The Real 007? Ed Koss Tells All” 2nd Episode

In this second episode of Mike Stone Conversations, we continue our compelling discussion with Ed Koss—diving even deeper into the stories, experiences, and insights that have shaped his remarkable life.

Building on our first conversation, Ed shares more behind-the-scenes perspectives, personal reflections, and unforgettable moments that you won’t hear anywhere else. From intriguing real-life encounters to thought-provoking lessons, this episode brings both depth and authenticity to the microphone.

Whether you’re joining us for the first time or continuing the journey, this episode offers a fascinating look into a life filled with purpose, mystery, and meaning.

🎧 Sit back, relax, and enjoy Part 2 of this engaging and eye-opening conversation with Ed Koss—only on Mike Stone Conversations.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello, this is Mark with the Mike Stone Show. Music, stories, and conversations. Today, Mike will be bringing you the second episode of his Conversation with Ed Coss. Mike's guest today has lived a life that sounds like it came straight from the pages of a spy novel. Ed Coss is a global traveler who has visited 177 countries, a military intelligence specialist, aviation expert, and author of more than 87 professional publications. He has also written 11 works of fiction inspired by his real-life adventures in military intelligence, in international contract work, stories that echo the intrigue and excitement of the legendary spy James Bond. Today we'll hear about his remarkable career, his travels around the world, and the stories behind the stories. Just a quick heads up before we start. Today's episode includes discussion of real intelligence operations and covert work. Some of the stories involve dangerous situations and mature themes, so listener discretion is advised. Let's go to Mike now for his conversation with Ed Coss.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

I drove my car up to Boston, and then I checking in. I had a guy that helped me check in through all the bureaucracy, and it was about three or four days later, and he says, Has anybody told told you what you're going to be doing? I said, No, nobody said anything. He said, Well, you're going to be you're going to be an intelligence. And I said, Well, that that sounds really cool. Well, within four or five weeks, I couldn't have drawn drawn this up any better than if I had to tell me exactly what you want us to do. They did a better job than I could have done. And I said, I don't know how this happens. I was in shock. I said, We all know about the war stories where they, you know, you want to be a fighter pilot and end up in the kitchen peeping potatoes. We know about those stories, but nobody comes up with this kind of story. And I was almost shocked and a little bit afraid. I said, How can all of this be happening just perfectly? You know, just perfect. And it was.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Destiny fell right into your lap.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

It did, right from the very, the very first get-go. I mean, it was I did nothing. I just showed up and showed up.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

And a lot of people didn't like that you showed up because they didn't want you flying their plane, they didn't, they didn't want you spending their money. And uh they said, Where are you, where are you from?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

So you got it exactly right, Michael. That uh if you if you're worried about being the popular guy on base, you don't want my life because no a lot of guys wouldn't talk to me, didn't want it, didn't know anything about it. And if they did know it, they were angry with you. Well, who do you think you are? I said, Listen, I just doing doing my job. If you got a problem, go talk to the general. I didn't associate with many of them because I was like you'll see it in the book a lot. I'll always say, always alone, but never lonely.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

I've said that many times already. We'll get into the novels right before we uh get out of here. I know you spent a lot of time, and I know you you married a lady there, and that golden triangle, the Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. Uh we know that as a golden triangle. I know there was a lot of back in my day in my career, uh a lot of heroin, a lot of things came out of the golden triangle. I know you had a lot of experience in that area about the golden triangle. Can you tell uh the listeners what about that area? What what's going on there? And now I think uh they've got things called scam compounds there, bringing people from all over the world, and they they mistreat them, abuse them, and make them work in there for years on scams, different kinds of romance scams or finance scams. Can you shed some light on the golden triangle for us?

SPEAKER_01 3:43

And so there's a lot of uh primitive, if you will, adventures in that area, lots of huge amounts of uh drugs, a lot of lawless, you got these militias up there and everything. So, and then this the scam centers came about because they had this big online gambling move in Southeast Asia. So all the Chinese wanted to go online gambling. Well, they shut all those down. They shut down online gambling. Well, there's the infrastructure of all these computers and everything, but now there's no no use because we can't gamble. So they transitioned that into these scam centers where they which, like you say, is very it's kind of brutal. They basically kidnap people and then torture them. And here's the kicker. Maybe it is just my life. But a couple of those scam centers they've closed down were about three blocks away from where I live in Cambodia. You would never know it, but they were all over the place in the city. That was all known by the people in power. They were making huge amounts of money. The main guy was in Cambodia, supposedly not a Chinese citizen, but they he was because they took him away as if he was a Chinese citizen. You go went back 50 years, the golden triangle was always the point, and a lot of that ties in with the Vietnam War. So you had these people in Burma and Laos with the poppies, and they needed, and the marketplace was the American GI that funnel all of that business. That was the business base that started all of the drugs, was the Vietnam War. And once that went away, then they found other marketplaces. If you look at that movie Air America, you'll see that Air America was flying all through that stuff. Lots of heroin and cocaine. It kind of disrupted a lot of that, but I'm sure it's still going on a lot.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

So now you have a lot of Chinese, most of these compounds, scam compounds, are run by Chinese or influenced by Chinese mafia or what you would call it.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Yeah, that's right. The Chinese are front and center on all of this stuff. Whether it's Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, uh, Laos, it's all Chinese gangsters.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Yeah, I wanted to ask you, along with that, because I know a lot of you scammers dealing cryptocurrency. I know you have a lot of education and finance, a lot of knowledge. What about cryptocurrency? Uh uh my son tells me it's used mostly for illegal operations.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Yeah, it's own a crypto coin. You basically own some computer code somewhere. So the only way they mine this stuff is an algorithm that says that you can only produce so much of this. So it's kind of like gold. It's very rare. So the crypto means you just can't inflate it. There's a natural end to the crypto. They haven't got there yet, but it takes the the beginning of the algorithm. You can do it, you know, you can get these codes maybe in six months or a year. But then as it goes on, it takes more and more time, more and more compute power to get the next coin. Because you have to go through this whole elaborate algorithm and produce one Bitcoin. Well, produce the next Bitcoin, you got to not only start back at the beginning, but you've got more algorithms to go through to get the next Bitcoin. And then there's a finite number of bitcoins that you can actually produce based on the algorithm. So that's part of the crypto. And I don't know if you've read a part, but they have and they have ways to assign value to a crypto coin. So this guy in Cambodia, who was front and center, he it's uh, if you want to look it up, just uh Google Prince Group, and this guy named was Chin Z, and this all happened the last six months, so this is hot off the press. The Prince Group was basically ground zero for collecting all these bitcoins that these scam centers would uh they would get the money and then they would convert them into Bitcoin. So there's people that do that. This guy had accumulated 15 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, and the US found out about it probably two or three years ago, but they were very quiet about it until the day in October of last year when they said, okay, it's the time to move. These guys may be onto us and they'll disable all of this crypto stuff. So the US decided to move, and then probably once they got everything set up, they probably uh emptied the $15 billion worth of crypto coin in less than one second. It all disappeared. And and the Chinese guys probably watched it go on their screen. I mean, it's one of those events where we got 15 billion. Whoops, wait a minute, what happened? These what's happening? And they could just see it all disappeared. The U.S. ended up with $15 billion worth of crypto. I think the British ended up with $2 billion of crypto, and then there's a whole bunch of uh real estate investments and stuff that the US and the British have uh confiscated. But this guy, he was front and center. There, they built a whole compound and a whole group of uh nests of high-rise buildings about a mile away from where I live. I my my townhouse is on a dead-end street in the diplomatic zone in Phnom Penh. So it's a very interesting area to live in because of all this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

The crypto was stolen or taken by Americans who were Yep.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

They got all the codes. So they got the crypto.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Yeah, would this be contract contract workers who were able to do this, or would this be uh military intelligence or the or the US government?

SPEAKER_01 9:23

It's probably a combination. I I'm sure the military, you know, FBI and CIA, they have their own cyber guys. So and they they'll also contract out uh certain technical jobs. And so that group of people were the ones that stole it all, if you will. They didn't steal it, it was nobody's to begin with. To get those codes, there was one guy, it was done in Bangkok, Thailand, the guy that basically blew the whistle on them. He knew all the codes. He was very, very close to this guy, Chen Z. And uh he, I think he got a his conscience got to him, you know, because they were just brutalizing these people. Hundred, this they they don't even know how many of them, but probably a hundred thousand, hundred and fifty thousand, basically slaves in these buildings, looking at these computer screens, you know, never able to get out or anything. I'll uh bring a picture of one of them that's about two blocks from my house. So I mean it's right, it's not like you're going to the ghetto or something. These scam centers are right in the middle of affluent areas.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Evidently, there's people getting scammed every second of the day to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Yeah, they've taken that model, which which was perfected in Southeast Asia, and now they've taken it to Central America and South America and places like that. You know, it's all electronic. Uh so tell you the truth, it's really hurt old school drug trade because nobody wants to raise poppies anymore, don't want to raise cocoa, coca plants, because you got to raise the plants, you got to process them and uh get the chemicals and all of that stuff. Then you got to transport them and sneak them in. This way you electronically you just scoop it up. And this guy had $15 billion worth of it. Well, that's more than uh a cartel, that that's 10 years worth of cartel money right there. They got it probably in less than five. I'm sure there's somebody writing the book about this guy, Chinese, and and Cambodia was is ground zero for the whole thing. And I'm sure it'll come out in the next year or two. Somebody's writing the story, and most of it will happen within a mile of my home, actually. I didn't know what was going on, but uh it was. There was a war, there's been a border war in Cambodia, Cambodian Thailand, and the Thai guys bombed one of the uh casinos, border casinos in Cambodia. Well, out comes all these workers. Well, what I was shocked at this only happened maybe in January. All the workers were not from Thailand or or Cambodia or Philippines or they were all from uh India and Pakistan. I said, Where in the world did they get? We're starting to scam those people now. There were probably 300 of them. They were all Pakistani or Indians. And I said, Well, my God, I thought we'd do in Southeast Asia. Now we're all the way over there.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Luring people and on the promise of a good job, I think is what they do. Yeah, and they get get there, you're gonna you're gonna be an IT person over so many people and come, you know, we'll pay you away. And then when they get there, slam and they bring you in, you can't get out.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

And they do it immediately. Uh so many stories that a guy will talk about. They, you know, the scammers would meet the target at the airport. It's a young guy, 25, very smart in IT and everything. He thinks he's gonna get this nice job and everything. He's they said they lead him to the car, he gets in the back, they immediately lock the doors, take his passport, and then that's it, man. They they treat him like garbage right after that. They take him straight to the compound, throw him in there, get on the internet, and you start scamming people. The only uh drama is the beginning. Okay, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. But as soon as you they could you pick you up at the airport, they slam the door on you right there. It goes from really happy times to you're just a prisoner uh and a slave.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

I guess uh Ed, what our listeners need to know is these scams are very elaborate. They uh really take you down a rabbit hole, and sometimes it takes months before they finally grab you. But they're their goal is uh eventually they're gonna ask you for well, can you can you help me I I need this money for this or that or whatever? That's eventually what's gonna happen. So I would say to our listeners, uh you got to be so careful when you start falling into any of this kind of stuff, you need to be aware, put a big aware sign on you because these folks are smart, they're elaborate schemes, and as you said, they got smart people doing them, and these people are at the risk of their own life if they don't do it right.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's right. And and you're right, they have very elaborate scripts, and the idea is that they will some of these, some of these cases, if you will, these targets, they will be being working these people for four or five weeks, you know, just trying to manipulate them and make them feel good about this, that, and the other. And then when they get an opportunity, a lot of it maybe well, there's a great investment opportunity or something, there'll be a point in time where they could uh get an opening where they can raid somebody's bank account. And then um that's what they call pig butchering. Basically, when they get to that point where where they they basically catch you, string you up and bleed you to death, and it'll happen very quickly. The scammers will acting like friends, and then all of a sudden they just disappear.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Oh yeah. Um they're gone. So yeah, you send the money, now they're gone, disappear. You can't yeah, where's my sweetheart? Where's my lovely lady there that the and she's gone? She she got your money and she's left.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

That's right. It happens just, you know, over just as soon as that button is clicked and the money's gone, they don't you don't exist anymore to them, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Couple more quick questions on on that, and then we're gonna be closing up because I want to talk about your your novels and your fiction. But what do you think the future of cryptocurrency in the world? What's your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Well, I think what the U.S. did to the Prince Group is a perfect example. The cryptocurrency really cannot be trusted. That nobody has ever made any sense out of it from the get-go. All you're buying is an algorithm and that's it. That's only worth as much as you can get somebody to pay for it. It's really a scam in itself. Because what they wanted to do, that particularly the big international criminal people, they wanted to get away from country currency where somebody is controlling that currency and they're not controlling it. If they can control the crypto, then they control their universe. But if you got a deal in American dollars or Chinese money or something, then you're really not ultimately in control. And so they just wanted to move that next level up of control and have their own international currency. It's very, very shallow, though. It's like I say, they got $15 billion at the stroke of a butt, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Oh man, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

And and that's that's the downside. And there's no there's no recourse, there's nobody guaranteeing that money. There's no FDIC or anything.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Uh no, you at the bank of crypto, you at the bank of being all alone if it something happens.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That's right. You're you're dancing on the on the uh on the edge of a knife with crypto. It'll be the it may be in there tomorrow or the next day, and it could be gone in the next two seconds.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

I want to get your take right quick here before we go into the great novels that you've written. Um about the global economy. Uh I know you know the U.S. is in a battle with China. How do you think this is going to play out? It appears we may be losing the race.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

This is something I've been talking about six or seven years to people that I know, you know. And I we get into China and how strong they are in the U.S. and how all of that. And I said, Well, you know, uh Chinese are going bankrupt. I said they don't have any money. All the things that you look at are all smoke screens. You have to understand about China that all of their financial information is a state secret. So what their debts are, nobody knows. We might have an idea of how much their assets are, but nobody knows their debts. And that and you don't know anything about China. They are fundamentally bankrupt three times over because nobody gets to see the balance sheets. We all assume that they're very powerful. And and a lot of it is the Western press. They're building, they're building these aircraft carriers now. Well, they built three of them, and in every I don't know how many articles I said. Well, they're building three, they're building them so fast. Are we are I think we're at risk. China's gonna win. China doesn't know how to operate an aircraft carrier. They built them, they're not even well designed. What they are is massive ball of metal. They're just models. They really don't function as a military weapon system because it's so, so incredibly complicated to run an aircraft carrier, plus, it's also incredibly expensive. Neither one, China doesn't have the money nor the expertise to fly to deal with an aircraft carrier. Now, if we want to go back to it, the the essence of the Chinese economy are two things rebar and concrete. They just want to produce more of it every year, whether they need to or not. It pretty much is the, and I I was gonna write a short article on this, it's pretty much a landfill economy. They will produce, they will never stop producing. They don't care what the market needs, they will just keep producing. Because the Communist Party mentality is we need to produce more next year than we did this year. Well, nobody used it this year. We no I need no, you produce more. And the Communist Party is so strong that they basically force people to keep producing. Uh they produce I don't know, 50% more steel than they need, uh, or the world needs. They produce 50% more concrete than the world needs. They just keep producing it though. That 30% of the garments that are produced in Chinese factories go straight to the landfill. There's no market for them. They produce them and then they send them straight to the landfill and then they start building them all over again. And they they did this years ago, uh and the Chinese are fixated on steel. They would produce the steel and then it's very poor quality. So at the end of the production cycle, they would probably scrap 30% of their production and send it around to the front of the factory again to redo it because it was such such poor quality. But they kept the numbers going up. Okay, we produced a million tons last year. We're going to produce two million tons. Nobody talks about the need for that or the quality. And the quality is is really pretty terrible. Most everything is just produce, produce, produce. What for? Uh, we don't really know. We're communists, we just want to produce. We don't have our whole system has just become bankrupt.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

With the chips now being the high-level ships now being freed up over there with their AI. Is that a potential issue that they uh can lead the world in technology?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Well, they can, but they'll just overproduce that too. Like you've probably seen some articles about the the humanoids, there's robots that they produce.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

They'll just keep producing those. And they'll nobody'll have use for all those. They'll just send them all to the landfill. They don't have any sense of market demand and meeting that. We don't need the steel mills that they have. We don't need um virtually everything that they have, we don't really need.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

They produce it, and and there's a is that because of the controlled, controlled economy by the communist government there? The yeah, they control it, and that's they have a certain target where they need it or not. That sounds like a bet on a false uh economy to me.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Oh, it is, it's all smoke and mirrors. And the only people you need to make happy are the uh the head guys at the Chinese Communist Party, which are all politicians. They're not brilliant scientists, they're not brilliant anything, they're just a bunch of guys shuffling papers. Rocket forces about five years ago. Z came through, the head the head guy in China came through and fired all the Rocket Force generals. There's like 10 or 11 of them, just wiped them all out. And why would he do that? Well, I guess there was some kind of an issue or whatever, and they were all corrupt. Well, as it turns out, that story is that yes, one of the communist head guys happened to be doing a tour of the missile silos, talking to a young captain, and said, Well, it must be kind of uh bad to sleep right next to so much of this rocket fuel every night, you know, in this hole. And the captain just kind of laughed and said, Well, no, it's fine. He says it's all water anyway. And so what the rocket generals had done is taken all of the missile fuel and sold it on the on the black market and put water in the missiles. So they found out about that and fired all the general. Well, he just fired them again. So whoever he put in charge in to correct the corruption problem, they must have found something else to do that was corrupt. Because there's just that over and over and over again with the with the Chinese. They just never be world class because there's so much corruption. And they they fudge everything. I've said this for 20 years. The three pillows of the Chinese communist economy lying, cheating, and stealing. Oh my gosh, once that goes away, you got nothing.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

It sounds like they fooled a lot of the world, Africa, South America. A lot of people want to do business with China now.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Well, they brought all the money and they gave it to them, but every uh like they built fast high-speed rails. Okay, China has 40 high-speed rail systems. We have zero. Yet we're the top economy in the world. That should tell you something right there. But here's the thing. If you get into the books, which you're not allowed to see, but we know we know enough about it, this is probably the best thing the CIA is doing is doing the economic thing. Of those 40 fast train routes, 40 of them lose money every day, every week, every year, and we'll do that until eternity. It's just a huge sinkhole of money. And the same thing with the apartment complexes. They have built 50, right? 50 what they call ghost cities. If you look at the skyline, you'll see maybe 80 to 100 or 200 high-rises, all 50 stories up, and there won't be a solar round. Why would they do that? Well, because you need rebar and you need concrete. And what they'll do is they'll be a 50-story building with all the rebar and all the concrete and then walk away. They won't spend any money on elevators or finishing or door handles or anything. They have done this in Cambodia. They built about 2,000 high-rises in this capital city, and about 10% of them are actually being used. The others are just ghosts. They're sitting there. I can see if I look south from my place, I can see three that they just put up less than two years ago. And then there are three more north of me they just put up the last three years, and there's nothing there. They quit, they walk away as soon as the concrete and rebar, they don't need more concrete and rebar, then they walk away because it's it doesn't help their numbers. And for those to build those buildings, 100% Chinese workers, 100% Chinese contracts, 100% so nobody has any visibility into what it's costing them or what they're gonna use it for. That's we'll build you a 50-story building, but you don't ask any questions. I'm bringing my own workers in here and I'm bringing everything that's gonna come from China, all the material, rebar, concrete, doorknobs, whatever, it's coming from China. All the workers are coming from China. And then they go away though. None of it works. They've built three high-speed rail systems, not high-speed, but three railroad systems in Africa. One is in Kenya, one is in Ethiopia, and one is in Guinea. And each time, about 18 months into the program, when they're trying to actually operate these as a going railroad, particularly like in Ethiopia. And then 18 months later, it's all bankrupt. They can't make enough money on the business to even service the debt that the Chinese lent them the money for. Okay. A very elaborate train system in Laos. 18 months after they built it, the business doesn't support that kind of very expensive. They charge them, I don't know, 1.3 billion dollars in Laos. Laos average uh income is probably a thousand dollars a year.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

There's no market, no market for what they're building then.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

No, that the people don't have the ability to pay for any of that stuff. That should tell you something. They got 40 high-speed rail systems in China. We have zero because they have been trying to do a high-speed rail system from Las Vegas, Los Angeles for like 25 years. They still can't make the numbers work, so they don't get any money. The politicians keep dreaming of it and dreaming of it and dreaming of it. We need a high rail, high-speed rail. But in America, what makes America the number one country in the world is something you would find kind of interesting. It's cost accounting, it's the finance side of it. You have to have a balance sheet, it has to be uh audited by uh professionals so there's no smoke and mirrors. That's the one thing America has that the Chinese have no idea what to do. They wouldn't know anything about running a uh proper accounting system. They'd be budgeted and cheating from day one.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Until America, if the ledger sheep shows you're gonna be in a deficit, you don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

That's right. So in the private economy, thank God for the CPAs and for the cost accounting system in America. The cost accounting system in America is and in Europe also is is true. Not allowed to fudge to go to jail in our society, but not in China. You know, you you better be fudging them or you're gonna go to jail. So they don't really know at the end of the day, the Chinese don't know how much it's costing them to produce something. They just know what they can sell it for to the West. So all these electric cars that they're building, they're selling for $35,000 per se. Well, it may be costing them fifty thousand dollars to build that. If they know it, they they're not allowed to say anything about it. And the Chinese government is not gonna say anything. So last year the Chinese economy had it was a trillion dollar uh surplus. Their trade balance was a trillion dollars. But you don't know how much it cost them to get that trillion. And I'm thinking it's gonna cost it probably cost the Chinese economy two trillion dollars to produce the one trillion dollars that they got on the open market.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

All right. Well, it so it appears that um maybe we're not in a neck and neck uh race. America still, even though uh we've got some problems, what would be your greatest concern about the U.S. economy if you have any?

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Well, it's back to what we just got talking about, the the cost of counting. We have very, very good cost accounting, and we have 38 and a half trillion dollars in debt. So those numbers don't lie, and that's number one problem, has been for 40 of my the last 40 years in this country is the debt, debt, debt, debt. Not only the consumers, but the government. So we're just have debt. And the Chinese have more debt than us, maybe four times as much. They're so bankrupt that uh it's painful, but you'll never know it. But they don't have nobody knows it. The Chinese communists don't even know what their their status is because they don't allow anybody to deal with the reality of the books. Western banks are smart, you know, and they've worked here, they get some backdoor information and all. They're basically saying that the Chinese debt is about $400 trillion. No, I'm sorry, $40 trillion, and ours is 38. Thing is, the Chinese economy is only about half as big as the U.S., so they're just toast.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Will we uh ever have the political will to try to do anything about the debt here?

SPEAKER_01 29:17

One thing about this is that the numbers don't lie. So if we have to keep paying the interest on the debt, the politics will take care of itself. And this has been something most people know for the in the finance area for the last 20 years. We're gonna get down to where we have interest on the national debt, we have the Defense Department, and we have Medicare and Medicaid. Those are gonna be the only three-line items in the United States budget, is those three line items. Forget education, forget all this other stuff. And we're at that point now. The interest on the national debt is the number one budget item in the U.S. It is higher than the Defense Department. They're going at about $1.2 trillion in interest on the national debt, and the Defense Department's going at about a trillion.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

So that can't sustain itself at some point.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

The cost of county is going to take care of that debt issue. That means that you're either going to have to stop spending money on pretty much everything except defense, just to feed the national debt, the interest on the national debt. And it's it's come very quickly. I think about five years ago that the interest on the national debt was about say 700 billion. Well, now it's at 1.2 trillion. So it's almost doubled in five or six years. It's it's at the point, it's the math of it also. It's become exponential, you know.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

Um, I don't know if any politician is gonna be able to explain that to the constituents when they say, Well, you know, we're out of money. Uh, I'm sorry, your pet project's gonna have to go by the wayside. That's gonna be a hard sell.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

It is, and I I don't know, it's the stark reality of it all. And I was telling this years ago, back probably George Bush and Obama. I said, there's gonna be a point in time where nobody would want to be the president because all he's gonna sit there and figure out what little money he has, where is he gonna spend it, the rest of it he just sit down and say, Well, what's the next check we had to write for the debt? There's not gonna be any any room to make any other decisions.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

We're going on here. I I could talk about this, uh, but I think we've got the gist of it. So I want to go back into your your fiction writing a little bit. Let's change gears completely here. And how did you get into uh the art of uh writing fiction?

SPEAKER_01 31:32

Well, uh uh pure serendipity. People had asked me about writing the book. I said, Well, no, I don't I don't really want to do that. And then a couple of guys tried to do it for me, and that was my spur. That that was early on, probably 2004 or five, three, four, or five, somewhere in there, there was some serious attempts to try to write the book. And I said, Well, if it turns out, you know, it didn't take much long for me. I said, Well, if we're gonna do this, they're not gonna be able to write it. I'll have to sit by them and tell them what to write, so I might as well write it myself. And then a couple of years passed, and then one night I said, Well, you know, let's just see what happens. So I started writing the books in 2010, and then this is in one and another part of my life, I have no idea what happened. I wrote 001 continuously, never stopped, never had a book outline, wrote it all in long hand because I can't type. It just flowed. It was the easiest thing I've ever done is writing 001. And I had no idea what what's gonna come next, or I would keep track of what has to be woven into the story, but I didn't have any outline about how I wanted to start and how I wanted to end, which made it for me uh the adventure of it. Uh the lady in Q West did my books. I finished uh the last one in 2023. She'd do my books and she'd say, Well, this is really interesting. She said, I can't wait to see how it ends. And I said, Well, I'm kind of like you. I can't wait to see how it ends either. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Are you planning to uh are you writing another book right now?

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Or no, I started in 2010, but the first one was uh published in 2012. At the end of the day, uh 11 books in 11 years. I haven't written anything since then.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Eleven novels out right now.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

Yeah, you know, I was influenced by James Bond movies. All the openings of the books uh start like a James Bond movie. You don't have to wait to develop any characters, they just throw it at you, you know.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Yeah, I love that. It's uh it reminded me of Ian Fleming. Uh like I said, right immediately you're thrown into the uh into the deal, and uh you get captured. I did. I got captured by, hey, what's what's gonna happen to this guy? This is a strange guy, man. I tell you. He lying in the desert, and I'm not gonna give away the the book, but how can people get uh a hold of your novels, which are read some Ian Fleming type James Bond novels? Uh go and find these uh books and get them. How do you get uh hold of your novels?

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Well, tell you the truth, uh Mike, and I didn't know how who did it or how it was done, but one day I Googled my author's name, it's on the book, William E. Coss. If you just Google that, most of the covers will come up immediately. You don't have to do anything else and just put William E. Cos, and then I guess that's the only thing the system knows is that all these covers come up, which is another story. Those are all hand-drawn covers. And the man that did that is an incredible artist in Chiang Mai, Thailand. And once I found out how good he was, then I would come up with these montages and say, Could you draw this? Can you draw that? And it's all hand-drawn, every charcoal pencil, everything's hand-drawn. And so that was another facet of the books that I loved. I said, Well, I'm gonna keep writing these books just to see what kind of cover I can put on it. I'd give this stuff to him and he'd come back with his artwork, and it was just phenomenal. So all of those hand-drawn your originals, I have the originals actually in my house here. I framed them and everything.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Pretty interesting covers, I must say. So I'm just gonna whet people's appetite. Go look at those covers, and then you want to see uh what's inside the book.

SPEAKER_01 35:03

I swear, Mike, I probably wrote six novels just because I knew I would come up with six more covers. Designing the covers just got to be a wonderful thing. The other little side note, because I was a lifelong bachelor, I personally knew all 22 girls that are on the covers. There's 11 books, two covers, front and back, and I knew all of those girls uh as friends. I'll call them friends. And some of them are from Russia, some from Thailand, some from Colombia, wherever. They were part of the story, if you will. The one on the 001, the front cover was a girl from Russia. Tell you the truth, Mark, and I've done it. I've done it in the last six months. I'll pick up one of my own books and start reading it, and I'll be, I swear, 90% of it. I don't I don't remember.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Yeah, who wrote the it's sort of like your whole career. Who am I? Who am I? And what am I doing here?

SPEAKER_01 35:51

And not once do I remember what how the plot goes. It's all over the place. And I said, Well, I don't remember any of this stuff. And I wrote them. All the manuscripts are here in Melbourne Beach, and they're all handwritten.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Yeah, that's a labor of love, uh, handwriting all all of that. But I must say, uh, for the readers out there, man, you take people on a journey. I mean, I've already been to uh in just I haven't read the whole book, about half the book. I've been on 40 countries already, all kind of missions.

SPEAKER_01 36:19

Got to be where I would got so involved that I would I said, well, I I have a map and I have a list of the of the places that the book takes you to. I don't know if they'd have that in the Kindle version, maybe not.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

It just takes me back to the Ian Fleming days. I loved Ian Fleming. Man, I got the Doctor No, I got Thunderball. I read all of those books, and of course my mom looked at the cover one time and said, What are you reading? I was about 15 years old. Yeah, yeah. So that's just James Bond, Ma. Well, is there any particular message or theme there that that you're trying to trying to bring forward in your stories? I don't think there is uh a theme or a message, but in your mind, is there a particular theme or message that you're trying to bring out?

SPEAKER_01 37:01

No, not really. People say, well, I would that sound like a great life to live. And I say, Well, it is you have to be a certain person. And I said, and we've talked about that. Always alone, never lonely, it's the core of it. Cannot be worried about the rest of the world or anything. You just got to go do these missions. And actually, thank God for me, there was a military because otherwise I don't know what I would have done. This that's what I've told people. This is probably the only thing I could have done. I couldn't do the sheriff's department job in Lincoln Parish. I couldn't, I couldn't be a lawyer, and I couldn't do any of that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Well, uh there's a lot of sheriffs there's only 10 of you around the world, so that's pretty neat. Let me finish off here. I know we've been talking two hours. I've enjoyed every second of it. You know, you've visited just about every corner of the world. What place uh still feels more like home?

SPEAKER_01 37:51

As it turns out, and it's gone on for so long, uh, Mike, there's a list of ten places that are all home. You know, when I'm in Cambodia, I feel at home. When I'm here at Melbourne Beach, I feel at home. I'm Key West, I feel like everywhere that I have a place, I feel at home. And then what's disturbing is a lot of times I'm not I don't even belong in other places, and I still feel at home. It's another part of living this life. You're gonna get homesick, then you're not going, you know, even a little bit, you're not gonna do it. But I've done it so long, it's been part of my personality so long. I was doing the contract work for 27 years, military contract. So I'm basically doing what I was doing in the military, except I'm just doing it on contract. In those 27 years, there was not any time that I stayed in one place more than three weeks. And that would be either, you know, one of my places, you know, like in Cambodia or South Africa or something. Otherwise, I'm on the move. And when I was in the military, well, it's 24 years, I was never in any one place more than six weeks. So you're looking at 51 years where you're never in any place more than uh six weeks, but even that would be a long time. Three weeks would be about the limit. Uh a lot of times in in my contract work, when I'm lucky enough to stay in some five-star hotel somewhere, I feel like it. You know, I show up at the airport, somebody picks me up, takes me to this beautiful hotel, then I go out and walk way through the mud somewhere in some village, and then do the do the mission and then come back and go home, you know. And then meanwhile, you meet a couple of good-looking girls. So yeah, I approximated the James Bond.

SPEAKER_00 39:27

Yeah, you were you were a heck of a lot closer than most of us will ever come. That's why uh my promo for this whole podcast is uh meet the real James Bond. We're gonna be talking with him. I guess I got one more question that, you know, you look back on all this remarkable uh job that you had, career, you know, right here from little old bitty North Louisiana and to your global intelligence work. What are you most grateful for right now?

SPEAKER_01 39:53

You know, I have to be eternally grateful for just what the serendipity was when I went into service. It just sit perfectly, you know. I mean, that that's a miracle that no one should be able to live. And I did. But you know, looking back now, Mike, it's actually back to Rustin. How can I have been gone for almost 60 years now, and I can come back to Rustin and I'll chat with you and George, and then we had the whole group of us at the flying burger the other day, is you know, Jimmy and Reg and Jimmy Martin's a perfect example. I ran across Jimmy Martin one or two days before we had that bigger luncheon. And Jackson was saying, Well, you know who that is? I said, No, I don't. Yeah, that's Jimmy Martin. When Jimmy Martin and I started talking, it was like we were out at Fraser Field in 1963.

SPEAKER_00 40:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

And I and when I got when I all that ended, I said, I cannot believe I haven't seen Jimmy Martin in 61 years, and yet it's like I only saw him last week. And so all those people, you and all of your friends, JB and Jimmy, and even Ernie, I never knew Ernie in high school, but the fact we all went to Ruston High School, you kind of feel that way. And uh who was oh uh Donnie Brown. Yes, did not really see any of Donnie Brown between 1957 and 2016. But when we talked in 2016, it's like we've been hanging out fishing for the last 10 years, you know.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

I think to put a bow on it, you would say this place right here sort of keep kept you grounded and still keeps you grounded.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's nothing nothing like a visit to Rust and tell you the truth, I have probably the biggest dilemma, not not dilemma, but the the biggest mystery is how it all hung together for so many years. How do I know all these guys and how do we all still fit together after so so so many years? Not 30 or 20 or 30 years, but 60 years, you know?

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Well, that's the power of uh memory and the power of good memories when you have people.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Your mom and dad were absolutely the best people ever walked the earth.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

I'm gonna have to second that, and I'm gonna have to put your dad, he was the best little league coach. He may have been the best coach I ever had because he was so patient with all of us and never allowed, never, you know, let me teach you, let me teach you. And he actually taught us, of course, you know, I grew up with the baseball in my hands. So uh I he didn't have well, but he did, he taught us uh the game of baseball, and he also knew we were youngsters and have fun. That was the main thing. Have fun.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Well, I didn't know this until just a couple of years ago, but Reg was we were having lunch with Reg Cassabri, and and he said, you know, uh he says, I have to of all the coaches, he says, I there's only one that I want to thank, and that's your dad. I said, What? He says, Yeah, your dad would come to me on the sidelines or somewhere, and he would talk to me about pitching. And I said, I never knew you did that one time. He says, Oh yeah, he would come all the time. And he says, he's the only pitching coach I've ever had. And I didn't even know he even talked to Reg at all, but he would do that. He loved to help people out, he loved to teach, you know.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

You know what George's biggest memory, brother George, who played professional ball, his biggest memory is going over to your house, I believe, and your dad had the baseball with a string.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

And uh swing it. So the string was probably 30 feet, you know, uh long rope. Yeah, swinging it around and uh and let you hit it. And George said, Man, Tess could hit that ball. I could never hit that ball. It was coming around like it was coming around.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

My dad invented that because he didn't want to pitch batting practices and go pick up the balls. And so he he drilled a hole into baseball. And it was, it was the most ingenious thing. I uh used that from probably until I finished baseball at tech. I we were still doing that. And so you I said, Dad, can you swing the ball? That's what I would tell you. Would you go swing the ball for me? And he'd always never once did he say, I'm sorry, I'm busy. He would always do it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

Yeah, that's a dead, and that's the kind of dead we had. Never was too busy when he was off. Can you hit me some ground balls? Can you throw to me or whatever? It was always there.

SPEAKER_01 44:06

And we lived uh we lived the the ultimate life uh back in those days. We really did.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

Uh no doubt.

SPEAKER_01 44:13

That's the most endearing thing to me, but it's also the most incredible thing. I think back of how many years has passed, and yet that feeling is still there amongst all the guys.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

You go out to the beach somewhere and enjoy the beach. Is that what you like to do?

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Well, I do some. Uh mostly when I'm here, I'll uh I would work on my cars and then uh I kind of do whatever I want to do uh since I retired. Where I am here on the third floor is where I write. The other the other story, which is almost the book itself, is all what I call writing quarters. I've written those books in so many different places all over the world. But yeah, I but I'll only be here for a couple of weeks, hope to come to Ruston, and then I gotta go to Las Vegas and Manhattan Beach, California, go down to Key West. And so I stay, I kind of stay on the move even when I'm in the U.S.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

And I guess one last thing. Uh your your wife now, she's she's in Cambodia.

SPEAKER_01 45:04

Yeah, she's in Cambodia. She's um, and this is another thing that uh will stress out the normal American people, but she's 43 years younger than I am, and my it was her idea to get married. I said, I'm I'm not supposed to be married. Uh she she had met me, and for some reason she decided that I was the man she was supposed to marry. She's Buddhist, so they believe very heavily in fate. That it's it's my fate that I met this man. And um, and I told her, I said, Well, I'm I'm not meant to be married. And she said, Well, if you weren't meant to be married, then I'm not meant to be married. And and she's never had a date in her life.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

That was her destiny, you know, as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

Well, it was. I said, How do you know that? I said, You're such a young girl that you can marry somebody and have a family. She says, No. She said, I'm only to only meant to know one man. And I said, Well, okay. Point where I said, Okay, if that's the way she feels about it, I'll marry her. Yeah, but she did say that. She says, uh, maybe you were you were just waiting for me to be born. That's the only thing that makes me comfortable with the marriage, is that if I had tr actually pursued her, we never had a date. We just walked along the river a couple or three times, and and I said, Well, okay, if you're not gonna marry anybody else, I'm gonna marry you. And uh, I'm coming back to Cambodia in three or four months, and these are the two dates I'm available to get married.

SPEAKER_00 46:23

It's not exactly your typical southern wedding.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

No, no, no. It was oh my god, so it's so foreign and exotic you wouldn't believe. I don't really know where all this stuff came from. It just came out of my pen.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Well, do you I don't think you know where a lot of the from the time you were four years old, you didn't want a birthday party. So I don't know where all this is coming from.

SPEAKER_01 46:44

No, my wife and my my my mother was right. She where did he come from? Yeah, what is it?

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Must have came from a uh crypto or another planet or something, uh you know.

SPEAKER_01 46:54

Yeah, and she all the way I was in my 40s, and she's still asking my dad, where do you come from? Not only where did he come from, but what's what do you think's wrong with him?

SPEAKER_00 47:03

Well, your dad, your dad do he he he knew everything was gonna work out just right.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Well, he was definitely the the the guy in my corner because there were a lot of my relatives and all were also upset with me because I wasn't following the path and all that.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:18

My dad would stop him and he was my uh he was my buffer. The best guy you could ever have.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

Oh man, yeah, no, no doubt. I fond memories.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

I I don't know why to explain it, but the the the time that I had in Rustin and since then, and when I come back, it's uh uh it's just amazing. Yeah, and I'll I'll keep you posted. I'm not sure when I'm getting to Rustin, but it hopefully it'll happen.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

All right, yeah, we'll we'll certainly get together. Uh enjoyed the heck out of it.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

Okay, thanks again, Mike.

SPEAKER_02 47:46

You've been listening to Mike's conversation with Ed Coss. Be sure to visit Mike's Facebook page for more details about this podcast, including replay dates and time so you can catch the program again or share it with a friend. From Mike and the entire crew here at the show, we really appreciate your support and for joining us today. Until next time, this is Mark saying, keep the music and the conversation going.