so one of them clearly leads to survival, and the other does not.
00:37:14.680
Right, very interesting. Okay, so I want to get, I hope it's not an abrupt segue. In a sense,
00:37:22.040
it isn't, because I think your novels deal with some of the issues that we're talking about.
00:37:25.540
So okay, you come off from, you get out of this career as a law enforcement, you know, you're hanging
00:37:31.000
around in Kandahar, whatever, and you're with the special forces, then you retire, and you say,
00:37:36.660
all right, act two of my career, I want to be a successful author. What was that transition?
00:37:43.980
What was your process? And I ask you this, because I often get people who write to me and say,
00:37:49.800
hey, Dr. Saad, what's the secret to being a good author? So do you have any recipes,
00:37:56.800
Well, the secret to being a good author is right, right? Don't talk about that you have a book,
00:38:00.760
actually sit down and write the book. And, you know, they say it takes about a million words to
00:38:04.400
achieve some mastery in it, sort of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. And there's some truth
00:38:08.640
to that. So right. Also, you have to learn the craft and the business. That means, you know,
00:38:13.400
following podcasts, going to seminars, joining, you know, going to conferences, joining writing
00:38:17.960
groups, getting critique partners, like actually learning it. And it does take a while. If you're
00:38:22.940
doing that, if you're constantly trying to better yourself and learn, everything you write will be
00:38:26.900
better than the predecessor. Right. And so I'll go back, I'll finish a book and I'll go back to the
00:38:31.260
beginning to start editing and I'll cringe at what I just wrote. So I'm actually a better writer at the
00:38:35.000
end of that book than I was at the beginning. I don't know if you've experienced this as well.
00:38:39.340
But it's interesting because probably not as much as what you're saying. I think because the process
00:38:46.680
of writing nonfiction is inherently different from the process of writing fiction. And so that was
00:38:53.600
actually, I mean, in a sense, you've, you've teed me up perfectly for my next question, which is,
00:38:58.520
I think you've done a bit of nonfiction writing, but mainly fiction. How does your process change
00:39:04.060
depending on those two genres? Well, you're right. It's completely different. So the first thing I
00:39:08.160
wrote upon retiring was the story of the first narco terrorism case. So it was, it was my story.
00:39:12.920
It's nonfiction. I, I, I tried to sell it at the time. I got an agent with it. We had a lot of
00:39:18.420
interest, but I didn't sell it. So it's one of those things that sort of sat on a shelf and I will go back.
00:39:22.980
Now this is 2017. So I'll go back and rewrite and then try it again. But I also pivoted right
00:39:29.060
after I got out because, you know, when you're in the government and you have a security clearance
00:39:32.480
and everything, you're, you're very limited in what you can say and what you can do. So I,
00:39:36.320
that was 2017. That was right during the time with all the defund the police, right. In the,
00:39:40.260
in the beginning of the demonizing police. So I wrote a bunch of essays and articles actually showing
00:39:45.000
facts, you know, about, about what the numbers looked like and in defending police. I mean,
00:39:49.600
if there, if there's a bad cop, if there's a racist cop, if there's a bad shooting,
00:39:53.100
everybody should be, should be, you know, pointing it out and it happens. Of course it happens. Right.
00:39:58.480
But it's, it's not statistically significant. And the numbers like every year, you know, there's,
00:40:03.840
there's something like, there's like 10 million arrests, about 700,000 U S police officers,
00:40:07.880
sworn officers, about 10 million arrests. And out of them every year, there's, there's a,
00:40:13.040
there's actually more unarmed white people are killed than black people. Right. But, but,
00:40:17.040
but the percentage, the, the, the, the, the percentage is, is, is skewed because there's
00:40:23.080
the, you know, blacks are like 13 and a half percent of the population or whatever. But when
00:40:26.460
you, so I started actually going into like government documents and showing what the numbers
00:40:31.200
were, you know, because it really matters. Like if there's an epidemic of racist police shootings,
00:40:35.320
we need to stop it. And it turns out, not only is there not, it's, it's, it's, it's almost
00:40:39.680
non-existent. Like about every year, there's one to two dozen unarmed black men who are shot in the
00:40:44.380
United States. And I would go through and I, and I was a tactical instructor for DEA. You know,
00:40:49.440
I've been in a lot of violent encounters, many, many encounters, and I would, I would go through
00:40:54.060
them and I would analyze each one, you know, and each year there's a couple of them that are bad
00:40:58.320
for sure. Every year, there's a couple of just outlandish like shootings or things in, in the,
00:41:02.660
in the cops go to jail. But most of them, even if they're unarmed, people think unarmed and they
00:41:06.720
think, well, that's a bad shooting, but it's not true. A lot of them came at the end of high
00:41:10.220
speed chases. A lot of them came when the, when the, the suspect was wrestling for the police
00:41:14.660
officers gone, or the, the bad guy had just been shooting at the police officers. And, and, you
00:41:19.680
know, so when you, when you look at them all, there's only a couple. And, and, and then, so
00:41:24.380
would you look at these numbers, you say, okay, you know, blacks are, you know, it's, it's like,
00:41:28.060
it's like a third or whatever the number is I've written about the exact numbers of all the
00:41:32.280
unarmed shootings. But then you, but then you look at like, like the black community's involvement in
00:41:36.720
crime, right? Like 54% of homicides, 54% of robberies, et cetera, et cetera. Once you account
00:41:43.080
for that, and, you know, as, as a, as a scientist yourself, you know, you look, you look at confounding
00:41:48.260
variables, right? And once you account for the, their left, their participation in criminality,
00:41:53.400
the disparity goes away completely. In fact, it actually reverses in a lot of, a lot of cases.
00:41:58.340
And there's been a bunch of studies about this, you know, from Roland Fryer.
00:42:02.180
I was just going to say, I was going to ask you if you're familiar with Roland Fryer's work. Yes.
00:42:06.180
Yeah. And there's a, there's a dozen of these done by different universities and they all show
00:42:09.920
the same thing. And then there's all these other like societal and sociological variables, like
00:42:15.840
father, the percentage of fatherless homes, poverty, you know, like, like almost all crime is done by
00:42:21.100
young men. Right. And the black population is significantly younger than the white population.
00:42:25.840
So just that one fact alone would mean there'd be a higher level of criminality. It's nothing to do
00:42:29.980
with race, obviously, right. It has to do with age and young men and testosterone. And so when you,
00:42:34.080
when you look at all that, it goes away completely. So I just, I just got, you know, I did, I did a lot
00:42:38.260
of media about it, you know, over a couple of times, but it's not going away and every election
00:42:42.000
cycle, it comes back and we'll probably get more of it, you know, this year leading into the U S
00:42:45.720
elections. But it's, but in a sense, what you just said, well, not in a sense, in an exact sense,
00:42:50.180
it speaks to my earlier point about most people are unwilling to be swayed by facts. Right. So when you
00:42:57.360
said that the same faulty narrative keeps coming up, it suggests that you are impervious to this
00:43:04.800
little pesky thing called data and analysis, right? Because I can't get rid of the narrative.
00:43:10.140
Right. So I'll give you, I'll give you a great example of that. So I still receive, you know,
00:43:16.400
pretty much almost every day, some thing from the university about how to be a better ally to women,
00:43:22.880
as if women in North American universities are indistinguishable from little girls trying to
00:43:30.760
go to school in Waziristan. That's the narrative, right? And so I had once shared the data from the
00:43:37.500
U S government. Okay. You ready for this, Jeff? Four levels of educational attainment, associate's
00:43:44.180
degree. So half a bachelor's bachelor's degree, master's degree, and doctoral degree. So four levels
00:43:49.940
of educational attainment broken up by five racial categories, you know, Hispanic, indigenous,
00:43:57.500
whatever, white, so on. So basically the matrix is four by five, four levels of attainment by five
00:44:04.100
races. And in every single one of those cells, you can calculate the ratio of male to female in that
00:44:11.240
cell. So I can go black associate's degree. Is it more men and women? Indigenous doctoral degree? Is it
00:44:18.280
more men and women? So out of 20 cells, Jeff, guess how many cells women outnumber men? 20.
00:44:28.040
Yes, sir. We have a winner, Jeopardy champion. So the narrative is women need constant allyship
00:44:39.380
because we live in Waziristan. The data could not have been doctored to be the exact opposite of the
00:44:48.060
narrative, but no amount of data that I show you alters the fact that I receive emails saying we need
00:44:55.620
to be, by the way, my dean is a woman. My departmental chair is a woman. My associate dean of research is a
00:45:02.880
woman, but I need to find ways if I apply for a grant to argue how I'm going to be a better ally
00:45:09.200
for women in universities. Yeah. I mean, it's because it's narrative, right? And not conclusion
00:45:17.160
based on analysis of facts. And, you know, my master's is in criminal justice and I have a
00:45:22.280
statistical research focus and it's just basic like 101 research and statistics. And you have to
00:45:30.040
look at that, but the narrative survives because the narrative is the point. And so, you know, it's
00:45:34.180
not the average person who's like listening to a podcast or hear something and then repeats it,
00:45:39.640
right? Because that's what they heard on the news. But the people who are actually like propagating
00:45:43.260
these lies have a political agenda and they're not shy about talking about it. You know, like it's
00:45:50.100
interesting that everything from like a disparity in like gender with wages to climate change has the
00:45:57.500
same solution and the capitalism, you know, like. Yeah. But it's interesting because I've often thought
00:46:06.180
about so, but why is it that this reality exists? So I think it's a it's a couple of factors. Number
00:46:11.240
one, most people regrettably are cognitive misers, which is a fancy way of saying they're intellectually
00:46:16.520
lazy. If Barack Obama, peace be upon him, or George Bush say that Islam is peace, then it's a lot easier
00:46:25.640
for me to say, oh, well, my president said Islam is peace, therefore Islam is peace. They're actually
00:46:30.400
going through the hard work of putting together the evidence to either support the fact that Islam
00:46:36.540
or peace is peaceful or not. It's too effortful. So I want to use some kind of simplifying heuristic
00:46:41.600
to make sense of the world. So number one, people are cognitive misers. Number two, we are a storytelling
00:46:48.220
animal. We love stories, right? That's why literature, that's why that's why fiction works,
00:46:53.680
right? Because because our big brain is is is fed by powerful literary narratives. So if you concoct a
00:47:03.620
story for me, that's going to be a lot better than if Jeff Higgins comes with all of his statistical
00:47:10.320
analyses. I don't give a shit about reality and truth. Tell me a story that sticks. And that's the
00:47:16.980
problem. What do you think? No, I completely agree. And it's it's it is it is so much easier.
00:47:23.360
And it's it's also there's social pressure, right? So if you have like, basically, a communist cadre,
00:47:29.560
and that's what it is, right? Intellectual communist cadre who are pushing, pushing pure socialism across
00:47:36.160
the West who hate everything about like America and other Western powers who who want to replace this
00:47:41.600
and they're, they're, they're using race, they're, they're, they're using dissension. I mean, these
00:47:46.120
are Marxist 101 tools that they're using to try to tear down institutions so that they can replace it
00:47:51.300
with something else. And don't trust me, ask them because they say all openly all the time, you know,
00:47:57.320
so you just have to believe them. But so that they create they craft these narratives, and they and
00:48:02.360
they spark something in us, right? If the idea of like a police officer, somebody that we have to trust
00:48:07.260
to protect us is committing like a racist crime. What's more horrific than that? Like, I mean,
00:48:12.820
that that makes me ill, right? And I would spend 25 years along, it makes us all like sickened by that.
00:48:17.620
So I think there's this natural inclination to want to stand up or stand up for the underdog or,
00:48:23.460
but the problem is, it's not happening. Or when it happens, you actually take away from when it
00:48:28.580
actually happens, right? Because there are racist incidents, there are bad cops, and we all need to go
00:48:32.500
after them. But when you when every time there's a shooting, you call the cop a racist,
00:48:36.680
even when there's not a single piece of evidence or any inclination to believe that that that racism
00:48:41.400
had something to do with it, what you what you do is you make people question all of it, you know,
00:48:46.340
and what and I've been writing about this for years and years and years. And what you're seeing now is
00:48:50.800
what happened like Miami in the 80s, they tried to like diversify. So they lowered standards, and they
00:48:56.100
made, they made the racial makeup of their police department, the goal, which, by the way, is fine,
00:49:02.880
because you know, there's different cultures. And it's great if you can have cops from all these
00:49:05.820
different cultures, and they can they can help with sensitivities, and they can they can help with
00:49:09.380
communication and all this. But when you drop like a meritocracy in place of that, you cause huge
00:49:15.400
problems. And what I predicted, like, it's got to be like, like, six, seven years ago now, is you're
00:49:20.560
having people who don't want to get into law enforcement, right? Like, why would you in the
00:49:24.160
United States want to be a cop right now? Like, why would you you might want to protect your community,
00:49:27.520
you might want to do good. But there's a good chance you would do your job exactly as trained and get
00:49:32.260
indicted for doing it. So who would want to do that? Plus, you're getting demonized in the press
00:49:36.820
and call these horrible things. So we are seeing it's already happening. And it doesn't happen
00:49:40.620
overnight, right? The cops that are there now are retiring in mass, and in fewer good candidates are
00:49:47.140
coming in. So what you're going to end up with is a lowering of the quality of candidates. And when
00:49:51.560
that happens, the people who are going to suffer are the people are who are in impoverished
00:49:55.100
neighborhoods with higher crime rates. Exactly. Very people we say we're protecting by demonizing the
00:49:59.920
cops who weren't doing anything wrong. And by the way, sometimes they were right there. They're
00:50:03.880
definitely departments that were doing a lot of bad things, and we should focus on them. But I'm
00:50:07.340
just talking in general, you know, and now you're actually hurting the very people you claimed you
00:50:11.460
were going to help. If that was your goal, but if your goal was to tear down the police and the
00:50:16.460
institutions, so that you could replace it with a utopian vision of the world that you have,
00:50:20.860
then you don't care. And that's what's happening at the top.
00:50:24.280
As you were talking about sort of corrupt officers, I thought of the movie,
00:50:29.540
I'm sure you've seen it by Al Pacino, Serpico. Do you remember that movie from way back in the
00:50:35.220
70s? Yeah. So that was, that was one of my early exposures as a young kid to Al Pacino. And then he
00:50:41.400
became one of my favorite actors. Okay, let's talk about with the time that we have left your book
00:50:46.800
that's coming out on February 29. Actually, the day that your book comes out is the day that I will be
00:50:52.280
speaking about all of these parasitic ideas at Arizona State University. The reason why I know that is
00:50:57.840
because it's a leap year, February 29. Tell us about your latest book, The Forever Game,
00:51:02.640
if I remember correctly, right? Right. So The Forever Game deals with artificial intelligence.
00:51:07.100
I actually, I had a friend of mine, who's the CEO of an AI company years ago. And he told me that
00:51:12.440
another CEO of another AI company was going to friends and family and offering to download their
00:51:18.260
consciousness, like as like a beta program. And I'm like, wait, what was that? You know,
00:51:22.300
it's, you know, we're really at this inflection point with AI, and we're seeing it all over the
00:51:27.220
place. And so it's, it's kind of a timely book, but all my books kind of have a theme, you know,
00:51:31.660
and, and this one, it's really the nature of artificial intelligence and what it says about
00:51:36.620
humanity and what it what it means to be human. So I have a special agent, Adam Locke, who quits DEA
00:51:43.220
because his girlfriend is terminally ill. So he can take care of her and he joins his brother's AI
00:51:47.280
company, then his brother's dies under suspicious circumstances. And in Adam learns that this
00:51:53.140
lifesaving technology can be deadly, you know, so the whole the whole thing deals with like,
00:51:57.760
what are the types of AI that people are experimenting with now? And what does that mean?
00:52:01.460
I mean, it's, listen, it's fantastic stuff, right? When you can have like nanobots that go into your
00:52:05.920
bloodstream and find cancer and cure things. It's amazing. But like what it means, like, actually,
00:52:11.800
when you're downloading, okay, so this is real. So this is real. A couple years ago, this is like
00:52:15.320
five years ago. Now, I saw a I read an article about a lab that was doing like some kind of high
00:52:21.980
density MRI, some type of MRI. And they were they were watching the synaptic connections when somebody
00:52:27.720
was having a memory, they were able to recreate that in the next room in a blind study in a blind.
00:52:33.340
Wow. Fascinating, right? So what does that mean? You know, what does that mean when you can download
00:52:39.240
your thoughts and your memories? And, and as AI gets to that, you know, fourth or fifth generation,
00:52:45.160
right, that that that next level of AI, where it's sentient, or that it's that it surpasses human
00:52:51.340
ability? What does that look like for us? So anyhow, that's what the book's about. I mean, it's I say all
00:52:56.400
that it's it's a thriller. So my books are they're fast paced, they're thrillers, they're fun, you know,
00:53:00.840
but having these underlying themes, I think is always interesting.
00:53:03.960
So as you were mentioning that study, I think, and I'm wondering if it's the same study that I'm
00:53:09.540
thinking of, there's a study, if I'm not mistaken, by a group of UCLA, or at least the lead author
00:53:14.620
might have been at UCLA and neuroscience group, where not, I don't think it was memories. But it was,
00:53:21.160
let's say there are eight different types of thoughts that you could have, I'd like to touch my
00:53:27.840
computer or whatever. Since each of those have a different neuronal activation pattern,
00:53:33.960
they were able to then guess what the thought was based on the neuronal signature at higher level
00:53:43.400
than chance. So it's exactly it's a very similar idea to what you're talking about. So it's,
00:53:46.860
it's unbelievable. Now, if one of your movies, not one of your movies, one of your books were turned
00:53:53.240
into a movie, and one of the characters was an incredibly good looking wise guy, can I immediately
00:54:02.180
assume that I would be the guy who would be playing that role?
00:54:07.300
Thank you very much. That's why you were the big DEA agent, you understand reality.
00:54:13.280
Hey, Jeff, any other project? I know you've got a looming one coming up on February 29. So I don't
00:54:18.340
want to look beyond that. But are there other projects, whether they be authoring or other things
00:54:23.500
that you're working on that you'd like to take this opportunity to promote?
00:54:27.340
Oh, yeah. Well, thanks. Thanks for that question. Yeah, I have another book called
00:54:31.260
the Havana syndrome. That's the working title. Oh, is that the the the the wave stuff that the
00:54:37.080
mysterious? Okay, yeah, it's US diplomats all over the world. And then other nationalities,
00:54:42.240
right? Canadians as well, who've succumbed to something right, that's called the Havana syndrome.
00:54:48.640
And a couple years ago, I read the CIA put out a report and said that these are anomalous health
00:54:53.380
incidents, right? And so they're blaming a psychogenic effects. And yet, that can't possibly
00:55:00.700
be true. And I actually I've actually interviewed people who were who were part of this or who were
00:55:06.500
who suffered from this had brain injury from it. But just to give you one example, there was a there
00:55:10.380
was a national security officer, national security advisor in I think it was across the across the
00:55:18.300
river in DC. And she was stricken by the Savannah syndrome, right? Like with all you know, the loss
00:55:24.040
of balance and the sound in the ears and all that there's like a whole host of symptoms. And people
00:55:28.700
like Oh, psychogenic causes, but her dog had a seizure at the same time. So unless you feel like
00:55:35.380
her dog is is is watching television and open to suggestion, or he's just mimicking her behavior.
00:55:40.340
That's right. Okay, yes, that's actually a much better explanation than what I read in the CIA report.
00:55:46.960
Right. So you know, so anyhow, that's, that's what that book's about. It's an international
00:55:50.480
thriller. And it goes to places like Estonia and Ukraine and places that I did operations in and
00:55:56.500
the Dominican Republic. And, and so it's, it's, I think that's a lot of fun. That's coming out with
00:56:00.740
Severn River publishing in 2025. And then I have another one a called shaking, which is like a pure mystery
00:56:07.340
takes place in a little town of Harvard, Massachusetts, where I grew up. And that's
00:56:10.700
coming out in the summer of 2025 with a running wild press. Very cool. So are most of your books
00:56:16.840
in one way or another related to, you know, your history in that, you know, most people write about
00:56:24.100
what they know about. And so is that what's happening in your case? Or, or do you, do you try to traverse
00:56:29.460
landscapes that are otherwise completely unfamiliar to you? Well, doing what you're suggesting would make
00:56:35.160
a lot more sense for branding, but they're all thrillers, right? So they're all mystery thrillers.
00:56:39.820
But my first book, Furious is psychological suspense. And it's a woman who's lost a child and her husband
00:56:45.140
takes her across the Indian ocean to get her away from everything. And while bad things happen, because
00:56:49.500
it's a thriller, you know, the second one unseen is about, it's about the Muslim brotherhood and an actual
00:56:56.720
real life terror. A topic that your wife, I believe knows a bit about. A bit. She's probably the world's
00:57:02.820
leading expert on that. By the way, her book, The Secret Apparatus is required reading. If you're
00:57:08.040
interested in terrorism, you have to read that book. It's the only book like it. And she's the
00:57:13.680
only one who had that information. She's studied this stuff for decades and decades. And, you know,
00:57:18.220
DHS is reading it now. And it's, she's all over the world. She's getting, she's in academic libraries
00:57:23.780
all over the place, but read that book. I really recommend it. That's fantastic. Well, you rarely do you
00:57:29.340
have a marriage where both partners are the epitome of honey badgers. You are both
00:57:35.260
certified as honey badgers. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jeff. Stay in touch. And as I
00:57:41.600
said, offline, if we, if I ever make it, I'm sure I'll make it to the Washington area. I look forward
00:57:47.700
to meeting you both in person. Thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you. It's been,
00:57:51.640
it's been a real pleasure. Keep up the good work. Thank you, sir.