Breaking the Left vs. Right Illusion | Honest Talk with a John Kiriakou

Is there anyone that interviews you like on a regular basis that you really don't see eye to eye with and it's kind of it kind of grinds a little bit but it's you know it's worth doing the interview. Yeah. >> No. And and that's a great question. I'll I'll tell you why. It's because it's because I've come to the realization that the ideological spectrum is not a straight line from left to right. It's a circle. And at a certain point, the left and the right meet. And I've become so anti >> duopoly that I'm happy to agree. I don't care if if people identify as conservatives or as Republicans or as liberals or Democrats or whatever. There are issues that we agree on and I embrace those issues. I don't care what people's personal politics. >> I love that. I think I think it's about it's like not getting caught in the forest from the trees and always remembering that we're all Americans and we want to we want the best. No, no, we don't have a lot. We don't hate people. We don't hate >> like the point is not to hate and to be divisive. >> The point is to seek common ground and just go, "Hey, we all want the same thing, right? We're just getting there maybe in different ways, but at the end of the day, we both agree that this is what we want." And as long as we're doing that instead of assuming the other side is evil and my side is right and and moral has moral high ground, I think that it you can find this commonalities, it shouldn't it doesn't feel like it should be that much of a challenge. >> You're absolutely right. We we talked, for example, he asked me kind of an odd question toward the end of the the conversation. He asked me um what examples I could give him of governmental actions that I'm opposed to outside of the um the intelligence community. Like you know I I consider myself to be a critic of the CIA, a critic of NSA, a critic of whatever. And I said well you know off the top of my head look at the Bureau of Land Management. Most Americans have never even heard of the Bureau of Land Management. and it wres havoc on farmers uh in in the in the west. And I end up I end up finding myself in support of of for example the Bundy family, which many Americans view as being so far to the right as to be like off the charts. But by God, they were right about the Bureau of Land Management. I talked to him about this this case that I followed in Hawaii >> where u there was a woman who's a GS12, you know, mid-level nobody from the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Noah. Because she's a GS12, she's living in and living in Honolulu, you you can't make ends meet. So, she and a business partner bought a boat together and they would take tourists out on the boat on weekends to go whale watching. So, one weekend they're out there and they come upon an orca feeding on a seal carcass and so everybody runs to the side of the boat. They're taking pictures and video of the of the killer whale eating the seal and somebody whistles at the whale, you know, to try to get it to stay near the surface. I don't know, for whatever reason. Not that like I don't do orcas have ears? I suppose they must, but who knows? So, um, >> some kind. Yeah. >> Yeah. So, a couple of weeks later, there's a pounding on her apartment door, and it's the FBI.