Chelsea Manning - H3 Podcast #252

three two what's up everybody it's hp podcast friday june 10th we have a special episode here today on this after dark well of course joined by my wife ela who we love so well thank you and uh a distinguished guest is with us here today chelsea manning thank you for joining us thank you i'm very you know very interested in your story and everything you've done and i look forward to having a uh talking about a lot of stuff with you so thanks for being here nice thanks um is it true so let me just lay some ground work here if if there's anybody who doesn't know who you are who's watching basically you are a united states government whistleblower you've blew the whistle on the military the government and it was the biggest leak of military documents ever right almost a million documents or over a million documents it was 750 000 750 000 yeah yeah and well it was you know a huge story all through i mean it still is right but like the past decades it's been uh very present and uh yeah media yeah it's gotten a little bit of attention you faced the wrath of of two presidents maybe more so one than the other yeah two two presidents technically three because one was vice president at the time so but trump obviously has not had kind things to say about you trump hasn't had kind things to say about me now or anyone really i mean yeah he does this a lot of government people hillary even hates his own kids don't feel too bad yeah i don't really care i don't care and pardoned by obama after seven years well communicated commuted by oh by obama after seven years yeah and there's just so much to talk about i really want to uh really want to start from the beginning but actually before i get started from the beginning it is friday so we have to say hello to uh this is gabe he's known as white claw gabe he calls in every friday yep he's a local celebrity around here gabe how's it going it's great [ __ ] it's friday baby [Music] i'm chugging a soda oh you got a root beer no white claws yet bart's the best [ __ ] okay the weekend [ __ ] let's [ __ ] go oh he loves friday he loves the weekend who doesn't what's going on with the barks rooper you're not oh [ __ ] he's chugging it oh my god oh we got a root beer chug from gabe no way dude you are going to be so [ __ ] up this friday he's dripping oh my god he's got to get the drips in wow how was that no no no no no no no games don't do it oh my god someone handed gabe another barks root beer oh he's struggling from off screen who is that mysterious yeah someone's miss gabe is just wow he is going off this friday two barks root beer chugs man that is legendary that counts yeah that one's clean clean you know people talk about the sprite challenge what is that gabe just is there a third one yeah don't do it not worth it gabe don't do a third one oh wow wow okay oh my god [ __ ] baby how's your stomach feeling after that much better [ __ ] baby oh [Laughter] all right gabe well you have a great weekend okay i gotta talk to my guest but thanks for checking in thank you that was quite a show [ __ ] baby all right you have a great weekend love you dude [ __ ] gabe uh white clock gave everyone that was an unexpected treat chugging two barks root beers first one didn't count that's why because there was a drip yeah that they had to do a mull again yeah and you are you are strict i am strong so it's put you know it's like in the military yeah yeah yeah you get you get to into the 41 club where you don't you know don't pass your airborne test because you only reach 42 you're supposed to reach 42 as a minimum yeah and then the the instructor whoever is measuring you just goes 41 41. 41. doesn't count military [ __ ] well let's talk let's start from the beginning okay so chelsea you were where were you born uh so i was born in uh mercy hospital in oklahoma city oklahoma if you want to get technical sure i was born in the midwest yeah i grew up mostly in the midwest until i was about 11 or 12. um i think it was 11 whenever i moved out with my mother because my so i have a my father is american he was in the navy and he he lived out in the uk um on his navy tour uh there and married my mother came back they came back to the states uh she got naturalized here um lived here for uh live lived here until i was basically born with my sister uh and uh yeah basically spent the first 11 or 12 years of my life living with her and my sister and my father until my parents divorced my sister being 11 years older moved out of the house and i moved my mother gained custody of me and i moved out in the uk uh and went to school and secondary school in southwest wales so you're okay so so your your dad is english or half no no my mother my mother's my mother's wife okay so you moved out to to the uk i did interesting and then and then it came back to the states after um after a few years i came back and moved in with my father again you're a dual citizen uh i am yes okay very cool yeah that used to get you into eu it doesn't anymore no it doesn't get yeah and that i i probably such a bird i apparently gotta apply for irish citizenship now oh that will that'll get you in that'll get me around a little a little curveball thrown so how was so basically what was it like kind of your your dad was a military man that's kind of interesting because obviously you ended up going into the military he was navy he was a navy guy you were an army guy yeah there's a rivalry there yeah i mean you know basically basically after after um after my parent after i moved back with my father um he remarried and uh i was uh i was a little uh a little different as a as a kid right because i was like living as living as this sort of this uh this like gender non-conforming you know uh twinkish boy boy mode kind of tran you know like i was i like i i didn't really know that i was trans like i kind of knew something was going on but i was just like you know goth rebellious or whatever um she did not like me and so uh after i turned 18 and he was no longer uh liable you know to legally to hold me she basically told him to kick me out of the house and i lived uh houseless in basically the midwest and landed in chicago for almost a year is your dad kind of a traditional guy like were they accepting of the whole i think gender confusion i think i think my father's not so much um uh on the on the uh i would say that my father uh wasn't homophobic but he was definitely like on the transphobic spectrum so just probably like but you know he's also like this individualist guy who's just like ah right you know like uh like you know like a macho yeah he's just like uh very uh very much your sort of typical like uh white upper middle class yeah western being trans is just like such a foreign concept yeah probably so you know i wasn't exactly accepted but you know i um i i did try you know so my i moved in with my aunt uh in maryland for uh you know after after being houseless in chicago which i just want to mention real fast you know being out in l.a it's just like the house well yeah i'm homeless that sounds really rough here and chicago is a cold [ __ ] like la's like nice you know but chicago has brutal brutal yeah yeah so you're you're um your stepmom was she what was the issue was it like a transphobic or homophobic yeah i think so i mean she was definitely homophobic um traditional like christian oh very much so okay um although the irony is that they divorced like a couple years later oh she's going to help yeah i know right see you in hell yeah so you know uh so yeah basically um you know didn't have a lot of family support uh you know as it was coming out um but i moved in with my aunt uh my my father's uh my father's sister uh in maryland and uh while i was there i was you know sort of juggling three jobs trying to pay for bills you know trying to find my own place uh and uh and you know it was like summer summer 2006 uh into like summer 2007 so about this year time frame that i was working at starbucks i was working at i worked at abercrombie and [ __ ] wow oh i um i was in college college too like so basically it was like 100 hour a week 100 hour weeks of just doing constant stuff and this churn and while this is all going on the iraq war is like the main thing like like the main like it's the dinner table discussion it's the conversation that everybody's having you know they had the the household names of george w bush donald rumsfeld um then robert gates you know and the surge sort of all of this stuff happening in the background um while i'm also just sort of like struggling to figure out who i am where i fit in the world how i you know where where do i go where do i land essentially um in you know going uh going forward with my life and you know fitting in and uh and i started wreaking i was trying to reconnect with my father in this time and he kept on pushing me to go you know into the uh going to the navy or the air force i see and of course me being a rebellious uh pain in the ass uh you know kid i i enlisted in the army uh and i also knew that you know this troop surge was going on so the army was where you know people were needed so i enlisted in the army so actually before i get too deep into that i want to go back to so you were living in chicago you were homeless in chicago yes and for how long did you live in chicago um i'm i've been i haven't really done the math on it but you know several months so and were you living on the street like streaming uh i had i borrowed uh my father's pickup truck okay so i was in a nissan i was in a red 1992 nissan hard body pickup and was it like a winter thing or a summer thankfully the winter hadn't hit but there were cold nights yeah yeah but the worst was the hot days right in that time frame so what did you do kind of what were you doing during that time you were you ran kind of got kicked out of your house by your stepmom yeah and then why did you decide to go to chicago um well i've it felt the safest um because i tried a couple different cities um i had been i had dealt with sort of tout like small town sheriffs tulsa police department you know st louis police department i dealt with sort of like being a houseless person not being able to find a place to sleep uh and basically being harassed by cops all the time so when you say safest you mean that like chicago has the most i wasn't even yeah they didn't they didn't [ __ ] with me like i could sleep somewhere and you know i could sleep in my truck and not be bothered for most nights i see i see um and so after living there for a couple months you basically i i do want to say what i was doing uh i i had a job at the guitar center okay do you play i was at the i was in pro audio so i was that's my dj hell yeah dude my uh my one of my side gigs is uh djing oh right so are you are you getting back into djing at all the people are wondering yeah i uh i've i got my uh i got my xdj so um and i'm working on my set so at some point going to surprise someone somewhere so when you dj are you mixing new things are you just playing i'm sticking to i'm sticking to a playlist right now um but uh it's not gonna be completely pre-programmed but you know like i'm i'm playing around with sort of um you know doing live production um pads and additional like things with with uh with synthesizers that i can attach to it you know just sort of mix it up and do sort of bootlegs but interesting that was what i did in like mid or you know later that uh when i was living the whenever i was living in um maryland uh i went and i did the dc club scene and you know played the oh play a couple sets mostly like mostly to like university of maryland and georgetown students that's a that's not a bad gig though they pay you oh yeah i got paid but you know it wasn't enough to like pay the bills yeah it was a semi-professional best so when you're living in chicago how do you like shower and kind of just take care of yourself and all that kind of stuff if you're living out of your car truck stop truck stops yeah because i had a truck so i'd spend an enormous amount of gas money driving out to a truck stop using a truck stop uh like shower like uh what is it the flying j they usually have showers or they had them back then so they still do dan dan dan you showered at the flying j on a road trip or two yeah uh that's interesting i've never i didn't even know they had showers at trucks yeah either do you pay or is it just open it should uh if i recall being open so um i'm not i mean they have a private stall it's yeah is it kind of shady like it's like a pool wow that's very progressive for this country yeah well you know i'm surprised it wasn't the best but it was certainly it was you know it was certainly uh the ability to have some amount of hygiene yeah that's good or or you know uh the other thing was just sort of like uh and i talked about more more about this in the my book sort of survival strategies in terms of city like you know surviving you know finding food this is what apparently it looks like that's that looks nice damn that's i don't remember looking nice one right i don't remember that looking like yeah that looks like a nice gym that's that's great how could you keep it that clean out of public truck stop there's no way it's a tiny towel well i guess it's a makeshif it's one it's in between let's let's go so anyway so okay so you're there so you're living in uh chicago so what makes you decide you're gonna move to maryland so my aunt tracked me down i don't know how um interesting you've been trying to try to work out work out exactly what happened but my aunt your dad's uh sister dad's sister who lives in this you know she says it's a oh she says it's a nice house and it's an okay house but it's a beautiful house and it's a it's a lovely house in maryland good for her yeah um and so yeah so she had a bit of space for me and i crashed there how did she track you down though i don't know uh you know there's been a just when we were sort of doing research for the book you know it was uh we were trying to figure out piece of pieces together because i just remember like on my phone being on my phone one day because i had things that i had were a cell phone i had a laptop i had uh and i could do wi-fi at some places and i had and i had my truck so um you know and i and i tried to get a like a like a post office box situation as well and uh so i was you know trying to establish myself i was actually looking for looking to get an apartment in uh like like um northern chicago uh you know the i'm a cubs fan yeah i'm sticking to northern chicago um but yeah i wanted to stay i wanted to sort of settle down there and my aunt called me and just rang me on the phone and i was just like she said hey come live with me yeah i don't have money and she's like well i'll send you money and she sent me enough gas money that's very sweet yeah lifesaver was she close were you close with her before absolutely yeah that's sweet god bless god bless you yeah man incredible is an incredible and very generous person wow that's touching that's really nice to hear yeah so you moved down into maryland with your with your aunt and then how long are you living there for uh almost a year um before i enlist in the military so what my aunt was not happy about right is she kind of more liberal version of like your dad yeah more progressive hates the military yeah she was a she was a john edwards uh like supporter and then uh john kerry supporter uh and then uh obama like uh i think she was clinton and then obama supporter in 2008 so liberal down the line yeah she's definitely very you know centrist democratic got it is your dad kind of a trump guy is that what where his politics i don't know i haven't talked to my dad in over a decade okay i don't know okay interesting uh i think the last time i spoke to my dad was in 2010 so that's interesting i was curious how he was i don't know i let my uh my sister is the buffer okay okay well we'll get we'll get to that we have a long way to cover yeah so you live with your aunt you were still in touch with your dad at the time iraq's going on and said now you said i wanted to join the army because that's where they needed people were were you fulfilling some kind of patriotic duty i think so i you know um i didn't have strong political i didn't have a lot of political underpinning um at that age uh i i often like to joke that uh in 2007 my politics consisted of uh leave brittany alone okay and they and you know what's interesting about the league brittany uh as well they were right you guys were right we all made fun of you and you guys were right god damn it yeah so that was the extent of my politics in 2007. how old were you when you enlisted in there i was 18. i think it was no it's 19. it was 19. because i was 2007. so was it kind of just the typical military trap where you're like i don't know what to do and the military sounds like a good place to go yeah i think so um yeah you know uh and and you know the uh it was everywhere like you know the ads were constant uh the army strong yeah it was really attractive for somebody sort of you know needing to find you know because like i felt lost at you know at 19 years old i had been houseless um i was struggling with all these different things um and i just really didn't have didn't really have a sense of like where i fit in the world and and then you know i was like struggling with being i i was i figured out by the time i was like 19 though that you know like hey like maybe i need to like see hormones or get some kind of you know interesting uh therapy or something like that and uh and you know my father was just pushing me to man up like and i did you know i did at that age still want to like get my you know get my family's favor back you know so so by the time you enlisted were you kind of did you you were somewhat aware that you were trans i i i i knew i was gay because i was definitely you were living as a guest yeah i was uh i was in the dc uh i was in the chicago and then the dc gay scene uh were you closeted though to your family at that time or you were out uh i mean i didn't exactly come out but uh i mean it wasn't hiding it you know yeah yeah me coming home with like a rainbow belt okay on fried weekend got it yeah okay so enrolling in the military were you somewhat afraid because you're living as a gay man and you think you might be trans were you afraid of what it would be like to live in the military with that identity no no i i had no idea what the real consequences of that i see i see you know uh i you know so i went to basic training and uh enlisted as an analyst so i became an intelligence analyst and i worked in that uh sort of you know it's funny um i became uh i became an intelligence analyst because i didn't want to get like because like i work with computers and i have a background i've always had a computer that was like seven years old that had like i've had this you know like rig in my apartment in my in my bedroom right my own computer which you know like out like being like seven or eight years old having a having a computer with internet access and it's like everything the mid 90s was just like you know something that most people didn't have access to um and uh and yeah so i've always you know i i have an affinity with computers and i've always worked with computers but actually i actually wanted to be a be in a role that was more like about geopolitics sort of thinking about things tactics strategy understanding of people um and uh sort of uh the the military has this phrase human terrain understanding the human terrain especially in counter-insurgency operations um and uh and that's what i wanted to do and i wanted to get into that and then the first thing i do whenever i finish training they hand me over this gigantic data science rig which is you know computer system and databases and i'm just like oh no why why were you like oh no because i was like i'm gonna get in trouble because you knew you were going to misuse the deck i mean well you can't help it right you know was it like a super computer at the time just like a super gnarly how was it it was it del alienware yeah you're saying yeah well so so you enlist you do how was boot camp for you i mean just right out the gate because how long i think basic training i had yeah i had nervous i had like some a nerve injury on my right arm and left foot um i talked about it more in the book uh you know there's the plug right there hey guys there's a book coming out for sure book is coming out something to look forward to towards the end of the year working on the title i think it's re i think it's readme i think that's going to be the title read me yeah it's a command yeah yeah it's also like it's an important thing because there's like a file in it's about double yeah uh but yeah like uh yeah so basically uh i you know i i was i was working with computers and doing data science and um and that was my role and that was what i did did they ask you what kind of role do you want or did it happen so you get to pick your military occupational specialty or mos before you enlist in the army not the same with other services i don't know if it's changed or anything but at the time the army was where you went to sign up and know the role that you were going to be put in that's interesting can you just sign up for whatever you want or do you do you have to take some aptitude test yeah i took an aptitude test and i slam dunked it apparently you're a smartie for the army i mean apparently like i i don't know i and i haven't looked at it but basically i was like i want to be i want to do this and like you have to pass this test i'm like okay like did i pass i'm like yes okay because i would assume that the analyst is one of the more probably yeah i remember i remember the only one that had i think that one of the ones that had more aptitude was like was like satellite communications federalist wow very specific yeah yeah but so the analyst basically is someone it's an it's a part of the intelligence branch right yeah it's the by definition yeah and you crunch basically data to we google we you google [ __ ] is that right well it's it's you know we do what google does which is just collect data and do analysis right so you get a bunch of data from the military and basically they say let me just do math oh it's math yeah it's math can you give me an example all right now we're getting into machine learning which is my specialty okay uh there is a number of different means and methods in uh in data science um one of which which was extremely popular at the time because this is this is before you know you had your uh you had your nvidia graphics card in your machine and you could do neural networks or anything kind of more advanced machine learning at the time you can use bayesian statistics which you know still requires a lot of number crunching and it it'll it uses a specific set of addition and addition instructions on something that is predictable and it allows you to take a historical data set and move it forward into the future and look at what's possible in the future through a certain amount of through a certain amount of time so but like what kind of stuff would you would you put in there or like it could be anything i mean you know uh if you know stock tips you want to put stock you know you want to put the stock market in into there that's how the early the earliest stock the stock market models were but i mean like in any rack what was like the most common thing that you would like how does that yeah i'm not yeah well i mean i can't get into the specific data but um generally it's you know it's people places locations times like you know like certain certain products you just try to find patterns yeah there's a pattern now pattern analysis okay okay i see but um you know and interesting now i do now i do this for a living still yeah they'll do the same thing it seems like so did you it sounds like you got an extensive education in the army is that uh accurate because it's well i mean school in the uk which helps yeah so you already had been to college um no i i essentially the the last two years of school in the uk sixth form are the equivalent to the first two years of u.s college education okay so yeah and then i had an a third year and then i had a third year so i don't have a degree but i have a lot of college credits got it so um you know and now i don't even don't need to bother yeah yeah yeah so you went to boot camp you sustained some kind of injuries uh yeah some kind of nerve injury i still don't know what it is this day i've had i've had i've had it looked at and whatever and um you know it didn't disqualify me from trying again so i just had issues with sort of the first few weeks of basic training they held me back for a few weeks okay um and then i waited until i healed up and got a good sign off good to go and i went back and no no no problems second how was the basic how was the boot camp for you uh i mean so long ago right um i think you know i mean obviously the first the first few weeks were tough because it was like i was like my my arm's not working i can't do a push-up right you know it's just like you know you can't do a push-up you're in basic training like that's kind of the point of face of training uh but yeah once i got but once i got and actually saw like a doctor was like yeah there's an issue here like we need to like look into it um then then then it was smooth sailing for me i basically fit in and did you find camaraderie there amongst the i did yeah yeah i did um i think i think one of the most fascinating things about sort of indoctrination to the military is um you know you get because i i wasn't from you know like my father was in the navy but like i didn't really know much about the military but once i got in once i was sort of brought into uh military culture and started to understand it i've always felt sort of um i've i find that in institutional environments now and this this goes with prison as well and jails and jails and being houseless as well i found that in in institutional environments i find that i bond with people very quickly and i sort of start to learn sort of the you know rules expectations roles that you you know that you sort of fit in um in these kinds of environments um you know sometimes harsh environments and yeah you know i find i make friends very quickly i've made connections very quickly i i develop trust and rapport with people very quickly so yeah i you know i felt throughout my time in the military i felt you know close to people i can't relate to that i did too yeah because i did the army in israel and um in boot camp i remember like getting really close group of friends yeah you're around you're on each other 12 14 hours a day and it's like people who maybe in outside of it you would never become friends but when you're put in that situation you kind of like develop that bond yeah it's a it's a bond it's hard to describe yeah like a you know sort of a camaraderie kinship i guess the reason i ask is because you were living as a gay man i wasn't sure how the army was accepting of that were you closeted at the time i was just kind of don't ask don't tell don't ask don't tell at this time um i mean i would say 2008 when i before before before i went over into iraq um in 2009 i would say that uh i've started started to become more aware of the idea that there might be a period of time in which there isn't a don't ask don't tell and which i don't have to hide this from my uh you know because it seems silly to like hide something that everybody everybody knew ever okay so it wasn't like it was not as serious in 2008 as it was in the 90s that was my sense and i and i was in a non-sort of combat role yeah it wasn't like i was i wasn't a dark kicker i was a number cruncher yeah so i i got the sense that um that i that i was pretty and you know and this is the intelligence field at at least in our unit we were 60 female so you know like this is a this is this is again oh is that infantry you know it's not ground pounder so most of your colleagues when you went to iraq and actually started doing the the analyzing were women yes it was uh it was it was it was primarily like women were the majority in my office um and so yeah i i got the sense that nobody cared well that's that's great but uh trans stuff was a different matter i started that and that started to kick in for me um while i was while i was deployed i was like you know because i was i was doing things like cross-dressing and you know trying to explore this uh new thing um quite a bit uh more and uh and that that was uh that was it that was a bit more difficult you couldn't get around that no one that one was not people were not understanding and i think that was where i started to feel more of frustration more sort of distance and more alienation i think during around that time it's funny you go well you know being being homosexuals more accepted understood and i think at the same time this issue of being trans was probably a really new conversation and i don't think people i think they've come a long way i think people there's like insane amounts of transphobia in the world that's disgusting yeah well you know like i often i have to remind people like in 2010 like nobody was talking about this stuff yeah exactly and then i came out of prison in 2017 and it's like the main issue that people want to talk about and now in 2022 like i just want people to shut up about it really please please leave us alone we do not do that we i mean you know like you know whatever they of course you know they they're like oh yeah you want to recruit people well guess what yeah i kind of do i'm like i'm coming for you oh yeah we're coming for you yeah we're coming we're coming for you we're gonna they're gonna yeah yeah guess what we are we'll see mailings i mean you know this goes back to hari milk you know like harvey milk you know like his his whole pitch you know running running for supervisor in san francisco was my name is harvey milk and i'm here to recruit you so uh yeah i'm here to recruit you there you go well it's a glamorous lifestyle and everybody loves you for being trans yeah it's hard yeah and you get you get to take you get to take these nice pretty pills yeah so okay so we're in boot camp things are going pretty good and then how long are you in boot camp and then you get get before you get deployed to iraq oh it wasn't so um i mean boot camp is a navy term okay it's a navy marine corps what would i what are you doing what is it uh it's basic training basic training basic training basic yeah um a little little terminology correction there for for the for the military graphics yes yes um but yeah like um but yeah so i actually spent uh about a year uh with my unit in uh in upstate new york fort drum new york um that was what i was attached to um and uh and i just did just to like watch the canadian border type stuff just make sure that you know canadians aren't invading they don't care they're damn it yeah so uh uh the our mission was uh homeland security i see a role for a year and then we went and uh we actually were actually we're actually supposed to go to afghanistan in 2000 uh december 2009 was we were originally slated to go to afghanistan but the obama administration shifted over a few units and moved things around to cause a surge in afghanistan uh go leading into 2010 and 2011 so this is a shift of resources from iraq which was drawing down and moving to afghanistan so we actually got bumped up on the sk on the calendar to i think september or october of 2009 and then we had our theater change so then we had all this work that i'd done for a year pre-deployment for afghanistan was thrown away and uh and it's like oh just kidding like you're going to iraq and you're going to iraq like in three months so how does that happen they're like hey just someone comes and they're like all right you have three months and we're going to arrest yeah this is this is big this is big thing in the military call or the army called the past chart it's like where the where the big divisions and brigade combat teams are and at least in the time this time frame and so it would you would see like the patches of the different units and the numbers and it would be like a different point to time where they were and it would be shifted over but yeah you you would check the past chart if you wanted to know when you were deploying it only certain people even knew like the time frame it was like you know it was the the troop movements tend to be you know uh secret though when you're in the army do you go back home every weekend or how does it work overseas not uh not at all that one year yeah i went i went on i went i went at home for the weekend i mean i lived i lived upstate new york which you know it was a drive drive down to maryland right it's not too far six hours so yeah i could do we we had for three or four day weekends we had weekend passes uh i on multiple occasions definitely violated the 75 mile rule you can't leave you can't go within 75 miles yeah you can't go you can't leave uh 75 miles of a base at least at fort drum uh in 2009 and uh and i did i went down to maryland for the weekend sometimes why is that just for army readiness yeah probably yeah yeah yeah i think i think it's 50 i think it's typically 50 50 miles for most bases but yeah so you get deployed to iraq are you nervous to go yeah i mean i'm a big ideal you're right i'm excited you want to work you want to yeah you know like i enlisted obviously with the intention of the troop search and being involved in that and it sort of didn't pan out that i was going to be there but uh i was excited i was ready to do my job i was super happy thrilled to finally do what i had trained to do what i was preparing to do what i'd spent a year of my life preparing for you know in terms of doing my work and being very prepared for it and uh and genuinely being excited and i i hit the ground running really that's interesting so by the way how do they fly you over there do they have their own charted army planes yeah so you do i see something they fly just coach yeah basically they just uh they just take they just take like a delta plane and they just they're like oh for real yeah they they contract out like uh airlines uh and just say like the you know the pilots or delta or really united or american uh american airlines and then you're the the um stewardess or the the um the flight attendants are uh that that as well uh it's just like and then it's just us with our right so it's all it's all military the whole thing yeah and you still get the officers get the first class upstairs of course and they still serve you peanuts and all that stuff and what it's like a normal play yeah it's like a normal flight except what happened wow that's very interesting actually i actually have a picture i have this funny picture that i that i have uh even to this day uh where i i took a picture of of uh of uh it was my uh it was my m16 or i am sorry my m4 and my m4 is just like sitting there with like with like the the optic and it's sitting in my chair and it's like like in in like a plane i'm just like tsa is really like letting their car okay so we land in iraq do you go with your team from before or is it about we just split up a little bit to shift everything over yeah some people yes yeah so like you know there's like the torch party and there's like the pre-party and then there's the main body and then there's little stragglers i see so you you land and then like how quickly do you have to like a big travel to go to your new base yeah yeah like and i was like very very movie right you know you're you get you you get into a c-130 and then you get off the c-130 you go into you know you're processed in and what's the c-130 like a armored vehicle no c-130 is uh c130 rolling down the strip it's a plane you know oh it's a player it's the airborne plane it's the plane that you know people jump out out of is that the one we that biden was in dan i think it was a c-17 oh okay so you land at the airport you get on a new plane one of these big fly okay this with the i say i see i see wait is that a c-130 yeah that's a c-130 it's like open on this side yeah some of those are ac-130s which those are the ones that have like they actually have like a howitzer like on the side that shoots it's like a big cargo plane for people to parachute out of but obviously you didn't do that no we didn't jump no we didn't jump out of it but uh yeah we landed but it was a combat landing so it's like you're your stomach goes up near your chest what does that mean it's like you know it's like a it's like you're on a roller coaster like oh really that's like straight down oh my god they're doing that to like evade yeah because yeah you know it's a war zone i see so just to lessen their descent area really wow interesting yeah uh but yeah you know and then uh and then we took a helicopter out to our uh remote base in east you know east of baghdad eastern magna interesting so it was remote was there like a military prison or was it kind of a secret thing uh oh the base yeah yeah so yeah it was it was remote it was a hammer uh which is uh 30 kilometers east of the of the main part of eastern baghdad so nothing around if you're just crunching numbers why why the remote base uh the for the draw down uh one of the agreements for the drawdown was to reduce the number of um the number of uh bases and positions in the cities i see so you were you were uh part of a dwindling force yes of uh u.s military yeah we were going home was that odd for you to be flying into iraq as everyone's leaving uh well no because it was it was it wasn't clear that we were leaving at that time um so there was a debate about it like obviously part of the drawdown was leave the cities obama had said that you know he had set a timetable was actually the bush administration's timetable for leaving uh for the withdrawal and that which then became obama's timetable right um and so you know we it it looked like we might be but we also were hedging sort of like okay what if we need to bring back more and then like i remember there was still construction going on okay even while we were talking about leaving so very much one foot in one foot out yeah yeah i see yeah so you're stationed here so how many people are you basically stationed with uh wow um i think it was i don't remember the numbers but it was at least 1500 in the basement well how many people did you have like an immediate working with is that big to you 1500 sounds like cool yeah it was it was medium sized yeah um but yeah and u.s military is big yeah i mean my base had maybe like 40 people yeah that was the number of people in my office it was very small there were people in my office like 40. the number of people and they were all analysts or they're doing all kinds of different stuff analysts yeah different different different roles is your work collaborative or is it kind of just like a wolf solo wolf stuff we were work group style baby we were we were doing the we were doing the silicon valley uh um working group interesting yeah from that time we were doing the the lean sort of lean uh office type environment where you know rotating roles and um you know like you you would have a diff you'd have different roles at different times it was it doesn't make a lot of sense because like the rest of the military is very hierarchy it's very hierarchy right it's just like you're you are you know you like you you're you have a captain who has a first sergeant who has a staff sergeant yeah or or a mat or or you know some some uh you know like uh or some sergeant or whatever who goes down the corporal and goes down to the privates right and no it was not like that it was very fluid you know everybody sort of had their different positions and roles it was a bit more horizontal and a bit more fluid in terms of like the actual work because it's a bottom-up sort of structure the intel intelligence work is stuff that comes in and then is brought up and you know uh um presented to the the staff officers interesting you know the staff officers being you know your um your commander their exo their administrative officer their intelligence officer their operations officer their supply officer etc legal okay so you're you're basically working with a bunch of analysts and basically at what point do you start thinking like you know start having kind of like gender gender wow this is this has been ongoing this is this has never stopped but it's it you had mentioned that it got really bad when you were deployed yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah i it was definitely becoming more marketed and more of a significant uh sort of thing as i was you know and and then it continued on because like uh i don't we're not going to get into the 20 into the 2010 leaks themselves but um we started it but i i so i got arrested obviously for a big leak um which the contents of which i cannot discuss sure um under non-disclosure agreement existing to this day from 2007. um which has made writing a book very difficult as you can imagine yeah uh you know uh getting it through the the publication process was uh has has caused a significant amount of delay um we did go to the government for permission because we don't want to get sued out into oblivion and unlike you know someone like er like edward snowden uh who you know lives in russia i live in the united states and i have to pay taxes right i've got the irs so i gotta i you know i i can't i can't play around um so yeah we've been very careful with with sort of uh writing the book but uh but yeah by the time i got into the prison system um it was clear like i was like yes this is this is this is important to me i'm trans interested i know what i need um but by that time it was you know the lawyers basically written it off as like too late uh for me to sort of like seek that but i didn't give up and so you know i went through this long court martial process and basically and i waited until after that court martial process because it was just so intense because it was literally a year it was a three and a half year long process through the court system you know the military court system our dog just did a big old puke nice that's a good that's some chunks yeah he has a puking problem he pukes all the time poor boy ah so so what something striking about your story is actually you were the first uh military person to undergo like hormone therapy yeah and stuff like that so i mean that's that's very interesting yeah at least at least with it with approval people have been taking like this first acknowledged person yeah by the way especially especially guys taking extra testosterone yeah definitely yeah okay of course yeah but uh yeah and there have been trans you know i i remember there's actually a story of a trans person who enlisted who enlisted in the military and uh man and just while going through a unit transition just like made just said that there was a gender marker mistake in their paperwork and then somebody just like clicked a button and they just got it done wow and they got away with it for like a year wow crazy wow so for example uh do you get like they have like the male uniform and the female uniform yeah it was yeah yeah were you very gendered existence was that difficult for you at the time there or in prison it became like it became very important like for to for the prison to enforce and we were uh i i had um the american civil liberties union uh chase strangio uh fantastic attorney and a fantastic advocate to this day on trans issues um fighting lots and lots of legal battles uh all the way up to the supreme court in some cases on a regular basis uh including many of these like [ __ ] laws that keep that keep getting proposed and passed in uh in like the state houses um and uh but yeah he was my attorney and uh you know we we we like fought on all these different nitpicky little regulations and things together that's incredible one of the things that we lost that we never went on until i until i was released and it was the day that i was released was like the day that i stopped cutting my hair because they did not light up on the hair they're like you can get hormones we can give you makeup we can give you all these different things we can give you all these things but hair no they would just did not want to relent on hair well women in the military can grow their hair right yeah and so 670-1 baby is that the code what's the code is there like a length regulation there's a whole regulation it changes everything so why do you think it was that they were stuck on that one yeah we have no idea interesting it's uh the all they had to do was was do a one-page exception of policy and they just would not relent i would think makeup would be more of a so that's what we thought right yeah we did we expected to not get makeup and to get the hair do you think it was a spite thing or just a weird bureaucracy thing i i don't know maybe they're worried about court cases and sort of because they have they have a prison system military has a prison system and i think they might have been worried about uh about different uh religious groups in prison wanting their hair extensions okay they thought it maybe it was a if they were one and yeah yeah right so yeah it was it wasn't so much spite with me as spite against like a lot a whole host of different groups of people i see just generals right so i want to ask you more about your time in iraq but if just if feel free if i ask a question that you can't answer just let me know yeah i mean you know just like it's just dark it's this dark period of time and now it's even darker it is why i mean i i feel like you know i feel like the us is uh you know the us is going through uh it's going through it's going through some things going through a time period you know and actually the my whole life experience um you know uh everything was like you know like i went from like 2010 and you know being like free out that was the last time i was like freaking out um before i went into the uh that back well not even that like you know uh deployed returning to my deployment and then going to prison and then coming out in in 2017 and um yeah it was like i was like oh shoot stuff is about to go down here like that vibe like it was immediate like i went through like a three day three or four day cool down period you know kind of like just sort of like getting a sense of like okay like you know because i remember the first time i looked at an iphone right you know it's not that i didn't know how to use it it was that was like my my brain was like fried by the by the sort of instant like deluge of information right from it and like even like the the the sort of super small pixels on the screen just for like we're like wow this is like this is like making my eyes hurt um so actually like i needed like a cool down period of like a few days um but yeah as soon as i got out uh i was like oh this is different the vibe is different the vibes are off it's sort of the boiling frog is that the sense that i got it's like this is abram like because like trump trump had been elected the year before um there was the whole election cycle before that um you know you this this was post-occupy post-ferguson you know the uh militarization of the police um the sort of rise of right-wing extremism um charlottesville happened only a few weeks after yeah that was a that was uh that wasn't that crazy and i had friends who i and i had friends who you know were out there protesting right you went into prison obama was president you came out trump was president yeah so that that was probably yeah it might actually one of the one of the most alarming part parts of my whole life story is the fact that like i spent as i i i obama commuted me at the end of at the end of his term but he commuted me to time served plus 120 days so i had 117 days of the trump administration i was like oh boy you thought he might take he might [ __ ] with you i mean it hadn't happened but this was a this was definitely scary well you were facing thirty your full term was like 35 years yeah it was 35 years i got i got sentenced to 35 years so i got 28 20 years like cut off and if you but also the thought of facing down another 28 years if trump decided to try to do something well yeah i was like i was like and i honest honestly until the day i was released like the morning the morning that i was like in upstate new york like okay i'm out um was uh i was like this isn't happening right right right that's crazy i remember i remember that like i remember i went through this whole process and actually needed therapy over this which was like sort of like because like when you're when you're given a 35-year sentence yeah and you've had time to digest that seven years is pretty half the amount of time oh yeah you've had time to digest that you're like okay this is this is this is it this is happening you write all that off in your brain so like the idea that i was going to be let out and be like i'll be opening up a credit card you know opening up a credit card balance or buying or renting an apartment or paying bills just just weird surreal yeah just so far it was so far away that you know i just didn't even think about it or didn't even worry about it and i just wrote it off and then to have that be returned to me was actually a shock to my system and that that's that i think is in my opinion that's sort of the definition of institutionalization is whenever you have accepted sort of that you know like your most of your adult life is written off right you have plenty of time to you know screw around in prison and play vid you know or play uh uh play dungeons and dragons and and dice dice games is that what you did in prison i did yes oh it doesn't sound that bad when you put it that way did you have good friends like i did yeah i had i had a lot of friends in prison um you know uh you know you again you know institutional environment you develop camaraderie make friends yeah um i i connected really well with the people that i was that i was there with um we had one very simple an important role in prison which was don't ask anybody what the crime is and don't look into it oh for real you don't want to know oh that's really interesting but everyone probably know who you were right yeah i was yeah yeah it didn't matter were you given a chance to wrap things up say goodbye no i was to your fellow it was an idiot yeah oh wow yeah they took me they're like we're not like but you knew the day was coming i knew the day was coming but they put they put me in they put me in a separate unit immediately when the commun yeah they saw it on t like the prison staffs done on t like it's in my book like a whole story about it but like they were they saw it on tv and they're like oh you're going you're we're putting you aside why'd they do that uh i think they just didn't want anything bad to happen to me in the meantime like anything interesting an injury in the workshop if only epstein's prison guards were as careful yeah yeah oh yeah it's super suspicious that's pretty interesting how they i want to be i want i have opinions on that okay somebody's been incarcerated in the in both both the military and the federal and the city and i mean you were a high priority prisoner but jeffrey epstein was a very high priority prisoner yeah we can do an aside here what do you think about that whole sh thing about how murder yeah murder you do that's that's that's how a person murder happens i've i know when it happens i'm not gonna say i'm not gonna say like some of the sad stories from prison where we know bad stuff happened because like you know it's like how do you prove it as an inmate but um and some of these stories are my book um and uh but yeah like definitely because it's like super like it's definitely like oh yeah i'm just like that's suspicious the cameras you want to get rid of somebody in prison that's how you do it the guards do that kind of thing that's all they do they just [ __ ] with people yeah they [ __ ] with people i mean yeah imagine this imagine you're sitting there and your job is to is to watch inmates for 12 hours and you're just sitting there or tossing your piece of paper or whatever like of course you're going to screw with us like we're we're like and we're not and like nobody you know nobody listens to inmates no but you know um i want to say this real fast because i'm then i'm really passionate about this and that is um you know i've i've been asked a little you know people ask me often ask me a lot was it scary being in prison or you know like like you know how how were people in prison and i just got to say this time and time again the most violent and dangerous people in prison without question were prison guards every single time and this was military civilian state federal just endless amounts of uh fear and anxiety of the arbitrariness and and the uh the the sort of lack of expectatio of consistent expectations of what a co or a prison guard or or somebody who's watching or a correctional uh officer of any of any variety was going to do um and the senior staff as well and uh and you know it's like it's like it haunts me to this day because like i you know i don't associate like somebody who's like in a prison uniform with with like a threat whereas like i see somebody like in a in in a in a co uniform and i'm like you have a little trauma left over oh yeah definitely so sad do you think it attracts sickos who like power absolutely that's what it is and it's even worse than being in some in some respects i think it's actually worse than being like a regular cop because at least a regular cop gets like carry a gun right they're sort of like the the second thought like they're the they're the sort of like after thought sort of cops right was there any kind of norm was there normal prison guards or was it just an accepted culture of like these are our objects to [ __ ] with and do what we want i would say that it's that they're that it's a rule of thirds which is pretty consistent with what i've seen in other in other institutions um so there is uh there there are the prison guards who are goody two shoes they care about their job they really um they they really think that they're doing a good they're doing a service or whatever and they're fair to you guys and they try to be fair okay um they they're that's a high attrition rate that's a fast turnover rate right that makes sense yeah then there's the then the there's the prison guards who um who look the other way at the bad apples right okay they're like i'm just doing a job i'm cutting a paycheck um you know i don't i i hear no evil see no they're not sadistic they just they're just here to work right but if they see something that's that's sketchy they will look the other way right yeah and then there's the then there's the people who are absolutely sadistic they will do the worst kinds of things they'll play games they will lie they will cheat they will steal they'll they're just and they get away with it and nobody will question and then it's the other and then the worst part is that that other third of people who look the other way just you know don't do anything and they don't say anything so when when there's like a really sick prison guard um does anything ever happen to them ever very rarely i've never seen it i've i've i've only never seen people retaliated against for reporting it too and that includes uh others other guards well that happens in the police as well yeah normally the same please it's the same the blue wall of silence kind of thing is what was the most uh f'ed up thing that you saw prison guard duty in my book okay it's it's how about the second one then uh second darkest thing second darkest thing um that i've seen in uh in prison guards do um uh well it's not it's not one thing but like it's just neglect of of people with mental health issues right people who people say i'm in it i like a person having a mental health crisis saying i'm having a dark time i'm i'm have i'm not doing so good right now i need to see somebody and the just absolute like disgust or um disregard and then placing that person in a more dangerous situation right putting them in a cell alone with their what sort of like boot laces or something right they're like do it yeah they're essentially yeah and then whenever and then whenever somebody follows through with it they're just like oh well we didn't know and you know the camera is more wrong yeah it's it's just it's just extremely dark wow they really see you as some other things i would imagine not humans yeah and i think i mean that it's kind of what society's taught us right yeah because like a lot you know it's the law and order effect right in my mind um because like we have this very pop culture understanding of of of of the the justice system right um which is you know uh a crime takes place um an offender or a suspect is is arrested um a prosecutor uh builds a case with the detectives or or the officers or whatever and then it goes to trial uh and then there's a long there's sort of a trial process which never really actually happens with plea deals and then there then after the trial there you know somebody goes to you know somebody goes to jail and that's the end of the story right you know it's like it's it's that's the other story but for that person typically they that's not the end of the story it's years and years and years of of the rest of their lives people grow people change people people really do change and it doesn't take that long it takes maybe you know especially especially if you're in your 20s it doesn't you know it's five you know five years so you're twenty for a long time yeah yeah in terms of like of your of your personality and you're sort of sort of changing so you would you know i i've seen this a lot where you know some somebody somebody who is like a terrible person will like become like a really like stable you know reasonable person like within a within within a three to four year period of time right and so um we have we sort of forget that about p people because of this pop culture thing uh and and it's and even even with like justice reform advocates i have this problem because like they're very focused on like the the the app the scene um police brutality type stuff right you know which is which is awful right you know it's like murdering it's like murdering of people murdering of houseless people um the abuse of people um not taking you know not taking people of color or immigrants at their word whenever they say that they've been abused or they've been harassed or that you know that that uh that they've been falsely accused of something you know like there's a lot of criminal justice aspects focused on that but they forget that like that's that we have two million people and we have like well i think it's what over two million uh yeah it's like 25 of the world's prison populations in the united states and you know often voiceless often not unseen often forgotten about even by people who really do care and really really do want to focus on these issues because of just sort of the way we've sort of focused on stuff because we focus on stuff because we can see whenever there's police brutality that happens on a cell phone camera we can see when that happens but when it ha when it happens in prison there's no cell phone yeah i think the prison system is one of the most in america and now it's one of the biggest uh problems we have as a society i mean the way that it's privately owned yeah that there's a vet um financial interest and keeping people in prison for as long as possible absolutely and also there's a profit motive so like the conditions are going to be horrible yeah the prison industrial complex it's just a it's a [ __ ] nightmare it's really is yeah and like non-violent offenders in prison i mean it's just [ __ ] horrible yeah it's hard to bridge that gap when you don't get to see what goes on there yeah exactly and then you know how do you go to battle over something you don't and as much as i have solidarity with people like i i remember 2020 with george floyd with the with the george yeah protest and um briana taylor protest like yeah you know i've you know i felt this affinity and the solidarity with with them but like it's it's also it's also don't forget about people in prison because we don't have cameras in prison we can't take our own cell phone photos we or videos we you know this stuff happens the revolution i've seen this stuff with my own eyes you have to believe me that this happened it seems also that people are just getting do you think in general people are getting over sentenced they're going to prison for too long you said that you could change in five years yeah i think i mean 35 years is insane almost for any crime do you yeah i oh yeah my i'm a very different person than i was at 20 very different yeah i mean 22 you're still a kid yeah in all honesty you know yeah i when i came out of prison i was like i was like oh yeah i'm like way different you still have a chance to like you still have a chance to also build a life i feel like where if you are released after 35 years yeah what happens with you then i mean you know it's the end of joshua institutionalized redemption right yeah characters who like i'm not gonna lie i when i the first time that i was hurt that i heard about that i was getting out of prison i was actually scared that was your first reaction um it wasn't my first reaction but like there was a couple days when i started to absorb that this is a possibility and i was like i i don't know like i'm scared because i what's changed what's different you know what um you know it was like an overwhelming thought and this was only after seven years right imagine somebody who's who who's never held the cell phone before yeah yeah yeah yeah you know who's spent 30 40 years in prison i mean you know i and you know what i've i've now had a chance to meet people that have spent many decades in prison and be released and they are you know after a couple years they're the the adapted the adaptiveness of humans is pretty incredible but the the fear and the anxiety that comes with being released from prison for the first time is is very real and it's very and it sticks with you for a while it lingers you know um and and i you know and i'm still in therapy you know for for uh dealing with institutionalization i'm still in therapy for sort of dealing with the consequences of spending uh such a such a large amount of time in like a hostile and institutional environment so yeah you know it's very much it's very much still a part of my you know um the difficulty that i have with you know developing you know long-term relationships and friendships and things because you know like you know both both both in prison and and uh and and in the military you know like i knew who had my back and i knew what tomorrow brought and now out here i don't i don't know who to trust and i don't know if somebody's putting on a front because i'm not with them 14 hours a day like you know uh and i don't know if they have my back i don't know who who's who's like i know the the prison guard's gonna be unfriendly but i know that like that this group of inmates here is gonna have my back or whatever and i don't have that out here i'm not sure quite how far people are gonna you know look out for me or who's gonna be like uh out and against me in a few in a few weeks or a few months and i don't know what tomorrow brings you know i'm i'm switching from time zone to time zone i'm going from city to city i whereas like i was i always knew i was going to be in in in oscar 227 right myself oscar 237 an oscar housing unit right for you know years were you you're out are you kind of living as a trans person in prison were the were the guards and the uh prisoners accepting of that as well um i would say the inmates are pretty accepting uh i think the prison guards were i think the prison guards were a little weirded out by it but they got used to it but um i'm i'm i think i'm just like a force of will like i'm just like a force of energy like in terms of my personality so i i really you know i i'm very sociable and i'm really like engaged with people and i'm very extroverted so i i just got to you know like if i encountered somebody who you know had reservations or hesitations about it i would just like just be like all right let's play some basketball or something like like just see how i am like you know judge for yourself that's very interesting though it seems like throughout your military and prison experience where you would expect people to be kind of more traditional or masculine that they were accepting of either your gayness or your transness yeah i think i think that the i think that military people at least in that time frame get a bit of a bad rap you know in terms of like that's very that's encouraging yeah i mean or maybe i'm just so or maybe i'm just so skewed in my mentality that i just i that i see you know that i haven't really encountered it you know or i don't see it as much because like you know like i i but yeah like when i see it happen to somebody else though i get oh i get defensive yeah yeah yeah but i i i think that i'm not as nearly i i don't nearly take things as personally and and i try to you know if somebody if somebody's like transphobic to me um in pre in a prison environment i want to be specific like the context here somebody's transphobic to me i'm just like okay bring it like like what's your issue here like i'm i'm very upfront about it and it doesn't always work but you usually usually they start to warm up uh and they start to be like okay like you're different you're you know which is not which is still an element of transphobia in my mind it doesn't mean they're not a transphobic person but i've had to deal with people like that and you know i i can see that there's like some ice breaking that happens because we're in an environment like that now out here it's a different story yeah i want to go back to iraq yeah so basically how long were you uh working at that base uh until i guess like up until you started kind of like leaking stuff like how long were you working there uh yeah so i was i think was january february 2010 uh was the time frame uh it's all in my testimony uh which uh i uh i testified to the things in trial so there's specific things that i've been told that went through the government process that i can say and so i refer people to the uh 20 30 to the january uh i think was january 29 2013 uh uh testimony that does anything outside of that range in fact in fact i have to go through government approval okay wow is that part of so but because yeah i was i was in i was an intelligence analyst well what are they risk what are you risking them just suing you because you've already yeah i can get they consume it they could see here here's the fun part because you've already gone to jail for like leaking right but the same non-disclosure agreement doesn't end so if if i were to violate it again oh you're interesting it doesn't end i see i see it so so it it ends either it ends either whenever the us government says uh that you know that this information has been approved and it's declassified which we're getting closer to um oh really so you could be released potentially from this nda yeah it will or somewhat sometime in my lifetime or or if the united states dissolves for some reason one or the other well i'll wait i can't wait to talk to you on that day i mean oh yeah like it's gonna be an interesting day i'm gonna have a lot to say there's a lot of missing pieces of the story so so let me just try to ask what i can so you're working there let me ask this a more personal question what was there something specifically no that happened where you're like i i i need to whistle blow no no no i i think um it was the cog it was me dealing with the sort of cognitive dissonance of me being i was a puppy right i was like wet behind the ears kind of very naive really truly believing my job and my role mm-hmm encountering the reality and sort of the you know having a you know like it's like training day right you know you sort of right right you know like denzel washington like pulls you aside and you know and walks you through this crack yeah exactly you know like smoke this pcp right yeah and like that that was like that was the gradual process that i went through which was like okay like here's a reality here the on the ground reality and what you've been told are completely different and and i felt you know i i felt i felt upset i felt you felt like maybe misled oh yeah i felt i felt very misled you know i felt very misled by by by media by our institutions you know by our political i bet a lot of soldiers feel that uh you know i i don't i'm not i'm not gonna speak for i'm not gonna speak for for a lot of veterans but you know like i i certainly have encountered friends and people that i know that one second we lost power are we still live yeah oh cause the tv went out yeah and the ac yeah at the same time yeah yeah no sometimes our powers sometimes explode too much ac season okay but we're still live dan so coming they're coming so there was was there like a growing kind of resentment just over time when you're like this is i don't know i wouldn't say resentment i would say i mean like the the institutions that i've that i've that i felt the the most that i cared about the most that i lost a lot of faith in um especially because like i first went to the washington post new york times you know everybody everybody knows the the big w word um but you know those are not not my first places um you don't say the w word yeah you don't even say that word well you know it's um what was that what was that are we dying are we is america dissolving they are really coming for us yeah what's that what was that though for real wait there's nothing upstairs there's no upstairs yeah they really are coming after you're saying too much all right well oh so um all right my security people are coming they're actually i see somebody [Laughter] you went to the washington post but media institutions i think i think let me down the most i i remember i remember specifically there was like a uh tom friedman article yes uh that came out while during the election iraq he's a he's an editorial for the new york times right yeah yeah and he was basically he basically like like just pretended away the last like seven years of civil conflict of was that the roof again that was i felt that boom what is going on guys that sounded like a potential firework yeah oh it's the solution of america good vibes wait fireworks why are you no i felt that i felt that in my thing that's a good indication that the vibrations are coming from the ground so just ahead oh you're sweating on your feet yeah i felt in my feet so why aren't people going someone looked outside and said yeah look outside is this a dress public what no no no no it's not we're not this is not horrible [Laughter] no no no we've never had any issues with yeah yeah but i was interested so you so go ahead about thomas freeman i was a captive i'm curious did you finish your term or was this happening wow yeah i was in jail for a long time so i yeah i basically i basically finished uh i finished up to the i was i was in the it was in the ending part of my enlistment okay um but that got extended by prison got it so what was it that thomas friedman wrote thomas freeman wrote an article about um sort of oh i guess it you know and we have there are free and fair elections in iraq now which is a question mark uh on the ground um and uh that this has made the ira the iraq invasion justified even though the wmd stuff you know which i don't really have a huge opinion on on like anything up to like 2004 i don't really have strong opinion on because i didn't i actually don't know anything prior to 2004 um in terms of like all of that um all the discussion um and i was in high school i was in middle school high school at the time so um but you know my understanding of sort of the uh the the insurgency and the counter insurgency and how that played out was this brutal um you know it was like there was an ethnic cleansing going on between you know um sunnis and shias there's sort of like a um a ratcheting up of of um political rhetoric uh across the political spectrum in in iraq um it was looked the other way we uh the united states government essentially picked aside and said okay like these people are more likely to win they might not be better they might not be more democratic but um and they might be using author autocratic means and methods to win but we're going to back them because they serve our security so can i ask you this is the kind of stuff that was on your mind during your service yeah i see i think so because you know like you know i we were going there to stabilize to help i mean this country was [ __ ] up yes because of us yes and we were making it worse and i mean you had a front seat to that more more than yeah and then and then when i was like well what we're doing is not really helpful you know and you know and then you get told like well that's not you're that's not you need to decide and you have thomas friedman writing [ __ ] like that yeah and basically because you know he's doing propaganda manufactured consent at home and you know and yeah i was like i was like i well one one of the advantages to having all this stuff be out there um and in the in the way that it's that that is that it is out there is that you can't take it away it's true it is reality take it or leave it this is what this is what actually happened it was it was a brutal ugly war yeah so we we did you know like what like you know we we did some pretty awful stuff and and on a scale of decimation and destruction that um that uh you know that even to this day is is is very rarely discussed or don't they estimate that like 500 000 iraqi civilians i don't think we'll ever know it's it's insane it's insane yeah the amount of damage you know we did into that yeah all right and now and now you know well just wonder why because there's because bro we didn't we didn't just see it we didn't see we didn't see iraqis as people you know right we didn't see them as people we saw them as like terrorists as as a problem as people in a location and yeah and i i yeah it's just you know it's it's it's dark and it's it make yeah you know i i started to feel increasingly heartbroken just seeing all the stuff and feeling and starting because like i i know that i'm um i'm a very technical person i'm a stem lord and i'm super into you know technology and math and computer science and all these other things and artificial intelligence and i'm just doing number crunching right and i just couldn't do the number crunching anymore i couldn't you felt just exhausted emotionally emotionally and i just started and i learned so much about people and the region and what was going on on the ground every day that i just and i was just like you know as i sort of feel like a connection or an empathy or an affinity do you feel guilty at all yeah i feel you know i talk about it more in my book just for how i feel about my role my participation right yeah you're like damn i mean again i was a true believer yeah when you got there did you did you ever have time to like befriend locals during your service there yeah i mean locals but they're mostly uh iraqi federal police iraqi army uh the i the the the if the fp and the ia as we call them by the way i just gotta say an estimate for stead this is civilians these aren't even militants yeah about two hundred thousand wow civilians died through iraqi civilians i mean that's terrific unfathomable yeah it's true yeah that's right you know and that and now we're you know like well and then was pretty devastating for us so i don't know there's one specific video that came out in the league can i talk about that or no um no i will not get into that can i talk about it without you commenting on it i would rather okay yeah yeah we're never mind we're i'm trying to keep out yeah okay so but anyway yeah horrific just horrific horrific disgusting yeah when you were finding out were you trying to like leave the army or talk to people like option is it no it wasn't really an option i wasn't thinking about it um i'm mostly just like thinking about like you know well i wanted things to run differently and operate differently and i tried i tried my best to like do that in my role in my position as best as i could i know that people i know people are often confused about sort of um about sort of like you know the the cognitive dissonance that happens where you are doing uh a an illegal act right and yet i in my in my mind i'm still in my mind trying to do my job in a way that i've rationalized it and i and i that's how i was able to really rationalize this in my brain was like i was like i tried to do my job i tried to do my role i tried to do the things that i that we actually set out to do and have a standard for and i can't do this i have a question you worked with like 40 other analysts did were any of these other people disturbed by the stuff that you guys were working on or did you feel uniquely like no i i i don't i don't feel that these are that these are concerns that are unique to me um i it's only human to see that and be like yo what the hell is this yeah and you know and you know it goes it goes back to the prison card guard conversation we have before the third the rule of thirds like right there's the people who try to do good i mean i would certainly put myself in that camp um and there's which is a low and that's a high attrition rate that's a high turnover rate yeah because if you care too much i think you just can't survive yeah and then there's the then there's the you know the the people who don't care on this statistic you know people so in that job you feel like if you're sadistic you can do like a lot of harm i think i think lesto um in the in sort of the the soldier role in the soldier role of being an analyst i i don't think that you you have that much of an opportunity to do that i think that door kickers uh had more of an opportunity but you know i i um i you know the as awful thing as things were in in iraq and afghanistan um with with u.s soldiers uh and is as striking as it is you know i i'm i'm i'm i'm still appalled and shocked at just what you know police do in the united states what they get away with you know it's just it's just shocking amounts of of violence and um and you know and uh it all it all comes together in my mind you know i don't i don't see what happened i don't see what happened in 2020 as like being different from what happened in iraq in 2009 2010 like i just don't i i see a common thread which is the militarization of you know um uh you know some people call it the boomerang effect where you know you go out and you do these foreign uh occupations and you do the you do an imperialism and then you eventually they come home and then you bring that mentality home with your with your soldiers with your soldiers turning into cops turning into you know your judges turning into your politicians and you just bring this sort of um counter-insurgency mindset home where you know cops you know will roll through a neighborhood of you know of of uh people of color and they'll they'll view it in the same way that as as the soldiers were in iraq and afghanistan like rolling through a neighborhood like looking for the enemy that's interesting it's like the cost of fighting this unjust yeah bloody war that's that's so sorry to blackpill you some more no this is great i mean this is the stuff that i really want to discuss with you yeah you know i think i was saying earlier uh you know i wore i wore the i wore the all black because i heard you were black people yeah the last episode with this song i heard you that i was black but yeah i was feeling particularly black i wanna i wanna i wanna make you feel better if i can which is that i i'm actually optimistic you are i am not optimistic and the reason why i say that in a dark time is not it's not it's not copium i swear it's not opium i swear it's not copium but um i you know i have seen like in 2000 in 2010 when i went to prison um there wasn't a lot of political activism particularly with progressives and on the left um then it was occupy which turned into you know uh protest movements in ferguson which turn into you know uh counter you know like uh resistance against the trump administration and uh you know ice and charlottesville which turned into the george floyd protests of 2020. so i i am seeing a groundswell of activism awareness education people talking about these things on trans issues in particular i've also seen a lot of progress listen i think the people care yeah and that's great i think the people of america are on whole were were on the right like the people care about the right things genuinely yeah but the government is so functionally uh [ __ ] like i mean just look at well anyway i don't i'm not trying to stay uh blackfield i [ __ ] about this stuff i'm i'm optimistic yeah i actually think i actually think people well i think enough old people are going to die off in the next like i mean genuinely like you look at [ __ ] don't get me wrong and not by me by the way not by me i mean they're going to die of natural causes not by me right just to be clear but like there's a lot of really old [ __ ] people in congress that just need to die of natural causes stop in minecraft i'm serious i know but i'm not threatening them i'm just saying yeah yeah yeah they need to [ __ ] die oh uh i think i think i think they would find another way to say it i i what's their name i think what's her name the 98 year old he's [ __ ] they don't retire dan they never retire they cling to power no what does it matter they're gonna die that's life speaking of i think i think we got we got something for you really oh you brought me something uh somebody brought this to you they asked me what is that to ethan some sketchy guy yeah from the and what does that say and hey national oh i see you spelled it out from the nra this is from the nra [Laughter] i don't know let's find out no wires coming all right so wow the nra brought me something great yeah thank you oh it's just cleaning tears yeah like your liberal here [Music] yeah yeah you know like you got it because yeah you know you know i mean you i mean that but be it seriously you are truly a victim of cancelled culture and i want to be here actually thank you i don't know why i don't know why they are i mean you hassan i don't know why like all these people who ran and speak about freeze peach and frozen peaches all the time you know like why is it that whenever somebody says something that they have to get all up in arms like why why do they have to cry about it right who are we talking about the republicans or because i get canceled by everyone just the right yeah specifically the right no but they are the they are the biggest counselors of all like i mean the fact that they even get to own this conversation about um they dominate all the conversations it's just ridiculous yeah but so i actually i have i have more questions okay all right because i'm i'm i'm captivated by your story you know i find my story boring really yeah because my story i'm just like i don't know i don't know well i mean you have one of the most unique life experiences of anyone in modern time yeah oops you do so let's say so you sent your stuff to the new york times and washington post and well i tried to i tried and as i understand it they ignored you they did they were your first people you reached what was that okay so i want to be clear like uh it's in my book this is actually it's really complicated so it wasn't i was ignored so much as it was it was sort of a complication with sort of the discussion of how to do it safely to how to do it securely i see they were too it was too hot for them you think no i just think that they i boomers right mm-hmm you know like hey like this is what you're talking about this is digital stuff you're talking specifically about getting data to them right so like this is 20 this is 2010. this is like january 2010 and these are people who like struggled to like open their email okay right i think that's what was going on it's just incredible that they missed that well that's that's why they've changed that's why i mean one of the things that happened that is that both in 2010 and in 2013 there was sort of like an oh [ __ ] moment like oh we need to modernize our our uh methods and our and you know and and sort of like how we collect information how we how we deal with this stuff and it's actually funny because you know um you actually get asked this a lot they're like oh well you know you you one of the things you want to talk about is government is government secrecy right and i'm just like well no because like that was like a 2010 issue right now we have now we're so awash in information and that there's they just will publish the awful things that they're doing and it gets drowned out by misinformation and disinformation and and people questioning like what reality is like you know that's the biggest problem now is there's like identifying what is real because what should we care about people people are living in like completely different realities even though they're like living right next to each other yeah yeah so were you kind of like disillusioned by the fact you're like i have this thing and these the biggest papers in the world that i want to get this to are incapable of receiving it i mean was that frustrating was it shocking i mean yeah i mean yeah it would have been not it would have been nice it would have been nice to you know like have uh have a dan ellsberg you know you know like uh you know meeting in a hotel room kind of thing but you know like alas this is not how things played out you know mm-hmm and and let's just say and i'm you know i'm you know i gotta i got a book coming out dude you're asking a lot of questions this is good this is this publicity this is going to get people interested to buy the book yeah you to you in my opinion you talking about whatever is only get people more interested in the book well they're gonna have to buy it to get it um i don't know if it's free if it's pre-sale yet oh if it's pre-sale i need to talk to my public system figure out but as these as the things were being disseminated around the world and there was shock around the world well i didn't know about this you'd ha i was in social confinement and i was like in like a cage in oh so you were waiting for like 59 days you were arrested by the time this became news by the time this became news i was arrested i was incarcerated and i had no idea so you didn't even get to see that whatever whatever you were being busted for had meant anything i didn't even know that they closed off up and uh the deep deep water horizon uh spill that was open when you went yeah i didn't even know until months later so that was okay so i'm a big i'm a big soccer fan i love the world cup and the world cup happened and i had no idea who played who won anything no scores or anything so it was someone you befriended snitched on you basically um yeah i'm not gonna talk i'm not gonna talk about that um that again there's court records so let's just say this let's skip all that and then i'm curious so so you get arrested right you have no idea that anything you did gets out to the world yeah you put in solitary confinement what is that like what is solitary confinement uh it's boring okay so uh you know i often get asked like you know what style confinement like and i'm like well well like uh go into your bathroom take all this stuff out and close the door and then put a bed in there and then that's your some people say that's torture what would you say um i'm careful with the word torture because you know for me it has a very legal implication um what about like cruel and unusual i think i think that it is i i think it is cruel punishment i think it is i i think that it's definitely not unusual it's not unusual it's very it's very difficult there's 60 000 people that deal with it every day i think that it is unlaw i i think that according to international law it is unlawful after 15 days i think that the practice should be banned i i i'm skeptical of prisons in general and i'm you know and i never thought i would have this kind of position where i would be like a skeptic of prisons but yeah as somebody who's been through prison and seen the system like i just don't see the value in it it doesn't do anything it doesn't really no it does it does do something it controls it controls large populations it doesn't have anything to do with individuals like everybody talks about like oh well this is about individual responsibility right but it's actually no it's about collective sort of control of larger populations that's why it's immigrant populations and and this isn't even just the united states it's like it's like if you look at new zealand for instance right the native population in new zealand the native population in canada are the are some of the highest you know have the some of the highest incarceration rates you know it's people of color in the united states it's immigrants in the united states you know the cultural system like imprisons like people who you know who who like have who are in there for petty offenses and just can't pay pay their way out right it's not it the intentionality of it is not it's not about individual responsibility it's not about crime it's not about any of these things rehabilitation it's about controlling an unwanted population i see that's the way i view it so you were in you were in solitary for how long i don't have the exact count off top my head but it was over a year i think all together a year over year not consecutively consecutively was 11 months yeah and so you're in and so this it's the size of a bathroom just a bit big enough for a bed to fit yeah and then 59 days of that we're in a steel cage in kuwait and so do you have a bed in this steel cage what is this yeah it was a mattress there was a mattress and anything else but a mattress i don't remember it was just remember sandy it was really really there was sand in your in your cell well yeah cause it was a tent was it a tent with a cage inside of is it hot as [ __ ] in there uh the air conditioner sometimes didn't work it was usually the ambient temperature i would say was around 85 to 90 degrees just all the time fahrenheit that's uh like 30 30 to 40 degrees for all you europeans out there so it's a cage with a bed in it yes and when you say cage there's no privacy no there's no private uh uh the the entire time that i was in some drinking confinement i was being watched by at least two people wow and what about like going potty yeah just go for it that's like prison life though because there's there's just in prison yeah you just have a toilet is there a toilet yeah sometimes i forget to close the door before i go to the bathroom my apartment and whenever i have a friend over there they're like oh you're lucky you're used to that oh darn i'm sorry yeah interesting yeah well you kind of gloss over that but it really seems like horrific i mean i mean almost a year it is it is the way that i it is a coping mechanism right you know it's it's just like it's just like you know like i had this thing happen to me and like you know my brain and my body are still trying to grapple with that and the easiest way to do that it's just like it's just like chugging on did you have books or something in there oh yeah i read thousands of them okay i i i don't know the number but it's at least a thousand books wow uh i yeah again i i've read a lot i started with like classics too like american classics and like historical classics and fiction non and then like non-fiction and i would keep up with like news and newspapers and stuff i read a lot of periodicals because they were still printing things back then um and so yeah i kept up with a lot of news and information and and reading uh an enormous amount of fictional that like did you learn to love reading or was it just i've always loved reading but i actually had time to do it and uh and you know i was able to for a while right yeah my prison is a prison was uh definitely a time of still a time of learning and growth for me personally what was the food like when you're in a prison a solitary cage in hawaii can i be on so kuwait was awful um because you know it's field it was like field stuff it was the same stuff we had in iraq military food yeah uh uh quantico where i was at for a period of time for where i was there for nine months was a marine corps base uh best food i've ever had really yeah prison food the weirdest it's actually a weird fact because uh they're off their officer candidate school was right across the street so it's like where all the officers become and become and they're sort of cafeteria that's so interesting like like okay like it wasn't the best food i've ever had but like the consistency of it being so good just you know it's like it's like having a it's like it's like having a three-star restaurant food like every day yeah like wow but uh but yeah then and then uh the you know u.s disciplinary barracks and kansas um and the the you know so prison system the rest of prison system was pretty typical um sodexo type stuff your your your your uh your standard uh um you know slop on a tray macaroni and cheese and maybe maybe maybe you know maybe chicken wings here and there like i've i'm i'm trying to eat more pla plant-based but i i have i have a really soft spot for for buffalo wings the chicken wings who doesn't who doesn't it's a huge so coming out of solitary for close to a year was it shocking for you yes to get out of that i needed a recovery period um it took me months to be able to interact with people again because you didn't talk to anyone during that time i would imagine or uh yeah so the pre i i did interact with prison guards um but it was mostly just like deliver food uh legal appointments i interact i started to interact more and more with lawyers at the time because we were obviously trying to collect evidence and build a case and defend ourselves and make our case to court marshall but yeah like my my time was barely isolated and so does time like become just a completely abstract thing or yeah i you know time uh i've learned a value time i think that one of the most important things that i've learned uh in my life experience for now is that i care far more about time than i do about money like if if it's a waste of time like if you were if you told me that i was gonna get um 100 million dollars but it was like gonna take a huge chunk of my time away i wouldn't change i wouldn't exchange i would want to do what i want to do with my time yeah um i i i value time because you know my like as a as awful as our sort of you know capitalist uh money-based uh world and structure of society is um and sort of the race of things is um i've really learned the value of of time uh and how it you know we are slowly dying like we're all slowly dying over time uh and uh and that time is valuable and having that time taken away and then being given back to me has just made me value every second so much more and you know and and i don't want to do things and you know like i i want when i when i spend time especially with my best friend um you know and we just watch anime or whatever and you know she often asks me like why do you like why do you want to hang out with me and spend time with me and i'm like because this is what i care about this is what i value i value the time together this is so important to me because i you know i i wouldn't give this away for anything else because like we're you know yeah you got a second lease on life yeah absolutely and i really have an understanding of how precious that time is and how precious life is and how precious you know relationships are too because the relationships i had in prison were about very learning how to interact with people and have meaningful relationships with people was was so important um and i always recommend this to people you know like if you know people often ask like oh you know like what should i do about you know people who are in prison or whatever and i'm like write to them write to them pick up the phone call when they call you send them a little bit of money have some interaction with or or be out there in the outside world because i've seen so many people be forgotten about in the prison system well it's it's it's it it sending a letter to an inmate especially an inmate who's been in for a significant chunk of time can be a life-changing experience for them it changes their entire outlook on life well that's really interesting so what was your transition period like when you came out of solitary um again in my book uh but uh yeah i really enjoyed it um i really enjoyed being able to like be outside of the prison or be outside of or be outside yeah by yourself um so uh i started to run it was one of the first things that i did was i started running again um i was interacting with general population again um it was a little slow in terms of like getting used to talking to people this was a little private at first uh and then i and then you know and then i got sucked into dnd and playing playing board games and and i got you know one of the things that that that is an invaluable skill from being in jail is i'm really good at poker in spades oh yeah i i for some reason it surprised me just to see think of prisoners playing d and d yeah well i mean it's an escape it is yeah i mean by definition right role playing game yeah so you know um oh yeah i dm i have a couple campaigns on standby so let me just fast forward kind of to you were in jail for seven years and those seven years whatever it comes down um you know by the way there's are you following a lot of the media that's happening because people are talking about you during that time there's people not really my stuff but almost certainly the rest of the world i was paying attention to there was a lot of advocates saying i tend not to read anything about myself it helps me yeah no i totally understand that yeah but there was a lot of people saying like uh she's being mistreated she's being tortured it's a human's right violation everybody in that system is right i guess they thought that what was happening to you was particularly well um i would say that the soldier confinement in quantico and in um and in kuwait were documentedly like inhumane or found to be like by by third parties and and outside sources including the united nations to be you know to be improper um now the rest of my confinement you know um was no different than i guess they thought that it was just making like an example out of you uh overly uh i don't know um you know i i mean i speculate a little bit on in my book there we go again it's gonna dude when that comes out we're gonna promote it we're gonna sell so many of those books i promise yeah well if it ever comes out if it ever comes out cause i've i've done i i've gone on tv and talked about it before already so but you know when you fir when your trial came up one of the charges against you was um aiding the enemy which carries a death sentence yeah well uh i'm guessing that they decided not to go with death ends because they went with life they went for what they shot for life without parole yeah which you know is i mean how that differs in my mind space to 35 years is mentally different what's what the difference but um in in terms of like your ability to access parole and or early release things like that um has a significant difference um but yeah they really they really harped on that um and it was scary it was a scary precedent it would have been a scary president for a lot just to kill a whistleblower i mean no no not even that it's because like aiding the enemy is strange in the military system because it's the one offense that you don't have to be in the military to be charged with by the military interesting a civilian can be charged for that yes interesting yeah the military can come in and grab you with that but typically you'll reserve for wartime so i i'm not i'm not a lawyer in this area it's really complicated there are a lot of people really scared about it um and the aclu and a bunch of other like a bunch of news organizations were like super nervous about it um it didn't pan out i got acquitted like of that one i got acquitted of that because you were charged for like 21 things found guilty yeah i mean yeah it's like whatever but um but yeah you know like were you scared of that charge though it must have been terrifying to be facing that down in the beginning yeah i mean like i i think i think i was just like well whatever comes comes you know and i had this mindset the whole time you know i i am willing to accept responsibility i i know when i i you know i like i i made a decision you know did i understand the consequences oh god no nobody had ever gotten prison for this before interesting right nobody ever gone to jail for a significant nobody ever like my entire life experience was completely unexpected with this um didn't you know didn't i i expected to lose my job lose my security clearance basically you didn't expect it would be such a big deal no i did not i did not fully grasp how far that they would go or how significant this would be but did you know what you were doing was significant would be significant for the world i i you know i honestly i i was i was a little i was going through a bit of a dark period where i was just like especially after the new york times in washington post struggling with them i was like is anybody gonna care you were like is this does this even matter do people even care yeah i can totally get that yeah and if two biggest papers are like we can't do this you're like well maybe it's not that interesting and i see this every day right and i see this whole this this horror playing out in my with my own two eyes and in the the sort of this i understand the statistics and i know what's going on you know with with the the data of what's going on and the reporting and everything else so i understand the stuff fully and it's just like how how is this like like like how like how can how can i how can i how can i share this with people how can i get people to understand the gravity of this and i was very worried that and i still to this day like there's a darker part of me that often wonders like how much people really seem to care about awful things happening in the world you know i'm you know like seeing seeing the last decade sort of pan out here in the us and after kovid and seeing you know the sort of people not caring about the pandemic and things like that is is really alarming for me you know just sort of the callousness and the carelessness um that is that you know because like you know uh when we're presented with the truth and we're we're presented with evidence of of something happening you know our propensity to to ignore that or to pretend it away or to argue away is is quite frightening quite disturbing and uh and and that that that's been a consistent sort of sense or a feeling that i've had which is you know like do people care i think people care i care i think people do care i think part of the problem today is that the propaganda machines have become so effective that people just don't know they know they know it's really they can't accept it as real because they there's like a whole propaganda machine on the right that's saying this shit's this is all [ __ ] and then you go and you don't want to believe it right it's it's a difficult truth yeah you say yo my government killed 200 000 people in iraq and so it's much easier to be like oh they deserved it yeah tucker's telling me the truth it's all [ __ ] that's a relief you know yeah they don't have to care about it so i think there's just this really powerful propaganda machine that it's not just the right yeah you know the center left the the the centrists the democrats you know like this is busy bite though the thing that scares me the most is whenever whenever there's bipartisanship in congress because it's usually that they're bipartisan not for a good reason right it's usually over something really scary and that people are just going to like look the other way like you know like we're going to like give we're going to give we're going to give local police forces like stinger missiles then you look at the votes and it's just like 435 yeah you're just like it's just members of congress and and you know like set like like 96 senators you know it's just it's it's always alarming to me like bipartisanship that's true is scary to me often because it's usually some of the worst things are bipartisan patriot act perfect example yeah pure bipartisanship yeah it's incredible isn't it yeah it was ever a point where you regretted doing what you did you're like this was not worth it you know i mean i i just couldn't play out anywhere other way like i one of the things that one of the things that gets me is that i i don't replay the stuff i don't you know i i i live in the moment and i and i and i live thinking of of the future i don't i don't try to i don't try to i don't try to relive stuff or relitigate stuff or or because like what happened happened and i can't change that and uh you know and you know i guess some people they wanna they wanna sort of like question or or or or think of different things and it was just like it was just that my experience and i i go through again this is in the book you know but that experience like played out in such a in such a meandering freak of nature way like you know such as such a freak of circumstances way um that uh i you know both both good and bad like i just i don't you know it was like it's like like a statistical error margin of like probabilities that right the set of events could have happened in this particular way and any little thing could have if anything had changed in any at any and any particular point you know if i if i decided to go um uh take up a certain offer and go to a different position i wouldn't have been there um if the if our unit hadn't been deployed redeployed from afghanistan to iraq you know whoop you know well you know history would have played out very differently and my role would have been very differently i mean i had to be in a specific office in a specific in a specific time frame that had specific access to things and then have a specific like you know like everything was just extremely extremely specific so i don't try to i don't try to rehash those decisions because i'm like i had i made all these decisions that i could do with the information that i had available to me at the time and the options that i had available to me at the time and what what more can you do um it is pretty incredible though i think even throughout it you did have a lot of even though there was a lot of like hate for you they're within like certain political i haven't really encountered a lot but there was a lot of really a lot of support like i think you must have had some really good lawyers that came to your defense right probe like and i mean you sure you know i have i have lawyers but i mean they cost me money you can't did you have to you can't do a pro you cannot do a scale you cannot do a case with a scale problem but then how do you how raise money my family raise money um yeah i i certainly have debts that i still still owe them well i mean like i saw some but like it's we have a payment plan so it's like right there was a big campaign to raise money for you to pay the lawyer yeah it's managed yeah it's not it's not it's not an issue not an issue for me wow but that's pretty incredible it is incredible though throughout everything that you're able to you know be free and be living your life yeah after all of that i mean it is pretty incredible yeah i'm living a pretty fun life now yeah i mean obviously you know we were on lockdowns and and and i wasn't traveling for a bit but i've i've been in europe i'm here in la i mean although i kind of and like being not a fan of the city oh that way yeah i get it it's love hate it's not a great city to visit i'm an east coaster through and through i knew i grew up in the midwest but i i i i love new york i've fallen in love with if you're a new yorker la's the worst city i i can you know because like it's the antithesis it's yeah we have we at least have some modicum of public transportation yeah nothing here so everything is so spread out here yeah yeah it's a 30 minute drive is short like it takes us 30 to 40 minutes on a good day here and we're like seven miles away yeah yeah seven miles away is like to jfk in new york that's like all the way out there oh is that right yeah um so basically the big the big change came for you when uh president obama decided after everything to commute your sentence why do you think he did that you know i he said what he said and so what did he say he uh he said that he felt that the sentence was was too much that um you know i had served my time and uh you know i i had gone through the process and gotten through the the court system um and uh and you know and then asked for a commutation which i did um i asked for you petitioned for that i petitioned well the public petition publicly for time served we petitioned for 10 years which is what we were able to do within our within on our end so we we we wanted a reduction of sentence from 35 years to 10 years which would have made me in the range of eligibility for parole at that time um but did it feel like a long shot when you were asking for commutation oh god yes yeah oh yeah like um actually you know i i i i talk about this again in my book but like we had we sort of had reasons for why we were doing it but they were like to to improve my quality of life you know to really you know just sort of draw attention to some issues and and raise some long-term health issues and and you know healthcare issues with being trans and whatnot and really drive home sort of message like you know like you know it's it's time to start it's time to start you know taking care of some of these things especially if i'm going to be in prison for you know another 20 plus years um uh and yeah uh i uh i we we we had no expectations walking into this yeah yeah we were you know uh it we figured it was a long shot and it was actually honestly i mean this is a bold decision from obama because he's the one that he was the president he got sentenced right yes so because if you think about it if because i i never had time to think about this um you know this was the last decision that he made as president is like one of the largest that's a big thing yeah it's a legacy but a cap on his presidency sort of legacy defining decision you know being a capital sort of like a legacy defining his decision and you know and one of those was to give me a chance and that's that that's a bull and and also not only that but like this isn't like oh we're commuting a 40-year sentence to a 30-year sentence right it was yeah this is like this is like no we are taking four fifths of your sentence and slashing it which is a big deal i mean i or five is five-sevenths is what i think it is um and yeah it's a big deal it's crazy to think that probably almost any other president probably would not have done that yeah and yeah the that's the thing is like i i think that it was a it was a bold and risky it was a it was a bold and rescue decision that you know sort of whatever i do for the rest of my life is going to be tied to his decision so yeah it was it was a bold decision and i'm and i'm very aware of that i'm very aware of sort of the the risk so how do you feel about uh president obama you know i i think i think he tried i think he tried i think he was a president who didn't understand the reality of the moment that he was in um he wanted to reach across the aisle he wanted you know like uh health what you know getting health care was like the capstone of his entire legacy and he didn't get anything else done um he's mostly spent the the presidency like treading water and whatnot and sort of um one of the reasons for that and then the only scene the only seemingly things that the only bits of his legacy that he seemed to to be able to keep were sort of carryovers from the bush administration and sort of the solidification the crystallization of the security apparatus um you know the the use of the of you know the the the use of the militarization of policing in the u.s um obviously he was uh he became known as sort of the deporter-in-chief in that time i think that i think that he that while he personally tried i think that the the presidency is such a toxic office it's such a poisonous position because it's not just a person it's an institution you are the executive of the executive branch of the united states and the executive branch the united states acts you know you know acts on behalf of the the of the sort of like ruling class in the united states the sort of power is to be within what you know the moneyed interests of the united states and so does the congress and and i think that um that he being sort of this constitutional lawyer um you know has tried to wrestle with this and grapple with this and you know and then you just had this sort of rise of power within the reactionary right where you know went from like because if you recall you know we went from like paul ryan being the face of the tea party to to what to like josh hawley and you know and this is the sort of marjorie taylor greens like you know the right has been just surging so far right and just the overturned window's been getting pushed further and further to the right and this is even occurring during his presidency and he's responding to the the republicans and to his his and to his progressive base the same way that they were in the 90s right you know which is like uh progressive base wait your turn we'll get to these things when we get to it and then trying to work across the i o constantly scrambling to to work with and try to get concessions from republicans and this is this has just been the consistent you know like the the administration has just got continuation of this yeah yeah at this point at this at this point i i think i think that personally he tried i think that he did that that he he made that he made a few that he made a few decisions as an individual um in in that and then in that role in that in the office but just just sort of like the poison-ness the the poisonedness and the toxicity of the of the office of the presidency is and i've often i i don't know if you've noted if you've seen this but i've regularly advocated for the the abolishment of the presidency as a as a political office i i don't think that a single person should be in this role i don't think that an executive office should exist i you know i i really think that that's one of like that's honestly like you know that's honestly one of the biggest failings i think of the constitution is sort of structuring the system in this way in which you have a soul you have this king like basically we have an elected monarch that's what we have you know you switch between the parties or whatnot but you you basically you get to pick you who who wears the crown every every few years and and has all the same powers that um that the crown of the of that year of the night of the 18th century had right and uh and so yeah i'm very skeptical of sort of the the ability of any of any pr like i don't think i don't think you just need to elect the right president i think you that the problem is the office itself interesting do you have personal feelings towards obama as the person who commuted your sentence like yeah yeah absolutely yeah i i you know i i i find it correct you know because like uh politically obviously we sort of have some disagreements and and whatnot but i mean that's a bold personal decision and i i can't how can i yeah yeah he didn't he didn't have to do that yeah there was just there was no penalty to pay for him not doing that sure it was only a risk to him yeah no benefit really and and and that that that that that's significant on a personal level to me there is a there is a a level of gratitude towards him yes yeah yeah personally yeah i would say so yeah i mean that makes sense so where were you when you this first broke that you uh had effectively been that's in the community because you're asking vignettes for the book now okay where were you the second after where no so well um i'm assuming you were obviously you're in jail and you know i do i do do other stuff now i do do all this stuff you know i am i'm a security expert i'm working in the field of ai now uh i work on many projects um you know uh and i'm just getting started you know i'm starting to do media stuff again um you know uh sorry to pivot but uh you know it's just uh you know i i um one of the things i've been trying to do for like the last few years is i've been trying to like oh well what about 2010 or what about president i'm just like well you know like look around you like this is a pretty scary time it's a pretty intense time well let me ask you about the book then how long have you been working on it uh well it's been since 2017. oh wow yeah and the book ends in 20 and it ends in 2017. oh it's just about that year you mean or no it's my life story up to 2017. okay i see i see and i know that you've been writing it and right now the book is just being held for approval from the government no no no i think we've got approved so oh you're all approved yeah it's approved and we'll just need to like actually publish the book so you just but you do have a publisher yeah uh for our stress i can never pronounce it right fsg so so this is going to be a huge national publication i'm assuming yeah i i think so you know it's a it's yeah it's not it's not like verso press or anything have you ever written a book i mean what was that experience like for you really why yeah i don't recommend it for anyone oh no because i'm rehashing and reliving it was awful i mean honestly like there were three drafts that i went through and i went through and and went through and it was like there were times whenever i couldn't look at the screen because i would have an anxiety attack looking at the screen i could write a book about writing the book that's how intense this process and i probably will mostly just from reliving the trauma not the act of actually writing i'm probably gonna have to write a book about just sort of dealing with the the real with sort of developing a lot of traumas living through a traumatic period period of my life and then having that be taken away but also like having the traumas be taken away and then be like dragged into a world that where everything is just sort of like a united states that is slowly crumbling and the infrastructure is collapsing and uh and and you know the the institutions are failing and you know there's like attempted coups and uh you know um uh mass you know mass shootings that don't lead to any sort of you know any any kind of uh change or anything like that you have mass protests the largest protest movement ever in united states history not lead to virtually any change whatsoever yeah you know it's just like it's just such a debilitatingly um exhausting time period to be a political figure and to be somebody who cares and is passionate about activism and politics and and and and being involved in the world and be being involved in community and uh and and to carry this weight of this time frame and this experience um and and yeah you know like um it's gonna be it's going to be uh it's going to take i mean i i you know i don't know i don't know i don't know if i'll ever recover i don't know if i'll ever fully recover but i'm definitely healing i'm definitely i mean yeah i probably wouldn't have been able to have i probably wouldn't have been able to have this conversation in this way and yeah with you what was it like working i'm assuming you worked with editors and stuff like that yeah was it weird getting notes on your like personal anecdotes oh and they always wanted more oh they they say dig deeper yeah which you know i did you know i did dig deeper um within the confines of the law yeah of course yeah um because uh i mean the government obviously got to say um you know we relented on that we we had we went through a government approval process but yeah the the editorial process was brutal brutal yeah uh i i believe it called my editor the uh the butcher oh no but that's good right to have a to have a brutal did you like your editor or was it just like uh uh i mean i hated my editor until until the book was cut and then i was like this is good and then i was like i'm satisfied i see this is this isn't the book that i envisioned this isn't the book that i set out to write interesting um this isn't the book that but it's the book that i feel comfortable with and then i can act that i feel comfortable with and i can say i can put my name on this that was that problem so the book is basically just like on a autobiography there were times when i was like this book sucks i was just throwing sheep really yeah well to be fair you were doing that with the with the information you had when the new york times didn't want it to so i'm sure the book is going to be amazing yeah i'm i'm [Music] you know i'm just i'm just eager to i'm very eager to move on with my life yeah and to like get on to the next stuff because like i got bigger stuff coming so what are you working on now yeah what's what's uh so i'm working on right now uh obviously the book is coming out um i work for uh i work for a a privacy company now um oh you work like full time for them uh i work or like a freelance thing i'm a contractor um but i work i essentially work uh i i work part-time full-time like basically full-time hours sometimes and then part-time hours um so i am a contractor for a privacy company called nim um which is uh which is privacy but uh which is like a privacy technology like you know tor you know uh and vpns and things like that it is a it is it is a forward thinking technology and sort of looking forward uh over the next 20 years and sort of the the needs of anonymization and encryption and securing things on on the internet i actually came up with a very similar idea in 2016. one of the reasons why they reached out to me in 2016 was they were trying to get uh they were trying to get my opinion on it so i reviewed this white paper and i got asked to review it and i went through and i reviewed it and i went through it and you know i'm not trying to do like a sales pitch or anything for them uh right now but uh this is something that i'm working on and that i sort of helped uh help help develop and create um the downside is is that you know we're doing cryptography and we're doing privacy-based technology um in a time whenever like everybody associates crypto with like cryptocurrency and tokens yeah it's crypto in a different completely different way yeah so it's more private it's privacy focused there is a blockchain component to it which is like the part that makes people cringe but i'm like well this is blockchain technology is like this is not nf this is not scam nfts this is not you're not nobody's going to be making bit like this isn't bitcoin like nobody's going to be hoarding a ton tons and tons and tons of this stuff it's simply a a sort of management system a way of managing sort of nodes across the network or whatever to truly decentralize things which you know i understand the skepticism of that because i am not a crypto bro i am not i am not into the stuff whatsoever um so you know like it's just trying to educate people about sort of like how how how cr how cryptographic technology can work without it burning down the rainforest uh without it uh without it sort of like leading to uh a bunch of uh a bunch of new um you know uh crypto bros like buying uh you know big houses in the hollywood hills right right and and and you know having cringe uh having cringed jpegs you know of course you know like it's it's just like you know like it's it the good news is that the crypto crash has made it easier to sort of like because it's cleared a lot of the people who are just like out get really quick um out of the way and sort of be able to be like well actually like we i come from privacy and techno from the privacy technology space which you know is older and is where a lot of stuff came from it's all these grifters who came back later to try to get rich quick so but we are sort of operating in the space where we're you know anytime we talk about cryptography or privacy like people are just like like are you talking about bitcoin no yeah so are you a little bit resentful or maybe i don't know if that's the right word but all these people that came out and kind of just let you describe just kind of ruined crypto and the public you know oh absolutely public sphere oh absolutely like you said crypto synonymous with like scam yes and you know that and that's going to be that's going to continue to be a problem yeah definitely not like the the crypto crash i think has cleared a lot of people but they're like you're just gonna open things up for the next uh for the next bear market for the next quote-unquote bear market step bitcoin's still at 29 000. yeah but i mean what was an app before like 50 60 i don't have any token assets i don't really mean neither i note that we're token free um well that's great and i know you you were streaming on twitch you said during the page i was streaming on twitch but i have uh the big thing i'm working on right now is i'm working on a youtube series oh um i've been working on this for one and a half years i know that people are going to be like i've been paying your patreon for this for this so what's the project um i it's a first youtube it's a youtube series in which i break down advanced technologies and sort of discussions about them um the things that are topical and uh break them down to a bill nye the science guy eighth grade level so what's the hold up if it's episodic um well it's episodic in terms of like the topic so the first video is cryptocurrency yeah uh which i am pretty i'm it may be pretty cryptic currency a postmortem uh where i just sort of talk about and i get into the weeds of how it actually works because everybody's like because i the most asked question of 2021 was what is an nfg and what is a crypt how does cryptocurrency work right and i was like okay i'm asked this question so much there's obviously demand for this and i looked for people who do try to talk about this stuff and everybody's talking about the market everybody's talking about like burning down of rainforest which all this stuff is true but nobody's boiling it down to the most interesting part for me as a as a technologist which is the math which is how this like why why is why is cryptography a basis of this technology and i get into that and and sort of how that connects to science technology so when can we expect that that sounds great uh i i've redone filming in production because i didn't like the first version i i i was there yeah i saw the first version i was like i was like okay i learned how not to do this and i learned you know it was a learning experience for me um but yeah so uh we're up uh we i'm filming this weekend in fact okay and in in new york again i'm back to filming uh filming portions of it so we're in the production phase um uh and mostly we're just sort of rehashing on on stuff so i'm thinking that by the end of summer but um i said that i said by the end of summer last summer but we put up we put a pin in it actually production we put a pin in production because uh because covid in late 2021 because it looked like we're coming out of it and then and then delta hit or what then yeah and then omicron and now it's like crazy again yeah it's crazy again but um you know it's kind of nuts like everybody i know yeah is getting covered like all my family members all my friends these guys yeah it's like people aren't really dying but the long of it is scary yeah it is scary yeah i mean i i got when i got covered in 2021 i got um i had i had symptoms for about two or three months so you had a little bit of long coved yeah i did um it was actually funny because like when i got my when i got the third shot when i got the booster december or january of december january um all those symptoms went away oh wow oh really that's amazing yeah and then i got and then like three months later i got covered again really just three months later three months later i got covered again but it was like by that time it didn't phase me i like tested positive and i was like oh wow like the rapid test i'm positive then i started to feel like a little a little under the weather but like it didn't it didn't really knock me out or anything like it did before so there's one question that everyone wants to ask before we wrap this up and it's what is your favorite anime that people are wondering oh that's a good question um because really i'm i'm actually torn a little bit uh with my animes um because death note is very high up there death note is pretty good but i in my opinion i won't say overrated yeah i won't say overrated but yeah i i've rewatched it recently and i've realized that it fails the bechtel test enormously which as a trans woman kind of bothers me oh that where there's like not enough women in it there's not enough women in this really they only talk about they only talk about other men or whatever yeah when there's a woman in on the scene they only talk about other men so it's really interesting i want to see i want to see i want to see death note but like with more more girl power i want to see an anime of that variety so death goes pretty high up there yeah neon evangelion um is pretty good um you know uh i actually revisited gundam wing oh wow i really got it because i watched that was one of the first animes that i ever saw um uh then it's actually aged really well and amazing it does not fail the bechtel test so that's it i mean yeah you have to that's the 90s like what is the specification of that test because it's not like it is really yeah it's actually you have to be really [ __ ] bad to fail this test and it's incredible how many things fail this test how's it called or send me the rules baby it's actually really interesting it's it's incredible how much media actually fails this because when you hear this you'll be shocked so that's it what about uh one punch man one punch man oh my god i haven't seen it you gotta watch that it's so [ __ ] no i haven't seen it that's probably i'm not a weeb you're not a wee but i'm not a weeb but i do what i do every everyone i don't know my my my my best friend in the whole wide world is uh is is a weep she's a weebo die hard weeb and uh is my source of all things anime and all sorts like and like if i if i ask a question she like knows it she's like on point and i'm just like oh wow so let me recommend my favorite is hunter hunter uh-huh you've seen that one or not yet i have seen that yet okay did you love it oh i thought it was all right you watched the whole thing you saw the camara ant arc i did okay all right everyone's a title well i mean like i'm in a becca okay yeah a mecca there's no mechs in that i know that's what i don't know you like the mech [ __ ] okay i like the mech [ __ ] you like gundam like evangelion like yeah there's some mechs in one punch there's a little message there there's a little bit but you know it's not like king of the hill i see people saying king of the hill great uh attack on titan is awesome mike on titan is great yeah they're like that shows let's go that show is really good yeah and then my hero academia is one that i really like it's a little it's a little yeah like i like that show i like it i like it but i wouldn't put it in that's a bad anime too recently oh really yeah i'm sure there's a lot of that yeah there's a lot of bad anime um i have a crunchyroll okay i've been trying to get on crunchyroll do you know what's so weird i'm trying to sign up with apple tv and they're making me sign in through itunes and i'm like i don't [ __ ] know my itunes and i really want to get we tried that didn't we all right i gotta i gotta put more effort into this i gotta find the email address yeah god you talk to me i'm the security so people are saying it's your birthday uh is it your birthday my birthday oh i don't know why people are saying that december 17th that's not even close oh couldn't be further away actually pretty much yeah it's almost exactly six months away yeah yeah um okay let me read this test because this is actually interesting so i just think i i'm fascinated by you know how close we are in age though are we the are you 36 i'm 34. oh i'm like yeah i'm just number 12 by the way so we're very close why are you fascinated by how close we are in age i don't know because i'm about to be 37 so yeah i look because i look you know like i feel closer to you than i am to hassan oh really hassan's like yeah his songs are you know what i'm used to everyone being younger he's yeah he's a young man he looks old as [ __ ] though he's decrepit yeah he looks beautiful he hunches he's like child but you know what um i'm used to everyone being younger than me yeah he's a summer child um so let's see this test is a measurement of the represent representation of women in fiction yep it asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man wow that's it yep all that has to happen is that two women have to talk to each other about something other than a man that entire serious death note fails [Music] i mean it's insane how many shows actually failed yeah i know i like i like just do a running a rough running estimate when i'm watching these things now so i pick up on this but so like when i watch it again like i cuz cause like i watched it when i was like what like 16 or 17. no it was 18 because it came out in like two thousand it was hanging on like 2007 right so like i was like young when it came out i'm actually curious how many uh shows fail or movies fail this is can you find this it's enormous because it's like it's kind of insane when you see this the basically anything from the 1990s a a.b wants to say that attack on titan uh the women are badass so there you have it yeah there you go i love attack on true give me a list of of notable failures here it is all right let's take a look jaeger who's that babe um the list hey how about you can you guys send me the link but can you send me a list of like notable uh morbius fails of course you did morbius fails in every aspect fantastic beast the secret of dumbledore not surprising that's incredible it's just incredible that anything could fail that top gun maverick fail i don't think there's even any women in that movie i haven't seen it though um all right here i got a list 11 blockbusters that fail the bechdel test let's take a look yo a whole marvel lord of the rings trilogy the whole trilogy are you serious what is that but that's written they went they stuck with the book and it's true dude the whole like 11 hours there's about two or two women having a conversation about anything but a man nope that's nice ratatouille damn you mouse slump dog millionaire avatar really avatar the social network i mean okay jump street avengers the avengers that doesn't surprise me yeah it doesn't surprise me the grand budapest hotel that surprised me that is surprising well it's it's super fascinating yeah i love this stuff well on that note well you know what um we didn't feel the bechtel test today uh no in fact not you're not even slow yeah not even close we didn't talk to each other about just a man yeah did you guys mention a man to i don't think so [Laughter] so the book is coming out hopefully this year beginning of next year yeah and we are going to be standing by very excited to read it yeah awesome i'm thrilled to you know actually do something that i've been working on for five years and we also look forward to your youtube series that's coming out yep uh soon right yes uh the youtube account is xy chelsea uh it's just c forwards that i think it's just xy chelsea on youtube is there anything on that channel currently no there's nothing on that channel currently it's just it's prepared i it's set aside um i'll publish it and i'll post it i have a patreon i have a patreon i i'm not recommending people subscribe to the patreon right now because i want i don't really need the budget we already have the budget for it um and uh we're gonna we're gonna wait until we actually put something out before i start pitching okay because we raised money and we set that money aside and that's been being used for the production project so okay i've been trying to send emails to people who have subscribed and i'm just like no no we're still doing it like it's still happening yeah yeah we're just it's just like literally production problems um yeah is there anything else you want to plug before we uh twitter you're on instagram you're yeah i'm on i'm on twitch uh or i was on twitch i haven't uh done a twitch stream since november of last year i will be streaming again um once uh i probably probably towards the autumn uh i will be streaming again because uh i'm way i'm really just waiting on the slow down in terms of like my travel because i've been making up for all of the travel of the last few years uh last three years really um in the last uh three or four months you know it's crazy i just so your tag is like xy chelsea right it is yes i just typed there's like a whole documentary there's so much media there was a documentary a showtime documentary xy chelsea what's the xy i mean uh that's just my uh that's my chromosomes baby oh okay yeah but why would they that's me that's an interesting name for a documentary they i mean they chose it because that's my that's that's your thing that's my twitter handle yeah i got it but i gotta get that trademark back it's kind of is it kind of surreal that there's like so much media about you there's like yeah i don't think you can get documentaries yeah that's good yeah yeah i i highly recommend that you know one one of the worst things that uh that like twitch streamers youtubers uh twitter personalities do because they read their own stuff yeah you know i yeah it will come to the same conclusion doom pill because nobody's ever gonna write the right thing you're always gonna know that it's different um i'm i live and have happily and bliss uh i have this is why i have an assistant who reads the stuff for me good mm-hmm beautiful that's the way the producer is like i got you covered well you know it's such a such a pleasure and honor to have you it's great to be here thank you man yeah oh thank you so much yeah and thank you for sharing you know all those things and you're a victim of cancer culture yeah i want you to know it from the rooftop say it thank you amen let this man go when will i be let him go off the rails let me go off the rails yeah they'll actually you know what's interesting i've been canceled many times lost a lot of sponsors i will say and i guess maybe i shouldn't be saying this but knock on wood i didn't lose any from the bomb [ __ ] well that's because you already lost them i think yeah well i mean yeah to be fair i think all of them that we're gonna leave carlson mode where you've lost everybody but i still got my pillow baby can we get my pillow i wonder if mike lindell would sponsor it no i need some mic i need some my pillow money yeah where is there a lib version of my pillow um there is but don't don't look at it really oh no now you're gonna look it up aren't you no but i mean like no like a super rich dude no chris who's willing to pay me no matter what i said it already exists it's the david hogg's thing yeah his name is david oh he made the pillow yeah the lip pillow oh really yeah he made a lip pill oh god liberal tears pillow yeah well you got tissues all right hopefully hog can take that big fat hog and sponsor me yeah right anyone cog thank you all right well listen you're going back to new york soon yes i am uh i'm going back to new york uh where oh god i don't this is why i have an assistant yeah love shadow love it love uh i want to be able to have a job like you where i sit in one spot yeah um which i was doing last year um but lately i've been on travel and i'm going to be traveling probably until well until 2023 at this stage so speaking engagements and stuff like that a lot of speaking i actually i mean my employ uh the project i'm working on uh most of the employees work in europe so that requires a lot of transatlantic travel um uh and uh um that's the nim project and um i am also um you know obviously doing media and filming and things like that yeah a lot of projects up in the air and then and then obviously like yeah like basically i'm just like like all of these different projects that i've been working on for like the last two years are all starting to come to fruition like in the next six months that would be good like the video get it all out dj stuff like i'm gonna start doing my first dj sets the book is coming out um you know uh the the video uh streaming i'm gonna get back into streaming all these different things are all happening all at once which means that my i have no sleep schedule what's that you know i just there was one thing i wanted to ask you that i just realized yeah that i forgot to circle back to you know i was just really curious how your dad having the military man yeah and having done you know become who you are and what you did what you did was that when you guys cut off uh communication or did you talk to him after all that happened oh no that's a different thing it's a different family issue oh really yeah so the so what was his reaction to the to the whole leaking thing i think it's just the only denial oh really yeah there's like a cringe interview like don't look at it oh you're like he like said that it wasn't that it was like impossible for me for dude to do that or something like that oh he thinks you're innocent it never happened well yeah it was like but that was like in his own it was we like told him not to and we're like yeah dad wait you know like we're gonna have we have a court martial coming up like don't don't go on tv and say things so it's been a long time since you talked to him so i guess you don't really know what's his opinion about all that i don't but you know this is why i have my sister and why i have my aunt so you know like we keep family i don't want to get in my family yeah my family like my family is off limits yeah i understand you know at the end of the day like at the end of the day you know as much as you know i have a falling out with you know any family member like you know that that is that we're still like we're still family this is it's a total like the reason why i haven't talked to my dad in a while is nothing to do with the latest with the leaks or the or the public stuff it is completely internal family affairs interesting okay i thought there might be a connection there but no there isn't folks the one thing i wanted to ask and uh you had to leave it on that note i know i'm sorry all right well we were talking about uh well you're about to get home yeah or getting on yeah cause i gotta go yeah well have a safe flight good luck with everything yeah very much looking forward to all the stuff you're working on thank you for having me and again oh thank you so much and thank you for coming on you should put up and don't be black pills anymore i'm optimistic if i can go through everything that i've gone through and you're and you can live and you know you can live in los angeles and and and have this and have this opportunity to have this show like there's no reason for you to be doing built i'm doing pill i mean just seeing tucker just being able to see ted cruz say something colossally stupid as we need one door and people and p him not get like you know somebody who grew up publicly i mean who grew up in the midwest the truth doesn't matter all that matters is that it owns lips yeah that's black filling yeah it's so depressing by the way if you need help with any youtube stuff let us know we're we're we're we're great we're great we're all right all right i'm gonna put you in connection with my business yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we can help you with whatever you need all right next all right well thanks everyone for watching it's friday baby friday i hope everyone has a great weekend we will be back on monday as usual do we have anything that next week dan that we're working on we have a bunch of stuff hold on i had to figure out where ian's beat switches uh yes we have a big uh week next week but um one of it is uh a top secret project that is a top secret well don't tell me that's funny that's really funny yeah uh all right well just it'll be next friday's episode though we got something really big planned for next friday so look forward to that everybody thanks guys see on a great weekend all right thank you [ __ ] yeah baby [Music] to the three ritual with more you

Channel: H3 Podcast

Views: 791,695

Keywords: h3 podcast, h3h3 podcast, the h3 podcast, the h3h3 podcast, h3h3productions, h3h3, h3, ethan klein, hila klein, ethan and hila, ethan & hila, chelsea manning, interview

Id: SI9jHA2pDMQ

Length: 150min 50sec (9050 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022