Ask Dr. Drew - General Anthony Tata on MK-Ultra, Russia & Threats Of Nuclear War – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 80

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata (U.S. Army, retired) is a cross functional leader involved in an array of successful business ventures from advancing cold supply chain to democratizing medical technology. Previously, he performed the duties of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the #3 position in the United States Department of Defense. General Tata's is also a bestselling author under the name A.J. Tata. His 14th novel "Chasing The Lion" explores topics involving the CIA, MK Ultra, and military experiments on mind control. Follow General Tata at https://twitter.com/ajtata  Read A.J. Tata's book "Chasing The Lion" at https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lion-J-Tata/dp/1250270480  Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). SPONSORS • REFRAME – Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol. Use the code DRDREW for 25% off your first month or annual subscription at https://drdrew.com/reframe • BLUE MICS – After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew’s iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don’t need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue’s lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew’s Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue  • HYDRALYTE – “In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market.” Dr. Drew recommends Hydralyte’s easy-to-use packets of fast-absorbing electrolytes. Learn more about Hydralyte and use DRDREW25 at checkout for a special discount at https://drdrew.com/hydralyte  • ELGATO – Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato’s Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew’s streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato’s lights transformed Dr. Drew’s set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/  THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Thank you for being here. We'll look at you on Clubhouse where we will take calls as well as your questions on Restream should you have any. Today my guest is Brigadier General Tata. Hang on, I will get you, I had to jump out of my screen here before I, there we go, so I can tell you all about the General. He's a geopolitical expert who held the number three position of the Department of Defense. That's right. He, again, is a retired brigadier general, a cross-functional leader involved in an array of businesses with things like advancing cold supply chain to democratizing medical technology. His previous duties included undersecretary of defense for policy. It's the number three position in the Defense Department.

And he is also a bestselling author. He has a new book, which is called Chasing the Lion. I have right here, which is, and there's the full screen for it. And it's a page turner, I have to tell you. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopaths start this way. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe

things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly one in five Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol. Could be you, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol altogether. Using evidence-based tools, techniques, and content, Reframe guides users through a personalized program to help them reach their goals.

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To learn more, go to joinreframeapp.com slash drdrew. Use the code drdrew for 25% off your first month or your annual subscription. That's at joinreframeapp.com slash drdrew. Let's bring in Brigadier General Tata. General, welcome. Great to be with you, Drew. Thank you. I got to tell you something.

There's a lot going on in that cranium of yours. The book, the amount of information in every paragraph of your book, I was blown away from the moment I started turning the pages. I mean, you do not write a book like this without having had the experience you've had. I'm guessing, you know, it's interesting. You know, I've written fictionalized nonfiction medical books in the past, and I guess I'm pulling upon very explicitly my experience. Are you doing so?

It feels like you had to have been in these kinds of places to write this kind of book. Yeah, absolutely. My writing, that's Chasing the Lines, my 14th novel, and the first in a new series from Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, Garrett Sinclair series. And for all of my novels, I pull upon my, not only my military experience, but my life experience. When you get inside the head of the protagonist, Garrett Sinclair, he's going through a lot of different processes in his life that he's got a character arc through that story. And, you know, he's just lost his wife. He's got a character arc through that story. And, you know, he's just lost his wife. He's he's dealing with personal loss in a big way.

And yet he's still got to function as a leader of troops in combat. And when I was in combat in Afghanistan and other places, I was always amazed at the stories of every individual soldier and what they had to deal with on the home front and then what they had to deal with in their day-to-day job as they worked 24-7 to combat terrorists and secure our liberties. It's really quite a dilemma for the tens, hundreds of thousands of soldiers that we have rotating through combat. And so as I think about that, I could not be more proud to have been associated with the men and women that serve our country. And as I write these stories, it's a way of sort of channeling that pride and integrating the layers of context for each individual character into that. No character is based in my stories is based on any one real life character. It's more of this synthetic process of weaving in lots of different layers of feelings and emotions and ambitions and faults and virtues and so forth.

And it's fun for me. It's a process for me. It's very cathartic for me to complete a novel. I bet. But I am telling you, I don't think I've ever read a book that is packed with this much. And I don't know. there's lots of action obviously but the information that you put in there if you pay attention to what you're describing i gotta tell you that it's really something i i i my i can't have been the first person to point this out right you're aware that that's he will he will talk about weapons and strategies, and his style is such that he'll all of a sudden toss off a policy, go just like we did, and he'll mention a very specific policy in Iraq or Iran. And if you're paying attention, you will learn what these policies are. And in there, he also embeds an opinion in his sort of attitude about them.

But there's, I mean, in a couple of sentences, there's just tons of information. And then, well, let me give you another example. I don't want to divulge too much because it's, like I said, I want people to read this. But you have an opening sequence. You go back and forth in time a little bit. But the one sequence in the cave is really wild. And it felt like you'd been through something like that before. Maybe not in a cave, but in one sequence in the cave is really wild and it felt like you'd been through something like that before maybe not in a cave but in something like that right well there are

a lot of caves in afghanistan and and so uh i i spent 13 months of my life in afghanistan leading troops and i went on a few missions with my troops and i always felt like the good leaders go on missions and uh the the opening scene there that you're referencing uh is um uh one that that sort of this uh more creative uh yeah i've been in caves in afghanistan never in iran of course uh but uh it's it's one where i visualize uh a special mission with a general lead knit and one of the criticisms that i get i got a lot of praise for the for the novel but um as well in general would never be out front like that a general is supposed to be in the office and not on the front lines and and my my comeback to that is well i went on missions with my troops uh how um am i supposed to be uh

has our culture drew off ossified so much that you know generals are in air-conditioned offices and privates and sergeants are out in the muddy trenches is that that's world war one kind of stuff and it has it i i think it has to a certain degree if I'm getting that kind of feedback from some readers. And, you know, there are a lot of good generals out there that are leading from the front. And not that these are good generals, but there's been about 12 Russian generals killed in combat. So, you know, today's battle lines are drawn such that there is no front line. Lines of communication get attacked all the time. That's where you'll find a lot of command and control convoys.

Senior leaders are in these command and control convoys, and they get attacked. And frankly, they're targets. They're high-value targets. So, but, you know, for me, it's fun to have this general leading this small team uh never mind that james bond was older than the general in my book you know but james bond was able to you know fly on jet skis over you know frozen glaciers and still save the girl right so um uh but it's it's uh gotten great reception uh that the novel has and and um you know for me it's a it's a it's a real uh pleasure to write these novels and i every morning i get up and i'll crank out about a thousand words i'm i'm already writing i've turned in book 15. going through

those edits now for macmillan got book 16 um I'm about 10,000 words into that and these books are around 100,000 words uh each one so at least at least please give our general that uh General Tata has created the same latitude that we give Ian Tata Tata I beg your pardon Tata for uh that we give to Ian Fleming for uh Bond at least give him the same latitude that we give to ian fleming for uh bond i'd at least give him the same latitude that we give to ian fleming how about that that's all i'm asking for yeah um but but uh susan to answer your question i i have i can't even tell you how he described some of this stuff but i have explicit images in my head that were sort of surprising and they were so surprising all right let's talk about the cave again since we've already divulged that scene.

He talks about, you know, complex equipment he's using to go into the cave and what he's seeing and what that's like and what that feels like and what it smells like and all this stuff. And then you talk about this cloth that you removed that looked like rock. And I thought, oh, my God, of course they do things like that. And what's behind it is these horrors. And the horrors are described in ways that are extremely accurate. Having seen a lot of dead bodies, I knew you had seen stuff like this. And it was described in a way that was just like, oh, man, this is where I'm in. So I was in very quickly. So there you go.

Well, well done. Well, thank you. Thank you. And I'm glad you're enjoying the book drew and um i'll tell you the the um i i was doing a show i think i mentioned this to you when we talked in miami but um i i mentioned that writing's cathartic for me. And on my very first book, Sudden Threat, I was doing a tour, and I was still active duty at the time. I had already submitted my retirement papers to begin to transition, and the Army had given me permission to have this book come out. And so I was doing a

LA nighttime, you know, Frasier Crane style talk show for an hour. And the host wanted to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder. And so I called the chief of, she was the chief of army nursing and she was now then chief of the army resiliency program, Rhonda cornum she was shot down behind enemy lines and Desert Storm um you know the first attack into Iraq and and uh you know went through some pretty horrible abuses as a pow so if anybody knows anything about uh post-traumatic stress she does and and I said hey Rhonda what what should i talk about with uh

this radio host and and she said tony the first thing you do is don't call it a disorder call it you know there can be growth from post-traumatic stress and just like a bone breaks if your mind breaks uh you can grow from that you heal and grow and it's a process. And so home in caskets and people coming home with missing legs and arms. And the trauma was significant, particularly in the military community. And she said, Tony, you're doing one of the things that we are trying to coach, teach, mentor our soldiers to do, and that is find an outlet. You're writing these books, and I imagine that you find that somewhat helpful for you. You've got that steam valve. What we're seeing with privates and sergeants and lieutenants and captains that

lose their best friend or lose their squad mate or whomever that they're close to, they become brittle and they crack. So for every one casualty, we actually have two because the other one's not functional. So we're trying to help people find an outlet that makes them more resilient. And that's why they called it the resiliency program. Maybe I will talk to her at some point. I would love that. I have found, I've worked with a lot of veterans, and the biggest problem, again,

I like the construct that it's not a disorder because it is adaptive. It's how we survive in these situations, but it leaves an imprint on our autonomic nervous system. But much like a broken limb or something, you need help healing. And this is the same thing with, with PTSD,

post-traumatic stress. You need help. And unfortunately, a lot of people avoid it. They push back from it. That's the biggest challenge in my experience with getting people. Yeah. Because there's so much stigma drew associated with particularly walking into

ward four in the hospital and everybody says okay well that's that's where all the mental health people are that's where all the psychos go and there's a stigma associated with that plus um is this going to hurt my promotion or is it going to you know impact how people view me and the ability to do my job and that's why telehealth that is so important with respect to being able to treat veterans and and others with respect to this post-traumatic stress and being able to do it more privately so people can get the help they need but not risk the you know that have the downside risk of career impact and that kind of thing. I want to pull out a specific quote and use it as a,

what shall we say, a jumping off point. Your lead character, his name escapes me again, of course, is speaking to, Sinclair is talking to his counterpart. I forget where this is. It's in Afghanistan, I think. Perizade. Am I getting that right? And he says, we shall meet again.

Right. But this one quote jumped out at me. It says, we shall meet again. Your government is stupid and arrogant. Men like us will be required to confront each other on the battlefield. It gives me no great pleasure, but we each have our duties. It's a very interesting quote, right? To sort of look at the enemy's point of view, think about them as somebody doing a job. You revealed in that quote what the enemy thinks of us, probably. Tell me more about that. And can we use that insight to help understand the Ukraine-Russia situation in some way? Well, I think it's really interesting that we tend to look at all of the world through an American lens. And it's that old adage, if you see every problem as a,

if all you've got is a hammer, you see every problem as a nail. And it's the same kind of thing where having been all over the world, having been in so many different conflict zones, from Panama to Afghanistan to Kosovo to South Korea, Philippines, all over, everybody's got a unique vantage point. Everybody has wants and needs and hopes and understanding and respecting cultures all around the world are important. And when you have an adversary, you have to understand that adversary, or you should try at least, so that you can better understand what they're trying to achieve, how they might act, how you might be able to convince them. You could play this out on the world stage right now with Putin and Zelensky and others and all the chess moves going on there, but you have to understand how others see you as well because they may make decisions based upon those perceptions. And when you get into military operations, you might have deception operations, you might have other types of information operations that you want to target that enemy and influence them in a certain way. to Sinclair, who's the protagonist. They are commanders of the same kinds of units,

Sinclair in the United States, Perizot in Iran. And Perizot is the Lion of Tabas. And Tabas is the town, I don't know if you remember, but during the Jimmy Carter era, we attempted a military rescue of the hostages that were being held in the embassy in Tehran. And that military operation was a disaster. And, you know, it was called Eagle Claw. And there was a refueling operation going on near the town of Tabas, Iran. A C-130 airplane had flown in there and landed on a dirt road and helicopters had flown off of a aircraft carrier into a refuel at this nameless spot called Desert One. And while they were refueling, sand got kicked up in the air and one helicopter struck another. And inside of the airplane was nothing but giant fuel bladders that were pumping gas for all these helicopters that were coming in to pick up the hostages. And there was a giant explosion. And so I fictionalize part of that and say,

this little kid watched his father get burned in that explosion. And that is Darius Parazon, the Lion of Tabas. The next next day and this is all fiction now previously it was true um all of the non-fiction aspects of desert one are of course real uh and then i fictionalize it and have derish parazite as a little kid watching all this happen and the ayatollah comes out the next day to bury his father and and anoints him as the lion of tabas and that is that is uh the title of the book chasing the lion is is uh uh sinclair has this mission now to stop parizad from doing this horrible thing that you see in the cave in the very first chapter uh that he's gonna then

import to the United States so that's where that comes from incredible I that that whole chapter had a I believe a deep impression left a deep impression on the country and particularly on my generation i remember i was a senior in college and i stepped out to my out of my dorm room that morning and saw an above the fold full page picture of the debris and it was on the boston globe all over you know the desert floor and like oh my god you know what and this was and this was day 180 or something for the hostages. We couldn't get them out. It was just really a – and, you know, inflation was out of control, and Carter was sort of unclear what he was doing, being a nice guy and all, but not at all clear what was going to happen.

Really, it was a really kind of a – people talk trying to compare this present moment with that. I feel like that was a darker period for this country is am i on to anything there or do you disagree with that i i well i think there are parallels for sure rising inflation uh wayward in my view foreign policy world uh spinning out of control a little bit i think there are some parallels um obviously some of that attenuated or exacerbated by technology and big big tech big media etc um and and i remember that image also i was a senior at west point and i was a junior when when that happened and became a senior, obviously the following year. And the it was this black cross against the tan sand of the desert because everything just burned in place and as you call it, in the debris field was

was astonishing and it was a real shock and then the Olympics were that winter. And I'll never forget the U., the U S hockey team, um, uh, yeah, coming in and, and defeating Russia. And, uh, we were, how do we had a TV about the size of the, um, Mac book I'm staring at right now. Yeah. A hundred of us were down in the day room um and because we weren't allowed to have TVs in our barracks room and no I said well man the luxury

couldn't even imagine that the patriotism was just like frothy and and then you know reagan comes in as president the next day the hostages are released 444 days those hostages drew flew into stuart anderson air force base and then were bussed down to west point to spend their first two weeks of reintegration with their family and so as as they came there we were all lined up on the side of the road to receive them. And it was just this unbelievable experience. And after two weeks of them getting reintegrated with their families, they put them on buses. We had to form up as cadets in our formation. And they drove the buses real slowly through our formation.

We were all standing there at, you know, present arms and the Marines and the buses were standing up saluting us back. There wasn't a dry eye in that formation. The pride, the... And so when I think about that shift from Carter to Reagan and just the perception of strength, the perception of doing what you say and saying what you do, there's something to that. And I think as, you know, I don't want to get political on the show unless you want me to, but the the uh where we find ourselves now there's this perception of weakness and and you know after afghanistan and all that went wrong with the withdrawal there uh our our enemies around the world see uh that uh we we we had a really

incompetent execution of that and and we have not properly accounted for it we've just kind of stuck with the narrative and and the big tech big media tailwinds behind a particular party uh make it so they don't really have to account for it because they're not held accountable in the press and so they can just kind of get, go, you know, get along and go along and not have to concern themselves with it. And that's, that's the part that bothers me as a soldier for three decades and public servant and education and state government and transportation and all that, and all that I've given and millions of other people have given to make this country better and what it, what it is today and then to have

that sort of um disrespected through senior government action i i don't uh that's that's discouraging and and it so it does harken back to the 1979 1980 era and but it's sort of reverse we went i think from a projection of strength uh to a projection of weakness and so uh we've got three more years of watching this unfold and we'll see what happens yeah i just keep thinking uh don't you think the ukrainians would have loved all that equipment i think they could maybe half of that equipment i think they would have liked that wouldn't that have been nice for them to have some of that equipment that we paid for, that I bought and you bought? I'll tell you what, Drew. Mark Paslowski

was a company mate of mine. He was the captain of the volleyball team, 1981 West Point, my classmate. He left Wall street in 2014 and uh he was ukrainian and the first party i went to after graduation was uh to uh paz as we called him paz's ukrainian party a mile outside the gate of west point and um i i didn't I didn't make it to the rest of my events for that day because they were pretty crazy. Just wonderful people. And so Mark leaves Wall Street in 2014 and goes over and joins the Ukrainian army as a company commander. he won this was after the maidan riots if if uh you know a little bit of you know the the president at the time had an offer from

the european union to accept a you know roughly 800 million dollars and an entree into the european union putin offered i want to say five, I probably got that number wrong, but it's give or take a billion, and to cheapen the natural gas prices to Russia. And he took that deal instead of the European Union deal. And so the centrrist within Ukraine rioted because the president had uh Lukashenko had had um uh made a deal on toward made a deal with Putin and and so Mark goes over there and fights for Ukraine and was killed by Russian shoulders soldiers and um that's the passion that these people have uh not a day goes by today particularly now that i don't think of as and our friendship and and everything that we you know did for four years at west point living right next to each other and and uh you know we're i have a west

point uh uh text string now and we, and we're constantly referencing Mark. And I post a little bit about social media. But today, everything's so transactional. It's hard to sustain any kind of conversation about anything meaningful because everything is moving so fast in today's world. Yeah. Yeah. People don't, I mean, I have Ukrainian descent. There was a huge diaspora out of Ukraine and Belarus at the turn of the 20th century. So there's a lot of people from that region in this country.

And most people were not aware of that. And there's a weird blurring of ethnicities and lines, you know, nationalist lines and stuff. I was always raised that I was Russian because that's what a lot of Ukrainian and Belarusians sort of called themselves for a long time there. And yet they were very quick to leave when Stalin came around. Very quick. All right. Yeah, well, now that you've declared now that you've declared that uh you you may be russian i expect a black helicopter to come swooping in here during this oh that's that's

after we wrap up after we wrap up i would never dream to do it while we're talking in fact i was thinking of plutonium poisoning that's really where i was going. It's a little easier. It won't be directly related to me then. But help us understand. I'm hoping you're willing to tell us today a little bit about making sense of what's going on over there. Let me just tell you my philosophical point of view on this is that I've been so pissed off at everyone suddenly becoming an expert in infectious diseases and virology for two years, having heated positions about medications or syndromes that they just learned how to pronounce, that I may have been using for 30 years or dealing with for 30 years. They just learned the words, and now they're an expert. It makes me insane.

And my fear is we're seeing something similar as it pertains to military operations, and I don't want to participate in any of that. So I've been sort of staying out of it. But I have been trying to make sense of it in my own mind. Can you help me make sense of what's going on over there? Well, Drew, I can certainly try. Thank you. The macro strategic politics are, you know, Putin has an economy.

It's primarily oil-based. And he had pipelines in Ukraine, and he had pipeline. He was building the Nord Stream 2 going through into Germany. When Trump was in office, he signed off on legislation that shut down any receptivity of the Nord Stream 2 and they quit building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And Putin was somewhat reliant on pipelines through Ukraine. When Biden came in, he overturned Trump's order and the legislation that shut down the receiving end of the Nord Stream 2. And so Nord Stream 2 gets turned back on as soon as Biden does his thing. And Putin doesn't need anything in Ukraine anymore from a pipeline perspective.

And now he can go in and destroy whatever he wants. And Putin's big issue with Ukraine is that NATO has done such an effective job of gobbling up the former Warsaw Pact nations to attempt to reshape the geopolitics of Europe into sort of a democratic capitalist image, not sort of, into that image. And it's really more about economics than about politics. That Putin's concern that Ukraine was next and Belarus would be the last to go if ever. But everything else around there basically is NATO now, former Warsaw Pact from Romania, the Slovakia, Czechonia, etc. So, you know, he sees this threat against his border. And I can tell you, NATO is never going to attack Russia, you know, unless he declares war on NATO nations. So it's a psychological thing with Putin. And I don't know, you probably know about this.

I've read a lot of Nietzsche and the beast with red cheeks and the psycho that gets embarrassed and he has to win. And that's, I think, kind of what we're dealing with right now and and uh he's this megalomaniac that um you know is is stomping his foot on the world stage saying pay attention to me i can do this i see the weakness and i i see that um this administration is is um you know got administration has got enough division in it. And frankly, Drew, we're divided as a country. And the war that's been going on within our country in the cyber domain is very real. And if you accept that there are different domains of warfare, whether it's land or air or sea, space, cyber, then we are in a serious civil war right now. We're very, very divided. The bell curves used to overlap sort of in the middle. You had center left, center right. Now it's sort of the dumbbell approach where you got hard left, hard right.

And if you're in that vast wasteland in the middle, you don't have anybody advocating for you. You can't advocate for anything. And this war is a really good example because what you've got is you've got people that for whatever reason hate Putin and Putin deserves to be hated. He's a bad guy. And then you have other people suspicious of, well, if those people on the far left are hating Putin, then I better not hate Putin. You know, that's kind of where we are today. Psychologically, with social media going around and what you've got this um you know reaction to uh world events that as you said many people really don't understand and it's it's a Putin

invaded Ukraine Ukraine's not at fault here uh from my point of view and they're defending and they're fighting well I commanded Ukrainian soldiers in Kosovo I had a battalion of them under my and Polish uh soldiers under my command very good troops uh very good troops uh they will fight passionately uh you know my Mark pazowski story is one that um I think embodies uh the passion of the Ukrainians and you see that with zielinski's great leadership on the ground now think about this true the very first reaction of the united states the white house to the invasion of ukraine by russia was to offer zielinski a ride out of ukraine that's verified bona fide right that was the very first reaction so think about that and and and think about if you know the previous president had done any of the stuff that's happening right now he would be impeached three four five six more times because you know

if he went if he hadn't if he had opened up the nordstream to receptivity again it would have oh my god yeah right oh you're in pocket i'm not i'm apolitical and i'm apolitical but you know i always believe in my president i try but i did notice that when we changed from republican to democrat all of a sudden everything had to be the opposite. Like they didn't think it out. And like the borders came down in Mexico and then all these horrible things happened. That's what the general is saying. And I've actually wondered if some of the insane policies we had around COVID were the same thing.

Trump said, don't worry about it. So we got to extra worry about it. We got to close everything down. And it was because I kept asking, where did this come from? Where did these ideas come from even? This is not an infectious disease doctor's idea of how to deal with a pandemic.

And so it was all very strange for me. I think it's still that, but I think it's settling a little bit. I think it's sort of dampening. War should be, or international relationship in war should be something that when you become president, you know what you're doing. That's why you get voted to be president. The COVID came up.

Nobody knew what to do. They did. But there should be. We should have past experience that helps us understand what to do moving forward. And that Putin was on the, you know, he was coming up. I mean, Joe Biden's been in the government for 50 years, right? Yeah. understand what to do moving forward and and that putin was on the you know he was coming up i mean joe biden's been in the government for 50 years right yeah he knows but why did they have to change everything because it was on the right that's what we're into now that's what the

general is pointing out it makes us weak but um i you know i just get really heated up because i don't i don't know a lot about it but i know a lot of people just don't want to talk about politics. They don't want to know what's going on. They just hide their heads in the sand. I'm the kind of person where I just want to know everything. Well, to that end, General, I've heard other commentators on television remark that the fact that the Ukraine hung on to the end of last it was i probably around wednesday or thursday of last week i saw a military commentator saying this is extraordinary this is fascinating let's see if they can hang on till the end of the week and now here we are

very nearly a week subsequent how do you interpret what's going on over there is this just a stepwise approach to tightening the noose that putin is just going to continue to pursue or is there really some meaningful resistance going on there i think there's meaningful resistance and i think both and i think putin's got a set peace plan i i if if we had a map up in front of us you you know, you think of Ukraine somewhat as a football shape. And midway down the half of the football there is the Dnieper River. The Dnieper River is the fourth largest river in Europe. And it's a mile wide in some locations.

Kiev is west of the Dnieper River. Obviously, Russia is east of Ukraine and the Dnieper River. Obviously, Russia is east of Ukraine and the Dnieper River. So to get to Kiev, they had to come up through Belarus and down, pass the Dnieper River where they weren't contested by Ukrainian forces in Belarus, and then drop down and pressure the command and control center of Ukraine and Kyiv. And while they were trying, are trying to move from east to west and south to north up through the ports. And what they want to do is control at a minimum that eastern half uh they i i'm sure their entire plan or their plan is to seize the entire country and and it certainly appears you know he's rocketing everywhere he's dropping bombs he's

he's got troops uh everywhere uh you know the reports i'm hearing and and one thing that we can be sure of there's an old combat adage that the first report is usually wrong. And that should be held true and doubly true because you have two masters of misinformation, actually three if you count our government. But you have Russia, master of misdirection, misinformation, disinformation. You have Ukraine, who's equally good, if not better than Russia. And then you have our government that lies to us every day about certain things. And so what can we believe?

Because there's not a whole lot of reporters in there. You saw the Fox News team cameraman and Stringer got killed there, and a reporter was wounded. And so when the U.S. Army goes to war, we have in-bed journalists that are wearing body armor, and they're in the trenches with our sergeants and captains, and you're getting pretty good resolution on what's happening uh here uh intentionally i think there's very few journalists uh and and i use the term journalists loosely because most of them are operatives now but i think the ones who who cowboy up and go into uh war zones like this they're tried and true people trying to get to the truth of the story. The others are trying to spin, whether it's hard left or hard right, and try to figure out how to tell the story through a different lens.

But the people in the country right now are trying to give us accurate information, which is really, really hard. And so it's hard to understand you know if 10 000 Russians have been have been killed as the ukrainians claim maybe maybe you know I you know there's been no evidence of that but you know it's a good talking point have 12 generals really been killed brushes acknowledge four or five but maybe 12 have been killed even four or five is a big deal, you know, because generals are up there commanding the troops. And so you see the map there and you see Kiev just to the right of the V is the Dnieper River and the blue arrow there. And so you see what they're trying to do is take that eastern third of the country and they've come down through Belarus to hit Kiev because they were able to

get west of the river. And when I saw that, Drew, pre-invasion, I said, they're coming down to Kiev to try to put a stranglehold on that, cut off the command and control, and then move across the country. what they didn't anticipate was the stiff resistance the insurgency sort of the Revolutionary War style fight that they're getting with the ukrainians popping up out of um you know swamps and trench lines and and and that kind of thing so it's it's um you know it's playing out here on the world stage who would have thought and uh you know 2022 we'd be on the precipice of World War III? But I think that's where we find ourselves.

Well, I want you to talk a little bit more about that in a second. What I'm going to do is take a quick break here. I have a quick question, too. And we'll be back with Susan's question as well. We're here with Brigadier General, retired, Anthony Tata. And we'll be right back after this. Let's talk about our friends at Hydrolyte. I can't say enough about Hydrolyte. You hear me talk

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or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolyte.com slash drdrew. That is H-Y-D-R-A-L-Y-T-E dot com slash drdrew. And be sure to use that code DRDrew25 at checkout for a special discount. I'm back with Brigadier General Anthony Tata. The new book is Chasing the Lion. You've heard the premise of the book. The lion anointed as such in Iran following the related to the botched attempt at saving the hostages. And just an extraordinary it's just

packed with detail and descriptions and information and action i recommend it most highly uh as we were leaving the last segment we sort of tilted at the notion of another world war susan you had a question before we go to that rabbit hole well Well, I don't know my geography very well. I'm looking at it. But like, you know, the Crimea, the Black Sea and the Crimea is sort of the water areas around there. And there's a lot of neighboring countries that are down in that area. And I was wondering, you know, how they're feeling. We know Poland's freaking out out which is next to ukraine

yeah but that's moldova is going to be another target like down down towards turkey across the black sea yeah i don't think what do we what do we say general is there much concern down there well so you've got romania that's a nato nation now you've got got Poland, then north of that, you've got Latvia. Around the Black Sea, of course, in 2014, Russia seized Crimea and a little piece of far eastern Ukraine. And we did nothing in response to that. So again, the double standard of the media has projected onto Trump what actually Obama-Biden did and what Biden is allowing to happen now, if you want to call it that. And so further down, you've got Moldova, you've got Azerbaijan, I think, and some other. Yes, Montenegro, Kosovo. Yeah, Montenegro.

Yeah, I'm in the wrong city. I was in the Caspian. I'm not looking at a map right now. That's all right next to Ukraine. Yeah. I mean, I just wonder. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I think that Putin is most interested in the countries that can help him the most.

And Ukraine obviously serves as a big buffer. It's not a nato nation he's not violating he's not going to trigger a violation of article 5 which is an attack against one and it is an attack against all of the north atlantic treaty and so i think he's going to be very careful about that because watching the performance of his army he um uh you know they're not uh in theory they they're not doing great. I don't think it's going as he had hoped. I think he wanted to move much quicker, blitzkrieg, shock and awe, all those, you know, verbs. And what you're really seeing here is a plotting effort to seize a country. It's tough. Even when we bolted into Baghdad out of Kuwait, we got there, but we

fought for several more years. I mean, that never stopped. And this could be very much the same thing. And so as he gets, think about the historical examples of the inverse of Napoleon going to Moscow or Germany going to Moscow in World War II. They, they got destroyed because of lines of communication. And so lines of communication define this fight. Lines of communication are how you get resupply in,

they're how you move troops around the battlefield, they're how you survive. And Ukraine has what we call internal lines of communication because it's their country. They're fighting from inside out. And Russia has external lines of communication. They're having to come in and penetrate the terrain the Ukrainians know. And so my point for mentioning this in relation to your question is that they're going to get consumed in Ukraine. us to do some more folly uh south or north or east or west uh is uh will be uh tempered by the pace at which they move in ukraine and the success that they have in ukraine so um i think he probably wants to finger in the eye of uh um uh nato uh but at the at the same time, and there you've got the map up there, I think that, yeah, Moldova could be a target, you know, Romania, Bulgaria, they're all these former Warsaw Pact nations that border Ukraine are potential targets. And more important to me and should be to this country is not so much is it a target

of Putin, but can some rogue general or even Putin order a strike, conduct a strike that goes into Moldova, that goes into Romania, that goes into Poland, or goes into Slovakia, and actually does some kind of damage or harm. And, you know, in my former position as the policy guy at the Pentagon, I'm sure my old team is working real hard on what are those thresholds? What are those red lines? What do we consider an attack against NATO that would trigger Article 5 that would cause NATO to go to war with Russia and potentially trigger a nuclear conflict? Because right now, you've got a guy that is at his least saber-rattling that he's prepared to do it.

And who's to say he wouldn't? I think a lot of it's sort of a bluff and a psych game against Biden and the national security team in the White House. But, you know, you just never know. I mean, he could be a madman. It's sort of how a lot of the world saw Trump. They didn't mess with Trump because they thought he was a little bit crazy. And there's something he said for them. Well, you know what?

I'm just thinking about how the Nazis came in and then the communists came in to the smaller countries and just sort of set up camp and made that like, we're in charge of everything, you know, so that they would could refresh their troops or have, you know, a place to surround the area that's destroyed. And, and I don't know, I don't know how many of these are, if any of those Hungary's Serbia, Slovenia or, or Montenegro are part of the NATO pack. I know that, I know that Moldova is neutral.

But I wonder how I would, if I lived there, I'd be like, oh, crap. What's next? Only from my experience of looking at how. Go ahead. That's a really good point you make, Susan. I mean, they just drive into the Moldova and set up camp? And what happens then? Do they just drive into Romania?

And this is where NATO and the foreign policy team and the DOD from the United States can try to get in front of something. They've been behind everything. They were behind in Afghanistan, they were behind here. We should have been talking about this three, four months ago, high level meetings between, should have been a summit between Biden and Putin to try to avoid this, if not the, God forbid, vice presidents or whatever. The seriousness with which this administration is taking this is reflected by their use of this crisis to brief TikTok influencers to blame the gas prices on Putin. That to me is just insulting and should be insulting to everybody in this country. We've got a potential world war nuclear conflict happening and they're focused on how do we transactionally get through um uh how do we transactionally blame Putin for high gas prices when gas prices have

been high anyway and if you want to lower gas prices open the Keystone XL pipeline uh approve more permits and and quit fighting with the oil industry and and open up the gates toward back toward energy independence we were a net exporter of energy in in the previous administration and the energy independence is really truly tied to national security and and that's that's something that that this dogma that that um this administration is adhering to is really impacting American citizens every day. And there's this gap between the dogma and reality. And those of us out here in reality, you know, the dogma doesn't do anything for us. Talking about a future where nobody drives a, you know, a gasoline-based car, sure, that'll happen one day, but you don't have to, you know, crank it down on us right now you can you can ease your way into it when they're more affordable right so and i thought all that was going just fine uh but they're trying to accelerate yeah and i think people are now more aware of that connection between uh energy independence

and national security and uh to explain what the general is talking about is the white house had eight or twelve tick tock influencers over to brief them on how to discuss inflation as Putin's problem and just this ridiculous political I mean really ridiculous marketing stuff that uh if you if you think about it gets kind of scary I'm hoping that that was just the idea of some underling at the White House and not you know not uh people that should be occupied with other things but god knows it is not exactly the message you want going out into the world but one last thing i'll ask you about the the conflict in ukraine and just just if you don't mind and it may and you may want to not answer this and that's certainly

reasonable but based on your experience how how do you because we you know when you've been through i can tell from writing your book you you would have an instinct about how this from reading your book, rather, that that how this is going to go. What does your instinct tell you how this is likely to play out? Yeah, so I think Putin is not going to make the progress he wants to make. I think the West is kind of waiting to see if the Ukrainians have a shot. It looks like they do. And so I think they're making decisions about resourcing based upon the likelihood of that resource and being successful. And so this announcement yesterday of new drones and Stinger missiles and Javelins, all very effective weapon systems that I've worked with all my career. You know, I see other nations supporting that. I see a rallying around

supporting Ukrainian army, you know, abetting helping to um allay the humanitarian crisis in in uh poland and elsewhere and all the other neighboring nations and some ossification maybe east of the nepa river in a zone of separation one of the things i've been calling for and the, the many Fox news and newsmax and other venue, um, segments I've been doing as a, um, uh, a zone of separation all law Dayton peace accords. If you remember, uh, when, when the Serbs attacked Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia and later Kosovo. It was very much the same thing. Artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets. And I went to Bosnia in late 95 through Germany

as an advanced party. I was with the 82nd Airborne Division helping out U.S. Army Europe figure out how they're going to get from Germany to Hungary to Croatia and into Bosnia. like no other of warfare and what the wars have done over the centuries to their people. And they remember those dates that significant events happened. And they also have an incredible ability to help one another. And so all these refugees that are flowing back and forth across different borders are being subsumed into society there. And I saw that in North Macedonia and Kosovo when I was a commander in the 101st Airborne there. And I had the Polish-Ukrainian battalion working for me, among others. And so I see what I'd like to see is the same kind of energy that Clinton and Wes Clark had to set up the Dayton Peace Accords coming out of this team.

As Putin feels that his progress is slowing and slowing and slowing, maybe he's got to accept some kind of a deal. And there's a maxim, I think it's Sun Tzu or one of the famous dead generals, is always leave your enemy a golden bridge. social media hammering of people that even talk about a rational solution for Ukraine and Russia that doesn't include wiping Russia off the map or killing whatever insanity is out there. You've got to have an option that if Russia is not not doing well and they appear not to be doing well you don't want him to feel like a bay a cornered animal baying in the corner uh you've got that he's got to have a trap door out of there uh because that then brings a nuclear option in so hopefully a zone of separation a a divided uh ukraine of sorts and some kind of peace resolution and maybe an international peacekeeping force well thank you for that assessment uh now to finish up here um a lot of my restream folks and uh caleb behind the curtain here has questions about here we go

caleb maybe you want to ask this question i'm not sure what uh general tata's relationship is with this stuff but um do you know yeah yeah yes uh so a lot of the question a lot of stuff and i know this is part of your book as well uh questions about mk ultra and government experiments and things that are you know in the history that we are now aware of now but obviously weren't aware of many years ago so So I wondered if you had any insight into the whole MKUltra program or could provide any answers for anybody, the questions that they're having in the comments here.

And let me say, I have a little, I've been, go ahead, General, please. No, no, go ahead, Drew, go ahead. I was gonna say, I've had a relationship with the Kentucky program, the addiction program in Kentucky is where they did a lot of those experiments. They were doing all kinds of interesting things there on prisoners. And they discovered how to treat opiate withdrawal as a result.

The concept of addiction was developed at the Kentucky farm, I think they called it. But isn't that where a lot of the MKUltra stuff happened too? It is. And in addition to Chasing the Lion, I would recommend reading a book called Poisoner in Chief. And it's about the head of the, it's from Sam Arn's Press, my publisher. So I'm fine recommending it. It's about the head of the MKUltra program. And he was this chemist, weird guy, but he was an icon in CIA circles and guys like Dulles and others who had been CIA directors, you know, they gave this guy free reign. And post-World War II, the psychology was that, you know, it's kind of like the Sputnik. If the Russians get to it first, then we're going to be behind and the Russians can wipe us off the map.

And so coming out of the Korean War, there were 22 Air Force pilots that had been captured by the Chinese. And when that ended, the prisoner exchange happened. Those 22 pilots didn't want to be repatriated to the United States. They wanted to stay in China. And the conclusion of the CIA was that the Chinese have figured out mind control because there's no reason that those 22 pilots would all want to stay in China. They all must be under some kind of mind control. And the U.S. had already gone to the Nuremberg trials and elsewhere and lobbied to not have some of the more experienced German doctors executed or tried and they hired them and began running experiments in safe houses in Heidelberg and other places and likewise in Japan with Hirohito's folks. They did the same thing.

And there's not a whole lot written about it, but what I've read about the Japanese experimentation on humans is just unbelievable. And so our CIA underwrote this experimentation and outsourced it to Germany and Japan. And they discovered LSD as part of this and then began experimenting with it here in the United States. And that Poisoner Chief lays out that entire MKUltra background. It's a fascinating book. And it was so fascinating, I built a whole fiction novel around the concept of mind control, some kind of drug, and technology, a techno drug, where the poison opens your mind a little bit and you see different things inside your phone that perhaps are being sent there from some other source.

And so and you're being told to do things. And so how many of us are always looking down at our phone? I mean, you know, I'll be walking in Manhattan. You know, everybody will be just staring at their phone. I think 50 percent of the country's already under that. Yeah. They already figured it out without the LSD. It comes on our screens all the time. The LSD is just a good part. Yeah, I'm being funny, but I'm not. I mean, I really think that I'm certain we're doing stuff to others,

and certainly multiple countries we know. Well, you mentioned cyber warfare. Isn't that some of what you're talking about, that other countries are meddling with us in addition to our conflicts between ourselves? They're amplifying that conflict, right? Yeah, exactly. You know what? I'm going to interject something really quick, too,

just because I have three millennials living in my house. And one was a history major at school. But Jordan asked me, you know, all these people are dying in the Ukraine. Why aren't we going in there? And I said, well, because if there's a world war, a lot of things happen. It's a lot more people that can die, you know, and basically the borders will shift and the other countries will jump in and start attacking the countries that they don't like.

And then America will have to go over there and help because they have their armed forces there. And he didn't really understand how we can just sit and watch this horrible tragedy happen and how we're just sitting on the borders. And it's something that I understand because I know World War, I mean, I was a history major. I know World War changes everything. And it's something that i i understand because i know world war i mean i was a history major i know world war changes everything and it's it's a big thing and i i know i'm saying this at the end and this is like a whole podcast in itself but could you just explain what your interpretation of world war would be so so so i guess what she's asking is what is the the modern domino theory or do we even get to the dominoes before there's a nuclear exchange is what i would wonder i'll let you answer that yeah well i i i think you did a great job susan and um explaining that um the you know that i i had a friend call me up and and she was talking about

uh this why aren't we doing something why aren't we doing something and you know she's got a teenage daughter and i said you want your daughter to go over there and fight and potentially die in ukraine she goes well no but somebody else needs to do something and and what what what you're talking about is exactly sort of that point and that, you know, the sense that, you know, it's very troubling to me and I'm sure everybody, anybody, to watch the scenes that we're seeing because war is brutal. It affronts us in so many ways psychologically. How can somebody do this? Why would he do this? It destabilizes our sense of security and stability. And then on a really human level, we see these images of people dying.

We think you get one life and they die a senseless death because some madman decides to cross the border and attack. And so it's really hard to explain unless you put it in personal terms that I've, I've found that, you know, uh, if, do you want America to be in a war? Do you want our taxes to pay for, for more military hardware to go overseas and defend, um, you know, a country that, um, is, uh, you know, uh, in the middle of Europe. And, and it would make sense sense to to have some kind of

stability there i remember when the balkan situation was happening you know i thought that a war in the middle of europe was not a good thing and so that peace enforcement uh um deal was was a good deal the dayton peace accords and so the the the trigger the domino i i think is a nato red line and they haven't i think wisely published what their red lines are uh for nato involvement uh but it's it's you know a good example is turkey announced the other day when this thing first started one of our ships was attacked with missiles well uh you know it turned out that it was an air attack but could that have been the you know Archduke Ferdinand being shot right you know that started with the main or the main yeah or the main turkey right yeah And so, you know, Turkey is a NATO nation. They had a ship get fired upon. Do we react to that and say, okay, Putin, you're ours now. And then we get into this conflagration that could lead to, you know, a major land war in Europe between these two nuclear powers that we're in uncharted territory and i think that's why we're seeing a little bit of extra caution from the you know the administration and how to how to move you know

their nature is not to move fast and so maybe maybe in this case that's that's a good thing uh that that they're not that they're trying to figure it out as they go. So I know I didn't fully answer your question, but I... No, it's okay. No, you got a flavor. I went on TikTok and I got some answers, but... Oh, my God. Oh, no. That's really funny.

But let me just clarify a little bit of history. So the main exploded in Cuba in the Havana Harbor, probably a boiler explosion. But the Hearst newspapers blamed it on a terrorist attack and whipped up war frenzy. And the Spanish-American War ensued. The Franz Ferdinand was the crown prince of Yugoslavia, if I'm right. And he was out touring. Where was he? In Serbia or something? He was in Austria.avia, if I'm right. And he was out touring where was he? In Herzegovina? In Serbia or something?

He was in Austria. And he there was a failed attempt on killing him. A bomb went off when he went to the hospital to visit the people that were injured. One of the black hand assassins happened to be coming out of a

sandwich shop and shot franz ferdinand and his wife and uh and because of exactly we're talking about these real politic relationships triggered a series of dominoes where people were required to fight you know against each other to um you know as soon as one country declared war because of the assassination, multiple other nations had to come in. It wasn't a NATO alliance, but it was, you know, it wasn't that far off of these kinds of same alliances we have today, correct? That's correct.

It was amorphous, right? You know, the countries got aligned as the action began to unfold. So you had, you know, Germany and Italy and, you know, Japan all teared up and the rest of the Western world trying to figure out how to fight it. And boy, that was an ugly war. And yet rail had, you know, you had this emergence of quote unquote technology, industrial technology, with railroads and vehicles were just becoming a thing.

And they were able to move troops quickly on rail. And that's why you'll see in Europe the difference between borders, the gauges are different. Post-World War I, they wanted to prevent invasion. And so you couldn't drive a train all the way across Europe. You had to offload and get on a new train. And because the gauge sizes are different. So a train in Austria won't work the same as a train in Hungary and even when we were deploying to Bosnia we had to uh in 1996 95 96 we we had we railed stuff through Germany into Hungary and and then down into Croatia and we had to offload equipment and put it on a new train that was waiting just across the border uh and that's a remnant of world war one uh when when they changed the cases and my understanding is

the the autobahn was hitler's attempt to move vehicles now on roads that was why he built the autobahn so it really interesting yeah and eisenhower with the interstate system was very much the same way it's a interior it's interior lines of communication that's a that's a real good example of having interior lines of communication and uh audubon or the interstate system you know we use it for recreation and travel and getting at work and that kind of thing but there is a defense application to it where general tata i i hope you were right that we get some sort of detente going here or some sort of agreement it feels like that's what should happen I can't imagine certainly the Russian people don't want anything of the domino effect and I don't even

believe Putin does no matter how crazy he is he still wants a country to rule you know what i mean i don't i can't imagine he's that he we've had people on this show talk about his psychopathology but he's still we're not sure if he's he's not an irrational operator i don't think and and even at least in the sense of self-preservation and uh historical record like that i i think so but uh but again let me hold up the book. It is Chasing the Lion. If you don't want to read it by this point, I don't know what's wrong with you. Check out many of the General's other books. As you've said,

there are, what, 14 other ones? They're all listed. Wow. 14 other books? Yeah. They're right behind me here. Incredible. There they all are. So, Double Crossfire, Dark Winter, Three Minutes to Midnight, a series that I guess you wrote with Nicholas Irving, there they all are so double crossfire dark winter three minutes to midnight a whole a series uh that i guess you wrote with nicholas irving right a series of books how come these things aren't movies which one's going to be a movie well you

know it's it's interesting and we can do another podcast about this uh if you'll ever have me back with the the um of course uh nick irving is a young African-American Army Ranger sniper. We have the same agent, Scott Miller, in Trident Media Agency in New York. And Scott called me one day about five years ago and said, hey, why don't the general and the sergeant write a fiction series together out of his very popular biography called The Reaper uh the most deadliest Special Forces sniper in the Rangers or something like that and um so you know Nick and I got together and riffed a little bit and we wrote these three books and um he's had a lot of interest from um the the uh kevin hart productions um michael b jordan supposedly apple right tv and uh so nick calls me about six months ago and said hey tato we got a deal and i'm like oh awesome awesome he

goes but um because you work for trump you're not in it they don't want you involved. Um, right. You're not in it. Yeah. Right. And I'm like, seriously, you know, uh, it's, that's where we are today in our society. Um, because I worked for Trump and, and, um, you know, the, they, um, uh, yeah, I don't know if that deal is going forward or not. I have no visibility on it but you know I've had other um movie producers uh call me about uh uh you know Dark Winter which is a you know techno uh Thriller uh about World War III that envisions a lot of what's happened today Belarus Russia going through Belarus uh to Poland um and North Korea attack and and then um you know mortal threat is probably um the most interesting yeah all my books i i i think fresh plots but happens in the sahara desert and um the

the uh this young uh doctor she finds uh she and another doctor find a cure for Ebola and HIV that shares the same protein and it's ISIS discovers a lab and it's a race across the Serengeti to preserve their last few vials and the medical cooler only has 48 hours on it and before everything spoils and it's lost forever in humanity in Africa. So pertinent. What are you predicting for the future? With respect to my books. Well, it seems like you have a pretty good mind for thinking up fictional plots that are close to reality. what kind of fictional yeah so what i'm working

on now i'll tell you it's it's uncanny some of the stuff that you know the book cycle is about a two-year cycle right you write a book for a year to eight months yeah and then it's in production for a year with the publisher and by the time it's coming out I'm you know swarming drones for example that attack things that was in Rogue Threat Ridley Ridley Scott called me about that book his production crew did um uh and uh that so what I'm working on now book 16 is um the idea of a tech government that is all controlling and all consuming and all seeing and all knowing. And my hero is, I don't want to give too much away because it will give away the next book, Total Empire is the title of the new book coming out in about nine months. And we'll just call that country Bina. Exactly. empire is all about China and some tech oligarchs and some U.S. government personnel working in

cahoots to, you know, line their own pockets. You know, one of the things that I've noticed about senior political appointees, of which I was one. At the end of the day, there's, you know, I'm a longtime public servant, Drew. Three decades in the military, I transitioned into education, serving in D.C. public schools and in Wake County, Raleigh, North Carolina, and then state government as the secretary of transportation in north carolina um and my mother always said you know bones that was my nickname as a kid bones always make a difference no matter what you do and so i've always tried to honor my mom in that way and uh but i i've also noticed that um not everybody's like that and what you get is a

lot of people get into these senior positions only to aggrandize themselves, only to enrich themselves, only to have the power and stroke their ego. And that was, I would say I was naive. I may be hopeful is the right term, but it was misplaced hope. Some of the stuff that I saw, you don't have people, you have some people that are true public servants, but there are also equally a number of bureaucrats and political appointees that are just out in it for themselves. And so one of my hallmarks is that there's always something like that reflected in one of my stories because you know i write from my heart and i try to be authentic and and um so there's so there's that at play in every one of my books not just

um chasing lion or total empire it's sad to hear that but i suppose not not surprising hey there was one last question completely unrelated to all this i just was thinking of a few minutes ago and i just just want to toss it out has has any of the senior officials ever contemplated trying to work the world in such a way that Russia actually became a Western ally, being part of NATO or something. Was that ever anybody's plan? And if not, why not? Well, if you remember when Russia began to unravel,

there's a real good book on this. I forget the name. It was written by a businessman. But he went over as Russia, and it was all about financial opportunity. But if you recall, there was this huge effort to help Russia become a capitalist country and to find a way to democratize them a little bit right around the 90s, early 90s, late 80s. And, you know, post Reagan, post as the wall fell and everything was falling apart, there was this program put together called Partnership for Peace. And that was sort of like Junior League NATO or Junior Varsity, not really junior varsity NATO.

And, and, and a lot of the NATO countries today were initially in partnership for peace. And so there was an engagement on many different levels with partner quote unquote partner nations. And, and they went through a process and then applied for NATO membership and became a NATO member, which comes with obligations, but also benefits as well, because you get that protective umbrella around you. And Russia, the discussion that Putin's position is that, well, you weren't supposed to do

that. You said you weren't going to do that, NATO. You said you weren't going to take former Warsaw Pact and make them NATO nations. And, you know, we can agree to disagree on that. But, you know, I think it was smart for us to do everything we did with regard to that. And it was Republican and Democrat presidents.

I mean, Clinton did a really good job with this as that program expanded and we marched eastward with our, you know, collective security umbrella. And I think the outreach was there. I think the mechanisms were there and it just never converted. And I, you know, I looked at that, the Iraq war, I have to say, I was not a fan, you know, I was a colonel in the army at the time, so I had to do what I was told, but I never understood it. I redeployed from Kosovo with my troops and 9-11 occurred while I was in Kosovo and I brought my troops home um and we were told to get ready to go to afghanistan um you know thanksgiving day uh when i stepped off the plane back from kosovo

so we go train we're in training in january of 02 in louisiana and the commanding general comes down and says tony you're not going to afghanistan're going to Iraq. And I never understood that. And the Iraq war to me was a complete folly and a huge mistake that altered the azimuth of US foreign policy forever. And it did two things. It put us into Iraq, much like Russia is going into Ukraine now. I'm not comparing the two at all, but, you know, it's a quagmire. And I think it's going to turn into one for Russia. But it also changed our policy in Afghanistan. And it put us in Afghanistan for 20 years instead of one, two, three and in and out of there as as you know I

thought we should be and and so the uh you know this um path that we were put on um uh is uh you know post uh Iraq and then during the Obama years I, there was not any serious engagement of Russia. If you remember, Obama called out Mitt Romney and said, you know, the 80s is calling, they want their foreign policy back or whatever. And, you know, there's been a lot of memes going around now on that. But that understanding Russia through a real politic lens and from a realist national security lens instead of from a social media hashtag lens and what's what's transactionally important today uh versus tomorrow um that that's what in my opinion led to this is this sense that we can just ignore Russia and we can use it as a battering ram on Trump. We can, we can, you know, forgive, you know, anything that, you know, Obama, when Syria

went across the red line on chemical weapons, he didn't, he didn't do anything. He called Russia in to take care of it. And Russia has all the Syrian chemical weapons now that are now being rumored to be personally been treated hugely unfairly by the media, just because I was appointed by Trump. You know, it's really sad for our country that we're at this place where you have good people everywhere just trying to scratch out a living and carve out their life. And they just get dogpiled on by social media and big corporate media and big tech. So that's a long way from your original question. No, but it's a good place to sort of roll to a stop

and to welcome you back anytime. Anytime you need an outlet or want to sit and think about things, I'm fascinated by these because I know nothing about it. And so just to have somebody who knows what he's talking about, try to school me. Frankly, it's, it's reassuring.

Susan, I feel you, I suspect you feel the same way. I feel more at ease after talking to him. I feel like, yeah, that there's, it's going to be okay.

Well, I mean, I hope we don't have to have you back because we're scared shitless. hope it's just like for other reasons but but but i'm but i'm back to i'm back to parizad your your uh and your your uh villain in the in the book which is i'm sure there are russian generals on the other side that are kind of contemplating the same as you as you um and and i'm sure you've even probably had contact with some of them over the years that i know there's i know there's that interplay a little bit at least in the intelligent side and so it gives me a little bit of confidence uh to um tell

my kids that we don't have to buy those big bags of rice and beans and have the decontamination suits ready to go well we need it though maybe we should anyway i don't know i might be wise but uh underground bunker general is such a privilege to talk with you and i really appreciate spending all this time with us and being so generous with not just your time but your your knowledge and hopefully we can talk again very soon yeah likewise by the way thank you thank you thank you so much for your service. Yes, indeed. Indeed. And all this piling on stuff. And I do feel, you know, I've been out in the public for a long time. And I just feel that this stuff, there's a lot of stuff dampening. You said something an hour ago about, yeah, I know, about ideology versus reality.

That's what you were talking about at the moment. And reality always has a way of coming to bear. And I feel like reality is coming into this country again, and it will reassert itself, and we'll kind of settle down a little bit. And again, much the Hegelian idea of synthesis, antithesis, wait, excuse me, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, we will get to some sort of synthetic place

where we maybe pull some good things out of all these experiences as well. So we'll leave it at that. And again, thank you so much. Thank you, Tim. Cheers. And Caleb, Susan, thank you all for putting this together. God bless America if he's in it. Thank you for setting this up.

I believe tomorrow we're going to try to do a show of just questions from Restream and maybe some of the Clubhouse. He was a good book, Drew. I'm very proud of you. Thank you for setting this up. I believe tomorrow we're going to try to do a show of just questions from Restream and maybe some... He was a good book, Drew. I'm very proud of you. Thank you. Oh, by the way, Jorge Suarez Melendez, thank you for putting us together and asking me to book the general because I met the general and I wanted to book him, but Jorge said

do it now. And I said, okay, done. Done and done. We're going to promote that book. Brando said he'd be in a bunker with me. Who did? Brando. Thank you, Brando. There's Brando. Yes, indeed. I appreciate that. Again.

I have a lot of rice and beans. So tomorrow we will just do questions and look at the restream. And I'll give a little update on COVID. People seem to like to talk about that. We had a nice conversation with the psychiatrist about mandates and whatnot. We'll review some of the stuff that's out there. A lot of excessive ink spilled on BA2 Omicron. We'll talk a little bit about that. I'm not saying you don't need to worry. I'm saying you don't need to panic. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational

purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911.

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