Speaker 1: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.
Speaker 2: I was a CIA officer stationed around the world in
Speaker 2: high threat posts in Europe, Russia, and in Asia.
Speaker 1: And I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East
Speaker 1: and in war zones. We sometimes created conspiracies to deceive
Speaker 1: our adversaries.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to use our expertise to deconstruct conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories large and small.
Speaker 1: Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 2: This is mission implausible.
Speaker 3: We now continue with part two of our conversation with
Speaker 3: Robin Kerno, former journalists for CNN and all around South African.
Speaker 2: Actually, South Africans are having quite an impact on us
Speaker 2: here politically in the United States now right. So there's
Speaker 2: a tech bros. Elon musk is the best known David Sachs,
Speaker 2: Peter Teel who have strong views about what the US
Speaker 2: government should be, what should happen to the future, where
Speaker 2: are we going with technology? And they're playing a very
Speaker 2: large role in our politics. Is there something based on
Speaker 2: your experience with South Africa that is South African about
Speaker 2: that or is there anything as we look at them
Speaker 2: and we try to figure out what impact is having
Speaker 2: on us, Is there something that we should know based
Speaker 2: on their background in South Africa that will help us
Speaker 2: put it into context.
Speaker 4: A lot of people have asked me this, and I've
Speaker 4: tried to listen to them as well. I'll listen to
Speaker 4: sax on the All In podcast. There's also David Freeberg
Speaker 4: who's also South African. Elon, you know, I've listened to
Speaker 4: a lot of his conversations. I've listened to and Chris
Speaker 4: Cuomo asked me this and then got Elon's dad on
Speaker 4: his show and asked him, you know, were you racist
Speaker 4: aparty topologists? And Elon's father dealt with it in he
Speaker 4: said no. The other question with that, which sometimes I
Speaker 4: think is also dangerous, is if is anybody who isn't
Speaker 4: black who grew up in white South Africa racist and
Speaker 4: therefore a crazy person who believes in things that aren't cool.
Speaker 4: And there's also that you've got to be careful that
Speaker 4: you're not painting an entire generation it just happened to
Speaker 4: be unfortunately born during a totalitarian race government that you
Speaker 4: all get tempered with some sort of race brush.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the things that they're saying this is the
Speaker 2: sort of viewpoint about what the role of government is
Speaker 2: and what the future is and what has I don't
Speaker 2: necessarily think of it as a racist thing, but there's something.
Speaker 2: Is there something cultural that's behind that sort of mental
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer, maybe no, But the.
Speaker 4: Only way I can I could probably bring some sort
Speaker 4: of light into it. So if you think about conspiracy theories,
Speaker 4: and I say we because I'm almost the same age
Speaker 4: as all of those men, and we grew up in
Speaker 4: Johannesburg Pretoria area, so you know, I had almost for
Speaker 4: some of the same childhood and news was censored. There
Speaker 4: was the SABC, it was the only news. The apartheid
Speaker 4: government was extremely good at propaganda and censorship. We lived
Speaker 4: in isolation. It was deliberate by the outside world. Of course,
Speaker 4: like the Soviet Union and the South Africans were cut off.
Speaker 4: The apartheid media machine was vicious. It was highly proficient
Speaker 4: at what it did, and it worked hand in hand
Speaker 4: with the apartheid government and the apartheid intelligence authorities. So
Speaker 4: when you grow up in an environment where nothing, you
Speaker 4: don't know anything, you and this is I think of
Speaker 4: true of any totalitarian state. Because South Africa and Apartheid
Speaker 4: at his basis was a Christian nationalist totalitarian state. When
Speaker 4: you grow up in that with no information, your instinct
Speaker 4: is to just not trust anything. If you're not a
Speaker 4: believer in the in the state, which you know none
Speaker 4: of us. I don't think you know the sac set.
Speaker 4: You know, they were a Jewish South African family who
Speaker 4: moved to the state. So did the Freeburgs. I think
Speaker 4: Elon Musk hated it, and they got out there as
Speaker 4: quickly as possible. I mean he was out of there
Speaker 4: before we could. And you know my family as well,
Speaker 4: liberal white English speaking South Africans. You know, you were
Speaker 4: stuck in this place and you couldn't leave, and so
Speaker 4: your instinct was, I don't believe any of this stuff,
Speaker 4: So I'm just not going to believe anything, or you
Speaker 4: take everything with a pinch of salt, or in that environment,
Speaker 4: you then say, okay, this seems to be vaguely true.
Speaker 4: This is maybe I saw this the past books or
Speaker 4: some violence on the street. But then there are a
Speaker 4: bunch of gaps like why is this happening, who gave
Speaker 4: the orders? What are the implications? So you start filling
Speaker 4: in the gaps, and that's where the conspiracy theories come in.
Speaker 4: And so you grow up either in a society which
Speaker 4: there's no information, or you start believing maybe this is true.
Speaker 4: I think an American diplomat once described the old South
Speaker 4: Africa as the republic of rumors, and so, you know,
Speaker 4: information became power because if you knew something, you could
Speaker 4: protect yourself, you could use it, you could just be
Speaker 4: an ostrich and bury your head in the sand. So
Speaker 4: South Africans, black and white, tend to have a very
Speaker 4: instinctive reaction to information sometimes because we're like, well, I
Speaker 4: don't know if that's true. You know, is it an
Speaker 4: official source? Who's telling me this?
Speaker 1: Why?
Speaker 4: Why are they telling me this? Why are they telling
Speaker 4: me in this way? Is this something I need to
Speaker 4: read between the lines or is it not. So I
Speaker 4: think that that kind of anarchist, maybe kind of deconstructionist
Speaker 4: Peter teele version of the world might have come from that.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I think maybe Elon's obsession with free
Speaker 4: speech to the point that it's just overwhelmed, maybe comes
Speaker 4: from growing up in an environment where speech was so
Speaker 4: limited and no, you couldn't say anything. I still my
Speaker 4: grandmother's I still call home and my grandmother will, well,
Speaker 4: just be careful what you say on the telephone. Don't
Speaker 4: say that, Robin. You never know who's listening. Now, nobody's
Speaker 4: going to be listening to a one hundred year old
Speaker 4: lady and her granddaughter sitting in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.
Speaker 4: But that instinct that somebody's listening and that you've got
Speaker 4: to fight the system can maybe create the Elons and
Speaker 4: the Peter Teals and their sort of nilistic views sometimes
Speaker 4: of the world. And that would be my only explanation.
Speaker 4: I think the interesting thing when we talk about information
Speaker 4: and conspiracy. So in those days, like a totalitarian state,
Speaker 4: no information, you how use conspiracy theories, rumors, half truths,
Speaker 4: mythstruths to kind of fill in the blanks of what
Speaker 4: you don't know. And then in a place like America
Speaker 4: now or in the sort of social media world were
Speaker 4: living in, there's too much information, so people are so
Speaker 4: overwhelmed by all the information coming at them that they
Speaker 4: then start to distrust it all and then come up
Speaker 4: and try and fill in the bits. So I think
Speaker 4: there's this sublime and the ridiculous here, and that is
Speaker 4: my kind of convoluted way of trying to understand the
Speaker 4: world views perhaps of the teals and the sexes and
Speaker 4: the Musks. I don't know if you think that makes.
Speaker 1: It so there's a word I use. I use lots
Speaker 1: of words that I don't actually understand that I don't understand,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's it's algorithm, right, and algorithms give
Speaker 1: us the news that we want, right, and so that.
Speaker 1: But did they well sort of? I think that you know,
Speaker 1: if you're interested in something, it tends to come your
Speaker 1: way to sell you more snow tires or beer, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever we sell. It also goes back to again when
Speaker 1: I was in the living in the third World. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that's the right term, but in Africa and
Speaker 1: the Middle East and Asia that people often use conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories and lack of information and Hollywood weirdly to make
Speaker 1: themselves the heroes of their own of their own movie.
Speaker 1: And so I was shocked when I first went to Zimbabwe,
Speaker 1: where it was clear that everyone in the Zimbabwean government
Speaker 1: thought that the president would wake up and he wants
Speaker 1: to know what's going on in Zimbabwe. What is Mugabi
Speaker 1: up to now? What about the white farmers, what's the
Speaker 1: what's his concern on the Shona and de bella split, right,
Speaker 1: what are his real views on it? Like, we obviously
Speaker 1: want to take over Zimbabwe and Botswana. And I found
Speaker 1: that in the Middle East as well, where people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that the president wants to know about the
Speaker 1: ismaily angle on. It's like, you know, look, you'll be
Speaker 1: lucky if they can figure out she you know. And
Speaker 1: so also with the US though, I find it also
Speaker 1: through family members who are into conspiracy theories that like,
Speaker 1: I get it. I'm the hero. I figured this out.
Speaker 1: I have a narrative and often it's me against the world, right,
Speaker 1: if you know, it's like they're almost superheroes. I was wondering,
Speaker 1: if you've talked to a lot of people around the world,
Speaker 1: do you get a sense that there's also this sense
Speaker 1: of ego as well?
Speaker 4: Yeah, but isn't that it? And it does because it's
Speaker 4: sort of like if.
Speaker 1: You if you and with Jesus, right, he's there for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that person. Isn't that the whole
Speaker 4: point of it? You know, in times of chain, a
Speaker 4: conspiracy theory will offer you a false sense of security
Speaker 4: or an explanation for the unknown. A conspiracy theory, to
Speaker 4: your point, also creates a social identity. So whether it's
Speaker 4: the bridge ladies discussing something in the northern suburbs or
Speaker 4: whether it's a group of Shauna having a conversation over
Speaker 4: warm beer. At the end of the day, there's a
Speaker 4: social oh did you hear this? And we feel a
Speaker 4: sense of belonging. Superiority I think comes into it. But
Speaker 4: victimhood two. Sometimes I think that they're the same sides
Speaker 4: of the you know, different sides of the coin. The
Speaker 4: sense of superiority or victim or shared victimhood that you'd
Speaker 4: get from sharing a conspiracy theory, and that confirmation bias
Speaker 4: that comes from that that we all agree that we're
Speaker 4: either being done in by somebody together, the victimhood one,
Speaker 4: or we know something that those other folks down the
Speaker 4: road don't know and we have evidence whatever is you know,
Speaker 4: also creates that confirmation bias. So yes, and I think
Speaker 4: I think in Africa, what's so funny? And then you
Speaker 4: probably saw too. I spent a lot of times also
Speaker 4: being fascinated by witchcraft. You mentioned it, and I think
Speaker 4: a World Health organization said ninety five percent of sub
Speaker 4: Saharan Africans visit a witch doctor a sangoma and younger
Speaker 4: first before they go to a traditional doctor. Now this
Speaker 4: cuts across class, and this is generally Black Africans, tribal Africans,
Speaker 4: but it also is infused within sort of white society too,
Speaker 4: I would argue, but just a different type of a younger.
Speaker 4: You're going to trust your restuctor, you know, your physiotherapist
Speaker 4: before you trust or whatever I think is the wrong.
Speaker 4: You're going to trust your acupunctures before you touch the doctor.
Speaker 4: But for me, I always found it so interesting how
Speaker 4: that sense of superiority played into the conspiracy theories around
Speaker 4: health and power and social status in Africa. So the
Speaker 4: witch doctor would be the kind of dispenser of the
Speaker 4: conspiracy theory. Often whether it's sleeping with a virgin to
Speaker 4: cure your aids, or whether it's to chase away a
Speaker 4: cheating wife, or whether it's to get good luck so
Speaker 4: you can be employed next year. And various tasks are
Speaker 4: given out, whether you slaughter a goat or a cow,
Speaker 4: or whether you go and you walk into the you know,
Speaker 4: and whatever the different tribal rituals are. That then creates
Speaker 4: this sort of narrative that then younger the san gorm
Speaker 4: has power. And then if you do this, you too
Speaker 4: will get power. And often I found it fascinating that
Speaker 4: the people who rejected the conspiracy theories or said no,
Speaker 4: this is BS, or I disagree with this, or no,
Speaker 4: you shouldn't rape children, or your wife wasn't cheating on you.
Speaker 4: Often those people would then be punished. It wouldn't be
Speaker 4: the soun gorma who would be punished. And so these
Speaker 4: witchcraft killings that would often turn up, these sort of
Speaker 4: tribalized killings were often often that sense of superiority by
Speaker 4: the group silencing somebody who was questioning their confirmation bias
Speaker 4: around whatever that theory was, and that sense of superior
Speaker 4: to ority often came, I think because people were threatened
Speaker 4: by somebody who was different or had a different point
Speaker 4: of view. And I think that group dynamic plays into everything.
Speaker 4: It plays into stuff we're seeing here in the States.
Speaker 4: And you don't have to be in rural vendor in
Speaker 4: the Soappunsburg getting someone dispensing information from a mad hut
Speaker 4: to know that those instincts can be amplified.
Speaker 2: I saw in our old world right, everybody the hero
Speaker 2: of their own movie. I'm armed, I can fight off
Speaker 2: bad guys when they come in intelligence, you'd see the
Speaker 2: same thing. Especially I remember when the snowed and thing
Speaker 2: happened and he left, there's this view, Oh my god,
Speaker 2: you know they're going after my privacy, They're coming after you,
Speaker 2: and like if you work in the intelligence, you're like
Speaker 2: nobody cares about you. No one is looking at the
Speaker 2: Americans stuff. There's millions and million, hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: Americans like this is not something that we are interested in,
Speaker 2: have time for, have legal reason to do. And it
Speaker 2: goes further, like when you talk to people who are voting,
Speaker 2: it's like the government's not solving my problems, and like
Speaker 2: it's everybody sees the world through their own lens, which
Speaker 2: is not surprising, but they take it incredibly seriously.
Speaker 4: But why do you think, why do you think America
Speaker 4: is such a bogey man? Because there is even now
Speaker 4: the sense of And that's one of the reasons I've
Speaker 4: realized with this podcast is that the sort of anti
Speaker 4: Americanism clearly is is a fear of what Trump is
Speaker 4: doing and the sort of the global implications of his policies.
Speaker 4: But there's also very easy anti americanism even without even
Speaker 4: during the Obama days, when people loved him. You know,
Speaker 4: you know, you guys are listening or you following, or
Speaker 4: you know, are you following me? You know, like you know,
Speaker 4: nobody's listening in Americans have far more important things to
Speaker 4: deal with right now than, like you said, whether or
Speaker 4: not at even a cabinet meeting in some random country.
Speaker 4: This is going one way or the other.
Speaker 1: Let's passib a second. We'll be right back. Remember a
Speaker 1: senior Iraqi official who was running one of their versions
Speaker 1: of the FBI said to me that he doesn't trust
Speaker 1: the United States because President Obama is anti Shia, because
Speaker 1: what do you mean his father was a Sunni. He's
Speaker 1: a Sunni. He bought into the conspiracy theory that he
Speaker 1: was born in Kenya and that he's a Muslim, right
Speaker 1: that was a given to him. And as a Sunni,
Speaker 1: he doesn't like that shea dominated Iraqi government. And I
Speaker 1: had to try to dissuade him to the fact that
Speaker 1: Obama knows a difference between She and Sunny a little bit,
Speaker 1: but like he doesn't really care.
Speaker 4: About that, and that plays into a superiority thing, like
Speaker 4: if that was it's your grouping that.
Speaker 1: But he was riffing off of American conspiracy theories right
Speaker 1: that he was picking up on the internet. Robert, there
Speaker 1: is one thing. So we've got two CIA guys and
Speaker 1: we've got an award winning journalist here. I just want
Speaker 1: to say, for the record, what record, Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know whatever anybody, So all.
Speaker 4: The people who are listening in and taking that.
Speaker 2: Everybody shut over your own story. Someone's keeping a record
Speaker 2: of what we're.
Speaker 1: Saying, really truly common. No shit, CIA does not use
Speaker 1: journalistic cover. It is like death to us. Now. I
Speaker 1: think we church committee like before the nineteen seventies, like
Speaker 1: you know, fifty years ago, we may have dabbled in that, but.
Speaker 4: But you can protest that until the cow's come and
Speaker 4: nobody's going to believe you that a journalist in a
Speaker 4: place is not that we that I wasn't feeding back
Speaker 4: information to the president. I just think we know that.
Speaker 1: The way to tell the CIA guy in a diplomatic function,
Speaker 1: if you're a journalist, is the person who runs away
Speaker 1: from you because we have to report it, and it's
Speaker 1: like it's trouble.
Speaker 4: I would love to know now who, Yeah, because I
Speaker 4: and also I'm not particularly interested in your point of
Speaker 4: view as a journalist either. I'm trying to get my
Speaker 4: own stuff. My output is different from.
Speaker 2: Your outputes are very thin too. We're all interested in like,
Speaker 2: very specific security related issues, not wider cultural and bigger
Speaker 2: news related things.
Speaker 4: And I mean you get you know, the ambassador you
Speaker 4: can see from when the CA you talk what Snowden,
Speaker 4: when the cables releaked, I mean the ambassadors are painting
Speaker 4: a picture of you know, you know, the power elite
Speaker 4: within a country. Often you know those that's often an
Speaker 4: interesting anecdotal stuff. You know, some of those cables were fascinating,
Speaker 4: but it wasn't I'm assuming what you guys were doing.
Speaker 4: You're not particularly interested in who's on top and who
Speaker 4: isn't unless it's a very specific angle that you're trying
Speaker 4: to get. I was more interested in painting a picture
Speaker 4: of what was important and what was happening, and again
Speaker 4: probably narrow, how is Mandela? Is he dying? Will he
Speaker 4: die tomorrow? That I spent a whole year of my
Speaker 4: life having that conversation, and that was important, I think
Speaker 4: for the US diplomatic call, because they needed to know
Speaker 4: if the president, if Obama, would be able to come
Speaker 4: to Mandela's funeral, for example, that was a political state
Speaker 4: argument nothing to do with what you guys were doing, obviously,
Speaker 4: But I think a lot of countries do use journalists
Speaker 4: as covered and there are a lot of stories of that.
Speaker 4: But yes, not the Americans. We have put it on
Speaker 4: the record for all the Chinese and listening.
Speaker 1: But I did a lot of counter terrorism in my time,
Speaker 1: and I remember Dick Cheney being Vice President United States,
Speaker 1: being really upset saying peterberg In, a journalist gets into
Speaker 1: the cave and sits with Osama bin Laden and we
Speaker 1: the CIA, we can't do We the US government, you,
Speaker 1: the CIA, you can't do this. And the answer was
Speaker 1: bin Laden actually believes that CIA doesn't use journalistic cover
Speaker 1: because we don't. So we had convinced beIN Laden that
Speaker 1: we don't do it. I don't know, can you tell me?
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 4: I think we've had this conversation, and I said, our
Speaker 4: output was different. I think the method of gathering is
Speaker 4: the same. It's getting information from people, and more often
Speaker 4: than not, that comes from connecting with people, looking them
Speaker 4: in the eye, getting them to trust you, keeping them,
Speaker 4: keeping them safe. The storytelling in terms of how you
Speaker 4: get somebody to share something with you. I was just
Speaker 4: putting it out publicly, you were just putting it out internally.
Speaker 4: It's probably the same skill set on some level, but
Speaker 4: very different, no doubt.
Speaker 2: That's what we like. We like talking to journals. There
Speaker 2: are very similarities in what your work was and what
Speaker 2: our work was. But the one thing that's not similar,
Speaker 2: which I do want to ask you about, is in
Speaker 2: your career you've interviewed lots of famous and interesting people
Speaker 2: and powerful people. Can you talk a little bit just
Speaker 2: in just like who you found most interesting or I
Speaker 2: know you've talked to Oprah for example, is she willing
Speaker 2: to accept blame for doctor Osby? Or who have you interviewed?
Speaker 2: What was interesting? Any anecdotes that those of us who
Speaker 2: live in a sort of loved run.
Speaker 1: Would find, especially Mandela, who is still a hero of mine.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think, and I think again. I wanted to
Speaker 4: meet those people and interview those people because I was
Speaker 4: interested in what made them tick. And I'm particularly interested
Speaker 4: in people who aren't that nice. I'm sure you're saying
Speaker 4: some of the most fascinating.
Speaker 1: People, which is while you're here, which is.
Speaker 4: Exactly is the sort of nefarious I just like the
Speaker 4: way power works, and I like to watch it, and
Speaker 4: I also like to watch people when they leave power
Speaker 4: because I think that's sometimes the most interesting place for
Speaker 4: someone to be. And with that in mind, one of
Speaker 4: funnal LEO that for the most interesting people I found
Speaker 4: who surprised me, because I don't get surprised by much,
Speaker 4: was actually George W. Bush. He surprised me a because
Speaker 4: he was so likable, and I went into the interview
Speaker 4: kind of thinking, and it was under an acacia tree
Speaker 4: in Zambia. He was opening up a clinic for to
Speaker 4: encourage the HPV vaccines. So he had saved all these
Speaker 4: lives with pepfar by giving HIV positive Africans entry retrovirals,
Speaker 4: which is an amazing program that saved so many lives.
Speaker 4: It was a Bush administration thing. And then he realized
Speaker 4: a lot of people, a lot of women were dying
Speaker 4: of cervical cancer because there were their immune systems were down,
Speaker 4: so he was saving them from HIV AIDS and then
Speaker 4: they were getting cancer. And so just the hot that's
Speaker 4: a George W. Bush conversation, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: It was just he surprised me on so many levels.
Speaker 4: And this was during the snowdon time. So I actually
Speaker 4: said to him, I said, do you think Snowden is
Speaker 4: a traitor? And he was like absolutely. He was very
Speaker 4: angry about Snowden. He also seemed to be fascinating you guys.
Speaker 4: He also seemed to be asked him about waterboarding, and
Speaker 4: he seemed to be very indignant that it wasn't it
Speaker 4: wasn't his fault, the whole waterboarding stuff, because it Congress
Speaker 4: had given permission or there'd been like a whole process. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and he said, they knew what everybody knew what they
Speaker 4: were signing off on. So why am I cutting the crap?
Speaker 4: Why am I getting Why am I getting in trouble
Speaker 4: for something? And he was wounded and hurt as if
Speaker 4: he had followed procedure and now he was being slapped
Speaker 4: on the wrist, and so that was interesting. But then
Speaker 4: and then he just became very chatty, and I just
Speaker 4: I could see why he had at a president because
Speaker 4: he was so authentic. You didn't have to agree with
Speaker 4: his politics, but you saw what you got, and I
Speaker 4: understood then the motivations behind the Americans. Mandela was the
Speaker 4: fleet opposite. I remember sitting with Mandela in one of
Speaker 4: his sort of one of his last official interviews. He
Speaker 4: was ninety. He was at home in Kunu, which is
Speaker 4: in the rural Eastern Cape, and he was looking out
Speaker 4: of his window and his cattle, and his Jerry cattle
Speaker 4: of very important wealth, particularly to a tribal leader in
Speaker 4: Southern Africa. And I was sitting there, and I was
Speaker 4: with a cameraman and quite and a few other journalists,
Speaker 4: and he just wanted to talk about his cattle. He
Speaker 4: just wanted to talk about what he saw out of
Speaker 4: his window. And he was he had grown up in
Speaker 4: those hills, walking barefoot as a sort of young boy.
Speaker 4: And he was just so difficult to make small talk with,
Speaker 4: you know. And I think someone like Bush was very
Speaker 4: easy to sort of shoot the breeze with. We talked
Speaker 4: about all sorts of things off the record. Mandela was
Speaker 4: never really very easy to be off the record with.
Speaker 4: You couldn't massage him before an interview, you know, and
Speaker 4: soften him up or just make yourself seem a little
Speaker 4: less intimidating, which is what you would do as a journalist,
Speaker 4: and probably when you're meeting a source, so you like
Speaker 4: self deprecating, or you make a joke, you try and
Speaker 4: sort of make yourself not too intimidating. Because it's CNN
Speaker 4: or whatever. Mandela was just very difficult to make small
Speaker 4: talk with. And then even when he spoke, he was
Speaker 4: very guarded. I mean, that's what happens when you know,
Speaker 4: spend twenty seven years incarcerated by a racist regime. You
Speaker 4: learn to keep things very close to your chest. So
Speaker 4: he was very difficult to get to know Mandela. And
Speaker 4: funnily enough, that's what I actually that what I literally
Speaker 4: this conversation I'm having with you now is the one
Speaker 4: I had with Michelle Obama before I interviewed her. The
Speaker 4: one thing we softened each other up about was our
Speaker 4: both of our inability to break the ice with Mandela.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 4: He was just, even to Michelle Obama as the sitting
Speaker 4: first lady at the time, he wasn't a natural raconteur,
Speaker 4: or he didn't let you in and I remember that time,
Speaker 4: or he just wasn't that kind of guy. So I
Speaker 4: think it's about trying to understand people's motivations and why
Speaker 4: they act in a way, and what you can get
Speaker 4: out of them in terms of information. And you have
Speaker 4: to be flexible, and you have to be organic, and
Speaker 4: you have to read somebody very well to be able
Speaker 4: to extract what you need from them. And yeah, Bush
Speaker 4: was an open book, Mandela, I mean closed book. I'm
Speaker 4: probably forgetting some of the others. Oprah was. Oprah was
Speaker 4: just on. She had as on switch on. She was
Speaker 4: fully one hundred and twenty percent to eleven Oprah. So
Speaker 4: she was very huggy. She kind of touched me and
Speaker 4: hugged me a lot, which is, you know, it's an
Speaker 4: interesting device. But yeah, I mean I'm fascinated by and
Speaker 4: I mean I was there at Fidel's. I didn't interview Fidel,
Speaker 4: you mentioned at the beginning. I didn't ever interview Fidel,
Speaker 4: but he obviously was a huge supporter of the South
Speaker 4: African Liberation movements and so he was there a lot
Speaker 4: in sod Africa supporting the ANC. So I saw him
Speaker 4: with a few times. Same with Gadaffi. I don't know
Speaker 4: about you guys. I don't know how much you guys
Speaker 4: saw Godaffi in Africa. But seeing Gadaffi with his ladies
Speaker 4: in tow and Gadaffi in full tinfoiled regalia, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: he had his female little these hot chicks and his
Speaker 4: sort of personal bodyguard.
Speaker 2: I want to make a dictator. That's I probably will
Speaker 2: go that way too.
Speaker 1: He was got to make on female journalists as well,
Speaker 1: right He would send them special clothes before they interviewed him,
Speaker 1: and it was really what you get. It's just saying,
Speaker 1: I don't think you got anything about you.
Speaker 4: Look you must look so pretty in one of God's dresses.
Speaker 4: I don't know. It's you tell me? Is that what
Speaker 4: you miss about is not It's not about being in
Speaker 4: the know. It's more about watching people and wondering what
Speaker 4: makes them tech. I think that's what I missed from
Speaker 4: being in the field, and I missed that when I
Speaker 4: moved to Atlanta and was anchoring a show. That sort
Speaker 4: of disconnect between either being in the field or being
Speaker 4: in a studio. It's probably like being in the field
Speaker 4: and then going to Langley. You feel a little bit
Speaker 4: of use, a lot left behind in the field.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back in a moment. All the people
Speaker 1: you've talked about, the famous or there people who like
Speaker 1: really impressed you. You've been involved in change in South Africa,
Speaker 1: the death of Mugabi at least, a change in Zimbabwe, Israel,
Speaker 1: Palestine issues, Russia, Ukraine issues. The biggest heroes often are
Speaker 1: people that are unsung. But you talk to a lot
Speaker 1: of those people and people that may just feel good
Speaker 1: about being a human being. Real heroes. Were there people
Speaker 1: out there Israelis or Palestinians or Russian dissidents? And I'm
Speaker 1: just thinking of this, and I'm trying to remember her name,
Speaker 1: that this Ukrainian journalist who was just tortured and murdered
Speaker 1: by the Russians, right, Victoria. Yeah, they returned. She was
Speaker 1: detained for a year without charges, finally returned without her eyeballs,
Speaker 1: brains or internal organs. Peers should be She'd had been
Speaker 1: strangled and tortured, muchecuted on her feet. This is a
Speaker 1: journalist who like risked everything, right, there are real heroes
Speaker 1: out there who were journalists and people that journalists work with,
Speaker 1: same with CIA, we work with. Some of our assets
Speaker 1: are like true heroes. I'm just wondering if there's any
Speaker 1: one or two sort of people or stories that made
Speaker 1: you feel good about being a journalist or a human being.
Speaker 4: I was always in awe of grandmother. There's something quite
Speaker 4: astounding about a grandmother. In Africa in particular, they're like Atlas.
Speaker 4: They hold the world on their shoulders, particularly during the
Speaker 4: HIV AIDS crisis, particularly during some of the political violence
Speaker 4: in the townships, the younger people were either killed or
Speaker 4: died or exiled or and a lot of these grandmothers
Speaker 4: were raising their grandchildren. And for me that I have,
Speaker 4: there are a number of images of grandmothers who I've
Speaker 4: encountered over my career, and I will always think to myself,
Speaker 4: if you ever if you know, they're the backbone of society,
Speaker 4: but they're some of the strongest, bravest people I ever
Speaker 4: have come across. You go back to our original thing,
Speaker 4: like what happened with the world right now? And why
Speaker 4: is there a sense of people not believing the news
Speaker 4: the stuff that is important? And I think a lot
Speaker 4: of it is that these are moral conundrums, these are
Speaker 4: complicated issues, and there's this sort of binary kind of perspective,
Speaker 4: this very simplified version of the world that is being
Speaker 4: put out and that bothers me, the sort of black
Speaker 4: and white binary lack of nuance, whether you want to
Speaker 4: couch it in oppressed versus the oppressor, the colonizer versus
Speaker 4: the colonized. I think the oversimplification of the effects after
Speaker 4: October the seventh, all the stuff we've seen in Southern Africa,
Speaker 4: you know, Syria and the terrorists.
Speaker 2: Go back to that personalized stuff, Like the sort of
Speaker 2: view is the world's out there, there's right and wrong,
Speaker 2: something went bad. I would have chosen right. You people
Speaker 2: chose wrong. That's a very simple narrative. I look good
Speaker 2: in the narrative, whereas these things that we're talking about
Speaker 2: are situations that there wasn't a right, like there was
Speaker 2: gradations of different things, whether you believe in truth or
Speaker 2: read that you believe in equality. I mean, those are
Speaker 2: hard issues and you almost have to lane a background
Speaker 2: to someone and say, Okay, here's the decision you are
Speaker 2: stuck with. How do you make that decision? And if
Speaker 2: people want to get out of it, they're like, well,
Speaker 2: I would you know? Move? No, no, no, we're stuck. This
Speaker 2: is the decision now. Both choices are bad, Both choices
Speaker 2: have consequences. That's where we are, Like everybody wants to
Speaker 2: back out and make it easy right and wrong, and
Speaker 2: if it was just right and wrong, we would almost
Speaker 2: always make the right decision.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I don't think you know these comms. And
Speaker 4: that's the problem right now is that I think if
Speaker 4: I think about Mike, we didn't even talk really about Zimbabwe,
Speaker 4: And I think about all the coverage and times and
Speaker 4: detained in Zimbabwe and how mcgaby just played footsy with
Speaker 4: us the whole time with the media. In the end,
Speaker 4: I knew what was happening because I had I had
Speaker 4: accessed through the way you do things is build sources
Speaker 4: within mcgaby's own inner circle. And so in the end,
Speaker 4: in those last few hours, I was getting messages from
Speaker 4: within the Blue House by the people who were with him.
Speaker 4: And I think, I think a lot of people see
Speaker 4: journalism now as you these champions for truth and then
Speaker 4: you you know, put a thirty second video on TikTok
Speaker 4: and this will explain why I was you know, this
Speaker 4: is right, Whereas if you try and explain why you're
Speaker 4: building relationships with the bad guys so you understand the
Speaker 4: impact in the end in a way that kind of
Speaker 4: shows the nuance, do you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 4: I think that depth, that analog way of reporting, old school.
Speaker 4: I think that's what we're missing. And I you know,
Speaker 4: I sound like a when we you know, when we
Speaker 4: were you know, to think better. But I do think
Speaker 4: some of the nuance and the complexity gets lost particularly
Speaker 4: with the younger generation and the need to see another
Speaker 4: someone's point of view.
Speaker 1: You've got to spend some of those twenty minutes with
Speaker 1: these things.
Speaker 4: And or you've got to go away into the bush
Speaker 4: for the week and know and you say, listen, I
Speaker 4: can't be doing live shots and updating my YouTube and
Speaker 4: treating and putting it on Instagram and doing a little
Speaker 4: short vignette reel. Do you know what I mean? You
Speaker 4: just need to go and immerse yourself, get the story
Speaker 4: come back. And so I think Sann is still doing
Speaker 4: that to some extent, But you know, it's a double
Speaker 4: you know. I think all these media organizations are trying
Speaker 4: to hold onto that analog way of storytelling. At the
Speaker 4: same time they're also trying to commoditize the algorithm. And
Speaker 4: it's a very it's a very uncomfortable juggling act. And
Speaker 4: I think that's the kind of messiness of where we
Speaker 4: are now.
Speaker 2: You know, we can talk to you forever and hopefully
Speaker 2: we can do this again. Absolutely, to the people out there,
Speaker 2: it is very much worth listening to her podcast as
Speaker 2: she tries to explain our crazy country to the rest
Speaker 2: of the world. So thank you for what you're doing
Speaker 2: and thanks for your time with us.
Speaker 4: Thanks Jerry, thanks John, appreciate it. We also thank you
Speaker 4: for all the work you did for this great, crazy,
Speaker 4: beautiful country.
Speaker 3: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'Shea, John Cipher,
Speaker 3: and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
Speaker 3: It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for
Speaker 3: iHeart Podcasts.