Buck Sexton

So this is a true labor of love.

And I really think that everybody it's meant to be read and it can be read chapter by chapter.

You have to read the whole thing at once, although I think some people get through it quickly.

It is readable more than once.

It is readable as a reference.

And I throw some cool CIA stories in there that I've never told before because the time has elapsed and I can talk about it now.

So there you go.

Oh, man, Ben, thank you so much for having me.

Great to see you.

So, no, it's so important, Ben.

I take the position, it's actually a thesis in the opening of the book, that mass delusion and mass hysteria, these are, and you can consider them to be essentially the same thing, it's the biggest threat that we face as human beings today.

It's actually not, as you know, climate change.

It's not these things that we're led to believe are going to tear us all apart and we're all going to starve to death or any of these things.

It's actually human beings going insane in in crowds and then only regaining their senses one by one, as as Mackey wrote a long time ago.

So when I was in the CIA, I was in the counterterrorism center for much of the time.

I actually moved around a little bit.

And so we dealt with radicalization.

And so I opened the book in a place where it was my first CIA mission, which was in Nigeria, which I had never really talked about before, because at the time it was definitely classified because we were looking for what seemed to be the opening phase of radicalization in a part of that country that would eventually become Boko Haram.

Right.

I mean, that's the short version of the much longer story.