Jack Hopkins: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast. I'm your host, Jack Hopkins. Today's guest is John Sipher

Jack Hopkins: 0:07

, former CIA station chief and national security expert. John Seifer is a retired member of the CIA Senior Intelligence Service, with over 28 years experience in the US intelligence community. During his career, he served in multiple overseas postings, including as CIA station chief, and led covert operations across Europe, asia and the Middle East. A recognized expert in espionage, russian intelligence and national security, seifer played a key role in managing and developing the CIA's Russia programs, including efforts to counter foreign influence and protect US interests abroad. He also held senior leadership roles in the CIA's clandestine service, focusing on human intelligence operations. He is the co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment, a production company that works to bring real intelligence stories to the public through media and film. His writing has appeared in major outlets like the New York Times, the Atlantic and Just Security, and he is frequently interviewed on national television and podcasts for his insight into covert operations, russian strategy and threats to democratic institutions.

Jack Hopkins: 1:21

This is one of the longest podcast episodes I've ever recorded and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the discussions that we have from beginning to end. John's a really knowledgeable guy and, as it turns out a really likable guy as well. I think you'll enjoy this as much as I did. Let's get right into it, okay? So, john boy, there's a lot to talk about going on in the world right now. I think the first thing I want to ask you what's the stated purpose, what's the outcome of the steady state? There's a lot of smart people that have come together on this. So what? Have a lot of smart people then decided, hey, this is what we need to do? No, I appreciate you that. You asked Essentially as a group of smart people, then decided, hey, this is what we need to do.

John Sipher: 2:04

No, I appreciate you.

John Sipher: 2:05

The US essentially is a group of people who are national security professionals, intelligence, diplomacy, military, you know, are concerned about sort of the erosion of knowledge about the security state and erosion of, you know, some democratic and rule of law principles that back up the security state, some democratic and rule of law principles that back up the security state.

John Sipher: 2:27

I mean, I think there's often a mythology out there that you know the intelligence sort of operates on its own and it's sort of a rogue element that's doing things, but we really rely on, you know, a very regulated rule of law that makes it clear where our boundaries are Like.

John Sipher: 2:39

I think a successful intelligence agency ought to work at the boundaries. We're about protecting American citizens. We're about making sure that you know we're out there in places that are hard to get to doing the things that Americans need done, and sometimes that involves, you know, a lot of flexibility, administration and essentially, the American people, and so there is some concern now, especially with this administration, that they don't take those things as seriously and that they want, you know, intelligence and diplomacy to be essentially a personal weapon or a personal arm of this party or that party or the administration, and we feel that, you know, we are nonpartisan professionals, we work for the American people, we take an oath to the Constitution and so therefore, we want to be. You know, now that we're retired we're all retired we want to help inform the American people of that viewpoint.

Jack Hopkins: 3:35

And do you find that, with all of you being retired, that perhaps it creates a freedom of thought and expression within the group, because you aren't bound by all of the can't-dos that you would have been when you were?

John Sipher: 3:48

Well, certainly, you know, I took an obligation to protect classified information and so, for example, I write a lot of opinion pieces and I, you know, I work with Hollywood trying to do movies. So as part of that, when I write things, I have an obligation to send it to the Central Intelligence Agency for them to make sure there's nothing classified in what I write. And it's the same thing when I speak. I certainly can explain what we did, how we did it, how, in what milieu it all works. But I'm not going to give up those kind of secrets that could put people in harm's way, and so that's not a problem. So, you know, I think in many ways, at least in the intelligence field.

John Sipher: 4:21

You know, when I was growing up it was very much, you know, we operate in secrecy and we don't have really an obligation to the American public to explain the work we did, whereas our leaders might do so in the Congress, you know, and have an obligation to that, and I think it was General Hayden, former NSA director, cia director, air Force general, who started to say you know, we have an obligation when we retire to try to get involved in the discussion to help Americans understand what their intelligence services do. These are powerful organizations law enforcement for the FBI, cia and intelligence and other parts of the intelligence community. We have obligation to try to explain to Americans what we do and why. You know, because you know we operate in secrecy. It's easy to come up with all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories, and so I think you know those of us who are retired try to do our best to do that. Now, of course, like in any organization, there's people who think all kinds of things, but so, yeah, we take that seriously.

Jack Hopkins: 5:29

And I think the steady state is one of the groups and there's a number of them that you know vote vets and some other ones that work in military people who are trying to play in that realm. Yeah, I always find it one of the most challenging things when I have somebody who's had involvement with the CIA on as a guest, because I know the fantastic stories inside their head that are there but that there's no sense even asking because there's not a chance in hell that they can tell me those things.

John Sipher: 5:45

Right, I think there is. I think one of the things that happens is if you're not paying attention to what there is out there publicly, you're nervous because you don't want to put people at risk or say things that are still out there. But you see, I read a lot of intelligence history and things, and so a lot of things have been declassified. There is a tremendous amount of information that our intelligence community has put out there and authors have put out there that can provide good examples of things. I think most questions can be answered to the point where it would be interesting to people and help illuminate what the intelligence services do. So I think it's a little bit of a cop-out to be like I can't talk about that, it's secret. There's pieces around of it that we can talk about for the most part.

Jack Hopkins: 6:27

Right. I'm not particularly immersed in this particular topic but, for example, because everybody's familiar with it, when we see repeated redactions in anything related, for example, to the Kennedy assassination, is there in your opinion, as frustrating as it is, is there usually good reason for that?

John Sipher: 6:48

in general, yeah, it's interesting. So I, with a former colleague, we have a podcast that looks at conspiracy theories and for the first couple of years we were doing these weekly podcasts and we would stay away from the Kennedy assassination because the people who get into that are like so, so deep in the weeds, they have all this knowledge so that even if you try to diffuse conspiracies around it, those people know everything. And so we finally, you know, dipped our toe in to talk about things. But to your question, yes, you know, I think the people who declassify information take it very seriously, like what we were talking about. I think they understand what American people nobody at the CIA wants the American people to think we're assassins or we're up to problems or that we're involved in killing presidents. That's just nuts. We work for presidents, we work for American people, and so my understanding of the few documents and I don't think there's, I think President Trump is putting out everything that were redacted were for a number of reasons. So one of the things we do when I work overseas, like name your place, because a lot of this was in Mexico, right, so say, I was the chief of station, cia chief of station in Mexico and we have some sources, and so if President Kennedy was assassinated, they would come and say, hey, what did you know about when Lee Harvey Oswald was in Mexico? And we would try to you know, make sure that we had been written about that before. What's out there.

John Sipher: 8:07

But there's some things that you know. A good portion of the intelligence that we get you know a lot of it's from spies that are secret. A lot of it is from technical stuff, but a good portion of it is from partners like, for example, the Mexican police or the Mexican intelligence service or the Mexican president or government. And one of the things that we say to people who share information with us is if you give us information, we will protect that information. Right, this isn't information I stole, this is somebody offering this to the US government, and so and there's periods of time and I think we've seen this now with the Kennedy stuff is, for example, the Mexicans came to us and gave us information on things that were actually would be illegal in their country, but they gave it to us because we had developed such a trusting relationship. They had sources in the Russian embassy that were there when Lee Harvey Oswald came in. They shared it with us, but they didn't want that to become public because it was against Mexican law. And then one of the things we say is we promise that we will never release that. And so, frankly, now they're releasing it and that you know, we gave it. We gave it oath to those people that we would not release that. So some of the stuff that's been released, you know, I can understand, on one hand, the public's like why aren't they doing this? What are they hiding? Well, we're not hiding, we're actually trying to protect the people that we've offered protection for.

John Sipher: 9:25

And there's also another thing is there was a law I'm sorry I won't go on too much more about this no, no, no. It was a law, I think in the 90s, about releasing or getting all the information we could about the Kennedy assassination. And one of the things it said is any situation of anything about the Kennedy assassination, you need to report that through this channel at CIA headquarters. So, for example, I was in the Balkans, I was working in Serbia for a while and I remember meeting with the head of the Serbian security service about nothing to do with Kennedy. It was about you know, what was happening in the war in Yugoslavia and all these in Bosnia. But he was like he was. He was fascinated with the Kennedy stuff. He was one of these people who knew everything about it.

John Sipher: 10:04

So half of our discussion was about the Kennedy assassination stuff, just friendly over drinks. And then of course we talked about the issues that related. But because of the law and we talked about the Kennedy assassination, I had to put it in that channel. That went in there, which meant that the people who then looked to release Kennedy information have this in their files. But there's nothing in there that actually illuminates the Kennedy assassination and in fact if that's released it gives up secret information that this person shared about the Balkans. So all of a sudden there's all this stuff in there that has nothing really to do with Kennedy. But from the outside you're like oh, you're hiding something. So I think people who are engaged in that are well-meaning. I don't think anyone's looking to hide anything from the American people. But we're in the secrecy business and we've got to protect sources that provide us information. Sorry, I went on so long on that.

Jack Hopkins: 10:55

Thanks for that. That's interesting. So when you talk about people who you know, just the average person, who a hobbyist, who maybe with this subject doesn't even consider themselves a hobbyist but a professional right, like you said, they're so into it and they know every detail about it I would assume that within the intelligence field is there such a thing as oversaturation of information, in that if you aren't good at sorting and creating a hierarchy, that it can start to work against you.

John Sipher: 11:29

Tell me more. What do you mean Like?

Jack Hopkins: 11:30

are you talking?

John Sipher: 11:31

specifically about the Kennedy assassination.

Jack Hopkins: 11:33

Yeah, yeah. For example, where somebody who just just the average guy, right, and it's just that's been his topic of focus, says that he works at a factory by day and he does this Kennedy thing by night, and who has gathered so much information that it's allowed him to be able to construct all of these intricate conspiracies. Right, does that exist within the intelligence world? But it's just that intelligence folks are just better at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

John Sipher: 12:07

Well, the one thing that intelligence services do professional intelligence services do very well is sort and collect and keep information. That's one of the things that is sort of a superpower Like. Decade after decade, we live in these countries and we write everything you know. The one thing people don't understand about the intelligence world is we say it didn't happen unless it's written down and sent to headquarters. So every source I meet, every person who might be a source I meet, every bit of information when I'm out is written and sent to headquarters and it's sorted in different places. It is sort of kept together. So there's a tremendous amount of information. Then we have a professional analytic cadre who goes over this stuff and tries to put it in context, because we're getting stuff from satellites and diplomats and spies and all these type of things.

John Sipher: 12:53

I worked in the spy side of the agency, living overseas running human spies and so, yes, there's a tremendous amount of information and the sorting and analysis and putting that into context is a huge, huge issue. But I do think that's the one thing that intelligence services do very well and it's going to be interesting to see how they use that massive amount of data now with AI, because we're collecting every day like more information. Like 10 times the amount of information in the Library of Congress is coming into our intelligence services like every day, and so there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't even get seen or read by a human, because there's just so much stuff coming in, and so we've always been good at sorting that and getting it in front of the eyeballs that need to see it. But it's going to be harder and harder as time goes on, because we're also getting data not just from human spies but from satellites and electronic communications and all these other kinds of things. On the other hand, I would just add to that with the Kennedy assassination stuff, for example.

John Sipher: 13:50

So yeah, like I worked in the CIA for a long time, if I thought the CIA was involved in killing Kennedy, I would. I would think that was horrific and I would say so publicly, even if I got in trouble for it. And frankly, everybody who's working is focused on what they're doing. Now we're trying to. There's so many threats out there there's North Korea, what's happening in Iran and Syria, has Ukraine, russia. Like nobody has time really to go back and dig into these old stories, except for that cadre that focuses on declassifying old information.

Jack Hopkins: 14:21

Right, which is that's part of why I asked about that. I kind of wanted to set the stage for a current day question that involves some of those same concepts. To your knowledge, has there ever been a US president that has had as much non-official as much non-official contact with someone like Putin.

John Sipher: 14:51

That's interesting. So you know a lot of our presidents. Obviously they've had large public lives before they were presidents. You know Eisenhower obviously was in the military huge amount of contacts. You know Nixon was a career politician, traveled the world, sort of an expert in written books. You know most of those people. When they came into government they had that knowledge and background to help them. You know better at what they were doing. And then when they got into the government they worked with the people around them the security advisor, the security state, the intelligence diplomats to put that into it. But when they were presidents it's rare for them to have one-on-one meetings and if they did it would just be for a specific purpose, to discuss something so that it could be written and categorized lately and put into the system.

John Sipher: 15:38

Because the goal is obviously to create foreign policy that keep Americans safe. There shouldn't be secrets that just are personal in nature. I mean presidents have to develop good relationships with foreign leaders. That's what we want and so there is some of that. That's not necessary to be part of the public record. But we've created a system that you know if you're working for the American people and you've taken an oath of constitution to include the president.

John Sipher: 16:03

You know that information it belongs to the public. Now some of it can be secret, but then it has a series of oversight. You know the Congress has a role in that, and the Justice Department and others to make sure that it's treated properly. And so, yeah, the relationship with Trump and Putin it's hard to say because essentially, yeah, Trump has met Putin, he's met him personally and publicly, but he because, essentially, yeah, trump has met Putin, he's met him personally and publicly, but he still, I think, really misunderstands Putin, like he doesn't have much of a knowledge of sort of the history and the kind of things that have gone on with Putin. But, to be honest, other presidents have been pretty bad in terms of understanding and dealing with Putin too, democrats and Republicans, I have to say.

Jack Hopkins: 16:43

Putin too, democrats and Republicans, I have to say Safe to say and I think this is kind of general knowledge, but to drill down a little deeper safe to say that Vladimir Putin is a dangerous human being in his cunningness and in his intellect, combined with his former experience with KGB, that there's probably never just a casual conversation between Putin and someone else. There's always an end goal and each thing that's said, question asked, question answered, is all to move the ball to the next yard marker.

John Sipher: 17:21

I think that's a very astute thing to say. Putin was a career KGB officer. He was trained in sort of manipulation. He's also very Russian. There's a long Russian history of under the czars and under the Soviet state a security state, a security service. That's all about keeping the leadership in power and therefore subverting their enemies and keeping them off balance. So they use propaganda and disinformation and deception, agitation all these things that we've seen in the last few years, to include assassination, all this kind of stuff. And so Vladimir Putin is absolutely never above using lies or using subversion or trickery or manipulating people to get what he wants. And so, yeah, that notion that you can sort of trust Vladimir Putin we've had now more than two decades of him in power. We have complete patterns that are very clear. So it's very surprising still to see people who you know listen to what he says and believe it rather than look at it in the longer period of what we have about Vladimir Putin. So, yeah, I agree with you.

Jack Hopkins: 18:22

I always chuckle, as I can imagine some people you know do when Donald Trump says how good of a friend Vladimir Putin are. That may or may not be his true perception of the relationship, but I can only imagine that from Putin's perspective. There's not a friendship there, or at least not described as we would.

John Sipher: 18:43

Yeah, he wants to play. If Trump wants to think he's got a friendship, putin's going to play along. You know, trump is frankly not hard to read. So Trump believes he has a sort of old 1970s view that Russia's this big power, economic power. If we just get along with them, it would benefit us financially. I mean, frankly, the Russian economy is the size of Italy or Portugal. It's not a huge, you know, it's you know, and they're involved in all this sort of nefarious stuff. They're undermining all of sort of the Western states and our allies as well as the United States. So he's really not a friend. But if he understands that Trump wants to see him that way, he will present himself that way.

John Sipher: 19:21

And so, yeah, I think in this game Vladimir Putin has been so far coming out ahead. But at the end of the day like I'd like to think that somebody can talk to President Trump that you know we are the biggest, most powerful country in the history of the world Vladimir Putin is sort of a loser of the 21st century he's actually been. His country's been going down in power. They've become sort of a second rate, a second rate power compared to China. China controls much of what they're doing now, and so any dictator that's been in power for 20 years is no longer. People are telling him what he wants to hear. And those kind of dictators like we've seen over the decades, they think they're really in power. They use repression to keep themselves in power until someday that big branch breaks and things change quickly.

Jack Hopkins: 20:09

Right and along those same lines of deception and always having an end point where Putin's trying to get to. In general, what we've seen in the last eight, nine years since Trump came on the scene nine years since Trump came on the scene how much, I guess, particularly in the last three to four years it seems that you hear people talk about and we know there are psyops, people who have been involved with the Trump administration or the Trump campaign. If you were just to kind of speculate and guess how much of how we got here is the result of some background psyops and how much of it is just clumsiness and, you know, accident and there was no real plan I think more of the latter.

John Sipher: 20:58

Frankly, like I study and I lived in moscow, I've worked on russia things for many of these years. The soviets and the russians again, are masters of creating a false narrative, of creating disinformation, of trying to undermine us from within, put us against each other, and social media obviously makes that very easy. Now, right, they can see bad actors. They don't even have to create a fake story. They can see us fight each other and they can exploit that and amplify that and create things anything to weaken your enemy. And so, yeah, they've been at that. But it's also hard to say that. You know, for example, trump won because of Vladimir Putin. Or you know, bad choices by us are just because of that. Now we should be resilient and smart enough to fend off.

John Sipher: 21:40

You know Russian disinformation. They've been doing this also. You know they've been doing it long before President Trump. You know, trying to interfere in our elections and put information into our system and usually, again, we were bigger, stronger, smarter, even some stuff that would stick. You know they created this story during the 80s that the US government had created the AIDS crisis. It was part of a plan that was in the Defense Department that got out of hand and all these people died in Africa and around the world because of AIDS. And it was a. It was a United States psyop or something and it was completely fake. But it went through the media system. There's still people who believe that. But you know, at the end of the day, you know we're a big, powerful country and with lots of narratives, lots of people working on things, and you know it created some problems, but it doesn't, it doesn't undermine the state. You know we're a powerful, powerful country.

John Sipher: 22:26

But I have to say you know the point where we've gotten now, or where Putin has gone into Ukraine, it's a bigger, long term political thing. You can go back to Clinton, bush, obama and Trump all of them. You know Putin would push the boundaries and do things and we would often think you know we're very Western Americans are like oh no, he you know he must not mean it Like maybe if we just treat him well and let him get away with it this time he won't do it. And so there's been a series of things where Vladimir Putin saw us back down or move away or not seem to pay attention. That he read as weakness that he could take advantage of.

John Sipher: 23:09

I mean, I was just going through some stuff back on the bin Laden stuff and looked at early bin Laden thought that we were to be attacked because you know there was a number of periods of time where they took action and we did nothing and they read that as weakness to be exploited. And we have been that way, frankly, with Vladimir Putin for a long time. They went into eastern Ukraine and Crimea and we really did nothing. And then you know they saw what happened in Afghanistan when we looked foolish and backed out, and they think they can play the long game better than we can and oftentimes they're right.

Jack Hopkins: 23:38

Is there some of? I'll give you an example here in this small community that I live in for-. Where are you give you an example? Here in this small community that I live in? I'm about 90 miles north of Kansas City, Missouri, pretty much straight up I-35. You know, for decades, since I was a kid, grade school because my grandfather was on the city council, you know it didn't mean much to me then, but I would hear him talking to other people. So they always kicked the can on our. For example, the sewer pipes in this community were 100 plus years old. They're the old clay pipes, right, and they were well past their. They needed to be replaced, but the city council always skipped on that because they didn't want to have to raise taxes, right, they didn't want to be the city council who was responsible for raising taxes. So ultimately now it's kind of hit crisis mode and we've experienced several in succession big spikes in taxes, right, tax increases. Is that a fair analogy for a lot of what happens from one presidency to the next?

John Sipher: 24:45

I think that's actually very that's true. I think that's very good, in fact, having grown up and worked in the CIA for many years, when there are people who are very into it and very against the CIA and look at its history and say these things that they find bad over history. Oftentimes it's exactly that. In the early years of the CIA, before the reforms of the 1970s that put it under congressional oversight and spheres of regulations, the CIA got involved in a lot of these things where we're overthrowing countries in Chile and Guatemala and Iran and this type of stuff, many of which backfired over time, and we look back at it and say that was probably not a smart move, but it was often because it was the easy button for presidents. So if the president you know name your president Truman, eisenhower, nixon, they see a problem. They can either then build up political support for that, go to the American people, explain it, try to get the Congress on board, build up the votes, or they can go to the CIA in secret and say you guys go kill that guy or whatever it is Like. It's like the easy button and you know at the end of the day, I think we learn over time that you know there is no easy button. You know you can do those things in secret and get away with it for a period of time, but it comes back to roost. There are consequences that follow on down the line. Iran is in the news today and there's, you know, a long history of Iran. There's still a lot of anger at the United States for its role in Iran in the 1950s, for Pete's sake. And so, yes, I think you know the way our politics works. There's a lot of concern that you know I need votes today, tomorrow, next year. Long-term things can be pushed back, pushed away.

John Sipher: 26:26

I remember working in the 1990s. The Clinton administration on foreign policy was very much like that. We'd put up these issues that were potential, say, for example, terrorism and things, and it would be like you know, it's just a little bit too hard to do all these things. Let's just put this piece of fruit in the back of the refrigerator and we'll get back to it later. But of course, by the time you get back to it, it's rotten and has gotten into all the other food, and so I think that's just a real problem with democratic politics that make it harder to focus on long-term issues and obviously some president's administrations have been better at that than others. But yeah, yeah, I think that's sadly a weakness of Americans in general.

Jack Hopkins: 27:10

And could it be because you said it makes it harder to focus on the long-term issues, right? Could that be a really powerful piece of why so many MAGA or hardcore Trump supporters? One thing they like about him is he has this impulsive nature that he almost responds, or reacts rather in the same way they would as a non-leader, somebody who doesn't have emotional control and who does have a temper that gets out of hand every now and then. And since that's what they would do, they see a mirror image of themselves in him and I go yeah, that's my guy.

John Sipher: 27:50

I think that's right. I mean, the one thing about President Trump is he is authentic, and authenticity goes a long way in politics, right. And so he has these instincts and he says what he thinks, and a lot of it is. People want simplicity, they want to understand things. A I think Trump just gives you that instinctual, simple answer that, yeah, that makes sense. Like you know, make America great again. Yeah, stop illegal people coming in. Totally makes sense, and Democrats and others often have a hard time.

John Sipher: 28:36

Yes, I agree with that in principle, but here are all the other issues you have to. There's issues of fairness, there's interests of government money, there's interests of taxation, there's interests of other countries and how they might do it, and maybe they won't work with us if we do it Like that. That always loses to the simple answer, and so I think, yeah, a lot of MAGA people, rather than delve into this world that you know, if they get too far into it, they'll feel like, oh, these people are going to say I'm stupid because I don't know all these details. I'm stupid because I don't know all these details. I'm going to stay where I'm comfortable, like I'm going to try to tie it to what I do in my day-to-day life and it makes sense right and wrong and, frankly, if these issues were just like right and wrong, we would have no problem making all these like.

Jack Hopkins: 29:15

Everybody wants to make a right decision and not the wrong decision, everybody in government and anything else, but the world's just too complex, so yeah, I totally get that and politics plays on that, and that's why, when feel like I've got the I figured it out about the connections between something, I pause and remind myself that there is somebody who is thrilled that I just got that dopamine spike, about having figured it out, because the farther and harder I run with that, the easier it makes them to accomplish what they're really doing. Now. That may or may not always be the case, but to just step back and to give myself pause, gosh, we see the media struggle with this. People on social media, myself included, struggle with this.

Jack Hopkins: 30:26

I have the Jack Hopkins Now newsletter and it's always coming back to what you said my writing style is such that I would fail any. Well, I guess I didn't, because I adhered to their rules when I was in college. But if I were to go now and use my writing style, they'd kick me out right. But I know the closer I write to how I just bullshit with my friends, the more people connect with it because, like you said, there's an authenticity in that You're not trying to like come up with fancier words to try to.

John Sipher: 31:01

You know you're not writing for. You know an academic audience Like people write for the audience that they want to Sure, and so obviously simpler, straightforward stuff is appealing to anybody.

Jack Hopkins: 31:13

Right. And so that's the trap. When you post on social media, or when just someone in general posts on social media, the goal obviously is to communicate something to someone, get them to read it and I guess, fortunately or unfortunately, whatever side of the fence you are on in order to get somebody to read it. You know, in the copywriting world there's a quote that says the purpose of the first sentence is to get them to read the second sentence. The purpose of the second sentence is to get them to read the second sentence. The purpose of the second sentence is to get them to read the third.

Jack Hopkins: 31:47

And if you can't do that, the whole thing fails. And so to move to a larger entity and look at a news network right, I mean, we complain and again I'm among them but if they didn't conduct business like they do, we wouldn't get the adrenaline spikes that we get, we wouldn't get the biochemical flood of neurotransmitters and just that right mix that kind of pulls us out of that afternoon funk, amp us up and people would stop watching. And the reason I brought that up is because I think that's something Trump understands as much as anyone.

John Sipher: 32:29

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean that's how things, that's how we sell things, that's how we get information across. I have a company that works trying to make espionage movies and shows and one of the things you know you work with, let's say, netflix or Amazon. It's incredibly sophisticated because they can tell, they have all the data that if you go on and start to watch a show, they can see exactly how long you watch before you turn it off. They can see whether you watch it and then go to the next one or not, the next. So they know same thing they got to catch you in. And then they can look over time at people like you and you to say, okay, what kind of things can I put out there? How do I get somebody hooked? And it's the same with social media. It's the same with criminals trying to get things that they try to get you hooked to cigarettes. You're trying to get somebody hooked on it.

John Sipher: 33:11

And politics, in many ways and certainly has become more so for a lot of people, it's entertainment, right, it's being interested in. He gets you. You know he's angry at the same people you're angry and he makes fun of them and that makes you feel good, or all those kind of things, which is certainly understandable. Like there's a lot of people, I think when Trump came along in 2015, 2016, there was a lot of people who just were out of politics, they weren't involved, and I think they used Facebook data and other kind of things to get these people engaged, to get them so angry that these people who never voted now came out and started support and then they like Trump, they're entertained by it. Like he hates the same people that they are taught to hate and that becomes addictive. Like you said, it's dopamine, and so this is how people try to get us to buy things. This is how criminals try to take advantage of us. This is how politicians try to keep us on side, and Trump is just sort of and we see he uses it to sell things too, right, so it's not. He uses it to stay in power. He uses it to, you know, hit enemies and he uses it to make money. And we just have never had that.

John Sipher: 34:16

You know those of us in government, you know, maybe it's because we take it seriously, our obligation is seriously. Because we take it seriously, our obligations seriously, we work for the American people. We don't care about how much we're paid, we're trying to do something that's important. Government is serious work for serious people, but that's not entertaining, that's not interesting to people, it's a turnoff. And so how do you do these things where you need experts in all of these areas that none of us can? You need experts because we can't each one of us can't look at our food and know it's all good for us, or we can't look at what's bad for us, or this vaccine or whatever, or this foreign policy thing, or this country, what's happening in Myanmar or Moldova, and so you need serious people, you need experts. But that bores people, and so, therefore, the entertainment wins the day, and so, therefore, the entertainment wins the day.

Jack Hopkins: 35:05

I think if people watching or listening, if they got nothing more out of this episode than what you just said collectively but then that last phrase it wouldn't be a golden nugget, it would be a brick of gold, and that is entertainment wins the day.

Jack Hopkins: 35:25

Donald Trump was a businessman slash entertainer. He's probably more of an entertainer now than he's ever been in his life. And whether they realize it or not and I'm sure there's not a big piece of conscious awareness on this, but that makes it even more dangerous, of course if it's just impacting them at the unconscious level People like the people who support Trump Let me clarify that the people who support Trump, who vote for Trump, they're entertained by him and, just like, they make sure they arrange the rest of their life to be home for that certain TV show on that certain night of the week because they love that show, because they feel entertained. And if they've got some aches and pains in their old arthritic knees, at least while they're watching that show they don't notice their knees aching any longer. And I think and maybe Donald Trump himself I've written about this, in fact, I'm not sure that Donald Trump on a conscious level understands this. I think it's instinctual, it's like an animal.

John Sipher: 36:35

It's like a feral animal who knows how to find weak spots?

Jack Hopkins: 36:39

Absolutely, it is. It's that purely reptilian brain which I think, in part anyway, he got from Roy Cohn, because Roy was about as much of a reptilian Not to say that he wasn't cunning and intelligent and crafty but he was going for the throat and that's a very primal thing. That doesn't come from the prefrontal cortex, right?

John Sipher: 37:06

Yeah, that is, I think you've nailed, and I think presidents, like you know, if you study the presidency, one of the things that presidents need to do and probably the most important thing to do is communicate. I think one of the things. I think people are very angry at Jake Tapper for talking about Joe Biden being old and all this type of stuff. But you know, I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump. I think he's very dangerous, but I also admit that I think Joe Biden failed the American people in that he failed to communicate to the American people. They kept him hidden away.

John Sipher: 37:35

I think he had professional experts around him who were competent and they generally did a better job on the economy and their security and things than the Trump people certainly do. But by hiding him away and hiding his age, he did not. Maybe he had good policies on the economy, maybe he had good policies on health and on these types of things, but he did not communicate that to the American people so they can understand. So by the time it came to run for election, it was easy for Donald Trump to just lie, say this is true, this is true, this is true, and there was nobody on the other side saying things clearly about to go against him, and so I think there's real failure on the part of the Biden administration in terms of communication and Donald Trump. I think a lot of the communication is bunkum and lies and for his own personal narcissistic views. But he does communicate and he does entertain and he does get people hyped up and that's that's that's your dopamine hit.

Jack Hopkins: 38:31

You know, and I have caught health for this anytime I've ever brought it up and I'll catch hell for it again for bringing it up this time. But I think it's so critical to talk about because I think there's substance there and needs to be talked about. We ran, or I should say President Biden stepped down and said Kamala Harris is going to be who's running. And now and I love Pete Buttigieg, but I keep seeing his name come up a lot as somebody to nominate for 2028, right, and here's the conundrum for me Okay, I'm not going to. I've found that pretending, like everybody else feels this way, don't worry about it. But here's my thing.

Jack Hopkins: 39:19

We know one of the really effective strategies the right used was in framing the left as woke right, the power of that word and all of the negative connotations, meaning negative connotations for voters on the right. And I'm not look ethically, morally absolutely, but I'm not sure running a black woman in a presidential election or, in 2028, running a gay man who's married to a man, to a man. That fits in perfectly to the values of many of those on the left, right and especially the progressives, and so that's who we think we should run. But that cuts out entirely the mindset and the thinking and the positioning of the right, and when we do that, we give them the greatest gifts that any party could give another. Now I voted for Kamala Harris. If Pete was on the ticket, would I vote for Pete? I would. Will I be somebody tooting the horn saying Pete should be the guy? I won't. Would I be somebody who was saying, yeah, kamala should run again? I will not. Now, if you people struggle with me, these things.

John Sipher: 41:00

I think it's true. I think the woke stuff. You know again doing this thing when we talk about conspiracies. Conspiracies work with when there is a nugget of truth that you can then spin the bigger conspiracy and the woke stuff. I mean, I'm a 64-year-old man. I'm progressive in a sense. I've voted mostly Democrat, but I see myself as a centrist. I worked on national security issues, lived around the world, I've lived in different cultures. I believe in America very strongly. I believe I'm a patriot, but some of these things did seem silly like I should be telling people to call me he or him or whatever.

John Sipher: 41:29

I mean like trying to dictate to people what you think to do. I understand the intent, it's a good intent, but we forget how new this stuff is right. So I mean we forget that literally, maybe 10, 12 years ago Obama was against gay marriage. I mean we think of you know Obama as a sort of left wing or president, whatever, but he was against it. Biden was against it.

John Sipher: 41:53

Well, biden came out before Obama did on this kind of things, and so it takes a while for the American public to get things. It took a long time for us to realize smoking was bad. It took us a long time to realize we had to wear seatbelts. We don't like being dictated to. You know the center of the American people are good people, but if you try to like get in front of them too soon, you know they'll get there. But you know winning elections is winning elections today and you know you want good people who create laws so that people you know of, you know weaker parts of the society or minority parts of society, are protected. It all totally makes sense, but it doesn't mean you're supposed to, you have to like automatically celebrate it or you know, I think parties win when they come to the middle and what has happened for both parties is the anger has pushed them both to the extremes and I don't think that's good ultimately for the Republicans or certainly for the Democrats either.

Jack Hopkins: 42:52

Right, you said something magnificent there. You said I get it, the intent is good. And the other half of that for me is when we get caught up on what the intent is, we say well, the intent is good, so it must be good. The intent over-focus on the intent can lead to us ignoring the cost. And, like I tell my kids, there's a cost to everything. Even a clean-shaven face costs a beard right to everything. Even a clean-shaven face costs a beard right. So I split the difference, I just get part of it. But no, there's a cost to every decision that we make. Does it matter what the intent is to your point? Does it matter what the intent is if the cost is so great that it hurts our chances of winning the election? And I think in this election.

John Sipher: 43:43

It was true there's those voters in Michigan who were angry about the Biden's support to Israel, but then by doing that, you've actually brought in something that's far worse. Right Even for that issue. Right Even for that issue that you care about. It's worse.

John Sipher: 44:00

Like we, if were provided with perfection. Again, if we were provided with the answer right or wrong almost all of us would always choose right. But we don't get perfection, we get choices, and in our system you get two choices and you got to be. You got to say one is good. You know, was Biden a great choice or was Kamala Harris a great choice compared to Trump? Yes, but in terms of like perfection, no, nobody's going to get the perfection. We got it. We got to grow up and be a little bit mature about this. Like in the Democratic Party has to start thinking we need to win elections rather than just put out all these great ideas that say I'm a good person because I have these ideas. No, you have to sell those ideas to people and not everybody buys them, and so sometimes it takes a while. We saw it took a while with civil rights. In a perfect world it wouldn't have, but it did. And presidents like Lyndon Johnson, who were from the South, were the ones that ended up sort of pushing it across the line.

Jack Hopkins: 44:57

Yeah, it's fascinating to me Again, that concept of just because something is right doesn't mean that it's the right time for it. And election year, you might argue, is always one of the most iffy times for anything. For anything, yeah, I'm trying to think, I want to backtrack just a little bit on that. For example, I've posted a few times about I really like JB Pritzker right and see, I'm not a political strategist, but when I'm thinking about things I like to think from the perspective of a political strategist, because in doing so I kind of give myself a moment to be able to step back from all the touchy-feely things. Right, because the touchy-feely things can really sabotage effective strategy in a hurry.

Jack Hopkins: 45:56

And so I understand the touchy-feely perspectives. But the question for me is always how does that impact the strategy effectiveness? And when you look at Pritzker, obviously one thing he would be attacked on is his wealth, and you know just the family money. But he's straight, male, married family. There's not a lot of their inherent woke to attack him on right. And I guess what I mean by that is he's less repugnant to the right, he's less repugnant to the people.

John Sipher: 46:33

Well, elections are becoming. I want to stay in my by lane because I don't get too much into politics in my by lane because I don't get too much into politics, but elections have come around that small scale of people who change like that might've been an Obama voter who then voted for Trump, now the Trump voter might get pulled back. So you know, both parties have to look for that center and see if they can pull that small majority over, and so they have to appeal. If you just appeal to you know what they call your base, your extreme side, you're not going to win elections. You have to find that middle ground that allows you to take some away from the other side, because right now we're like a 50-50 country and if you don't take a little bit from the other side, you lose, and that's security.

John Sipher: 47:14

Some of the people that I've gotten to meet since I've retired and become friends with in the political space, who I really am impressed by, are women Abigail Spanberger, who's running for governor here in Virginia, mickey Sherrill, who's running for governor in New Jersey, and Alyssa Slotkin, who's your senator in Michigan. Two of them were CIA officers and one of them went to Naval Academy and flew planes and was in the Navy and they have know, they have national security background, they're centrist, they're very, they're really smart, they understand governing and they're impressive communicators. And so you know, I think there is hope for the Democratic Party when I see people yeah, jb Pritzker is a good example. There's some of those people who are really good, but they need to be able to communicate effectively, and not just to their team.

Jack Hopkins: 48:01

And so one reason I kind of went down the path of this realm is to kind of come back to how that links up with your field of expertise and you mentioned.

Jack Hopkins: 48:13

You know you kind of want to stay in your lane and so I want to bring this back to your lane then and connect the two.

Jack Hopkins: 48:19

And so I want to bring this back to your lane then and connect the two, because I think you would agree with me, these things that you kind of consider out of your lane.

Jack Hopkins: 48:47

There are people, very smart people such as yourself, who are part of these campaigns, that will take these fragments that are like diamonds when it comes to division and separating this little group from that little group and then fragmenting the whole thing. Each time we gift them with something like that, it's going to be multiplied. So whatever we think we've given them like ouch, oh, we just gave them that, we've given them a hundred times of that, because they are going to milk that and multiply that and exacerbate the whole mess to such a degree that it becomes another one of those problems we don't have a strategy in place to deal with. And I think you would be quick to agree that one of the big problems the Democratic Party has had the last few years is we've been involved in all of these battles, if you will, with the right that we have no strategy in place to deal with.

John Sipher: 49:39

You can't give your opponents the weapon to beat you with. Right, Right, right.

Jack Hopkins: 49:43

You know, I mean there are so many parallels, the Art of War, right, a classic book and one that even people who aren't interested in politics or war should consider reading, just because of the just the practical value of life and positioning and thinking. And so I think if there's a party that understands the art of war, it's the Republican Party.

John Sipher: 50:11

It's interesting, I think, in that way. I think that's true. I think Republicans are more disciplined and are ready to stay on because we I saw this overseas right. So when you're, my career was working overseas, so I was undercover. I was a State Department officer, really worked for the CIA. So you live in a country say Russia or name a different place two, three years, get to know the people, work with the locals. We were looking to recruit spies and sources and you might live in a country like Zimbabwe, but you're looking to recruit Russians and Chinese and North Koreans who happen to be there that can go back to their country as spies, but oftentimes because we're under congressional oversight. That's our connection to making sure the American people are getting what they need out of the intelligence service Always.

John Sipher: 50:53

We always entertain senators and congressmen and certainly people on the intelligence committees when they come overseas and so they get briefed on what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and what you learn is you know a lot of these Republicans, for example, now that you know, I see in the news they know better. We brief them on stuff. They understand the issues, they understand. You know good and bad Russia, whatever you know. And then you see them saying something that you know, they know is not true, because Donald Trump has said it that way. They're going to be disciplined, they're going to stay together, and so they're very good at that.

John Sipher: 51:29

You know, holding together stuff Democrats tend to be, you know, and I respect the fact that you know. On this issue, I think this and on this issue, I think that and you know, the Republicans can pick at that and take them apart because they're more unified. And so, yeah, I think that the Republicans are more sort of focused, brutal, willing to stick the line, willing to say things they know not to be true in order to win. And the Democrats, they can't change their stripes completely, but they do need to figure out a way to appeal to a larger group of people so they can win these elections, because, at the end of the day, I do think, at least in today's world, they're more competent to govern.

Jack Hopkins: 52:09

Yeah, I agree with that completely. You know, in 1995, and I didn't get through the program, I didn't graduate and I didn't get through the program. I didn't graduate. I was never a SEAL, but I was in a BUDS class at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, california, and I had a spinal injury a short time in Med, dropped, and then about six, eight months later I had a TBI that I could never pass a dive physical again. So there was no going back, right. But I was there just long enough to understand a little bit about the culture and to pick up some really good and interesting and controversial quotes that would be useful later on.

Jack Hopkins: 52:58

And one phrase I heard mentioned there several times and it's easily misunderstood, but I have a feeling you understand this as well as anybody and it was if you're not cheating, you're not trying Now, when I don't preface that, you know when I don't preface that in the right way, people wig out because, right, with the anger about Trump and all of the things that he has done, but in the context of the objective is to accomplish the mission. Right, here's how we propose we do that. Right, here's how we propose we do that. But if you fail to complete the mission, don't come back and say well, I tried what we were going to do and it didn't work. Find another way and keep looking for another way until you've exhausted everything you can think of. Then, if you fail the mission, well, you still failed the mission. But we know you really failed the mission, not that you quit.

John Sipher: 54:13

In the intelligence world. General Hayden was a director of CIA and director of NSA used to say you know the Congress and give us the laws. The laws create our authorities, but we need to be playing along those boundaries. We need to. He used to say we need to get chalk on our cleats. Our job, if we're going to protect the American people, we're going to do. Our job is, we have to say, if you're giving us this authority to do this and our job is to complete that mission, we need to go right up to the edge to do that. And if it turns out that American people and Congress see that that's still too far, then okay, you can change the rules of the game for us. But our goal is to achieve the mission, to get things done. And that's one thing I really miss about working in the intelligence community is it's mission-driven. You woke up every day knowing clearly what you're doing and why, and knowing it's mission driven. You woke up every day knowing clearly what you're doing and why and knowing it's important. You didn't go to work thinking like what am I doing? Why am I doing it? That never happened because you were focused on a mission and you're given authorities and you have to use those authorities to the complete, farthest you can, as best you can, to get things done. So I hear you. And same thing with the military.

John Sipher: 55:19

When I retired I worked for a while for Stan McChrystal's company. He was the head of JSOC, head of special forces over the SEALs, the Delta Force and things was in Iraq and Afghanistan and stuff, and we'd often talk about SEAL training and the people who would fail out of SEAL training were these people who came in all muscled up and very like, focused on themselves and didn't you know, whereas anybody who gets involved in elite activity understands it's a team sport like. If you think you're a someone who can do everything yourself and you don't need others, those are the ones that fail. Like it's you know. If you're going to be a SEAL, you know every SEAL is not the biggest, fastest, strongest, meanest looking guy. They're the ones that say there's a job to be done. What can I do? Who can I work with? How can we do this together?

Jack Hopkins: 56:11

You mentioned the Crystal Group. You may or may not be familiar with Jeffrey Eggers or Chris Fussell.

John Sipher: 56:18

Yes, I know him very well. I used to work there.

Jack Hopkins: 56:21

Eggers was one of the officers in my BUDS class, so I had the privilege of spending a short time in his presence and Fussell was enlisted. In fact, initially he was my swim buddy, as a matter of fact. Oh yeah.

John Sipher: 56:35

He's not a big guy.

Jack Hopkins: 56:36

He's a little guy, oh you know crazy, and I'll just tell you this funny story. It's completely irrelevant to anything that we're talking about, but uh impressive, don't get me wrong.

Jack Hopkins: 56:48

I wasn't trying to say little like not yeah oh, no, no, no no, I know I know, believe me, he uh, it's just one of those things that's always stuck in my mind for some unknown reason, but, like the the first day there, uh, he said, you know, my dad has really and this is really before the internet just the ability to do this easily. He said my dad has really done a lot of research on what some of the best things out there for recovery and carb loading and stuff like that. And he said these cliff bars he's found are the you know, and at the time I'd never even heard of cliff bars, but I I still eat cliff bars today. So every time I do, I think of his dad and the pre-internet research that he did. But talk about two stellar individuals, values driven, just great guys. So it's cool that that you know them. And yeah, I think.

John Sipher: 57:45

Chris doesn't. Chris still does some work from a crystal group, but he's not there full time yet. My son actually works from a crystal group now. I haven't been back there in a while, but yeah, yeah, impressive guys.

Jack Hopkins: 57:55

You know, speaking of values, what, both individually and collectively, and I know it's harder for you to be able to speak to the individual reasons for each of the members of the steady state. Why are they doing this, other than the obvious? What's something that you might know about a few of them, and you don't have to mention names, of course, but that really makes this something they want to do.

John Sipher: 58:43

You know and I would prefer not to say it this way, but I think it's the Trump phenomenon, Like I think almost everyone who's involved in that, who signed their name and have some sort of now public role, had no intention or don't want to be public. Like I had no public role but it was in 2016, because I had worked in Russia. I worked on Russian espionage cases, I worked with the FBI and catching Russian spies and things. Like I had no public role, but it was in 2016 because I had worked in Russia. I worked on Russian espionage cases, I worked with the FBI and catching Russian spies and things. I found myself because people all of a sudden were like, what does this mean? What is all this Russia stuff? And I found, okay, I have a role to speak and try to write and try to help educate about this.

John Sipher: 59:19

But in this case, I think most people we worked comfortably, we focused on the mission, we work inside the government, we were satisfied with our job, we had no intention of having a public life or trying to get out there in front of the camera and stuff. But I think a lot of people saw this as a real danger. They see our security infrastructure as nonpartisan, our security infrastructure. As nonpartisan, I worked around the world with friends in like difficult places, war zones and other places incredibly important, spends, day and night with them and I had no idea what their politics were. We never talked about this party or that party or this president or that president. We were focused on the mission. You know, if we were in Pakistan trying to figure out what al-Qaeda is doing, that's what we were doing and so we had no and that was satisfying and the career was great and we had, you know, our relationships were inside and they were focused on that.

John Sipher: 1:00:14

But I think people saw when Trump came along that he had a completely different view. He wanted he wanted these powerful institutions not to be nonpartisan, focused on American people, but weapons that he can use to smite his enemies and or make money or you know someone to blame. He created this whole view that there's the deep state that are working against me, and essentially nobody in the deep state was working against him. They worked for the president. But because he didn't understand the system, he didn't understand law, he said if I want to do this, you know someone would come to him and explain, like sir, that I understand what you're trying to do, but that's against the law, you know. But we can go to Congress, we can do this, we can do that. He saw that as people just trying to undermine him, you know, instead of realizing, like you know, yes, we want to support you in every way we can, but we can't break the law. And so he needed someone to blame. And so I think that's what's behind these people, the people who sign up for these things, like the steady state and other things, believe that we are blessed as Americans with having so many selfless people willing to put their time in and expertise in to help the American people. Now, yes, any grouping of people, any organization is not perfect, make mistakes, all those kind of things, but there's a process where there's accountability and that type of thing.

John Sipher: 1:01:29

But Trump himself, I think, is a danger to that view. He doesn't understand the importance of allies. He doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand the idea of nonpartisanship. He sees the other party as the enemy, Like I see the Russians, Chinese, other as either opponents or the enemy of the American people. I don't see other Americans as the enemy he sees. You know his American opponent, you know whether it's Hillary Clinton. She's the enemy. Therefore, anything I do to destroy or hurt the enemy is okay, even if it's against the law or even if you know, and so that's against our ethos, that's against what we do. So I think the steady state wouldn't exist, probably if it wasn't for Donald Trump. So we have to be honest about that. I think it's a concern that he's a threat to sort of the health of our democracy in the United States, and you know the Western world, for instance, as well.

Jack Hopkins: 1:02:25

And in that answer you also answered the next question I was going to ask, which was without Trump, would there be a steady state, and you answered that question.

John Sipher: 1:02:32

I'd be glad to do no podcast, no TV, no writing. I'm happy, I have a nice family, I like what I'm doing, but I think all Americans need to do what they can and we believe strongly about these things. And you know, it's a rough and tumble world of politics and we're glad to stay out of it. When I was inside, we saw ourselves as professionals and again, when Congress, people would come out and stuff it's like oh, that game of politics is not something. You know, we support presidents, we support administrations, but that sort of dirty thing of politics of people attacking each other is just not our comfort zone.

Jack Hopkins: 1:03:07

And that's always been interesting for me as the host of this podcast, and I've gotten feedback from viewers and listeners who it's been surprising to them too, and it's a pleasant surprise. There's an element of comfort to that, even though it's very different than what I expected, and that is, for example, with yourself and the last episode I had Stephen Cash on. It's interesting how non-political they've been in their career. Right, you can just sense it, and it's not necessarily anything that you or that Stephen, for example, said, but you can just pick it up that the job was the focus. Right, there was a very clear understanding of what the job was and just as clear of an understanding about what you need to do to accomplish the job.

Jack Hopkins: 1:04:02

Who was president? Those were, I hate to diminish, but almost peripheral issues. Right, that you might be reminded of it occasionally, but it really didn't factor into the. And if there's nothing else and there's plenty of other things, but if nothing else came out of these discussions with people like yourself and Stephen, I think those are great things for the American people to know.

John Sipher: 1:04:30

We took pride in providing presidents or providing you know, it's not just presidents, it's their administration, secretaries of state and the military and army navy and providing intelligence to help people make better policy and execute better on policy. You know military generals and stuff, and so you know we even take a pride. So if I was working in India and I was, you know we had sources and we were trying to provide you know policymakers what's the best thing, what's happening on India? Our diplomats are doing that, intelligence services are doing that. You know what's their relationship with Pakistan, what's their relationship with China?

John Sipher: 1:05:03

We take pride in providing what we think is the best information to those policymakers to make policy and sometimes they don't want to hear it because they have a view like this is what I want to do, and we come in and say, well, okay, but here's a pile of shit you got to deal with Right, and so, like in our world. You know you took pride in that. Our job is to give you the unbiased truth. Now we understand the political process. If we give you intelligence, it doesn't mean you have to do anything. Presidents have lots of constituents. They have, you know business and they have the Congress and they have their voters and they have, you know, foreign press, all these things that weigh on them to make a decision. Intelligence is just one piece of that. We totally get that. But we take pride in giving our best guests, our best information to them. We used to say you can lead a policymaker to intelligence, but you can't make them think. That was sort of our word.

John Sipher: 1:05:55

But Donald Trump sees that as oh, if you're telling me information that I don't want to hear, you're an enemy. You're doing it on purpose to screw me. You're doing it because you're on the other side. It's absolutely not true. Anybody who shows how old I am. I worked for Reagan. I worked for Bush. I worked for Clinton. I worked for Bush, I worked for Obama, Like it didn't matter. Our goal is to get the best information to the administration as we could, and sometimes it was really helpful and they liked it and it fit with their preconceived notions, and sometimes it didn't. But Trump sees that if you tell him something he doesn't want to hear, you're the enemy.

Jack Hopkins: 1:06:29

Right. How would you assess this statement that I'll make that within the intelligence world, and particularly, I guess, the CIA, there are often things that are so much in the best interest of the United States and what we stand for and our national security that sometimes there are things that happen and must happen that are unpalatable to the average American citizen. So when we I want to take this back to politics for just a minute, and I think the reason I bring up so many issues that I know people who've been Democrats their entire life really are put off by, for example, like me, saying you know what, we can't continue to run people who have been identified as woke candidates and expect to get the same result we would without gifting them with that. The reason I bring that kind of thing up anyway is because, look, there are to win and to do what's in the best interest of the nation. You sometimes have to do things that are unpalatable to the average American citizen, and I have no illusions about how effective I will be in convincing the masses of that, but I'm always attempting.

Jack Hopkins: 1:07:57

I always write and speak to one person because I believe sitting eye to eye across the table from someone. I believe enough in my skills, that of every 10 people, there will be some people that I talk to that I can persuade, and I never know online or a podcast or in an article. I never know on what day, who that one person will be and whether I persuaded them or not, but I know if I do they might then persuade somebody. So it's worth the risk to. Obviously I'm not trying to be a mega influencer because I don't do the right things to right. If my goal was to become a mega-influencer within the Democratic Party, I would not say things or post things like that because it's kind of death-rattle, but they're important, I feel, to say and discuss. So the steady state I want to know how important or how much of a growing need there will be in the future for people from the intelligence and national security communities to do what the steady state has set out to do.

John Sipher: 1:09:18

Yeah, to go back to your thing about unpalatable stuff, I have to say you know, I worked almost 30 years overseas in lots of places and most of it is not unpalatable stuff. I have to say, you know, I worked almost 30 years overseas in lots of places and most of it is not unpalatable. We used to talk about the Washington Post test Like if, what? You, if you know, we operate in secrecy, but if, what? If all of a sudden there were, you know there's, a leak and it all came out on the front page of the Washington Post, what would your mother think? Could she, would your mother understand basically what you're trying to do? Would the American people get a sense of why are you doing what you're doing? And for the most part, absolutely you feel comfortable about that.

John Sipher: 1:09:50

There have been things obviously in the past. The one that comes to mind most recently in the last few decades is the whole issue with terrorism and torture, the whole interrogation programs which became called torture and the CIA did, in fact, waterboard three terrorists to try to get information from them and that became a huge issue which people fought over and stuff. And you know you have to be honest about that. Looking back, was it worth it? Did it make sense? How do the American people do that? Did administrations explain that? Well, so on one hand you know you hear people say, oh, the CIA program. You know those of us in the CIA often say you know, I hate to tell you, but the interrogation program, that's America's interrogation program. That was a presidentially. The president said I wanted this done. It went through the whole system, the Justice Department, the lawyers, everybody. The Congress was brief told on it. That was a program. You know now, when it became public because it was secret, you know there was a lot of pushback. Did it make sense? And those are good discussions to have. But that wasn't the CIA doing something. That was not part of you know what the president and the Congress, everybody wanted to do. It was America's program and it's good to look at those things in retrospect. Does it make sense or not make sense?

John Sipher: 1:11:03

You know we'll talk about, you know, the war in Iraq. Or people say, oh, the CIA war. And we're like, no, it's not the CIA war, it's. You know we're part of the US government, we work for the president. The president has written, you know, orders of things to do. Those go through the congressional committees. Those are vetted by the Justice Department.

John Sipher: 1:11:20

So when we do something, you know, like you said, we need to go up to the edge of our authorities. But sometimes, sometimes those authorities, in retrospect, look like they went too far. When Americans are scared, you know, places like the CIA and the military are given a lot of latitude, like, oh my God, you know, we might be attacked again. 9-11 happened, buildings came down, thousands of Americans dead. We need you to do these things.

John Sipher: 1:11:45

Then, of course, you know, as we try to have success and stop terrorists and catch terrorists, a few years down the road it's like people aren't scared and then they look and say, oh, you went too far, like well, you know, when you're scared, you ask for this and now you're not scared and you say we went too far, like well, it's our job to do those things. You, meaning the American people, the Congress, the Senate has to take your responsibility seriously about telling us exactly what you want us to do and why, and be comfortable with that. And if the Congress, you know, and the president say that they want these things and they can't justify them to the American people, then they have to be willing to put up with something. If you know, we catch a terrorist and you know we can't question them and interrogate them and we find out that they knew something that we didn't get and Americans are killed, we've got to be comfortable living with that. And so, yeah, we have to have those discussions, but they need to be serious discussions.

John Sipher: 1:12:38

You know, I didn't get involved in that directly because I was working on other programs Russian and other kinds of things but those are really interesting and important discussions to have and oftentimes, when you drill down to talk to Americans, you realize again, these are hard decisions. If it was like this one's right and this one's wrong, we would always choose the right one, like we're given choices, like both bad outcomes what do you do in this situation? And not making a decision is not one of the options. And so, yeah, americans need to come to terms with those things. Our government needs to take this stuff seriously.

John Sipher: 1:13:10

Again, when we look at the Trump administration, these people tend to have like these simplistic views. You know, and act like they know the answer to these things, and I think they're going to find, you know, like Bongino and Patel now run the FBI. They've had these podcasts forever. They've been saying these things which are untrue or get people hyped up their followers. Now they're going to have a tough time when they're working with professionals who are explaining things to them and they're like, oh okay, yeah, I see, but that doesn't appeal to the people that they've been telling these stories to for a long time. They set themselves up for this.

Jack Hopkins: 1:13:43

That they've been telling these stories to for a long time. They set themselves up for this. That clarification on so many levels was beautiful and it clarified a couple of things for me right from the start that have helped me do a little internal realignment on my thinking. Even when I asked the question, you said I don't know so much about how unpalatable some of those things are, and I couldn't agree with you more because I think it's not what the CIA is actually doing that the American people find unpalatable. What they find unpalatable is kind of a direct result of the secrecy you are sworn to and the things they generate in their mind. They think you are doing in the absence of knowledge.

John Sipher: 1:14:33

No, and that's understandable. I mean, it's easy to go to the darkest part of the room and assume these kind of things. You know, secrecy is just. It doesn't inherently work with a democratic government right and it's easier if you're Russia or China, to just do things.

John Sipher: 1:14:46

And because the people have no, they they understand, they have no say or no part, they don't get to vote for things.

John Sipher: 1:14:52

They don't. You know, it's just the way it is. In America, we expect you know, to know, what's being done in our name, and so you know, if I was, you know, with most Americans, if I was to sit down and explain here's what we're doing and why, I think almost 100 percent of the time they'd be like I get it, I get why that's important and why that's being done, but from the outside I don't have the context and therefore it's easy for me to say I don't support that, I don't like that. So that's an inherent friction in a country like ours, and so that's why our oversight committees and committees and Congress need to be serious people who take their responsibility seriously. If their only goal is to get on Fox News and spread crap, then they're not doing their job. Their job is to look at these institutions, to hold them accountable and explain and make sure the laws are clear to them so that they can get along with their mission.

Jack Hopkins: 1:15:42

Yeah, someone who was. He was actually my first ever podcast guest and over the last year and a half I've actually become friends with him. I guess you could say who goes on routinely at Denver Riggleman. Oh, I know Denver. Yeah, I love listening to his breakdowns of Interesting guy. Yeah, breaking-.

John Sipher: 1:15:59

I got to go down to his. He has that bourbon place. I got to get down there and get myself some of his bourbon. I've said the same thing Well you tell me where you're going to go, I'll go down there with you, because I live in Northern Virginia, I can get down there. That would be fantastic.

Jack Hopkins: 1:16:13

Yeah, yeah, I guess his wife has won some awards. I guess it's a pretty top-notch deal. So, yeah, notch deal. So yeah, let's talk about, because I see in almost every post that I make I get this question or somebody poses this question. I don't know that it's necessarily to me or somebody else in the thread, but it's a good question and it's one that I know I don't have an answer for what they want, right, but it is what can we as everyday citizens, what can we actually do?

John Sipher: 1:16:50

That's a tough one. That's a hard one, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, obviously is. You know, our forefathers created a system that was unique in the world and brought the people into the body politic, but they expected an educated and engaged polity. Or you know people who would take their job seriously and you know voting is not just you know, watching TV a day or two before the election and voting things, it's really. You know, getting engaged, contacting your congresspeople, all of those type of things.

John Sipher: 1:17:24

I think people are doing those things. You see, now a lot of people are out protesting, people are writing to Congress, people are getting online expressing frustrations. They're trying to find media. They're trying to find information. There's probably more information out there, but it's also a flood of bad information along with the good information. In fact, you see Trump people and others trying to like poison that by saying you know the media is bad. You shouldn't follow these things. Well, it's because they want to control their media. You know, and you know most serious journalists I see take their job, just like I took my job inside the government seriously. They take their job to get good information, to find good sources, to check it when they're wrong, to explain they're wrong and continue to learn. And so, yeah, I think, keeping yourself educated, being smart about the information that you consume, making sure that you vote, making sure you're engaged, maybe, sure, maybe, run for local offices there's no office that's too small to be engaged with. But yeah, I don't know I that is a hard question I've had that answer.

John Sipher: 1:18:29

I'm like. You know there's 300 million of us. We need to all play some sort of role right.

Jack Hopkins: 1:18:35

I want to ask you what is john cypher's shit? Uh, description meaning. What would, what would have to happen, or what would, if it did happen, signal to you that it may be unrecoverable at that point?

John Sipher: 1:18:57

You know it's so easy to say just the things that I've seen in the last few days, where you know a sitting senator is wrestled to the ground and handcuffed, you know in a federal facility, with FBI officers escorting him in, gone through security. You know, bringing American troops into our cities. I mean it's just really creating false stories. You know, saying you know what's happening in one small block radius of LA is an insurrection. These people are going to destroy our country. Like these are law enforcement things that happen all the time. You're in a big, busy place, there's criminals, there's problems. They're not easy Law enforcement people. Others are trying to deal with it. But when you create a false story and you scare the people into believing there's danger to them, we forget Again.

John Sipher: 1:19:46

We live in the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world. We live better than kings and queens did a couple hundred years ago. You know we have computers in our pockets and we have healthy food and we have. I mean, you know, yes, there's problems. Yes, we don't have enough people to have enough money to have issues. There's concerns and those kind of things. But we need to focus on the positive and then not see themselves as political pawns to be used in politics but, you know, to defend the country. But they're really. These are real powerful tools. That's why we in the steady state are talking up. If you have the intelligence services and the FBI and the military and you use them like weapons, they're incredibly powerful and that's why they're under strong. You know regulatory, legal rules to make sure that these things are used on behalf of the American people. But if they're used against the American people, yeah, it's bad.

Jack Hopkins: 1:21:03

I saw a post last it was this week, I can't tell you the day, but it was this week by Alexander Vindman and it really stopped me in my tracks. One, because Alexander is not somebody who posts BS, he's not looking for the viral tweet, he's sticking to the facts. And the first sentence of this post said our generals are scared and Wow. And it went on to say anything I would say would be paraphrasing, but it went on to say that they are cowed right there, they're there. He made the statement. I do remember this be paraphrasing, but it went on to say that they are cowed right. They made the statement. I do remember this and not word for word, but he said I'm not confident they're going to stand up to this in the way that we need them to.

John Sipher: 1:22:01

Again, that goes back to Trump's gift for knowing how to weaken people. He saw it in his last administration. He hired people, put them in positions and then eventually went against them. And now he's actually trying to arrest the same people he put in positions of power to include General Milley and other people ahead of the Pentagon in incredibly powerful roles who took that job seriously of providing the president with advice, even if the president didn't want that advice. But again Trump said you give me bad advice or I don't want to hear you're an enemy. And now we see him acting on that and that's really dangerous.

John Sipher: 1:22:30

If you get the Justice Department supporting, investigating and arresting serious Americans that are taking their job seriously in the military, it's a real problem. So, like all, that's the thing all generals can't quit. Trump is, you know, putting out this information that you know the lower levels of the military watch Fox News in their place. A lot of time may may resonate with them, I think. I do think the officer class tends to understand their role in a free society is not not to be partisan. But yeah, you keep digging away at that and tearing at that fabric. At some point it weakens and just rips. Yeah.

Jack Hopkins: 1:23:13

Will we have a free and fair election in 2026? Yeah, it's funny.

John Sipher: 1:23:18

I have a podcast too, and we interview some of these same guys. Denver's a friend and Alex and Eugene, his brothers, are friends and all these type of things. As Americans, we always hope for the best. It'll work out. It'll work out. It's part of our instinct and I feel that too. It's like there's so many good people, we're so lucky to have what we have. This country is so great. It'll work out. But yeah, I worry.

John Sipher: 1:23:41

There chances like we had a guest on and he started saying, hey, you know, actually from Britain, and he said well, you know, here's some of the things I worry about. I worry that you know, you see what Trump's doing. Say, in Los Angeles, he claims an emergency. He says, oh, there's, they're, they're invading these immigrants. Well, they're not, and so therefore, I'm going to use the authorities for Insurrection Act to take over and use the military at the border or what have you. If you can create these fake emergencies and they are in our system, I guess, legal because the president does them. They're unwise and they're dangerous, but they're legal.

John Sipher: 1:24:15

In the lead up to the election, if he's worried that they might lose the election, he could say come up with some false emergency and say we can't hold the election because you know we're being invaded by foreigners, or there's these radical Marxist, whatever create a fake emergency and say you know we're putting off the election. And then some governors decide, well, we're going to go through with it and some governors don't, and like then what do you have? You have like real chaos and like state against state governors against federal you know, and like state against state governors against federal military, some military not wanting to like. These are dangerous things that Americans deserve better than, and so I worry about that.

John Sipher: 1:24:54

Again. I expect things to work out well, but why, yeah, why do these things? I don't get it. I think they created, like they create false information, created false narrative to scare their people, to keep them voting for them. Then I think they start believing this stuff. I think they start believing that radical Marxists, blah, blah, blah it's insanity, but they're willing to do so many things on behalf of these things that they say For a while you're like they're just doing it for populist reasons, and now you start to worry, like Jesus do they believe these things?

Jack Hopkins: 1:25:31

You know, rural areas in red states are interesting. It's where I was born and raised and grew up here. I was a Republican for 59, almost 50 years, I guess, if you count the years even before I could vote and who my, how my parents voted. But you know there there is I can't point to anybody specifically here in this area that has plans to shoot me, but I do know a lot of people here because of my, but I do know a lot of people here because of my position who would probably be happy if someone else did the appetite and watch as I say this, I'll step out on the front porch. There's not really the appetite that I know of for somebody at this point to do it, but there is the mindset and the psychology of well, if somebody does, that guy's a traitor, you know. And so one reason I do this, I think, is because people who don't live in rural areas or haven't experienced rural areas, I've found it's very hard for some of them to understand how the Trump supporters in those areas can think and feel like they do. And I get that because it's not the same right. It's a different environment.

Jack Hopkins: 1:27:18

You know, I grew up it was not an odd thing at all to go to my grandparents and have squirrels and biscuits and gravy for breakfast. It just wasn't. You know that was somebody was oh wow, I hate that. I missed that right, that's not an experience that my first wife was from. Spent most of her time in Baltimore, maryland, right, different in Baltimore. Yeah, there were aspects of my life that she just you know, it was like a TV show to her.

Jack Hopkins: 1:27:52

And I remember the first time she came back here with me we were driving somewhere and everybody that you met, right, everybody just raised a friend, friend kind of wave, acknowledge. And she said do you know all of those people? Well, first of all, and this kind of blew her away, yeah, probably, yeah, I did, I knew who they were at the very least. And she said I said well, yes and no. So why do you all wave at each other? And I said it's almost a reflex, you just kind of grow up with that. But then she heard my parents say and now, forever, every time I hear it, I think of that. I never noticed it before. But my dad said well of an evening, you know, talking about something happening. He said well of an evening.

Jack Hopkins: 1:28:40

We usually and I remember her asking me what's of an evening or somebody asking do you take the paper? It's a way of saying you know, do you have a subscription to the paper, do you get the paper, do you take the paper? Things like that. There's a different language. So I guess my point is I try to help people connect to the idea and many of them just find it so repulsive I'm not sure that they can expects their husband to come backing the truck into the driveway with a gutted deer in the back right Because they're going to take it, have it processed and made into jerky and that's like a high point of the fall. It makes it easier for them to embrace certain aspects of Donald Trump. There's a— but what's funny?

John Sipher: 1:29:45

he is not that. Like they are Right. Yeah, I'm from a small town, I'm from upstate New York, near Finger Lakes. Like little, yeah, we used to hit deer and then you have to like, wait for someone to come along who could take it and do it. Yeah, I grew up in a small town too, and the thing Donald Trump is exploiting that Like, yeah, small town values are good, Rural is good. We had on our podcast, we had Trey Crowder. Do you know who Trey Crowder is?

Jack Hopkins: 1:30:11

Yes, he's from.

John Sipher: 1:30:12

Tennessee. It was interesting to talk to him, but let me try to put it with something I learned from when I was overseas. So I spent some time in Yugoslavia, which became eventually Serbia. Serbia, montenegro used to be Bosnia. Yugoslavia means South Slavs, so they were part of the Soviet bloc in the old days, communist.

John Sipher: 1:30:33

So as communism was falling, after the Soviet Union was falling apart, the head was Milosevic and he was a communist, you know sort of dictator. But as the country fell apart and Croatia moved out and Bosnia moved out, you know he exploited like essentially communism was dying. He had to find a way to maintain power and the way he did it was to exploit the differences between the country and the city. And so I saw a leader exploit rural, urban for his personal benefit to keep himself in power and willing and supported and led to civil war. So essentially he controlled because of the communist and they controlled TV and the media, which meant the people in the rural areas. That's the only way they got messages. So he was essentially the Fox News of his day and he would spread all this stuff about keeping power and creating enemies and saying you know, the Croats are your enemies, or the Bosnians are enemies or this type of thing. And then people I lived in Belgrade, which is the capital of Serbia, worked in the embassy there, and if you were in that city, it was as urbane and people traveled to Europe and these were as, but he knew that electorally, if he wanted to stay in power, he almost didn't care about them. They had lots of different ways of media, they had newspapers, they had liberals, they had whatever. They were very pro-European, but he controlled the countryside. He controlled and he turned these against each other, which led to a vicious, horrible, bloody civil war in that part of the world.

John Sipher: 1:32:06

So I saw a dictator who had to find a way to stay in power that used urban versus rural, and I would like to think we could learn from that, because there's urban and rural. That's not a real difference in our country. We're still like you might be from a small town, but you're like a Kansas City Chiefs fan or whatever. We have sports teams. We are more woven together than we think we are Like. We focus, you know, we have the same kind of stores that we go to, we have the same kind of sports teams we follow, we eat and drink the same stuff. Yeah, there's some differences, but they're not real. But if you scare people and you make them think they're real for your own personal benefit, either to steal from them or to steal power, that's just yeah that doesn't come out.

Jack Hopkins: 1:32:46

Well, that is brilliant and kind of a short golden nugget piece. We're not as different as what some might lead you to believe, and so you might ask why do why? Is it important for me to point out the differences of people in rural areas? And the answer to that question is I want people to understand what he's exploiting. Right, he can take a difference of that much that is noticeable but not problematic, and he can make it a difference of this much which now becomes impossible to ignore and becomes very problematic.

Jack Hopkins: 1:33:35

You know, when I was a kid growing up, my parents would say you know, we're an hour and a half two hours from Kansas City in a rural area, my parents would say we're going to go to the city this weekend. You know that was the city. Any place bigger than this is the city Now, but once we got there, it's just a bunch of other people right. So we knew there was a difference, but once you're in the collective mix, you're just part of it. What Donald Trump has successfully done is those people who used to maybe have gotten ready to go to the city who, when they got there, would just kind of blend in and feel part of the city. He now has these barriers in place so that, no matter how long they mingle and mix, they will still feel this separation.

John Sipher: 1:34:26

Looking over their shoulder. Do they think they're being looked down on? If you tell people enough that they're looked down on, they believe it.

Jack Hopkins: 1:34:32

Right.

John Sipher: 1:34:33

Whereas I'm sure most people in that city are walking by people. They're not thinking at all about them, they're focusing on their day. They're not walking by saying, oh look at that country person.

Jack Hopkins: 1:34:49

You brought something up, john, that he's nothing like the—I'll hear people say you know, he's just like us, it's like you know. No, he's not. But here's the scary part of that innate skill to be so different, to be so completely unlike in so many ways the people who he has convinced.

John Sipher: 1:35:19

He's just like that's cult-like behavior. Remember, howard Stern used to say, like you guys understand, howard Stern hates you people, he thinks you're stupid. He wouldn't, you know he would wash his hand if he had to shake hands with people like, but yeah, but you know, he is gifted at that feral instinct of saying you know, creating enemies to hate and blaming. You know whether it's a foreigner or whether it's an immigrant or whether it's a Democrat or whether it's a whatever name it up Marxist, liberal, whatever. I get a kick out of this. I lived in communist countries. Like there's no Marxist anything going on in the United States. I mean, like you know, the most Marxist thing is like the NFL draft. You can't just pick whatever you want from college, you have to like go through this thing. So you know it's exploiting us and I don't know when we'll sort of figure it out.

Jack Hopkins: 1:36:10

We're being taken advantage of all of us, not just his supporters, boy, no truer words have been spoken. So, john, finally let's get down to this and it comes back to the question neither one of us had a good answer for. So the closest thing that we can get to that and let's look at some things, even though we can't give the answer people are looking for in terms of things they can do that don't fit that mold of it's this thing. Would you agree that, as long as you are doing something? Look, I mean, if you are 85 years old and you walk with a walker, nobody's expecting you to go to a rally on a weekend right, and spend eight hours out on the curbside at a protest. But even for someone like that, there's something you can do, whether it's pick up the phone, call your senator.

Jack Hopkins: 1:37:04

I think if, because it's as much as anything, it's the attitude, it's to not fall into that defeatist, victim attitude. I think that's where so much of the danger kicks in is when people get to the point where they feel like, and that's what I fear every time. Someone says what can we as an average citizen do? I can't know because I don't ask each of them, but behind that question. I have to assume that there's somebody who currently feels like there's nothing that can do and that's once we hit critical mass in terms of enough people feeling that way. We're in big trouble.

John Sipher: 1:37:48

I think it's. We're too. Our politics is entertaining, but it's national politics and, honestly, it has, in general, very little to do with our lives, like the voting and the laws, like our lives remain the same, but we get too hyped up in watching Fox News or national news when it's local things that matter to us. And so if we can focus on making our communities the best they can be like, one of the things I think people could do like would be the best thing for this country is be more supportive and help teachers. Man, they don't make enough money. They're working their heart out. A lot of them are having to quit because they're getting beaten down. You know support teachers. Get them the things that they can do. You know lead your life. Focus on community things.

John Sipher: 1:38:33

Don't get into this entertainment game of being angry, like the fact that there's people like in Iowa and places that are screaming about the border like an immigrant says there's no immigrants there, there's no criminals chasing you down the street. Think about your life when you walk out the door. Are the things that you watch on the news actually things that are affecting you? They're not, and I get so upset now people I even see it around here like I don't want to go there. You know, go to a red state. Or like what do you mean red state?

John Sipher: 1:38:53

You go to the plate, good people and all this, even the people who are Trump supporters. If you talk to them, for the most part and they talk to you face to face they're nice people. They might think this stuff or have gotten hyped up over this stuff, but you know, spend time with them, talk to them. You know, don't write people like oh, we get rid of Texas, like what there's. Like you know it's almost 50-50 in terms of supporting national politics. Why would you write off all those people who think like you? And then certainly write off those other people as if they're some kind of enemies. They're Americans, but so, yeah, I think it's just, for the most part, is make your community better. Yeah.

Jack Hopkins: 1:39:36

You know on that, a neighbor of mine lives across the street but about two houses down. He's probably 70-ish and he and his family own a big nail salon. And then there's also a Vietnamese restaurant on another end of it. But classic story of he and his wife came over, they rented a building, they lived in the storeroom of this building, opened a nail salon back in the I'm assuming, probably the 70s and continued to live there with next to nothing until they started to generate some income. And then the rest of it is stories. We've heard like that time and time again. He's now a successful man. His family, he has a lot more family here. They're successful, they're a very important part of our community and when I was growing up in the 70s there was one black family here and there were no Hispanics. There was one black family. That was it. Now we have, for a town of 6,000 people, a pretty good mix of different cultures who are all have a restaurant or have some type of business, right, right.

Jack Hopkins: 1:40:59

And you know, when I think about not just their businesses, but these people as individuals, as human beings, when I think about the possibility of them just all of a sudden not being part of the community anymore, all because and some might say this is taking it an exaggeration but for the most part all because of their skin color just being gone. They didn't do anything else wrong and the people that I'm talking about are here legally. But the reason I throw them into the mix anyway is because we've seen instances of where people were here legally but again because they look like the people they're after.

John Sipher: 1:41:47

But if you weren't watching that national politics news, they would just be part of the community and you would deal with them as you deal with them, and if they're bad people, they're bad people and if they're criminals, they're criminals. But we've created this entertainment game of the other someone to blame. There's these horrible people and probably you don't blame the people you know all the time and you think there must be these awful other people out there and therefore it's just too easy if someone's faceless. And then you and I have grown up we're a little bit older.

John Sipher: 1:42:15

Now social media allows people to get on anonymously and say things to each other that they would never say face to face, like horrible things to each other. You and say things to each other that they would never say face-to-face, like horrible things to each other. You know, I don't know Somehow we've got to like. I think hopefully the younger generations are less, they understand that, they don't get caught up in it as much. But like, yeah, the fact, the blaming and the thinking there's these awful people out there, when your day-to-day experience is not that like, maybe ask yourself like am I being manipulated? Like how is it possible that there's all this awful stuff happening, but I never see it Right.

Jack Hopkins: 1:42:49

You know when I will get mildly confrontational with somebody that I know almost certainly voted for Trump in this last election here in the community, about immigration, for example, and I'll say so. Are you telling me, then, that the couple that have the Chinese restaurant are you telling me you are in support of them losing their business and them going with? And more times than not, the comment will be the reply will be not them, and which is kind of exactly where I want them to go, because at that point I go. But see, here's the problem. It's not people like you and I that are assessing on an individual basis and saying they're good people. We don't want them to go, this cluster of people at the top that have an agenda and they're not looking at people on an individual basis. If you fit, we're coming.

John Sipher: 1:43:50

Well, you see, with the ice stuff it's funny. So you're from a small town like me, like you know that at the end of the month on the highway, the guys are out there, they're going to get their quota of speeding tickets, so you drive a little slower, you drive a little slower toward the end of the month or whatever right. What's happening, it sounds like to me, is these people in the White House have gone to ICE and say you know what? I'm being embarrassed Every month they're showing me that actually the previous administration kicked out more people every month than you're kicking out. I'm running on the fact that we're going to get rid of illegals. You're not getting out enough of them. Therefore, you need to do more, more, more, more. And so, essentially, you've created ice into, like the highway cop at the end of the month trying to meet his quotas, and so they're running around, going to Home Depots in place, arresting people who aren't really criminal.

John Sipher: 1:44:41

I think Americans voted for I don't want illegal aliens here who are criminals, and I think we all agree on that. Get them out of here, and the system is set up to do that. Now what you're doing is you've put quotas on people. You need to throw out millions of these people. And so they're running to meet their quota. They're running to places where they know they're going to find immigrants they're not running to places where they're necessarily going to find criminal immigrants and it's creating friction in our cities. And then they're bringing in the military and like we may find ourselves, you know, with a civil war here over the cop on the highway getting his quota at the end of the month.

Jack Hopkins: 1:45:17

Great, great analogy Boy. Yeah, that's spot on. Great analogy Boy. Yeah, that's spot on In kind of leading to wrapping things up here. John, there are a lot of people out there. I told you earlier I'm among them. I find the whole world of intelligence, especially the clandestine services, fascinating, deeply fascinating. What's a story from your experience, your career, that you can, to the extent that you can talk about it, that's about as spy-like as what people might imagine, and I preface that with saying I assume the bulk of your career is not like the movies. But what's the most movie-like or spy-like experience that you had?

John Sipher: 1:46:14

Geez well, a lot of them, and that's why, actually, I work with a couple former colleagues and we have a company called Spycraft Entertainment. We're trying to work with Hollywood to make more authentic movies and TV shows and we've learned that Hollywood is way more screwed up than the intelligence community. It's like it's such a hard thing to work through. It's fun and creative and interesting, but it's been a slow goal. So, yeah, I mean I guess you know if I was to try to, you know, hit some vignettes to talk about sort of what it's like being overseas. So your job as a case officer, which is in the spy? The CIA has a big analytic cadre, a big science cadre and then the people who you know. It's actually a pretty small organization of people whose job is to go out and recruit, run spies that give us secrets that we can't get any other way. So we can get stuff from satellites and we get stuff from diplomats. We don't need people like me to meet a spy that gives us whether it's an Iranian or Russian who is working secretly with me to give me information, but working in a place like Moscow. For example, I served in Moscow at the American embassy there. What they believe is American espionage, that it's not hyperbole to say that when you're there as an American official and certainly if they suspect you might be a CIA officer you are under a constant surveillance 24 hours a day. So I was there, lived there for like two years Every single day, every hour of the day. I was under surveillance. So my house had audio video in it, like if I was in the bathroom they were watching it. Whatever I was doing. It was completely. If I walked out at two in the morning, there was cars there ready to take me and follow me. If I went around a corner and they didn't see what I did around the corner, they'd bring dogs and people after to do to see if I'd left something there, left a signal for a spy or some kind of things.

John Sipher: 1:47:58

So one of the stories I tell, for example, is it was actually a colleague of mine was a runner and we live in that sort of. We got to be real careful because we live in that you can't give out information or secrets in your house because they're listening and stuff. And he knew he lived in that world and so it's a pretty big city long winters. He was a big runner, much thinner than I was. And finally the spring was coming on and he decided he was going to start running and so we lived in these big, tall, nasty, old Russian apartment buildings.

John Sipher: 1:48:29

So it was his first day he came home from work and he went for a run. And he had a route where he'd go sort of across out of his building, across the street, into Gorky Park and run along the river. And so he went to work the next day, came back the next night to go for a run and one of his shoes was gone and he's like I can't, I couldn't find it. He's asking his wife where's my other shoe? So next day he went to work and it was. You know, it's a busy, big, huge city but there's not a lot of place. But he found a place to go buy some running shoes and so he went home that night and did a run again, came home again the next night, one of those new shoes was gone. He's like, okay, I know what's going on, my surveillance is pissed at me. So he went to his in his living room, knowing he's being monitored, and said listen, here's the deal, I'm going to run every night and here's my route I'm going to go out of the building, across the the street, into Gorky Park, through the gates, run down along the river and come back, and I'm going to buy shoes every day if this keeps happening. And so he came back the next night or after work and both sets of shoes were back in his room together. And when he went for a run, when he got to Gorky Park through the gates, the surveillance cars pulled up and they opened their trunks and they had little foldable bicycles to follow him through. So what had happened is the surveillance were embarrassed, because their job is to follow the American and never let him out of their sights. And the first day he went running they weren't ready for it and so this was their way of sending a signal to him to do those kind of things. And that's a joking way to talk about the kind of.

John Sipher: 1:50:02

You know, we do meet sources in places like that and we put incredible time and effort and use disguise and things to meet sources who are really willing to help America out because they understand the corruption and the danger of their country, that they're willing to take personal risks. And I can think of one source that was before my time. There's a great book called the Billion Dollar Spy about this Russian military scientist who was working for the CIA. He believed his country was falling apart and was evil and he wanted to do damage to it, and so his way of doing that was to meet secretly with us and pass us intelligence Intelligence that was so important that when the Pentagon got it they said, hey, this intelligence could be the difference between victory and defeat in a war with the Soviet Union back then.

John Sipher: 1:50:50

And one of the things he did is he insisted in part of the relationship with us that he had what we call an L-pill ability to commit suicide, a pill to kill yourself, because he knew if he was caught he would be tortured. And the book talks a lot of back and forth where we tried to say, hey, do you really need that? We talk you out of it. Like you know, here's how we're going to keep you safe. But he insisted on it because he understood his you know the viciousness of his country and he got to a point where he was trying to do as much damage as he could and there was security around where he was worried that they might be getting onto him. Security was getting tighter in this institute where he worked and when he would get called into his boss's office from his office every day he would take that pill and he'd put it in his mouth by his teeth. He'd go in to see his boss and it was a routine request or something the boss would be like okay, and then he would walk back out and take the pill back out and put it away. But that shows the intensity of some of these people who work for us secretly that he is willing to kill himself at any moment to continue to steal information and give it to the Americans.

John Sipher: 1:51:49

And there's a lot of people around the world that think America is something special. They think America is the answer. And if I live in a corrupt, oppressive regime, the Americans can help and therefore I'm willing to risk my life to help America and I worry now that some of this administration might be. We are becoming that corrupt country. It wasn't that I was anything special overseas trying to get people to work for it. It was. America was special and people were willing to do incredible things to help America. But if America looks just like every other corrupt place, is just trying to make money and just trying to screw everybody, it's going to be harder for those people to justify putting their life at risk to work for us. So that's sort of a story about you know a place like Moscow where you're under surveillance all the time.

Jack Hopkins: 1:52:34

I don't know if it is apparent on camera, but I'm aware that my eyes started to water a little bit there when you said that there are people who think America is special and, as a veteran, when you said that, my mind instantly went to what you said. I'm not sure that that mindset is holding right, that that mindset is holding right.

John Sipher: 1:53:09

And boy that hurts, right in right here. These are foreigners that are willing to do things that Americans won't even do for the United States. You know they're putting themselves at risk to help us. They're heroes Like I oftentimes will be done. This stuff with Hollywood stuff oh, thank you for what you did. You guys are heroes Like no. On this stuff with Hollywood and stuff, oh, thank you for what you did. You guys are heroes Like no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. We had a job to do. Part of our mission was wonderful and thank you for saying that. But the people who are heroes are the ones that risk their lives every day. These foreigners in these countries essentially commit treason against their own country to help America. Those are heroes because they're, you know, and too many of them have been caught and arrested and things and tortured over the years, and it's our obligation to keep them safe.

Jack Hopkins: 1:53:49

How would you be with this statement that it as a partial answer to people who say what can we as the everyday citizen do? How would a response of? To take a story like you told about this man who, every time he got called in, would put that pill you know he'd cheek it just in case to try to better understand the level of commitment those people have made who don't even live here.

John Sipher: 1:54:21

They've never, been Right. They've never been Right.

Jack Hopkins: 1:54:23

They've never been yeah, because would you agree that, if not saying the average citizen's going to get to that point, but the closer people get to that level of commitment to this country and the Constitution, that in and of itself helps generate the answer to their question.

John Sipher: 1:54:46

Read a book about our founding fathers. I mean we're unusual in the world because we're a country that was created on an idea. Like we're not. You're not a Russian unless you're an ethnic Russian. Like if you come in there and you're telling you're not a Russian, you're not a Chinese unless you're an ethnic Chinese, but you can be an American to have come from anywhere, because if you believe in the Constitution and you're taking the oath and you swore an oath to this country, you could become an American, all of us from somewhere. And it's because we're a country that's based on an idea and like sometimes it's good to refresh that idea and remind ourselves like that's what makes us special and that's why people around the world all want to come here.

John Sipher: 1:55:22

We're worried about immigration, illegal immigration. That's because people want to come here and it's incredible strength for us, like one thing that China can't compete with us on like they are growing. They got lots of people, they're doing all this kind of stuff. They've come a long way, a lot of people out of poverty really moving forward. But economically over time. You know they have a demographic problem. They can't continue to grow because they don't have immigrants. People don't move there. We. Almost all of our growth in the last several decades is based on immigration, on people coming here. We have a demographic boon that most of the rest of the world can't match, because people want to come here.

John Sipher: 1:56:01

Now, yes, there's a downside to that. There's illegals and there's people who come here because and they don't come in the right way, but part of that's the problem of us and our Congress. We haven't created a system that's sensible, that can get people here. We're operating on this old system that people have to come, like you know. So if you live in China, 12 time zones away from Beijing, you got to go to Beijing, get an interview in the US Embassy and then get on the list to try to immigrate here, and so if you don't have the resources to do that, it's easier to sneak in or just take a flight in and stay. So we need to fix our immigration system. Frankly, it's on us to do that, which would fix a lot of this, and remind ourselves people come here because we're special and we should want people to come here. We just need to create a system to get people here legally.

Jack Hopkins: 1:56:47

Yeah, and to your point. I think it was last week I skimmed an article. Anyway, japan is experiencing a problem right now. People don't immigrate there Older, yeah, and the older generation is really disappearing rapidly now. Yeah, what was, if any, the psychological effect of living under that close of surveillance for two years?

John Sipher: 1:57:14

That's a good question. Before we go to a place like that, we go through regular CIA. There's a lot of training and preparation and polygraphs and security and education and things to get into. But go to a place like that. If you're going to go to a place that's under heavy security, we have a special series of courses, but also you have to go through additional psychological testing and so if you have a family, your family has to go through that too. Plus, you're taking language and you're taking preparation to go there. So there's a lot of ways to sort of not get, not be able to get to one of these places.

John Sipher: 1:57:48

But one of the psychological things is like if you have a family, how is it? How is your wife and husband? How are you going to be if you realize you might be being watched in your bedroom? How is it you think that they're watching your kids? You know. You know that they're. When you're not there, they may be breaking into your house. We've had people have their dogs killed, all this kind of stuff, and so it is.

John Sipher: 1:58:10

You have to be prepared and you have to understand the mission is so important and you have to believe you're doing something. That's so important that you're willing to put up with that stuff. And then eventually you develop sort of a tougher skin for that in for that. So like if I'm in a party and I'm out, even if I have colleagues, other CIA colleagues there, we all sort of know, you know where we can talk, what we can talk about, because people are listening and not, and so you develop that you know, even like when I'm talking to you I sort of know I can know what I can talk about and I know what I can't, and sort of learn that over time. It's like even if I've been drinking and I'm out and I know I'm being paid attention to, I sort of have this governor that says, oh, can't go past that level.

Jack Hopkins: 1:58:47

So it sounds like a lot of the way you're kind of the core concept, the way you're taught to deal with that sounds reminiscent of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. That's a great, important book. Got a big enough reason why you can bear the burden of any how.

John Sipher: 1:59:02

I think that's an excellent, excellent connection, and that's another thing people could. That book is really powerful and important yeah.

Jack Hopkins: 1:59:11

Meaning in life is everything. Absolutely, John. How can people find you? How can people learn more about your company? Where do they?

John Sipher: 1:59:20

go. Well, I used to be on Twitter and I had quite quite I don't know why I had quite a bit of Twitter followers because I was just snarky or whatever. But I stopped Twitter with sort of the Elon Musk thing. It got really to be a rancid place. I'm on Blue Sky in true name and I follow you and I've followed you for years both on Twitter and Blue Sky.

John Sipher: 1:59:38

I have a podcast with my other CIA colleague, friend and a New Yorker journalist called Mission Implausible. It's on iHeart and Apple and all those things Mission Implausible and it's about conspiracy theories and the notion is that we were sort of as CIA officers undercover, like mini conspiracists right, because we were undercover and things. Let's try to look at and debunk and try to figure out what makes sense about conspiracies and whatnot. Look at and debunk and try to figure out what makes sense about conspiracies and whatnot. And my company is called Spycraft Entertainment and we're trying to make more authentic espionage and TV shows and movies and that type of stuff. And so, yeah, I'm not trying to make myself more popular or more public, but those are the things that I do. I also write occasional opinion pieces in New York Times and Washington Post and Atlantic in various places.

Jack Hopkins: 2:00:29

Well, personally, I've got to tell you what an honor it is when somebody like you follows me, and I mean that on a level I'm not sure that I can convey, and the reason I say that is because I know my style of posting and the things that I say are very unlike what someone such as yourself, how they go about posting, and so when somebody like you follows me, whether it's true or not, but I think, wow, maybe there's somebody who sees beyond that and sees my core message and I'm delivering it in a different style, but they get where I'm coming from.

John Sipher: 2:01:11

That's the thing we got to remember as Americans. People might say things in little different ways, but we're on the same team and so, even if you and I are following each other and we don't agree with everything, no, we're focused on the right things. We're on the same team. We're trying to. We care about the country, we're trying to move the country in the right way. We're scared of the dangers. We see Too many Americans now like if there's one thing they don't like about someone, they write them off and they say nasty things to them. Like maybe we disagree on Israel or whatever, or maybe we disagree on immigration or something, but like we got to get over ourselves thinking that everyone has to agree with 100% of what I agree with or they're bad people. And so you know, I followed you for a while.

Jack Hopkins: 2:01:48

I can see that picture up in the corner there, that's very, very and you know what's crazy about that and that's been a topic of debate for years. I've never smoked in my life and in fact years ago. I haven't been on Facebook for years, but when I had one of those little generators where you could put sunglasses on whatever, and I did that one day for fun, and then I kind of pursued this path, I thought, yeah, I'm going to use that just for the hell.

John Sipher: 2:02:16

That's fun yeah.

Jack Hopkins: 2:02:17

Yeah, yeah, and the only reason. You know, occasionally I'll have people say why are you endorsing smoking and that type of thing? And I get that perspective, but I've had so many people who know enough about what they're talking about that I listen who say that that's your brand. Now you better not change that. And I think there's some… the real world today. Yeah, so listen, I want to extend an open invitation to you, as well as anybody at the Steady State, to come back anytime for any reason, and we'll just make it happen. It's as simple as that. I've enjoyed this thoroughly and learned a lot, but I've also enjoyed it. You're somebody I know I would enjoy having a beer with you, know.

John Sipher: 2:03:06

Well, that's what we need to do. We need to go to Denver Riggleman's place and get free bourbon from him. I think he owes that to us. Yes, and I think I can get one of the Vindmans there and maybe I can get Abigail Spanberger.

Jack Hopkins: 2:03:16

She's going to be a good group. That that would be incredible. John, thank you for your time and I've got a feeling, if you're willing, we'll do this again sometime. It might even be an episode that just discusses the meeting at Denver Wriglemoons.

John Sipher: 2:03:34

We'll do it from here, yeah.

Jack Hopkins: 2:03:36

Yeah, he probably has a studio. Yeah, hey, thank you and enjoy the rest of your day, john.

John Sipher: 2:03:41

You too. Thank you much, it was a.