The Cost of Telling the Truth | John Kiriakou | Ep. 446
Release Date: 05/04/2026
Cruise Ships, Cover-Ups, and Cow Killers | Negligent Discharge Friday | 5.8.2026
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Michael and I get into it on this one. Hantavirus headlines, the Doomsday Clock, wind turbines, the Epstein note, and a guy on YouTube paying his bills by getting stung by bugs. I open by confidently passing along bad medical advice from two articles I read. Michael fact-checks me in real time. We agree it's a good exercise in why you should slow down before you repeat anything. From there we get into what Hantavirus actually is, why this isn't going to be another lockdown, and why I think people would push back hard if it were. The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds. Not 90. Not 88. Two old guys...
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The Cost of Telling the Truth | John Kiriakou | Ep. 446
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John Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA. He started as an analyst, went operational, and eventually ran counterterrorism work in Pakistan that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. He was the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the agency was waterboarding prisoners. For that, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sent him to federal prison for 23 months. He lost his pension. He lost his career. Most of his kids stopped speaking to him. Today he writes books, hosts a podcast, and teaches a course on the history of...
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Learning To Suffer Well | Full Auto Friday | 5.01.2026
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Four questions this week. The kind that don't have clean answers. A guy whose father murdered his mother is asking how to get back to who he was before. He's not. A 28-year-old still living at home is watching his mom's cancer come back and trying to figure out how to spend the time he has left. A man in his sixties wants to know how to bring up suicide with three friends he's had for 40 years before it's too late. A 31-year-old in his first long-term relationship doesn't feel anything for the woman he's dating but knows everyone around him likes her. I talk about why the people you see online...
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Bonus Episode - Drownproof Chapter 1 - Be the Author of your Life, not the Victim of it
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Today's "episode" is the audiobook first chapter of my book: Drownproof. Thank you to everyone who helped make the launch such a tremendous success. Hitting all of the "Best Seller" lists, to include the NYT, was quite frankly, incredibly humbling. You all made that happen, not me. For those of you who have read or listened to it already, well, clearly today's episode is not going to be exciting for you! For those that haven't, this chapter is about a very formative experience in my young life that changed how I viewed my self in the world. That change in mindset altered the trajectory of my...
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Working for Kanye, Building "Items" for Delta Force | Justin Klahn | Ep. 445
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Justin Klahn is hard to put in a box. Twenty years inside Nike Innovation. Years embedded with JSOC units building gear that had to actually work. Time consulting with three-letter agencies, DARPA, and the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory. A run working directly for Kanye West. He calls himself a problem solver, and the resume backs it up. His new book is Innovator's Handbook. We open on the divorce conversation, the kind of failure neither of us wished for, and what it takes to show up for a partner the second time around. From there it gets wide. The competition mindset that separates...
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Bladder Control and Geopolitics | Negligent Discharge Friday | 4.24.2026
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Michael, my dad, and me. Three generations arguing in one room. That's the format today. My dad watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon live at twenty-two years old. He remembers the Iranian hostage crisis when it was happening, not when it was a movie. That perspective matters when we get into where we are now — the rhetoric coming out of the White House, the ceasefire that may or may not hold, a war nobody has explained the objective of. We talked about the leaders we don't seem to produce anymore. Kennedy to the moon in ten years. Hungary voting out a hard-right prime minister by historic...
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How Fast and Furious Buried an FBI Agent | John Shipley | Ep. 444
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John Shipley spent fourteen years carrying an FBI badge. Army aviator first — commissioned by his own father, a retired Vietnam-era lieutenant colonel — until a spinal cord injury at Walter Reed ended his flying career. He walked into Quantico in 1996, drew El Paso, and spent the next decade working narcotics and surveillance on the Mexican border. SWAT. Sniper. Bodyguard details for the FBI Director and the Attorney General. A father of two adopted kids. The kind of agent who refused a $27 million bribe because he didn't want the money — he wanted to keep his oath. And then the...
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Windshield, Not the Rearview Mirror | Full Auto Friday | 4.17.2026
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Week one of the book being out in the world, and I still don't have the vocabulary for the support. Thank you. Genuinely. If you read it, an honest Amazon review costs nothing and helps more than you'd think. Then we get into the questions. A 25-year-old lawyer writes in about imposter syndrome and getting put on a pedestal for a job he doesn't feel qualified for yet. My take: keep the imposter syndrome. Just find a response that doesn't escalate or deescalate, and move the conversation to them. Next one hits harder. A Marine turned med student on the "vet bro" archetype, the guy in...
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Giving It All Back Before the Clock Runs Out | John Dudley | Ep. 443
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John Dudley is a decorated professional archer, two-time IBO National Champion, World Field Championship medalist, and the founder of Nock On Archery. He's spent close to 30 years inside the archery industry — competing at the highest levels across multiple continents, working with elite manufacturers, coaching everyone from beginners to national team athletes, and building one of the most comprehensive free archery education platforms on the internet through his School of Nock. He's also the host of the Nock On Podcast and turns 50 this June. This conversation covers a lot of ground. We get...
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350 Ops, 200 Bites, and the Future of Healing | Bill Clark & Dr. Bob Harmon | Ep. 442
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Bill Clark is a former DEVGRU military working dog handler — one of the first brought into the program when it launched around 2002. He grew up in chaos. His father was a Vietnam-era Marine door gunner. His mother married five times. His stepfathers were abusive. He played Division I football, joined the Marines, switched to the Navy for a dog handler slot, and ended up spending 13 years at the command across 13 deployments. He ran over 350 operations and logged more than 200 bites. He survived late-stage colon cancer at 37 — linked to battlefield exposures — and now leads executive...
info_outlineJohn Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA. He started as an analyst, went operational, and eventually ran counterterrorism work in Pakistan that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. He was the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the agency was waterboarding prisoners. For that, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sent him to federal prison for 23 months. He lost his pension. He lost his career. Most of his kids stopped speaking to him. Today he writes books, hosts a podcast, and teaches a course on the history of terrorism.
We get into how the agency really works. Recruiting spies. Breaking into a house in a foreign country to plant a bug. The mentor who told him to walk up to a target's front door and sell him out to his face. Then we get into the part nobody at Langley wants to talk about. Torture. Rendition. The innocent people who got grabbed off planes and buses and never got their lives back.
We also cover Section 702, the Patriot Act, Iran, Iraq, and why no agency ever gives the power back.
Enjoy.
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