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John Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA. He started as an analyst, went operational, and eventually ran counterterrorism work in Pakistan that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. He was the first U.S. government official to publicly confirm that the agency was waterboarding prisoners. For that, the Obama administration prosecuted him under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and sent him to federal prison for 23 months. He lost his pension. He lost his career. Most of his kids stopped speaking to him. Today he writes books, hosts a podcast, and teaches a course on the history of terrorism.
We get into how the agency really works. Recruiting spies. Breaking into a house in a foreign country to plant a bug. The mentor who told him to walk up to a target's front door and sell him out to his face. Then we get into the part nobody at Langley wants to talk about. Torture. Rendition. The innocent people who got grabbed off planes and buses and never got their lives back.
We also cover Section 702, the Patriot Act, Iran, Iraq, and why no agency ever gives the power back. 
Enjoy.
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Four questions this week. The kind that don't have clean answers.
A guy whose father murdered his mother is asking how to get back to who he was before. He's not.
A 28-year-old still living at home is watching his mom's cancer come back and trying to figure out how to spend the time he has left.
A man in his sixties wants to know how to bring up suicide with three friends he's had for 40 years before it's too late.
A 31-year-old in his first long-term relationship doesn't feel anything for the woman he's dating but knows everyone around him likes her. I talk about why the people you see online keeping it together aren't keeping it together. I talk about why the snapshot isn't the whole picture.
I talk about why the first therapist who wants to sell you his book isn't the last therapist you'll need to find. I talk about going right at the hard conversation instead of around it. And I talk about why bringing the government into a relationship you're already unsure about is the wrong move.
Enjoy
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Today's "episode" is the audiobook first chapter of my book: Drownproof. Thank you to everyone who helped make the launch such a tremendous success.
Hitting all of the "Best Seller" lists, to include the NYT, was quite frankly, incredibly humbling. You all made that happen, not me.
For those of you who have read or listened to it already, well, clearly today's episode is not going to be exciting for you! For those that haven't, this chapter is about a very formative experience in my young life that changed how I viewed my self in the world. That change in mindset altered the trajectory of my life.
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Justin Klahn is hard to put in a box. Twenty years inside Nike Innovation. Years embedded with JSOC units building gear that had to actually work. Time consulting with three-letter agencies, DARPA, and the Harvard Learning Innovations Laboratory. A run working directly for Kanye West. He calls himself a problem solver, and the resume backs it up. His new book is Innovator's Handbook.
We open on the divorce conversation, the kind of failure neither of us wished for, and what it takes to show up for a partner the second time around.
From there it gets wide. The competition mindset that separates the top of the JSOC food chain from everyone else. What it's actually like to sit in a room with Kobe, with Tinker, with Kanye. The Nike origin stories most people don't know — the real Jordan re-signing, the Pantry, the relationship between Phil Knight and Steve Jobs.
We dig into the supernatural. Faith. Conspiracy and control. How a guy who advises high-stakes operators stays open enough to consider anything but grounded enough to still get the work done. 
And we end on the AI workflow he used to write a book in two weeks — and what that says about where the world is going. 
The Innovator's Handbook: https://a.co/d/01Zqj9Q7
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Michael, my dad, and me. Three generations arguing in one room. That's the format today.
My dad watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon live at twenty-two years old. He remembers the Iranian hostage crisis when it was happening, not when it was a movie. That perspective matters when we get into where we are now — the rhetoric coming out of the White House, the ceasefire that may or may not hold, a war nobody has explained the objective of.
We talked about the leaders we don't seem to produce anymore. Kennedy to the moon in ten years. Hungary voting out a hard-right prime minister by historic margins. Why most good people won't touch politics now — they'll destroy your entire family before you ever reach the ballot.
Then the stuff that piles up every week. California's rail to nowhere. AI versus actual brain tissue running video games. ICE changing tactics. Cancer research funding cut by thirty-one percent. Civil War monuments and what you do with history you don't want to celebrate.
And yes, my dad tried to break into the neighbor's house. And pissed himself at the rodeo. We get to that too.
Enjoy.
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