Camp Gagnon - The Tiktok War Weapon & Israel Palestine Propaganda | War Expert Ryan McBeth

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

🏞️ Sign up to Camp for exclusive updates: https://camp.beehiiv.com/War expert Ryan McBeth details how China uses TikTok as a weapon. He also discusses the Ukraine Russia War aftermath, the Israel Palestine War, and the information war Americans face everyday. We end the conversation with an overview of the use of AI in modern warfare from targeting to autonomous weapon systems. If you're interested in war and warfare: WELCOME. TO. CAMP. 🏕️Shoutout to @trinidadlorenzo1798 for requesting ...

The military industrial complex, which doesn't exist, by the way. Wait, what? Yeah, the military industrial complex doesn't exist. Wait, why? TikTok is a cyber weapon. It deterrence fails, and we go to war with China. You already have all this information that China's collected about users on TikTok. They can reach out to those users and say, Taiwan has always been Chinese.

Ukraine is not going to win this war. Russia is not going to win this war. There is no win. There is lose and lose less. So right now, Russia and Ukraine are in a battle to lose less. I think Iraq's going to be a paradise. Iraqis are like the Germans of the Middle East. Why does the U.S. have such a vested interest in protecting the Israeli state?

We're really the only democracy in the Middle East. Why does that matter? Couldn't we sort of prop up a dictator that then can control a region at our behest? How well does that work out? Ryan, there's so many things I want to talk about today. I'm very excited to have you here. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I had seen a bunch of your videos popping up kind of like throughout the Ukraine.

war developing and then you just broke it down in a very interesting way. Your shorts are great. And then not literally your shorts, but on YouTube. And then furthermore, there was actually a bunch of listeners of the show that had commented. They're like, you got to get Ryan Macbeth. Got to get them on. And I was like, that is a great idea. And now fast forward, here we are. So the first thing I want to talk to about, I want to talk about everything, Ukraine war, geopolitical conflicts, things that are brewing geography, like I mentioned. I'm so obsessed with geography and how that plays into how wars develop kind of political angles and like how you know Biden's presidency and Trump's presidency affect foreign policy but the place that I want

to start at is something that I think affects everybody I have this bizarre and maybe not so bizarre paranoia that my phone is going to be hacked I watched the great hack on Netflix maybe like three or four years and I saw how they used Pegas's software to get into Bezos's phone and messed his whole life up. And to this day, that is, that freaks me out. So my question for you is, is my paranoia about my phone getting hacked and all my information getting leaked either by a foreign government or by a private citizen trying to blackmail me or extort me? Is that a justified fear or am I just completely delusional? Yes.

Both. You know, the, um, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, right. Right. And so, um, and so they might enter your phone to get to someone else's contact information, get to someone else's phone. So like, like there's there might be a, there's a tactic in cybersecurity where let's say you have, let's say, let's say you want to get to Lockheed Martin, right? You want to get, you down, want to download the plans for the F-35, right? Well, it might be pretty hard to bring into Lockheed Martin security. But what you might be able to do is target the landscaper of the company that does the landscaping for one Lockheed Martin building. And then you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you know, you'd say they have a billing system that that landscaper has to go through to get paid from Locky Martin an invoicing system. So maybe that has a flaw. So that's how you might get into the Lockheed Martin network, right? Through the back door, through the landscaping company, which probably doesn't have good cybersecurity or any cybersecurity.

That's very clever. That is very clever. That's something I would have never thought of. And elicitation is another big thing. Like, that's something. So elicitation is where someone might come up to you and say, like, hey, you know, my daughter's doing a book report on the F-35. Can you help out? You know, you work for Lockheed Martin. Can you help her out in her report for the F-35? And you might give her unclassified information, but sometimes that's all you need is a little puzzle piece to put that puzzle together. And that's a big thing, like on the Internet.

Like, if I wanted to get secrets about the F-35, I would create an account called Engineer Girl. with three R's. And I'd get an AI-generated picture of an attractive younger woman with purple hair, maybe one streak of purple hair, and make that my profile picture and say, hey, and go on the Lockheed Martin forums or on Reddit, you know, in whatever aerospace forums. Like, hey, I'm a student at University of whatever. I'm doing a report on stealth. Can anybody help me with this? And so, you know, any middle-aged guy, you know, sees, oh, I'm going to help out this young engineer, right? That's elicitation.

Oh. Yeah. But you're not necessarily offering the kind of sexual services that the guy might think they might theoretically get. Yeah. But as bipedal primates, it is the underpinning of all interaction. So I get that. That's, it's sort of used as kind of like a, like a, like a tithell. a tool to try to like just attract someone and draw them in.

Yeah. And governments are doing this? It would be governments. It could be governments. It could be private corporations. I mean, one of the things I've always been afraid of is using internet campaigns, internet troll campaigns to short stock. Last year there was a Australia. I couldn't freaking prove it.

I couldn't freaking prove it. Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program. but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe.

That is the best way to support this show. Because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations, and it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much.

Let's get back to it. Last year, there was this thing called Australia Day. And there were these two companies, Woolworths, and I forget the other name of the company, but they decided they were going to stop selling Australia Day merchandise. And Australia Day is like the day that Captain Cook landed on Australia, which worked out well for the Australians, but not so well for the Aborigines.

I remember about that. And Australia, Australia Day wasn't really a thing until like the 1990s, and I guess now it's kind of considered to be colonialism, and so they just kind of stopped doing it. But apparently all the stuff for Australia Day is cheap Chinese crap anyway. Sure. All right. But there was this campaign that was started.

I'm never shopping at Woolworths again because they're pulling their Australia Day stuff. What's this country coming to? We're bowing to the immigrants. All of that was computer generated. Australia, I'm actually going to Australia in a couple of weeks to present at the 2024 disaster and emergency relief conference. Oh, sick. To talk about disinformation during a disaster. Because they're definitely afraid of China during the next day.

during the next wildfire that China has, or that Australia has, they're definitely afraid of Chinese disinformation agents saying, go south, so people go south into the fire instead of north into safety. And that's a real concern. It's a weapon system. Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah. How, what?

I've never, I've never, I'm not, this is crazy. Yeah, it's a weapon system. It's an effector. But why are they out here trying to disrupt the Australian people? Because disrupting the government is one of the goals. of Chinese disinformation, just like disrupting our government is one of the goals of Russia and Iran. Wow. And Australia is seen as sort of a proxy government? Australia is going to be when, if deterrence fails, when we go to war with China, Australia is going to be a major player in that.

Just geographically, just geographically. Australia has a good military. Not the largest military. They have a good military. We cooperate with Australia in a lot of military and intelligence topics. They're purchasing some U.S. submarines or joint-built submarines. And they know what they're doing. And they're an expeditionary force. They're not an expeditionary force on the level of the U.S., but just because of their nature, their remoteness, both New Zealand and Australia have an expeditionary force. And a strong Navy? Strong for their size.

Right. But it's not just a Navy. I mean, I can talk about any sense or any decide or any. shooter. And, you know, the U.S., if deterrence fails and China decides to invade Taiwan, they're going to have to face the U.S., Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. South Korea will probably be in that mix. Japan will probably say, hold my beer, hold my sake, we're going to come to. And right now what we're planning is this tactic called any sensor, any decider, any shooter.

China has more missiles than we're ever going to have. And we also have this tyranny of distance. We have to go 6,300 miles across Pacific Ocean to resupply. Yeah, it's a long supply chain. 10,000 kilometers, something like that. It's a long supply line. There's a tyranny of distance. So we can't beat China missile for missile.

So if we're shooting down China's missiles with our missiles, we're going to run out. We're going to run out. What we can do is if an Australian Special Forces guy sees a Chinese missile launcher on an island, we can call that in. He can call that in to an American AWACS, an American Airborne Warning Control Center, and say, like, hey, I see this Chinese missile, and the AWACs can call down to, let's say, a Filipino. Maybe the Filipinos want to get involved, too. Is there an expeditionary force? Just by, they have 10,000 some 6,300 islands.

Can you define that term expeditionary force? So there's four different kinds of militaries, all right? And you have your defensive militaries, which are most of the armies of Europe. And for that, the military can mainly just defends the country or it might aid the country in a natural disaster. So that's type one, defensive militaries, most of the armies of Europe. Number two, you have internal security militaries. It's most of the armies of South America and some in Asia. So these internal security militaries, they help the police.

police fight insurgency or they help keep the peace. Now, the third is palace guard. Most of the armies of the Arab world are palace guard. They're designed to keep the ruler in power. So the Saudi Arabia military, Egyptian military, they're all designed to keep the ruler in power. And the fourth kind is an expeditionary military. There's only four and a half countries that have expeditionary capability. And I'll define expeditionary. So it's the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and to a lesser extent, China. An honorable mention might be the Philippines because they have 6,300 islands. So expeditionary, meaning you can leave your home base and you can supply logistically that force at scale while it's deployed. And that is a capability that really

only four and a half militaries have. And is that predicated on bases? Like, what is the, what are the factors? It's predicated on bases and the logistical lift, how much you dedicate to logistics. So, I don't know if you, a couple of weeks ago, there was this big thing about, oh, Russia sent a bunch of battleships to Cuba and they're sailing near the U.S. They weren't battleships. I don't think we've had battleships since the 1980s. We were the last country that had battleships. Hell, yeah. And we, you know, we got rid of them.

Russia sent one frigate, one submarine, an oiler, like a fueler, and a tugboat. And you can imagine why they send the tugboat. Because if their stuff breaks down, they need to tow it back. And Russia just, they don't have the amount of bases that the U.S. has. We don't have to send a tugboat out with their stuff. Because we have a port. We have a base in Djibouti. We got a thing over here.

We can hit Australia to pull up. That's expedition. I see. So we can essentially go anywhere in the world. And one story I like to tell is about Egypt, where when I was in Egypt, we were on the border between Egypt and Israel enforcing the peace treaty between those two countries. And one of the features of that was we'd stay at these remote cops, these combat outposts. and spend 21 days of the outpost, 21 days back at our main base.

So I'm at this combat outpost, and we have a freezer there full of food, and we have a site cook, you know, we'll cook food for us and stuff. And whenever you take over a site, you like go through every single thing, like how much ammunition you have,

because you sign for all that stuff, you know, how many strobe lights you have in the helicopter kit, you know, all this stuff. Sign for all that. And one of the things you do is, the freezers because if you have any expired food that's a health issue and the New Zealanders were like the people who do these inspections that come around to different posts and make sure that you have all your stuff. So we had all these chicken patties that were like in the back of the

freezer and I was like, you know, I hate wasting food. I'm like, let's just cook it all. So we ate chicken patties for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then I go over to, you know, by the second day, The guys are like, sorry, we have to have more chicken patties. I'm like, all right, we're done. So I went over to the Egyptian border guards who were across the street from us. This little brick building, they had like a little TV with a little antenna sticking out of it. You know, it was made from a coat hanger. One uniform.

Their first sergeant would drop off a bag of rice and vegetables every morning. That was their breakfast, lunch and dinner. They had one 55-gallon drum that they would drink out of, bathe out of, do their ablutions out of, cook out of. and I brought them these chicken patties. And they were very thankful being the... I'm the Kalamadabik. I can speak a little Arabic. Okay, okay.

They could speak a little English. And one of the things they kind of... I guess the point they made with me was that they only got meat when they rotated back to their main base. And they called it Army meat. And I might be mistranslating that, but it sounded like meat

that had been rejected by their equivalent of the USDA. So, you know, like in Egypt, you can't sell it to civilians. but you can sell this bad meat to the army. And that's when it struck me. That's why our military is so powerful. It's not because of our Patriot missiles and our M1 tanks.

It's because we can get more chicken patties halfway across the world than we could possibly eat. And the Egyptians couldn't even feed their own people in their own country. It's not a manpower problem. It's a logistics problem. Everything is a logistics problem. And that's the strength of the U.S. military. It's logistics. It's all logistics.

Okay. So then just to kind of button up those other things. So that's what an expeditionary forces. So if China goes into Taiwan, all of a sudden you have all these expeditionary forces bucking off. That's a problem for China. So therefore, China has an incentive to kind of disrupt the expeditionary forces in the region. Not just that, but they have an incentive to use effectors.

So TikTok, TikTok is a cyber weapon. TikTok is a weapons platform. So in the olden days, meaning like before the Internet, in the olden days, let's say you wanted to destroy a bridge. All right, you'd have to use a cruise missile, use a bomb. Now, why do you destroy a bridge? Well, because you don't want the enemy to use that bridge, right? Why do you buy a drill? You don't buy a drill because you want a drill, you buy a drill, because you want a drill.

Because you want a hole. A hole. Right? You want a hole. Yeah, that seemed too easy. I got scared. So you buy a weapon because you want to affect the target. So a weapon is really an effector, right?

Right. I don't want the weapon. You want the results of the weapon. So let's say you want, why do you want to do not? the enemy, the ability to cross the bridge. Doesn't matter, it's a bridge you want to deny the enemy the ability to cross it. So you can use a missile. You could use a cyber attack.

Maybe shut down the tolls on that bridge and they won't let people cross. You screw with the traffic lights. Or you tell a bunch of weak-minded people shut down the bridge for Palestine. That's a weapon. You just created the same effect

as blowing that bridge up with a missile. So, if deterrence fails and we go to war with China, you already have all this information that China's collected about the users from TikTok. They have that in the database. They can reach out to those users and say, Taiwan has always been Chinese. Go to this Navy base and glue yourself to the ships before they leave. Wow.

And now it's a weapon system. That's really, really interesting. And so this is the way that you could say information or misinformation is going to be dispersed through these platforms. Disinformation, right? There's a difference. There's misinformation, which is usually like getting the facts wrong. A couple of months ago, there was a drone attack on a U.S. base, and a couple of reservists

were killed. Three reservists were killed. And this one Australian reporter called them Marines. I'm sure he didn't mean to do that. He just messed that up, right? That was unintentional. That's misinformation. A bunch of Marines were killed.

They were Army reservists. Disinformation is I made a video about it today where President Zelensky's wife, oh my God, I can't remember her name, Elena Zelenska. She was accused of buying a Bugatti in France for $4.5 billion, $4.5 million for a Bugatti. But I was looking at the receipt. I'm like, well, in France, they use a comma for the decimal, not a decimal point. They use a comma. It's like it's flipped. He used a decimal to separate thousands and they use a comma.

And also, like, they use Blanc for white, but they didn't use noir for black. Like, talking about, you know, wouldn't it say, like, carbon noir, you know, instead of carbon black. Right. So that's what's, those are what are called active measures and, like, the protocols of the elders of Zion. That was a Russian active measure from, like, 1904. You know, they basically took like, it was like an old French magazine article about like Machiavelli in Hell. And they just kind of ripped that off and turned into the protocols of the elders of Zion and published it as if it was real to kind of reinforce the czar's rule. Now this is, would you parse like disinformation and propaganda?

I guess propaganda would be used on your own citizens or like is there a technical difference in your opinion? Well, I mean, this is propaganda, right? So what is propaganda? Propaganda is branding, right? So, like, disinformation is, like, you're intentionally getting the facts wrong. Propaganda is branding. Right. I mean, you have, what is that?

Zin. These are Zins. Why does Zin have that can and that legal? It's because branding is a contract of quality between the manufacturer and the consumer, right? Like when I open a can't, when I pop open this bottle, Woodford, I know exactly what I'm going to get. Every time. Every time. And you can use propaganda to create your country's brand.

Like, what's America's brand? Freedom. Anything's possible. You can achieve your dreams here. And greatest country on earth. That's America's brand. So what's Ukraine's brand? Bravery.

We fight the Russians. Look at us rescuing this cat from the battles. You're upset. stand, defense of democracy. Yeah, so propaganda is really branding. And countries have brands. Countries have brands. When you think of France, you know, wine, cheese, culture, fashion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, this is really interesting. So now disinformation you would consider as some type of concerted effort to inform the population of something that is fallacious or a misinterpretation. Both, could be both. It could be a complete lie. Okay. And it's designed to destabilize your government or reduce your faith in government. And you do that to accomplish a specific military objective. So, pardon me. Russia, right, Russia can't. So I'm going to say the word win. But I want to emphasize Ukraine is not going to win this war. Russia is not going to win this war. There is no win. There is lose and lose less. So right now, Russia and Ukraine are in a battle to lose. lose less. Now, what losing less means to Russia is Russia gets to keep all the provinces. It's

captured. The Dunbass plus Crimea plus, oh my God, it starts with the Z. I can't remember that other name of the province. God, it's like almost in the morning. And I only have one cup of coffee and I'm drinking. But they have to capture those four provinces and ideally they can go all the way to Odessa, which probably isn't going to happen because you have to cross a number of rivers. But that's kind of what wind looks like. Well, that's what lose less looks like for Russia. For Ukraine, lose less means they're able to negotiate peace from a position of strength and maybe kick Russia out of everything but the Dunbos, maybe Crimea, and have a UN peacekeeping force in Crimea and the Dunbos for the next 50 years.

So why would Russia advancing all the way to Odessa be a lot? lose less. That seems like they achieve their objective. Yeah, that would be that, well, they've still lost. They've still lost by that time, it'll be millions of young men. Right. All their generation. All their alliances with the Western world. All their alliances with the Western world. And all right. I mean, you might have an alliance with Iran, North Korea, China and Iran, North Korea, China. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Syria. But what do they produce? The only thing that produces anything is China. Right. And none of those countries produce good machine tools, which you need machine tools to create your own industry. You need machine tools to repair the oil rigs that will start breaking soon. So there are a lot of these oil rigs are Western supply. They're not Russian supplied. You don't have machine tools to make parts for these oil rigs pretty soon. Your oil industry is going to go to hell. Right.

So it seems like in that situation there is a desire for some type of treaty or something. type of like brokerage. There will be. There will be a treaty eventually. They both would lose less from that type of civil agreement. Yeah. The question is who is negotiating for a position of strength? Is it Ukraine or Russia?

What Russia needs is they need the West to stop supplying weapons to Ukraine. And they're going to do that by convincing people that your money is going to corruption. Your tax dollars are going to fund a lavish lifestyle by President Zelensky and his wife. There's all this corruption in Ukraine. There's corruption in Ukraine. Of course.

But not at the, they're working on it. They fire people all the time. And honestly, when we send money to Ukraine, we're not sending money. We're not loading pallets of money onto C-17s and air dropping it over the country. You know, weapon systems expire. Patriot missiles, Heimor's missiles, attack-cams missiles. They expire. The fuel in them degrades.

over time, and we have to shoot it. Because if we don't shoot it, we have to send it back to Raytheon, and they have to what's called demil it, meaning they destroy it in a safe way, and then all that stuff becomes hazardous waste. They have to shoot it? You have to shoot it, or it goes back to Raytheon, and they have to destroy it. So what if there's no, they just launch it? Yeah, well, that's where we get our missiles for training exercises and stuff.

I understand. Okay. So, like... I picture them sitting there being like, dude, it's 12 o'clock. Like, we got to launch this thing, and they're like, but no one's attacking. They're like, fuck, it just light a lot of it. All, sort of. So I think once we fired like 21 tow missiles in one day.

So I never thought I'd get sick of shooting toes. But like I knew the, a Raytheon guy who came out to brief us on the ITAS, which is this, it's a site that you use for the toe, which is an anti-tank weapon system. The guy gave me his business company, he's like, dude, whenever you guys want to do gunnery, let us know. Because we'll come out with many missiles as you want. You can shoot those things off. We have to get rid of them. Now, the problem is that there's a limited number of training facilities. There's a limited number of slots in the training calendar.

So you have to send this stuff back. Well, right now, we can send these old missiles to Ukraine. They'll shoot them at Russia. It actually saves us the cost of having to dispose of them. You know what we're doing with our old M1-3s? Armored personnel carriers? We're dumping them in the ocean as reefs. Oh, right.

I like fish. Fish are great. I think fish are fantastic. But you take an M1-1-3-Hen personnel carrier, you dump it in the ocean. First, you have to take all the trans fluid out. That costs money. That costs money. And then you put it on a barge and you're going to the ocean.

You push it into the ocean. And then in a couple of years, the fish start going into it. And it becomes a scuba diving spot and all that. And that's great. I like fish. But we can also give those to Ukraine and they can use them to kill Russians and help protect Europe. This is interesting. And it costs less money.

When we talk about disinformation, now again, I don't want to overly politicize this. So I'll speak in vague hypotheticals, okay? And if you want to get more specific, you're more than welcome to. But sometimes in America, we will see things, specifically in my family's group chat, where I will get a message from someone from my family. And they say, we are sending another $90 billion aid package to Ukraine. And we are funding this war. And we're people starving in America and we're bankrolling them.

And like you mentioned with the Bugatti story, it's like, oh, Zelensky's wife, is da-da-da-da. This is all at the behest of the Russian government. Are they creating it? Or are they finding, are they finding actors in America that are talking about these things and then perpetuating them? Both. Both. Like, are there useful idiots in the American media that are being unknowingly utilized as weapons of Russian disinformation? Yeah. Yeah, there's a term in the intelligence community called mice. It means, well, you've heard this term before? No, but I just love that this is an acronym. And it's also. a word that makes sense. You military guys love acronyms.

We do. We do. The intelligence community uses this. It's money. Money. Oh my God. Influence.

Yeah. I think you've actually covered this before because you talked to other. There was a Russian spy who came on here and talked about it. Yeah, Barski.

Although he might have switched the two words up. Maybe we use a different term. So it's money, ideology, compromise, and ego. Yes. So, in some Okay, so that's how kind of rush, that's not any intelligence organization flips people.

Now, I'm not part of the human intelligence equation. I do see for ISR, command control communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. I find the bad guys using technological means. And then we might continue surveillance. We might put a hellfire through their window. Depends on what my client wants to do. Fire.

So the, in America's case, for like a lot of spot. they go by or supporters might be money that a lot of like people who like steal secrets, they might do it for money. Robert Hanson is a good example. For the FBI guy, killed a lot of people. Robert Hansen, money. Ideology, there is a woman who spied for Cuba. Eva Mendez.

That's like an ideology thing. Ida Mendez, sorry. And there's a lot of people here in the U.S. who they kind of go the Palestine route because of ideology. Oh, colonialism is bad. Israelis are white. They're colonialists. They're not from there.

Therefore, they're bad because colonialism is bad ideology. So that's how you can flip those people. Compromise. That's actually not a great way of doing things because, like, you want your target to be you want him to be compliant with you, not like hating you. Right.

You know? And in some ways, ideology can be bad because they might get upset that you're not going far enough. You know? So I didn't, you know,

that could be bad too. And then ego, Tucker Carlson. Why does Tucker Carlson spout lies and, you know, to spout Russian propaganda? Well,

it was fired from Fox News. And, you know, Now, why does someone like Colonel Douglas McGregor go on Tucker Carlson and spout lies? Well, because once the guy was a colonel and colonels are really respected. Yes, sir, absolutely, sir. You were the smartest person in this room, sir. And then you retire, and you can't even get a plumber to come to your house. And then Russia, RT, you know, Russia today, they come along and they say, come on our panel.

Shoot, I'm important again. Oh, wow. This is very interesting. So Russia uses that it's a combination of useful idiots. And also, they've been laying the foundation for this since 2011. Mm-hmm. And that was when Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of the State, basically said that the Russian elections were a sham. Right.

And that was when President Putin said, that woman is never going to be president. And that's what they basically started this operation. You know, it's a... There is no evidence of collusion between Russia and Trump's campaign. I mean, President Trump would tell him to go poop in your hat, right? We're not colluding with you. But Russia built this infrastructure, not necessarily to support President Trump, but to make sure that President Clinton or Secretary Clinton did not become president.

Wow. And that infrastructure is still in place. So that's what they're utilizing. That's a great way to look at it. China utilizes, if you want to look at liberals, China utilizes environmentalists all the time. So let's say you're on a school board or you're in some, you're in Wyoming, and you don't want us to create another gypsom or another rare earth mine in the U.S. Because, not necessarily because you're concerned about the environment. you just don't want those trucks rolling by your house.

Well, if some dude from an environmental organization that's backed by China gives you a check for $20,000 and says, I'm going to fund your campaign against opening this mine. He can use your nimbism, not in my backyard, to basically perpetuate this agenda to not have a mine that would benefit the American government. You get it on both sides. Wow. Yeah, it's not just. That's so clever. Yeah.

Can you give me more examples of the way that. that disinformation is used by foreign governments, either knowingly or unknowingly within, you know, like America and by the American public. Because I hear these things all the time, and it's so hard to parse, okay, are there Nazis in Ukraine? Who are the, you know what I mean? Like, what is the truth?

Is the Ghost of Kiev real? Like, are these things just, like, stories perpetuated by government? Some. I mean, Ghost of Kiev, like, there was a person who was the ghost of Kiev, but ain't nobody shooting down five Russian planes in one day. And so that's, this is paid for by the Ukrainian government. Well, I think that in a case like goes to Kiev, like that was done by very patriotic people who weren't necessarily in Ukraine and they used a video game called DCS to kind of create the footage for that. And DCS looks very real.

No way. Yeah. Yeah. They used a video game. And Israeli did that as well. So if you want an example of disinformation. I'm sorry, before you go on that point, just the ghost of key thing with the video game. That is speculation.

That's kind of confirmed. That's confirmed. Yeah, DCS. It's a video game called DCS. Wow. Digital combat simulator. I've never heard that before. That is wild.

Okay. So that's on the record. You would be comfortable being like that is a real thing. Yeah. DCS. Okay. So now this other disinformation that you were mentioning about with Israel. So I can tell you this.

The Iranians and by extent people who support Hamas, they, since October 7th, I've encountered like three instances of genuine honest to God Israeli misinformation. One was... Misinformation or disinformation? Disinformation, I'm sorry. Three honest God instances. One was an F-15 shooting down a drone.

They used DCS to simulate that. That didn't happen. Well, they did shoot down drones, but there's no footage of that. the colors are wrong on the plane. You know, there's a lot of funny things with that. That was number one. The second was the, there was someone generated an AI image of an armory under a hospital. And the third thing was 40 beheaded babies.

Right. I remember this. Those three, those things didn't happen. Babies were killed. But the number 40, very significant in Judaism, like 40 days, 40 days. 90 nights, you know. I think the number 40 has a very significant resonance in Judaism. And I'm sorry, just so everyone can be up to speed with that headline for like the beheaded

babies, which is like the worst headline you could ever see in the world. What was the headline that the American people got? And then what is sort of the truth behind that story? Well, there's truth. I mean, the headline is there were 40 beheaded babies that were found. And that's a very specific number. but there were children who were killed. Right.

Teenagers who were killed. There were Muslims who were killed. They were killing everybody. These are bad people. These are bad people. So I can find, since October 7th, I have found three instances of Israeli disinformation that probably wasn't put out by the Israeli government just by very enthusiastic supporters. But literally everything coming out of Gaza is a lie. Everything.

Everything. Like, it's just constantly. This one example I have was, this is kind of on the IDF for doing this. It was pretty stupid. But one example I give is meat cans. There was this video on Twitter and telegram showing these cans of meat, these cans. And the claim was Israel's dropping these cans and the cans are booby-trapped. When people open the cans, because there's this little key on the can pull back, when people open these cans, they explode.

They're cans of meat that were dropped by Israel to kill innocent women and children. Two women have already been killed. If you see these cans, don't open them. Well, those cans were M603 landmine fuses. So let me explain. So what the Israelis discovered was that their EOD or their engineers, when they want to blow up a tunnel instead of bringing in dynamite or whatever. plastic explosive, they've been bringing in,

or they've been bringing in M15 landmines. And so they'll take these landmines and they'll bring them in and they'll daisy chain them with debt cord, detonation cord, and they'll blow up the tunnel with these landmines. So when you get the landmine in the box,

one of the things that's in the box is a fuse. The fuse is intended to go on the top of the landmine and then you put the pressure plate on and that way when the tank grows over the landmine, it explodes. Well, you don't need the fuse because you're exploding it by putting a deck cord inside of it. So these guys were taking the M603 fuse can, and they were tossing it.

Now there's a pile of M603 fuse cans, and then Daddy old daddy comes by with a cell phone camera and takes all the fuse cans, puts it on a table, takes a video of it and says, oh, look what the Jews are doing. They're killing innocent women and children with these explosive cans. Well, number one, Moshi, police up your damn dunnage. You know, all the crap, all the packing material. Police set up, bring it back with you, right? So that's kind of on them.

But like the Hamas has an incredible wing of video production. And people call it Pollywood. I actually don't like saying that. I think it's disrespectful. But I have this propaganda wing that. that uses active measures constantly. So just to button up that story, there were actual cans of meat

that were given to people that was used as food. And then there were also these boxes that were these fuse cans and they were conflating them when they were two separate things. I'm sure there was humanitarian aid that was delivered.

I don't know whether it was in cans or not. They just took these cans and they just lied. Because there is a key on the top of the can that you can use to peel back like an old school Scardian can. Yeah. So they just turned the cans so the writing on the can wasn't visible.

So they turned that around so you can't see that. And then they just lied. They lie. That's what they do. They lie. They know they can't win by force of arms. So how do they win? They win by getting people in Western countries to stop supporting Israel and stop helping arm them

or give them the weapon systems they need or give them. them the drones they need or give them funding or give them intelligence. So now when you say everything coming out of Gaza is a lie. That's about. There's a lot of people that are going to be frustrated or bothered by that statement, as you can imagine and as you've probably already dealt with. So I'm curious, like when you see footage of, you know, kids after a bombing or, you know, people holding their babies, we've seen so much footage from this conflict that has been

tragic. That type of footage. I'm like, well, that's... People are getting killed. That's real probably. You drop enough bombs, they're going to land on civilians. And if you embed yourself in with a civilian population, some of those people are going to get killed, and that sucks.

Israelis try to prevent that. In the U.S. military, we have a term called NCV, non-combatant cutoff value. Usually the NCV is zero. NCV is basically the number of civilians you're allowed to kill to go after a target. So you might have an NCV of five. So you're allowed to kill five civilians. If Daddy old daddy is in a white truck and he's in that white truck with four other civilians that are not associated with him normally, then we might take out that white truck because the NCV is below five.

I see. If there's six dudes in that truck, then we got to call, you know, sent com. Yeah, sentcom asked to approve that, all right, yeah, you can hit that white truck. Or it might go all the way up to the president. And they might say no, you can't. They might say no. And that actually happens a lot. And typically the NCV is zero.

Wow. I don't know how Israel is doing its calculations. I know that they try to tailor their weapon to the actual target when they can. But I'll tell you this, if Daddy El Badi is in a house and ideally you would use a small diameter bomb to take out one room of that house, which we can do. But there's 2F16 circling overhead with 2,000 pounders and, you know, well, this is Daddy L. Badi. were talking about. Might not get another chance at this, you know. There might be collateral.

There might be, yeah, they might say like, all right, well, let's just take the hit on this. Wow. So that's just war, dude. This is really interesting. So how is Hamas so much better at this, the media game than Israel is, right? Like, this seems like such a clear, like, if what you're kind of saying here is true that, you know, a lot of these things are kind of distorted. or at least misinterpreted to try to, you know, create a narrative. How are they so much better at it than, you know, this extremely advanced democracy with military intelligence?

Israel is obviously a very developed, you know, nation with, you know, high tech. So how is Hamas so much better at it? Well, that's just it. It's a democracy, right? And look, and Israel has a free press. Apparently not through Al Jazeera, but Al Jazeera is working against Israel. That's none of my business, how they run their, as recently Israel said Al Jazeera can't report in the country anymore. That's their law.

That's what they do. All right. Whatever. But for the most part, Israel has a free press. So it's very difficult to get genuine honest to God lying propaganda out when you have a free press. But you have Hamas, which is sponsored by Iran. And part of their battle plan is to put out this propaganda. It's part of their plan

They have to do this You know, why does Iran fund These militia groups? Well, they do it because they can't afford an aircraft carrier, right? We have 11 aircraft carriers Most countries don't even have one. Right. You know?

We have 11. Yeah, I mean, how many countries even have aircrafts? There's like seven or eight or something? Not a lot. India... France and some of them aren't even real aircraft carriers They're like,

they're really amphibious assault ships that can launch F-35 Bs. I see. A good version of F-35s. And actually, Japan, they're not allowed to have aircraft carriers, but they call them like helicopter destroyers or something to kind of get around them. I think it's like in their constitution.

They can't have aircraft carriers because it's an offensive weapon. That might change. Since World War II, right? Yeah, since World War II. Interesting. China has some aircraft carriers. They have three.

They have one. I can't remember their darn names. I'll probably mispronounce them anyway, but they have one they actually bought from Ukraine that they were going to say, oh, this is going to be like a, like a, floating casino and they just, yeah. And that aircraft carrier, it's not a particularly good one, but they used it to figure out

how to do aircraft carrier operations. Interesting. You know, by the third one, they're just kind of, they're literally like iterating with aircraft carriers, the way Elon Musk iterated with rockets. Wow. So then back to Hamas, they don't have any aircraft carriers. They don't have any aircraft carriers. So they need to use active measures.

They need to use disinformation in order to get the West on their side in this fight. Wow. So hypothetically, let's say this conflict happened 100 years ago. The media is not, there is no way to sort of utilize the media on either side. So this conflict probably would have gone very differently. But now in the modern age with social media, there is now they have an ability on both sides to try to manipulate, you know, forces around the world to do their bidding. For the first time ever, like you're seeing war in real time. And that's one of the things, one of the reasons I think people don't know what the hell a war crime is anymore.

Because they'll watch war footage that someone streamed from their cell phone. Oh my God, that's a war crime. Like, no, that's perfectly legal. You're allowed to do that. Well, nobody really knows what a war crime is. They've never seen it before. They've never read the Loak, the law of armed conflict. They've never read the Geneva Convention.

It's like, war crime. That's a war crime. You can't attack an unarmed person. That's a war crime. Dude, you're allowed to attack a command post. And I guarantee you, if people are in any. a command post, they're unarmed. They have a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee in a command post. And they're still a valid target. I see. You know, so attacking someone who's unarmed,

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crazy and disturbing where there's these four guys that are walking down the street. They seem like Palestinian citizens that are just unarmed, walking around, and then all of a drone flies out of the sky and just kills them. Yeah, neutralizes all four, kills all four of these guys. I watched it, and I was like, this is crazy.

So can you explain to me what that is, how that footage gets to my phone and sort of like the whole narrative from the very beginning of like what that footage was? So most likely Israel was following those dudes and those dudes are up to no good. And I've explained why. And a lot of people, they don't like it because there is a cost and there's an opportunity cost associated with this.

Let me explain. For the most part, armed drones. And I can't remember the darn name of their drone. Hermes, I think. Yeah, Hermes is their armed drone. For the most part, an armed drone is a brigade or a theater level asset. And a brigade is like 5,000, 2,500 to 5,000 dudes. So typically the brigade commander will have control over that armed drone.

It is not just a thing that a soldier just throws out there and I'm just going to blow these people up for the lulls, right? Hellfire missile, I believe a hellfire missile cost about $160,000. All right. Now, in the middle of combat, you're not too worried about the cost of a weapon. But before you deploy a weapon, especially from a drone system, there's a whole chain of command that you go through. Like, all right, is this the valetariat? Yes. Because the second you fire that weapon, you're losing opportunity cost because you might have to use that weapon platform to support somebody else. So let's say some Israeli fighters get into a tick.

Let's say if you're just rolling around in your drone, just blowing people up for the lulls. And then a bunch of Israeli soldiers get into a tick. They get into troops in contact. And you need that drone to support them. Well, now you don't have any missiles on you. Now you've got to go back and land and rearm. That could take an hour, half hour to do, right? So you're only shooting at targets that are bad guys.

So in that particular footage that you saw, you have four dudes walking. Number one, I could tell they waited until those guys were in an area where there were no other people. And they had my guess is that they were watching these guys. Why are they watching these guys? Why did they assign a brigade or theater level asset to these dudes? because they're bad guys. And they might be high-level Hamas commanders, and they're like, all right, this is the chance.

This is right? They're out in the middle of nowhere. There's no civilians around. There's no cars around. Hit them. Now, is it possible that they're just trying to commit genocide against innocent Muslim dudes that are just walking down the street?

If they wanted to do that, that'll be dead. Sir, if Israel wanted everyone in Gaza dead, that'd all be dead. I mean, I don't want to say it wouldn't be that hard, but like you have one of Israel's issues is they they do show restraint now sometimes they don't necessarily show enough restraint and I've said people I've gotten Israel Israelis mad at me before when I say this but the truth is that the the mother of a of a dead Palestinian doesn't vote

in Israeli elections but the mother of a dead IDF soldier does so if you have a dude shooting a machine gun from a house are you going to send a platoon? to take that house down, or are you just going to put a bomb in that house? I know what I'm going to do, right? I'm not going to commit my troops unless I absolutely have to. But if there's another family in that house that you didn't know about, that's war, unfortunately. And now, the U.S., the way we approach things, we'd probably send a platoon to hit that house. I see.

But that's kind of, that's how we work. You know, the Israelis, they've been dealing with this for a very long time. And they're done with it. So that specific footage that we saw, what percent of confidence would you say that those guys were, you know, high value targets? I would say that's between 55 percent and 80 percent. I was called that a likely using ICD 203, the intelligence community directive 203, which is put out by the intelligence community to come up with actual probability standards. Now, I don't know anything about warfare, so I'm just going to take your word for it here and be like, okay, these guys were bad guys, sure. Again, I have no idea.

I don't know if anyone really knows. So my question then is, how does this footage, which seems like it belongs to the Israeli government, why does it come on my phone if it makes them look so bad? Because some dude thought it was funny and they're putting together a greatest hits compilation. And they record it either they bring their phone into the skiff. Skiff means a security compartmentalized information facility. So you, yeah, ideally when you go into a skiff, you get. can't bring your phone. Actually, if you have like a pacemaker or like a glucose monitor, you have to get a waiver

for that. You can't bring any electronics into the SCIF. Because it's so controlled. It's so controlled. So that way you can't take any pictures. But there's some dude and whatever these are really equivalent of a SCIF is, who's like, I'm getting this footage. I'm going to put it up on Telegram.

I'm going to put it up on my Secret Telegram channel. And we're coming up with the greatest hits video where we're showing all the hits that we did. That's what they're doing. I mean, at the end of the day, it's still a stupid kid. and his boss is out of the room and like, all right, I'm going to get my phone in here. I'm going to copy this.

I mean, that seems like a huge blind spot. Don't do that. Wow. But, like, that's, that's, I've seen that, I've seen as early soldiers, they're rolling to some dude's house and they're, like, trying on the wife's underwear. I'm like, dude, don't freaking do that. And don't take pictures of yourself doing it.

Yeah. That's, that's, seems unprofessional at best. Incredibly unprofessional and immoral and probably unethical. It is. I mean, there's a term, it's actually very weird. If you read the Geneva Convention, they actually use a term called pillage, which seems like it's a very like. Viking-esque. Yeah, like a very like paternal kind of term, you know. I know in Maryland we have a law that's called like defrauding an innkeeper. Like it's from the 1700s or something. Right. Like defrauding an innkeeper. But so you're not allowed to tank stuff. Even in Iraq, like you might, you might. kicking someone's door to take Daddy old daddy, you know, and you got to write a receipt for the broken door

and, you know, you give it to the family members. Like, hey, go to Camp Victory, present this receipt at the gate, you'll get paid to have your door repaired. Got it. You don't, like, you don't, now, if you need water or food or something like that, you can take that, you're supposed to leave a receipt. But you're not supposed to mess with people's stuff. Now, is it possible?

Because when I saw that footage for the first time, I was like, this was not supposed to be out. Like this obviously, whether it was justified or not, it definitely does not make, you know, any government that did that look good. Like, if this is America hypothetically, I would be like, oh, that makes America look terrible. Just these four innocent guys, not in uniform, I don't think, just walking around getting, you know, destroyed from heaven. Like, that's, like, insane. I was wondering, is it possible that Iran, with all of their, you know, like, resources and money, paid someone to say, hey, here's a little 50K, 100K, K, your kidney, needs medical service, we can get them what they need, and you give us some footage that makes

Israel look bad. There's a, so I believe Israel is universal health care, but I know what you're talking about. There would be a non-zero chance that you would have someone in the Israeli military who's payroll that would sneak out that kind of footage for money. But that's why we have periodic security reviews. That's why, you know, you don't necessarily, you're constantly, even as, you're, you're, you're, Even as if you have this, at least in America, if you have a security clearance, you're constantly being investigated. You just don't know it.

Like, are there any debts that you have? You know, if I travel to Canada, in Canada, if I travel to Bahamas, I'm traveling to Australia in a couple of weeks. I had to give my FSO, my security manager, to give them when I'm leaving, when I'm coming back, where I'm staying. where I'm going. And if I meet with any foreigners there, like, if anybody asks me, like, oh, are you Ryan Macbeth? So tell me about the blah, blah, blah. Like, I have to report any contact I have with people who ask me questions. And we take that stuff really seriously.

You're constantly being investigated. Interesting. So it is possible that something like that could have happened. There's a non-zero chance of that. But my guess, like a more likely scenario is you get some dude whose friends, they shwack somebody. and they shared the video on Telegram or on whatever private channel they have. Actually, Israelis use WhatsApp a lot.

So they might have a private WhatsApp group and like, this guy, oh, I want to put my footage in there and then someone that gets out or it gets posted on Facebook or something. Thank you. Now it's out in the wild. Wow. Can you explain how these things now sort of like

embed into American culture? So like as, like I went to college in 2015 and I was in college. from 2015 to 2019, and there's a lot of political activism. And obviously there's always political activism within college, right? But it seems like there's more and more now. And things specifically with like the election, with Trump, da-da-da, it seems like as a college student, there was a feed coming to me to sort of get me to believe certain things.

And as someone that like, you know, I've read different books about propaganda and things like this, I have such a distrust of media on both sides that I never really know what to believe. So could you just like paint how a government, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Russia, whether it's Israel, whether it's, you know, Palestine, whether it's Hamas and Iran as proxies, how they would use American citizens to kind of do their bidding? Like you sort of touched on it a little bit, but like what is the narrative? Let's say there's someone listening to this that's like, you know, I'm a liberal person. I just graduated college. I stand up for the disenfranchised. I truly want good in the world and I don't like colonialism.

I don't like indigenous people getting killed. and all of a sudden they see some things on their feed that kind of activate that feeling inside of them. So like just paint the picture from, you know, that person sitting in America and how they all of a sudden get activated and how that actually can affect a conflict across the world. Okay. So I guess one major part of that

is that this generation of kids who are in college right now, they grew up disconnected from everything. Like teenagers, they're not even having girls having sex. They're not dating. They're having girlfriends. They're if they have to go to a dorm room meeting, they're doing it over Zoom. You know, like, so they grew up during the pandemic. And they, I think they miss that social, you know, they don't have friends in the traditional sense.

And so what Iran kind of did was they exploited that sense. of wanting to have a common cause and a goal. And you can go to a protest and you can wear a shemag and you can, it's very Instagramable, right? You know, where you wear your kaffia, your headscarf, and, you know, you might even cover your face and your eye makeup is on point, right? And you do that, and now that that's an Instagramable moment and you're making friends. And if you're a guy, well, that's where all the girls are going.

I want a girlfriend. I want to have sex for God's sake. I haven't had sex since high school. I didn't even have sex in high school. I'm a senior now. You know, I've been locked in my room doing Zoom during the pandemic. Let me, let me get with these girls. I mean, I set up a program on TikTok where I, $13,000 I was able to selectively target 600 people to create a protest to shut down the beltway. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah, I did a third, there was a video I did, it was called, you know, why TikTok is so dangerous or why TikTok is a cyber weapon, where I got myself an advertising account on TikTok. And what I found just targeting people with certain kinds of messaging, I decided on the mix of 85% white women and the other 15% to be Arab women. And for targeting white women, I'm basically targeting people who, because you do. you can select boxes of who you want these ads to go to. So people who support social justice, environmental causes,

and also people who make a certain amount of income. And you get them to go to these events, and then you need a smattering of ethnically Arab people because that way they can take selfies with them for virtue signaling on Instagram or on TikTok. Like, look, I'm with my Arab friend who's wearing a hijab and we support Palestine, right?

And if you get the women to come, the men, you don't need to target men because the men who are looking for girlfriends will simp for them and make signs. And oh, I believe, too. Club promoters discover this. Can you sleep with me now? Yeah, I guess, yeah.

So, yeah, I only cost 13. I never pulled the trigger on it because it was going to shut down the beltway and I'm like, I kind of want to not get involved in that. But yeah, for $13,000, you can shut down the beltway. It's a weapon system. So I think what I ran did was they exploited the nature of people who granted George Floyd protests. What happened to George Floyd was criminal.

Of course. But that was a reckoning for America. And America went way down the rabbit hole. We need to frigging account for what we did here. Right. And maybe there really is institutional racism. Maybe we ought to root that out. but I think what Iran was able to do in Hamas by extension,

they were able to take those feelings of people who had organized for those protests, and they were able to use that and exploit that. Let's give them a new cause, and now you can go out and you can wear a cool hat or cool Shamog or Kaffia and take pictures on Instagram and be part of something. And maybe even you'll meet a girl. Wow. Now, are these ads that they're running? Is this content that they're promoting?

Well, it can be content that you promote. It can be ads. It can also be, like, TikTok can, they can push those pro-Palestinian influencers up to the top, right? And they're doing that in order to undermine American government. And also, the other thing they want, they want a mass shooting. What? Yeah. What?

Wait, hold on. Wait, why? Okay, explain that. Because of chaos. Look, look at America. So what they're looking for. So when you have a bunch of people protesting in one place, that's a huge soft target. It's a massive soft target.

There was a guy, Brooke Goldstein, I think his name was. He was an Israeli dude. Back in the 90s, he took his rifle that he got as a reservist and he went to the cave of the Patriarchs. and killed like 26 Muslims and he was beaten to death, right? The guy, bad dude. So what they're looking for is they get this big soft target and he gets some pro-Israel dude with a rifle. And you know what?

I'm going to take these kids out. And now we have a race war in the U.S. Or doesn't even have to be a pro-Israel dude. It could just be a dude who wants to hurt people just because he wants to, right? Do you think they're trying to activate those people as well? Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, they would love that.

They would love to have a mass shooting at a anti-Israel protest. They need that. They need that because it needs to start this chaos. Look what they did to us. They're murdering us in the streets. What the fuck? That's why you see police officers on the roofs of buildings with sniper rifles at these protests. They're not there because they're afraid of one of these soft college kids who's never even

touched a gun. They might be a little afraid of agitators. And there will be agitators in the crowd, pro-Hamas agitators, who might start a mass shooting or a bombing. They might do that just to cause chaos. Like an agent provocateur. An agent provocateur. Yeah, they're there for the agent provocateurs and for the people who want to cause

trauma. Wow. And I mean, that is, these are the kinds of things that I hear about that are like quasi conspiratorial where I'm like, oh, yeah, this is, if I was this government, I would do XYZ, but it just seems so far-fetched. I think the thing that kind of opened up my mind to this sort of stuff was that documentary, The Great Hack, I think is what it was called. You saw this. This is about Russian disinformation affecting the American elections. And the one example from that that was the most compelling to me was there was a guy. And I'm going to get some of the details wrong,

but correct me if you've heard this. There was a guy in Alabama. And they were doing a governmental election for, I think it was the governor. There was a guy. Guy Roy something. I forget his name. And there was basically like a conservative guy and a liberal guy. And they were trying to decide the election, da-da-da. And basically what he decided to do was run Facebook ads that were going to get people to go towards the Democrat guy, not to the Republican guy. And what he decided to do is he run, he ran super radical Republican ads towards the Republican sort of like middle, like right of middle base to try to get them to go less.

And so what he did is he ran these ads that said, you know, the Republican governor, you know, candidate, he wants to ban alcohol. We need to make Alabama a dry state. And we need to make this, you know, we don't want any more alcohol. We need prohibition again. And he didn't believe this. This is a guy again. That's a Democrat. He doesn't want alcohol prohibition.

No one wants that. But because he pushed such a radical issue, he was able to push some of the people right of center to the left. And he ended up what looked like the election was decided. The Democrat won. and it was by a factor of like 5,000 votes. And they looked at this guy's Facebook ads that he purchased, and it looked like it had affected like 5 million people. And so he was able to deduce with some certainty,

oh, I probably influenced like one or two percent of them. I probably affected this election. And just one guy with a couple thousand dollars swayed an entire state's election to get someone elected. That blew my mind. I was like, that is crazy. And if this is happening on a state level with just like a random citizen, there's no way this isn't happening, you know, with every government, with every conflict happening around the world.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would say that the whole, you know, Iran wants to cause a mass shooting. I wouldn't call that conspiratorial at all. Why? They would love that. You look at who benefits. Iran only benefits from absolute chaos. Look at our children getting slaughtered. Let's pull people out. They want, they need chaos. Because in an environment, where they have chaos and it doesn't look like the president can govern. Like, they need that level of America not having faith in their government. Because then if the president decides to get tough on Iran, oh, you're just doing this because the military industrial complex, which doesn't exist, by the way. Wait, what? Yeah, the military industrial complex doesn't exist. Wait, why?

Why doesn't the military industrial complex exist? So I actually, I did a video about this. the so back in um so today if you take a look at the top five producers of uh defense defense which is boeing lucky martin north of bruman uh raytheon and uh oh lucky martin north of broughman raytheon forget the fifth guy but if you take a look at these top five they make maybe 13 billion a year it was like 13.8 billion a year combined and um Just Procter and Gamble made $14 billion last year selling diapers and soap. You know, there's in 1993, we used to have a military industrial complex.

We used to. I mean, you look at RCA, RCA, they made TVs. They also make radar. They made radar. The Aege's system that's on American destroyers and cruisers, that was from RCA. But they also made record players, right? Motorola, make your Motorola razor flip phone

or whatever, they used to make radios for the Army. And for a while they were making radios for both, right? Those are Texas instruments. Texas instruments to make the TA85 calculator. They also made the Paveway laser guided bomb. So

it used to be tech companies were military companies. And by 1993 when the Cold War was kind of winding down, there was this, they call it the last supper. There was this dinner at the Pentagon. Les Aspen invited all the major military, 15 defense

contractors of the Pentagon for dinner. And they showed him a chart. And he said, listen, the Cold War is over. We cannot afford to keep all you guys in business. You guys need to either consolidate or die. And essentially after 1993,

you see defense spending go yeah. It used to be, defense spending was like 9.6%. I believe I'm doing this from memory, 9.6% of our GDP back in this 1960s, which is when Eisenhower said, military industrial complex.

Yeah, he wasn't wrong then. But today, there's no military industrial complex. When you look at Apple, which Apple made, I think it was $97 billion last year, and Lockheed Martin made, I think it was like maybe $9 billion. I think it was $6.7 billion last year. Do you have any stock in Lockheed Martin?

No. Yeah. Why? They have a military industrial complex. They should be doing great. You don't own any stock. Do you have stock in Apple? Yeah.

Yeah. But if the military industrial complex is tied in with Congress and Congress just shoves money into the military industrial complex, why isn't everybody invested in these defense contractors? Do you know anybody who works for a defense contractor? I actually do. I grew up in Florida, and there's a lot of defense contracting in the area, but I get your point here. Yeah.

This is interesting. So can you define what you would sort of call a military-destro complex pre-Cold War? Like, what is that definition? It was just called manufacturing. We had a manufacturing base in this country and a tech base in this country. And now most of our manufacturing is gone. We're trying to bring that back. And a lot of our tech is, you know, Apple or Dell or Microsoft.

So that's kind of separated, although Microsoft does do some military. stuff. Google does do some military stuff. So you would define a military industrial complex as American corporations working in conjunction with defense? With defense. Yeah, well, I mean, American defense corporations. So to find that the military industrial complex was this manufacturing conglomerate where the government and the military worked hand in hand. You saw this a lot during, in the years between World War I and World War II in Germany, Krupp, Messerschmitt, Henkel. Those companies worked hand in hand with the government to turn to these behemoths who could theoretically direct war efforts because we want to make more money.

We want more profits. Now today, just to sell a fighter plane, I work for a defense contractor. I work for the Texas Air Med Lab. That's one of my four jobs is work for the Texas Air Med Lab. We create these AI power drones that deliver whole blood to wounded soldiers and the AI drones. They get there without GPS. They figure out how to get to the wounded soldier on their own autonomously. So dealing with the government just to get a grant, you fill out pages and pages and pages and pages of application in order just to get money from the government for a maybe, for a quarter million dollars.

You know, people like to say, oh, the $200 toilet, the $500 hammer. Well, you know, if you have a toilet in a C-130 and that toilet has to fly to Antarctica, is the toilet going to crack. Is the toilet lid going to crack? When you have to test that, you have to put it into a cold room, right? And then you have to test it to make sure when it's in a 120 degree heat in the desert. So the kind of toilet that you have in a

C-130 that's going to Antarctica and then the next day going to freaking Saudi Arabia and has to survive those two heat extremes, it's not the same toilet you're getting at a Home Depot. So that's how a toilet ends up costing $400. I see. So people be like, oh, these costs are all inflated.

it's all bullshit. How are you going to spend, you know, $1,000 for this little bolt? Like, this is nonsense. Can you clean a chemical? If the plane gets slimed, if the plane is hit with a chemical weapon, are you able to use chemical decontamination on that toilet? So the cost is not necessarily the good itself, but it's the research and development that went into it.

I mean, look, GPS. Everybody uses GPS. Thank the military for that. If you want to get technical, the first Gulf War, 1991, that was the first space war. Saddam Hussein, they didn't really defend the western desert of Iraq because they were like, nobody's getting through that desert. They'll all get lost and they'll die of, you know, lack of water. Well, what he didn't know is that we had GPS.

Now, back then, GPS was the size of like a breadbox. And there was like one per company, one purple tune. And at one point, we actually captured this, we did this left hook. They called the Hail Mary Play. General Schwarzkopf who commanded this war. He was a former football player, West Point, and he called the Hail Mary, where essentially they just threw U.S. units out into the Western Desert

and whoever can take the initiative, go take the initiative. That was their basic plan. I think they called it, yeah, the Hail Mary play. And we were able to do that because all these vehicles had GPS guidance. We captured an Iraqi, colonel, brigade commander, and the Iraqi colonel was invited back to the talk, to the tactical operation center

of this American colonel. And he was like, how were you able to cross the desert? This American colonel was like, well, GPS. He's like, what is this? One per battalion, one per brigade. It's like, one per company, one per platoon. Wow. Corresponding with a satellite.

This guy was like jaw on the freaking floor. And that was 91? 91. Wow. I mean, that's pretty recent. I think we started to launch them in mid-80s. I did a whole video about it. Wow.

Wow. So back to the military industrial complex. When I hear that, what I kind of interpret as military industrial complex and correct me is this sort of nature where we have these contractors, these defense contractors in the United States, right? And, you know, for example, with Ukraine, we send them all of our old stuff. They use it for defense. Then we make our new stuff and we're sort of stimulating the American economy. NATO needs to make all their weapons with us. And so we're stimulating that. So we are. They make their own stuff. But, yeah. Europe, some of them make their own stuff.

But yeah. So, but I understood, I guess, like, a lot of NATO weapons are made by the United States or have to be made by American industrial contractors. Yes, and now. So one of the, so there are some, so we use some European weapons. I mean, the, the M240 machine gun, the saw, the squad automatic weapon. Those are Belgian designs. HK, the HK416, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, Belgian design.

I think, I want to say the M27, I actually don't remember who makes sense. This is a bad part about going on podcasts. Like, when I used to listen to podcasts, we go, oh, you're wrong about that. But like now, like when you're put on the spot. Sure, sure, sure. Oh, crap, I don't remember who made that weapons. One of the things about NATO is that it's not just a defensive organization. It's a standards organization.

Have you heard of Stenag, the term Stenag? So if you take an M4 M16 magazine, AR-15 magazine, standard, that is a NATO standard magazine, it's an AG. You can theoretically put that into any NATO weapon that carries 556. Interesting. That's a standard magazine. The weapons racks, a lot of those are standard. So that, you know, theoretically, if you develop a 500-pound bomb, that can be put on. any NATO aircraft because they're mated correctly.

In fact, in order to arm Ukraine with harm anti-radiation missiles, which go out and seek radar, we had to develop a special rack that could be kind of bolted on to the standard Russian rack so that way it could release one of our weapon systems. Oh, wow. So this creates uniformity across all of these disparate forces. Yeah. And in fact, even for logistics, we have classes of supply. And it's the same for everybody.

So class one is food. Class three is petroleum oil lubricants. Class five is ammunition. That's interesting. We have symbols on all of our boxes and they're all the same. So that standardization isn't necessarily, maybe it's both things, but it's not necessarily just a way to pump manufacturing through the United States and through all of our little arms.

It is a way to standardize things so that they work across all NATO forces. That's interesting. So given that, though. I look at that and I'm like, is it possible that America benefits from conflicts around the world because it stimulates our economy? So I don't think anybody benefits from conflict, but I don't think it stimulates our economy to the point that, you know, it's not like World War II. We're hiring millions of workers, right? Like, we might open up an extra factory. Like, do you know anybody?

We just opened up a new ammunition plant, Mesquite, Texas, to build artillery ammunition. artillery rounds. So maybe that'll employ 200 people. Like we're really not talking like these major gains in production or in workers or in profits from opening up a new ammunition plant. But in terms of injection back into the U.S. economy. It helps us because we are manufacturing our own stuff. But we need to do that anyway. I think before the war in Ukraine started, we hadn't manufactured a new state.

our missile since like 2008, I want to say. And a lot of those people retired. So we didn't really have the expertise to manufacture those weapon systems again. We had to bring all that back and figure out how to do it. And some components weren't available anymore because companies went out of business. So now we have to go like, oh, wow, this chip isn't available anymore. We need to redesign this weapon system with a different kind of chip. So would you say the U.S. economy benefits from conflict? Not to the, I don't think. I don't think. so, not to the extent that, that, not to the extent that we would like it to, that you would actually see an uptick.

Like, again, like during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, who really benefited? Were there, were our standards of living raised? How many people went to work at an ammunition supplier? We already have a lot of that infrastructure in place. I don't really see the economy benefiting to a great amount from spending. Because don't forget, every time you buy a bullet, that's one less book, right? That's one less dollar in taxes you can give back to someone to spend on their own. And a bullet doesn't do anything, right?

You can't build a school with a bullet. Right. So there is a, what is it called the Broken Windows Theory? Like, that's already been proven wrong. The idea that, oh, if I break a window, then I have to employ the person who made the glass and the person who fixed the window and the person who drove the truck and the person who sold the fuel to the guy who drove the truck. and that's great, but if you didn't break the window, you could use that money to do other things. Right.

Right. So I don't really see that benefiting our economy all that much. So now when we look at American defense spending, and again, these are sort of loose numbers because I don't have them offhand. But I've seen the charts where it's like, you know, what America spends and what everyone else spends. And like what we spend on defense spending is more than like what most countries' entire GDP is. So I'm curious those kinds of things. Like, does that not sort of contribute to this idea that they're not. is like America has a vested interest in pumping defense.

It might contribute to the idea, but it's not necessarily right. And that's why we have an expeditionary military. We could just pull everything back and say, you know what, we're just going to have a defensive military. We're going to have a small active duty component. We're going to have a small Navy and everything else is going to be National Guard, like reservists that can be activated when they need to be activated. That was basically our military in World War I. We could do that.

We could spend significantly less on defense, but if you take a look at the budget, I think like 55 some percent of it's like just Social Security. Like I think we spend 20 percent of our budget on defense, which actually works out to like 3.4 percent, something like that, 3.6 of our GDP. And I'm doing these numbers off the top of my head trying to remember the chart. Sure. But we used to spend 9.6 percent of GDP on weapons systems. Now we're down to 3.4. like but you know when the government grows we tend to honestly we should probably be spending more on defense not less

really well if you take a look at soldiers there was a bill in congress I think soldiers pay was going to be increased I want to say 15% or maybe it was 30% like lower enlisted soldiers that hasn't been done um you know lower enlisted soldiers their pay is definitely they're getting paid less than what someone makes at McDonald's. Now granted, like, they get free health care. Well, it's not free you earn it. They get free health care, free meals, education benefits. You get that. So that's certainly

one advantage. But a lot of people just look at pay. We should probably be paying our soldiers more. If you look at our Air Force, our Air Force is basically like half the size it was during the Cold War. They're actually considering the Maryland Air National Guard. They're considering taking away all their airplanes and just making them a cyber unit. Interesting. Which is, you know, to me is bad because that's, they want to get rid of the A-10, which is understandable.

It's this attack plane. It's not really survivable in a Lisco, large-scale combat operations environment. I get that. But, hey, let's replace the A-10 with the F-35. Hmm. So, now, I've heard this claim that America is sort of the police of the world. You hear

people talk about that all the time, that we are sort of We're not doing the sort of like World War I National Guard kind of, I guess, defensive situation one military that you had talked about before. And that we're kind of proactive expeditionary. We have bases all over and we're kind of patrolling what happens globally. Do you think that that's a smart sort of foreign policy position or do you think that exposes us? I think it's a smart foreign policy position if you want commerce between nations. Because when it comes to police in the world, really that's the U.S. Navy. right like the reason we're able to get cheap stuff from other countries is that our our navy

polices the world and prevents piracy we've made the oceans safe for international commerce why did we place ships in the red sea to fight the hoothies and shoot their missiles down well number one we're farming XP we're going to need that for for if diplomacy fails deterrence fails and China invades Taiwan we now have all this aid on how to shoot down missiles. The USS Carney, incredible ship. USS Carney,

I think they're like 55 and O. They, these sailors, I actually sent the USS Carney a bunch of my t-shirts. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I call it the Department of the Boat people. It's like, it looks like the Navy's.

I don't know that much about the Navy. But the Navy is so foreign to me. I actually went on the USS Eisenhower, which is an aircraft carrier. The Navy invited me on the USS Eisenhower. And it was, that place, people call you an aircraft carrier a floating city. It's a floating factory.

And what it produces is vengeance. Right? That's a factor that produces vengeance. But it has all of the dangers associated with any factory. Like everything on that carrier is trying to kill you. Like there's chains hanging down and there's peto tubes from the, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. tubes from the airplanes that measure their speed and stuff

they're sticking out and they're poking in the eye and like everything on that ship is, I was on the flight deck of the carrier watching these things launch. I'm amazed everybody up on that deck isn't dead. But they have to go through this whole

training program just to get certified to be up on the deck. Like watching watching carriers watching these young men and women on the Eisenhower launch planes off that.

carrier. It was like watching a ballet through chainsaws or something. It was amazing what they did. It was absolutely amazing. And seeing like Navy culture compared to Army culture, that was kind of amazing too. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. The differences between the two cultures. Yeah. The Navy eats separately. Wait, what do you mean? So in the Navy, uh, officers, they eat in a different mess than the enlisted men and the chiefs who are like the senior NCOs, the senior. sergeants. Well, they call them chiefs or petty officers. The petty officers have their own mess. The chiefs have their own mess. The mess meaning place to eat. The enlisted people have their own mess. The enlisted people have their own mess. And I thought that was weird because in the U.S. Army,

it's like you sit down at the table, eat your food, burp, and taste it later. You could be sitting next to a full colonel. That doesn't tend to happen all the time. It can. And the officers, you know, you know, usually eat with their men in the army. In the Navy, they separate the officers from the petty officers from the enlisted. I think that goes back to like sale times when like the officers were educated and they couldn't be around those riff-ref. And today, from what I actually asked about this, because I was an NCO. I was a sergeant.

I was a sergeant. I was a sergeant, a sergeant, a first sergeant for a little while. And the reason they do that in the Navy is that like it was. was, like, you do your job all day, and it's nice to, like, not have to be around your guys and just be around guys of your own ranks so you can, like, vent or talk about things or bounce ideas off of things. And I think that that's because when you're in the Navy, like, you're, especially if you're a chief, you're like a specialist. And, like, Chief, like, E7, like the chief is, that's like a major thing when you become a chief. There's, like, a whole ceremony in the Army, when you become an E7, when you become an E7, when you're, you're, you're, you. you become starting first class, it's like, hey, by the way, you got staff duty on the next three-day

weekend. That's your celebration right there. And the Navy, like, if you become a chief, you are at the pinnacle of your abilities, your technical abilities. You're the best electrician. You're the best, you know, you know everything about radar. You know everything about cryptography. You know everything about whatever.

So when you become a chief in the Navy, it's like a really big deal. So you get your own little place to eat, you know, a little chief's mess. Interesting. Yeah. Such an interesting little culture. But yeah, I understand navies do protect global commerce. Like I remember reading that China didn't really have a very advanced Navy until relatively recently. Yeah, they're trying.

And they have all these ports. They have this massive coastline. Like they have deep ports that seems like they have every reason to have a Navy. But according to what I read, it wasn't until they really started manufacturing that they were like, okay, we're shipping all of this product out of here. if we're going to be shipping product and becoming the factory of the world, we need to have some sort of defense in order to get those supply lines open to get these things where they need to go. Why do they have a base in Djibouti?

Right. Djibouti is a very, very interesting spot. Can you explain? Because everyone hears this growing up and they go, oh, that's so funny, there's a country with the name Djiboutian. And can you explain why this tiny little country has so many bases, why it's so important geopolitically and why every country wants a piece of it? Well, it's right on like the corner of the Red Sea.

and the Babelamandab Strait, which leads into the sea of Gulf of Aden. And that is, if you want to ship goods to Europe, you have to go through the Suez Canal. You must go through the Suez Canal. And so to have a base in Djibouti, which is a relatively stable country, that's really important. The French had a base there originally. It's called Camp LeMunier, and the U.S. kind of took that over. The French were still involved there, too. and the president of Djibouti just a couple of years ago

that made a deal with China. So China has a base like six miles away from the U.S. base. But China has a vested interest in keeping this base there because it's part of their Belt and Road initiative. You know, they need to be able to send to protect tankers going from one place to the other or shipping containers going from one place to the other. And, you know, that I think it's,

if you don't have to go around, you don't have to go through the, the Suez Canal, but if you don't, that's extra 16 to 20 days. Yeah, a lot more money. Which is fuel, which is crew pay,

which is whatever. And that's why the Houthis were being idiots in Yemen and destroying ships, shooting missiles at ships, because they thought, all right, well, the West will pressure Israel

because they don't want to lose money on ships having to go all the way around Africa. And actually, when I understand, I think the, oh my god i can't remember the horn of africa i hear that's actually a pretty dangerous place for ships yeah so and i've heard have you seen this they're trying to circumvent the suez canal

that there's like sort of speculative plans to create a new canal have you ever seen this no i mean are the egyptians doing it i believe i need to find it maybe i can i can pull it off my computer but it was like a speculative plan again i don't know if this is a conspiracy or what but kind of going through Gaza, that they're going to try to develop a canal that then can circumvent the Suez Canal. Well, I'd have to go through Israel as well. Right. So I think it's kind of at the behest of the Israeli government or something to this effect. If you haven't heard of it, that's totally fine. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, which will make people go, like, oh, see, the Jews is why the Jews actually want Gaza, because they want to build a canal and they

want to, I mean, honestly, if, my God, if they, if they did do that and the Palestinian people get their hands in that, I could actually solve a lot of their problems because, like, I've often said, look, Gaza could be a freaking paradise. Nice beaches, Mediterranean climate, a lot of people there are educated, they have stable power that they get from Israel. Israel supplies a lot of their electricity. Israel supplies a lot of their water. Those are two things that most people on Africa don't have, right? You have educated people. I mean, these people are building rockets out of sugar and fertilizer. Well, let's get them working for Microsoft. They've got some good engineers there, you know? Right. Like, Gaza could be

a freaking paradise. They just got to put down the guns. They can have some guns. You have a police force or something like that. Yeah, you can have some guns, but shoot, let's, I mean, you're right next to Israel. a lot of Palestinians used to work in Israel. It could be a technical powerhouse. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you are a man who needs a personal shopper. Now, here's how you're going to do it. You're going to go check out my good friends over at Bespoke Post. They scour the internet, every single corner in recess of the internet, to find the coolest items that you want, that you didn't even know that you needed.

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It could be better. It can always be better. Let's say you're in the 1% you're about to be in the 0.01% with BluHu. Let's get back to the show. Why does the U.S. have such a vested interest in protecting the Israeli state and working with them as an alliance

geographically and geopolitically? We're the only democracy. We're really the only democracy in the Middle East. Turkey is kind of a democracy, Iraq, is kind of a democracy. Egypt is kind of a democracy. Why does that matter? Couldn't we sort of prop up a dictator

that then can control a region at our behest and everything works out? Sure. Didn't work out that well in South America. Got to do a couple coup d'etas or whatever. But I'm curious, like, why... I hear people say that, oh, it's the only democracy in the Middle East. Why is that important?

Well, I think that as Americans, it's necessary to support democracy wherever we go. And also, Israelis are like us. I mean, there is a strong bond between America and Israel. There has been since Israel was founded. You have a lot of Israelis. They come to America to seek their fortune.

The guy who started Wii work, he was Israeli. I actually, I used to live in a place called Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And a lot of my friends there were Israeli. I learned how to speak a couple words of Hebrew, mainly to play poker. Yeah. Because when they played poker,

I started to get to know all these guys because it was only Israeli Jews who went to the gun range. Because they're all like former IDF guys. Yeah, they like guns. And, you know, I don't go shooting as much as I used to. So I used to, God, when I

got out of the military, I owned 13 guns. It's a lot of guns. Well, it's a lot of guns to some people's. It's not enough to some others, right? I own 13 guns. And I used to go to the range like twice a week, Tuesdays and usually on Saturdays, I go to the range.

And, you know, you start making friends with people. You go to the gun range and it was all Israelis. And so hey, Ray, Chavalshili, come, come to my poker game. Every Friday night. We're doing it at Tzuki's house. You know? I learned enough Hebrew to say

I'm out. I'm in, you know, numbers. I fold. Yeah, I fold. Yeah. I learned enough to speak a little bit of Hebrew. At least I know when they're talking about me. But you know, they're

Americans. They're, they're, I mean, I say that. I also say a lot of Iraqis I met are Americans too. They are as capitalist as, like, you know, every, I tell you, every Iraqi ever met as a hustle. You know, they're all, oh, I have a cousin that can do that for you, you know. They're all like, like inside it. I swear to God, I think Iraq's going to be a paradise. Iraqis are like the Germans of the Middle East.

They're very industrious people, you know. And I had this one Iraqi policeman who asked me, like, Ryan, when things calm now, will you come back here on vacation? I'm like, dude, I hope so. Yeah. Iraq is it, I think it's an amazing country, some amazing people. Yeah. So Israel kind of serves as a democratic stronghold in the region that America can correspond with on diplomatic terms. Yeah, and we have exercises with them.

And there, we are militaries, we trade not only weapon systems, so we trade information. The trophy system. Every, just about every murk of a four, I think, has a trophy system. Trophy is, think of it like an iron dome for a tank. When someone shoots a missile at a tank, this system will detect the missile coming at and intercept it and destroy it. In fact, a lot of the Palestinian propaganda that you see, which, you know, you see the little red, red triangle bounce on top of the tank and then there's an explosion. That's usually the

trophy system shooting the missile down. You notice none of these productions ever have an actual destroyed and burning tank. You see them, a lot of them in Russia. You don't see any coming out of Israel. I think, I think Palestinians have catastrophically destroyed one vehicle that I know for sure. I was a namer, which is a, which is a armored personnel carrier. But, The trophy system, we have that on like 100 American tanks in Germany, the trophy system, which can shoot down enemy rockets. So we share that technology. Israel used the Patriot. We gather data from that, their Patriot engagements. And those are the spice bomb? Spice. Oh, my God. I'm trying to remember the acronym for spice. But it's like this adapter kit for a bomb they have that uses optical

and you can use laser guidance as well. It's like a joint venture between, I think, Raphael and the United States developed this glide kit. So we share stuff all the time. We share technology information. There's a bandage called the Israeli bandage that we carried in Iraq. We actually stopped calling it the Israeli bandage. I forget the exact name that we changed it,

but I think soldiers still call the Israeli bandage. But essentially it was a bandage that could be put on with one hand. Interesting. It was a bandage that when you take it out of its packaging, it kind of falls open. And you can wrap it. And you can wrap it with, you know, there's like a little plastic nub here that you can do that. And you can wrap it with one hand. Interesting.

They're, one of the things that Israel is really good at is they're really focused on survivability when it comes to their soldiers living through a catastrophic incident. a tank being destroyed or just keeping a soldier alive until they can get medically evacuated. Is it because they have fewer men? They have fewer men. They have respect for life. You know, one of the things I noticed when I evaluated some of the footage of Hamas going into Israeli homes was none of these guys had first aid kids or water. Those are two things you need. You need water.

When you fight, you need water. So why didn't these guys have first aid kits in water? Because they didn't expect them coming back. The guys who were taking prisoners, those guys, had first aid kits and water. Interesting. Is it possible they didn't have water because they weren't supplied water through Israeli government? Yeah, well, we're attacking these homes.

We'll just take water from these homes. Interesting. But doesn't Israel supply water? So if they don't have water, is it possible to Israel? Well, I'm talking about water as in like canteens. They didn't have canteens. I see. This is like Sun Tzu talks about this in the art of war. That if you see, if you see enemies approaching you and they don't put their pots over fire, that means they're not coming home. They're ready to fight to the death. It's a very interesting thing. I had never really thought about, but this reminded me of it. That if they leave and you see their encampment without their pots over water, they're not expecting to come back. Oh, that's interesting. It's kind of sounds similar. Yeah, those dudes weren't. Some of those dudes are not expecting to come back. I mean, I did a whole breakdown. I watched all this footage from Hamas, the GoPro footage.

which is horrible stuff. You know, guys like posing over like old men that they had killed like a deer. You know. That's awful. Just like that was, that was not good. But yeah, some of those dudes, you look at it, they're like, where's your canteens? Where's your first aid kits?

These dudes are not planning on coming home. That's interesting. Now, we talked a little bit about disinformation being used in America, which I'm completely, you know, open to. I think that's completely reasonable. I mean, I've even read different articles about, you know, like foreign agencies having like police forces in America. Yeah, something China does.

Yeah, I've heard that, which again, like, I don't want to spread fucking xenophobia, not your Chinese neighbor. He's probably not a spy. The guy in China sounds probably not a spy. But the Chinese government does have agents in America that are kind of working within universities and they kind of have some type of allegiance to the Chinese government and the CCP. And they're kind of working conjunction either, you know, directly or kind of softly. So I'm completely open to that. But I'm curious about when we talk about TikTok, right, being used as a weapon, I think that's completely reasonable. But I'm curious how America has used our platforms.

And obviously, we were first to the social media game. We kind of like, you look at Arab Spring, like obviously all these American companies that are able to disseminate information. I've been doing this for a long time. Does America participate in these games in the same way in other countries by kind of inserting our narratives through our social media? and obviously like in China and Russia all of our stuff is banned but I'm curious does that happen still do you have any thoughts on that?

We really haven't I know that people had said that during COVID like we had messed with the Philippines to encourage them not to take the Chinese shot I don't know whether that's true we typically we stopped doing a lot of our active measures in like the

I want to say like the 1970s it just didn't work as well You need a free society to do that. And our active measures were like we would publish like a biography of a Russian general who complained about corruption in Russia. You know, or we would, I'm trying to think of a – like we established a jazz magazine in Eastern Germany that had some politically subversive articles in it. And, you know, we probably – I would say the one act of measure. that we do use is Voice of America, which isn't even an act of measure.

It's the truth. What is that? Voice of America is a broadcast service, both on the Internet and radio, that is in the local language of the host nation, which kind of tells America's side of the story when it comes to news. Oh, interesting.

We'll broadcast that into Russia. We'll have it on the Internet. I've been on Voice of America, Russia, number of times. I've been on the Armenian service a number of times. and we have the So you can kind of consider a voice of American active measure

but we don't lie We don't actually create propaganda We just we tell the truth That people aren't actually getting From their own government Yeah I've heard this about like modern art During the Cold War Have you ever heard this before?

No, tell me about that This is really interesting I'll send you the article again I don't I'm not an expert But I just read an article It's really interesting that America was sort of like Not there was obviously this modern Or postmodern art trend

In the United States where you had like the Jackson Pollock's doing these very like free form, you know, paint splatter, giant canvas paintings that were like very liberated, that were very free. You know, art was just kind of what you interpreted it as. It was this big movement in America. And the CIA had kind of utilized that as a tool in Russia to say, oh, look at how free America is. Look what's happening in America that you can paint and be free. You don't have to be confined by these rigid, brutalist rules that your government's imposing on you.

And that it was used kind of as like a soft power. tool to culturally inoculate the people of Russia. Maybe. I thought it was very interesting. I actually don't think we're other than Voice of America. We're really, I don't think we're doing any of that. And I think a lot of it said as a, in some ways, like, we don't think we need to.

You don't think so? I have a hard time believe in that, to be frank. So here's why I say that. And it's because one of the things I actually advocate, and I've stood up on podiums and I've said this, that we need what's called an offensive PAL. So PAO means public affairs officer. And right now when the military does something, oftentimes they'll put it out in like a press release.

Or let's say China, one of China's destroyers and counted an American destroyer and they like cut off the American destroyer to try to cause an incident or just be unsafe. I think the Chinese, there was like a symbol for diver down or something like the Australian were trying to repair a propeller and there are divers in the water and China used active sonar which like caused. Yeah, you can kill people. Yeah, something bad happened to the people in the water. And, you know, we call China out for doing that.

Like, maybe don't ping your sonar when you have a diver down flag up, right? But we're very, very bad at getting the message out. And we have pro-military influencers. I was just at the U.S. Army birthday ball in Tampa, Florida. with four of them, three of them. Chris Cappy, Task and Purpose. Preston Stewart, habitual line crosser, Ethan Long. We invited Matt, it's very fun day,

but I think he was watching all of his red tank tops. But, you know, we have these resources. Freaking use us. When an incident happens, call us and say, hey, this thing happened, here's the footage, here's what actually happened. If you want to put this out, you can. If you don't want to put it out, don't put it out.

but we have that and in order to do that we need an offensive PAO we kind of have that the Navy has what they call Vipar teams which is Vipar sounds a lot

cooler than it actually is visual information I know right visual information personnel Viper I want Viper yeah I want Viper teams but when China's acting a fool

on their destroyer the Viper teams go out with the video cameras so that we can show our side of the story but we don't push that out to influencers and say hey, this is what really happened.

Instead, the influencers have to find that and put it out themselves. But how much do we need the influencers if we have the platform that they influence on? I guess that's my question, right? Like, you know, if the government's controlling social media, I think everyone can consider that to be bad. Right. I mean, we saw that during COVID with Twitter, with the government saying you need to suppress these people. Now, I think when the government starts telling platform, to start suppressing speech, that's when people are going to get out their plate carriers in Hawaiian shirts.

Right. Like that's bad. Mm-hmm. Right. You fight lies with knowledge. You fight lies with the truth. You don't do it by suppressing people. You know, I've, you know, I fought misinformation today with the Bogatti story.

I created a video about it. Here's the truth. Here's what a Bogotty receipt actually looks like. This Elena Zelenska, she didn't purchase a bagadi. This is not what the receipt looks like. But, you know, unfortunately, if we start suppressing speech, we go down a road, I don't know if we want to go down. Now, one of the things I have advocated for, I've done this, I've stood up on podiums, and we need to kinetically target disinformation actors.

in foreign countries. And what would that look like? I don't know. I just find them. I mean, it could look like putting a tomahawk missile into a building. Well, look, if you're, if information war is war, then you are a combatant.

You choose to work there. If someone is working in an arms factory, are they a valid target? That arms factory is a valid target. Why isn't the data center of a disinformation shop a valid target? It could be a cyber weapon that we use. We could shut it down through a cyber weapon. We could ask a local police force.

Let's say it's coming out of India. Well, we're probably not going to fire a T-LAM into India. But we could tell the Indian police, we would like this shutdown police. This is causing disinformation. This is whatever. And they might cooperate with that. And if they don't, there's various ways that we might be able to engage those targets. Have we done that?

I wouldn't really know anything about that. I'm not on that end of, I just find them. I don't know what happens afterwards. Interesting. Yeah, because it seems to me like in the way China's utilizing TikTok, right? Where, you know, they benefit from chaos in America. And so if there's a story or a social trend or something that they can boost and maybe amplify on their platform to inject into the American psyche, that seems, you know, like a very effective weapon. As we've kind of discussed, it's very useful.

you can pressure local politicians, you can change foreign policy. I just don't see why we don't or what we haven't used that in other countries. You know, if we're in a conflict with, you know, China, you know, if we're in like a modern Cold War, right? Yeah. If there's countries that are kind of neutral,

they're not really sure which way to go, why not on Instagram or Facebook prop up, you know, American stories or American media that kind of show that and sort of neutralize, you know, the Chinese side that, you know, would potentially sway a middle of the road, you know, citizen in a different country. Well, that's Voice of America. It's one of the things we do with Voice of America.

I still see why we wouldn't do it with Facebook. Do foreigners use Facebook to the extent that Americans do? I have no idea, but my suspicion says yes, but I don't know. I don't know. That's a good question. I think, like, I think in China it's Yandy. That's one of their platforms. But that's Russia, I think.

Russia is Yenna. Yeah, you're right. Russia's Yenji. China is like. I forget exactly what it is Dow yen. Yeah, yeah, that's their equivalent of TikTok. I mean, I suppose that that might be

an option. The deal is that we have to tell the truth. We have to? We're Americans. Maybe I'm very idealistic. No, I'm with you. Like, I'm Team America here. You know what I mean? But I also think it's important for countries kind of acknowledge times that things have been sort of misinterpreted

or maybe, you know, like Gulf of Tonkin is a thing people always like to point out where it's like, oh, there's a false flag that didn't really happen, but it did help us. And granted, it happened a long time ago. But I look at situations like that where I'm like, America utilized our media to try to like, you know, push a narrative globally. Which, again, I'm team America.

So I'm like, whatever we got to do, we're the boys. Let's make it happen. You know what I'm saying? Like, I was born in France, but I'm USA. Really? Yeah, I was born in Paris. Yeah. But I'm not a turncoat, okay, don't get me wrong.

But I'm looking at this. I'm like, yeah, I want America to win, but I also think we have to be at least somewhat upfront with like, okay, here's what we've done in the past. So I'm curious, like, when you look at things like in the past that have happened, like through like CIA ops back in the day, does that, like, should that be acknowledged by the U.S.? Where it's like, yeah, we did these things, but now we're focused on the truth and like should people believe us? Oh, I think people should believe us and that's why we need to focus on the truth.

Mm-hmm. Because, you know, at the end of the day that the truth is going to come out. And I kind of like being on the side of the truth. You know, I wouldn't, I personally, I personally wouldn't. engage in any kind of disinformation operations. Like if the government came to me and said, Ryan, we really need you to put out a video about this thing. This thing really didn't happen.

I'd say, you know, I really appreciate it, but I'm good. Like there's, I mean, I am 100% for America here. I'm 100% for creators being able to work with the military to push out topics that are beneficial to the military. You look at, we don't have, we don't have a recruitment problem in the U.S. We have a, we have a messaging problem. You know, one of the big issues that I've had with the military is that, you know, some people, like, I've embedded with the military before where, like, I embedded with 101st airborne. And I've embedded with, I've embedded with 1001st airborne, I've embedded with the 82nd airborne, I did an aerosol with 1001st airborne.

I was at Project Convergence Capstone 4, which was where we basically helped implement any sense or any decide or any shooter program. And, you know, some people in the military get it. They get that social media is a good thing. And, you know, the teenage kid that is thinking, you know, hey, you know, joining the military might be a good idea. They're getting that information from social media. they're not getting it from NASCAR commercials. You know, they're getting it from social media. And we need to start focusing on social media seriously as an engagement tool with our young people.

Because that's where they're getting most of their information. So we need to start taking that seriously. Do you think films like Top Gun or like, you know, pro-military America films kind of aid that effort? It seems to me, like, you know, the U.S. government would have a very strong interest in kind of promoting, like, video games and film that would show the American military in a positive light, which Top Gun does, right? You watch that and you're like, I want to do that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that could. That certainly could be part of it. But I think that what would really resonate is that private, who's a paratrooper, who's like, I'm going to take you on a. I'm going to take you on a paratroop. And I'm going to put a GoPro on my helmet. And I'm going to jump out of this plane.

I'm going to talk about how awesome it is to be a paratrooper in the 82nd airborne. So I think that, yeah, you could spend half a billion dollars on a movie. Or you could allow that private to tell his story, which is more engaging. I think I'm going with the private, right? And so in some ways, like habitual line crosser, habitual line crosser, Ethan Long, I'm going to say he's a friend of mine now. Yeah, we met in Tampa. We made some content together.

He's a good guy. He's a patriot guy. Patriot missile system guy. He's a patriot instructor. The guy knows more about air defense than I'll ever know. And the army, like his commander is like, he's like, hey, I have an idea for a video. He's like, hey, take the time you need, go make the video. And like that, that's only going to increase engagement and increase the pool of people who go, like,

Man, you know, I want to do that. Fire and Patriot Missile sounds like a cool job. And it is a cool job. And that will get way more play than a movie about people firing Patriot missiles. You think so? Maybe. I mean, maybe R.O.I. But I look at Top Gun.

I'm like, dude, that was a global hit. Everyone loved it. I think Top Gun worked because what they did was they made a movie. There was no messaging in that movie. there was no like, you know, we're going to try to hit some kind of necessary limit for characters. This character has to be this. This character has to be that. They just made a good movie for Top Gun 2, right?

Although the Air Force would say that that movie would have been over in five minutes if they just used a B2 bomber. But that's, you know, like the movie has to happen. Exactly. Exactly. So you had mentioned that you work with AI in some capacity with the drones at your defense contractor. AI is a fascinating thing, obviously, it is potentially the invention of the century, certainly the decade. I'm curious if you can explain how AI is being used in military and in warfare and how far are we away from Terminator-esque, you know, killing machines that can just. destroy the world. So we've had these Terminator machines since the 1980s. The Aegis system that's on every American destroyer and cruiser, although we're getting rid of the cruisers,

that's the Aegis system is essentially, it's not AI, but it kind of is. It is a system that can coordinate among all ships when it detects missiles coming in. It can fire missiles automatically these targets, you can make all these decisions. The Patriot system. Since the 1980s, we can just put Patriot into auto mode, and it will decide the engagement, which missile to engage, which targets to engage. You can override that. But we've had AI since the 1980s.

We've had killer robots since the 1980s. Like, that's easy. Got it. For the most part, right now, what we're using AI for is targeting. Like, you know, a couple of days ago, someone said that. Ukraine fired an attack cam's missile at a bunch of beachgoers. And that wasn't true. Most likely the footage from that was a missile being intercepted and shot down.

Number one, you probably shouldn't be vacationing in a war zone. That's kind of on you there, boo. But number two, you know, one of the reasons you wouldn't fire a very expensive missile at a bunch of beachgoers is that when you fire a weapon system, you have to think about. effector, right? What is the effect that you want? Well, what is killing a bunch of beachgoers give you? It doesn't give you anything, right? And you're going to burn a precious attack cams missile to kill a bunch of beachgoers. Probably not the best use of your resources. But number two, the launch location, there's a finite amount of launch locations. And you can take that and you can throw that into AI and you can predict the next launch location from that.

You can see if there's a pattern. Interesting. So the Russians, no doubt in my way. mind, they have AI looking at all the launch locations from attack cams. Because their radar, when you see a ballistic missile launch, attack cams really is a ballistic missile. When you see a ballistic missile launch, you can figure out the point of origin. That's trivial. Right. And from that, you can feel, okay, that's what the launch location was. All right, well, they launch here and they launch here, and then they launch here. Okay, so the next launch location is probably going to be here. Then you can put assets in place to either strike those targets when they set up or to further intercept those targets when they're shot.

So right now we're using AI and Palenters has done some work with this too of just seeing like what is in an area. Like hey, I found an enemy here. What is the best effector that we can use to disrupt that target? And so the AI might say, well, there's a brigade over here that has this kind of missile

that can affect that target. So that's kind of what we're using AI for now. At the tactical level, we should be using it for target identification and we do it in some ways. Like I've worked with software that says, all right, we're trying to find Daddy El Badi. So with the software that I worked with at Accenture, Accenture Federal Services, one of the things we could do is called Aegean. You could say, all right, show me all the white trucks in this area.

And you'll show you all the white trucks. Not all the white SUVs, not any white vans, not any white cars, just white trucks. You find a white truck with a dent in the back. Because we know Daddy L. Baddy has a land cruiser that has a dent in the right rear corridor. panel. And that's how we track Daddy old batty. Interesting. Now when it comes to autonomous weapons systems, they call it Hoodle or Human Out of the Loop. There are, I know that the Armenians use loiter ammunition. Loiter ammunition is a good example of kind of a primitive AI. So you might load a picture of a tank that you want to destroy into that loiter ammunition. You fire that

loiter ammunition. That loiter ammunition will stay up for 10, 12 hours, however long it has a fuel and it'll look for that vehicle. And when it matches with what it is designed to attack, it'll go after that target. That's a human out of the loop AI. I believe that the Armenians use that in their war. The Azerbaijani's used that in their war against Armenia in 2000. Wow. It's a little scary.

Or 2020. Like the black mirror, you know, viewer in me is like, well, what are the odds? You get it wrong and you accidentally just kill an ice cream truck. We get it wrong all the time. That's not good. Humans get it wrong all the time. Oh, I see. Humans.

No, I'm serious. Look, the one advantage of AI is it doesn't get tired. And another thing I've advocated for is that we need to start drawing boxes. When you look at every Bradley, Bradley is a CIV, Commander's thermal viewer, the M1 tank is a CITV, command as a thermal viewer, we can hook that to a computer system. and it can constantly be searching for things that look like targets. And you can just draw boxes around those targets. So that way, you know, it'll just, hey, bring this to your attention. Hey, there's an 85% chance.

This is a T-72. Got it. All right. Well, let's service that target. Interesting. Now, I've heard that drones that use AI. One of the benefits is that, you know, for a long time, Americans were using, you know, drone systems that were not manned,

but they were piloted by someone at a base somewhere across the world. In Nevada. We're still doing this to a large extent. And part of the problem with that is that they can get jammed. And so, you know, anti-drone technology would be used to jam up that drone, and then the communication is then lost between the pilot and the drone, and the drone will kind of just circle and then auto land wherever it's supposed to go. That's a problem because if we're trying to get a target or whatever, we can't do it anymore.

Now, having AI in the drone means it can't be jammed. So even if it loses communication with the base, it can still carry out the mission that it needs to do. Is that more or less true? The jamming part is more like the GPS jamming, so it might not know where it is. But a good AI will be able to use terrain features or even the stars. Oh, interesting.

Okay, this is where I actually am. If I know the time and I know the general location of where I am, use the stars to kind of, you know, navigators have been doing it out on ships since the 1500s. Oh, wow. Fourteen hundreds? Yeah, Columbus. Oh, that's what the sextant was. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Even the astronauts had a sextant. They could figure out where they were in space if they really had to. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, you could use it. In fact, a missile we used. We developed a ballistic missile that could be fired from a B-52. And normally ballistic missiles are fired from silos.

We actually, I can't remember the darn any of it. I did a video about it, though. But this ballistic missile could be hung off the back of a B-52, and it actually kind of had a system that looked up at the stars. They could figure out where it was from, because it needs to figure out where it is to figure out where it needs to go. Of course.

I think the British, they put it on their Vulcan bomber as well. It had to like stick out the bottom because it had to see the stars. Interesting. Now, the AI component is fascinating to me. And now I'm going to compare it and sort of pair it with the scariest technology we have as nuclear weapons.

Are you concerned about, nuclear weapons and AI combining forces? Are you concerned about nuclear war in general? No, not one bit. Why? Because, so we should all be concerned about nuclear war. And one of the things I've been fighting is Annie Jacobson, who writes a couple of books. She's written for the Jack Ryan show on Amazon Prime.

She just released a book recently. A freaking book. Really? I didn't read the whole thing. Nuclear winter is like, that was really pushed as a Russian narrative. like nuclear, yeah. I mean, Carl Sagan kind of researched that term,

but it might not be entirely true. And we have different climate models now because we've been looking at climate change. So we did a lot of those nuclear. So nuclear winter, the idea was that if there was a nuclear wall, all this dust, it would be cast up in the air and the world be plunged into another ice age.

And we're doing that with 1980s tech. And when Russia found out about this, they really pushed the nuclear winter narrative. And we got Anna Jacobson freaking pushing that damn Russian, nuclear winter narrative again. That darn book has caused me so much freaking trouble because I got to run around talking about it. I don't. So nuclear wars should be a concern. But when you take a look at what's happening in Ukraine, there's only essentially today. There's five use cases for a battlefield

nuclear weapon. That's kind of the fear that a battlefield nuclear weapon would be used and that will eventually go to strategic city buster counterforce countervalue nuclear weapons. And so what is a battlefield nuclear weapon? So it would be a tactical nuclear weapon. So it would be a small nuclear weapon that's localized and just used to destroy a formation. So there's essentially five reasons you'd use a battlefield nuclear weapon. The first reason is to establish a breakthrough. And we actually practice this in the 1950s where we would drop a nuclear weapon. There's footage of this of soldiers getting up out of their trenches and walking toward the mushroom cloud.

The idea was that we could use a nuclear weapon to blow a hole through enemy defenses and then rush our troops through that and fight. That's how we get in their rear. In fact, we organized our army along those lines. It was called the Pentomic Army. And we had, down at the, like, brigade level, we had colonels with the authority to launch these mini-nuclear weapons. Davy Crockett was one example. It almost said, if you ever play the video game Fallout, or you had the Fat Boy? Yeah, that was the Davy Crockett, essentially.

It was this recoilless rifle, nuclear bomb. We had nuclear artillery. We had the lance and the Honest John missile over nuclear cable. so local commanders could use nuclear weapons to blow a hole through enemy lines and rush through. In fact, one of the reasons the T-72, the Russian premier or the most manufactured Russian tank, one of the reasons it has an auto-loader is that Russia expected to fight in a nuclear environment. And every time you open that breach, if you have a human loader, the loader is getting all that shine, all that radiation is coming in through the breach, and they're getting their right arm juiced up.

Right? So if you just eliminate the loader, there's one less person that's going to get juiced up. You can keep the people inside the tank safely buttoned up. And a tank is a pretty safe place if there's radiation outside. So that's one of the reasons they use an auto loader instead of a human loader. It makes the tank a little bit smaller too. Interesting. But, well, that one use would be use case one, using it as a breakthrough. Well, Russia, they don't have the troops to mass to do a break. breakthrough. Right? So to use a nuclear weapon on Ukrainian lines and then rush a bunch of people forward, right now, ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance is so good. Russia can't form more than a company to mass against a target because they try to form more than a company attacking Amazon missiles will start raining down on top of them. Because it creates this huge signature, thermal signature and radio signature and visual

signature. You just can't, Ukraine can't do it either, you know, because Russia has the, the oil, the on 10 drones that are watching them and going, oh, well, they just massed a bunch of troops. Let's fire some rockets. Wow. So that is gone. A second reason you'd use a tactical nuclear weapon,

a battlefield nuclear weapon, would be, let's say someone makes a breakthrough. Let's say Ukraine makes a breakthrough into Russian lines, and they're driving toward the Sea of Azov to cut off Crimea. That would be a use case for using a nuclear weapon. Blow one up right on their line of advance. It'll stop their line of advance, finish off the stragglers that survived.

Ukraine isn't going to make a breakthrough to that extent either because of the same reasons that Russia has. They can't form enough troops to actually make a breakthrough. It's tough going through minefields. So that's off the table. Third reason you use a nuclear weapon is to destroy underground bunkers, command centers like NORAD, or like there's some field command center that's underground, or let's say the Iranians have uranium enrichment underground.

that's a valid use case for using a nuclear weapon. Not saying it's right, but it's a valid use case. Ukraine really doesn't have any of those underground command centers. The fourth reason you use a nuclear weapon is on a carrier strike group. That's a pretty good use case for a nuclear weapon. Use it on a carrier strike group, especially you put on a hypersonic missile. It's a good use case. Ukraine doesn't have any aircraft carriers.

And the fifth reason is to destroy either an amphibious landing site or a forording site. Ukraine doesn't have a navy. Now, you could use a nuclear weapon if they're doing a river crossing. You drop that on the ground. You make it dirty. And that kind of eliminates that place as a place you can cross, at least for a little while, in any place downwind. But so there's no tactical reason to use a nuclear weapon.

What about the sixth reason that Annie puts in her book where North Korea happens to launch a missile at the United States? Okay. Okay. Now, okay. So that book had what's called the idiot plot. All right. So essentially in the book, North Korea shoots a missile at the United States and we decide to fire a bunch of ICBMs, you know, kind of ballistic missiles at North Korea. But those have to fly over Russia and Russia sees that as an attack. So Russia launches their nuclear weapons. So we launch for the rest of ours. So in order for that to work, everybody has to be stupid. If North Korea launched a single weapon at us, we might be able to, we might have interceptors in the Washington, D.C. area. We might have a fad system there. Maybe. Maybe. And that, you know, dating girls in Washington, D.C., you hear things. We may or may not have a fad system protecting Washington, D.C.

So we could theoretically shoot it down. But also, all right, so what? what if it's not a nuclear weapon? What if it's just a conventional weapon? What if it's a dud? One of her big things was launch on warning. We need to worry about launch on warning. And we don't have,

just because we might have had a policy of launch on warning back in the 60s when we had two massive nuclear arsenals pointed at each other, that doesn't mean we're actually going to do that. Right. So, okay, let's see, we let it explode. Let's see what happens

when it hits Washington, D.C. We can build another Washington, D.C. Might be an improvement. I live in Washington, D.C. But just because Washington, D.C. That doesn't mean our counterstrike isn't valid after that. We'll still have assets in place to launch a counterstrike. And honestly, if Northcreated, that would probably use submarine-launch ballistic missiles

that wouldn't fly over Russia. We most definitely, we have submarines out in the Pacific Ocean right now that'd be able to hit that. And we also have bombers. That was a plot point in the boat. We launched bombers, which was going to take about 10 hours to get there. But, all right, what if it isn't a nuclear weapon? You know, North Korea is not going to be able to take out all of our defenses. So the smart thing to do in that book would have been, all right, let's see what happens.

I mean, I hate to put it that way, but that's most likely what people would do. Interesting. Now, as far as AI being used, so obviously we hear these stories about this Russian guy that's in the submarine and there, you know, two of the guys in the submarine. were like fired a nuke at America because we're getting shot at and our radar and all of our intelligence saying that they already fired a missile at us so we got a counter strike and the one guy was like, no, I'm not going to do it

and then saved America from going to nuclear war. That was a, I know what you're talking about. It was the man who saved the world. I can't remember this Russian's name. He was actually on duty and he was like, it looks like four missiles were fired at the U.S. They wouldn't launch with four, so I'm just not even going to bring this up to the chain of command

because I doubt that it's a real thing. Right. So now would an AI I have seen that and been like, oh, all of our inputs are showing that we're getting attacked, time to counterstrike. If it was trained like that, it might. The AI is all training. But do you think our AI for counterstriking would be trained like that? I do not believe we use AI for that.

We have enough procedures in place. We've had them there since the 1960s to do this manually. I think at least most Americans would be very reluctant to use AI for any kind of coordinating a counterstriking. Greg, just because, you know, we're, I want to say we're so good at this, but we've been doing this since the 1950s. In fact, we've heard of PL or permissive action links. So we actually gave this technology to Russia. So all of our, back during the 1950s, like our nuclear weapons were essentially controlled with like a lock, like a bicycle lock, right? not a bicycle lock, but a lock.

All right. And we invented technology that unless you put the right code into this nuclear weapon, it's either not going to explode or it's going to explode the wrong way and it's not going to actually have any effect. We actually gave that tech to Russia. And we said, please put these on your weapons. That way, like, nobody could rogue launch a nuclear weapon. That's one of the reasons, like, our fighters have to be raided to carry a nuclear weapon. The tech has to be in the cockpit to actually allow you to unlock this thing.

So, yeah, I don't think we're really interested in doing that because even at the permissive action link level, there's always a human in the loop. Interesting. So now, last question. Do you feel like America is in good hands, militarily speaking? Do you feel like that our direction as a global military force is moving in the right direction? do you trust the leadership? And, yeah, should I as a citizen that knows basically nothing about the military sleep well at night, knowing that, you know, the good guys are in charge?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've embedded with 101st. I've embedded with the 82nd. You know, I've embedded with the Navy, tangentially the Marine Corps on an amphibious assault ship. You know, these are some of the best kids we have. And talking with leadership, I spoke with all these four-star generals when I was at Project Convergence Capstone 4.

And these guys are dedicated to being the global deterrence for any bad guys to do us harm. Bad guys won't even think twice about doing us harm. It's all these guys think about is how they can be that global force for good, that global force for stability. I think we are in good hands. And some of these kids, you know, I look at the kids that were on the USS Eisenhower, which was Eisenhower was in the Gulf of Aden. helping take out who the targets,

helping destroy incoming missiles. I helped out when Israel was attacked by Iran with all those missiles fired from Iran. And these guys did a great job. And these are kids, 18, 19-year-old kids who are doing their job every day, even if it's slinging fuel. You know, moving fuel from one place to the other,

fueling up jets or putting ammo in jets. They all have a role to play. I was so impressed with these kids. and I was at age once which blows my mind 30 years ago 35 yeah we'll call it 80 pounds ago

We're going to edit that We'll edit out the age I'm 48 I know I don't look at I'm almost 50 Wow 50 You look good for 50 I do I attribute that to smoking and drinking

Yeah exactly you're getting pickled Yeah people don't smoke and drink enough anymore Yeah, I think we're on pretty good hands. You know, I think when I work at Accenture, like, everybody at Accenture was devoted to giving the U.S. Army and our clients the best possible platform to use against bad guys. So I think we're doing, I think we're doing pretty good. Well, that makes me feel better. That makes me feel better. I'm going to sleep well tonight, knowing that the good guys are in charge.

Ryan, thank you so much for coming on, brother. I really appreciate the time and your expertise. and I'm grateful for all the stuff that you're doing, both in media, but as well as in your sort of personal and professional life. Yeah, keeping the bad guys at bay. Thank you. Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate it. Let's do this again. Absolutely.