Danny Jones Podcast - #127 - Ex-CIA Super Spy Exposes Russia & China's Secret Plan Behind Ukraine Invasion | Andrew Bustamante

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer & Air Force combat veteran who spent 7 years in the CIA as a clandestine operative.  He has circled the globe gathering intelligence for the Unites States government living in disguise and serving in the shadows. Today Andrew teaches international espionage tactics that benefit everyday life. On this podcast Andrew talks United States Foreign Policy, the Russia Ukraine war, freedom of speech, Julian Assange, and much more. Test your spy skills with Andy: https://hq.everydayspy.com/ort Find EverydaySpy on YouTube: https://YouTube.com/everydayspy Everyday Spy: https://everydayspy.com help us make more money: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon sponsors https://liquiddeath.com -  Use code KONCRETE at checkout to get a free koozie 2-pack with a 12-pack purchase. danny https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Andrew Bustamante. It's good to be back, brother. Welcome back, dude. I appreciate it. Before we start, tell the new listeners and or viewers who you are and what your background is. Yeah, absolutely. My name is Andrew Bustamante. I'm the founder of EverydaySpy.com.

I am a former covert CIA intelligence officer, and now I teach people spy skills for everyday life and everyday use to get an unfair advantage at work, insecurity, and life is good for me, man. What part of the CIA? What division of the CIA were you in? exactly where you're doing in the CIA? Yeah, so CIA doesn't have your traditional divisions like you would think of with like the Army or the Navy or the Air Force. CIA is all covert, but there's general breakdowns by directorate. So I came from what was called the National Clandestine Service, NCS. It's also sometimes called the Directorate of Operations, but we are the undercover field

operative kind of element of CIA. So one of the main reasons, one of the main things I want to talk to you about today, obviously, is this whole thing going on with Russia and Ukraine, this whole war. What is your take on everything that's going on over there and what the U.S. narrative is? Yeah, so it's funny. I'm super hot on this topic right now. And I'm also very hot about the fact that, like, people are speaking out against Spotify, hosting Joe Rogan because people on Joe Rogan's podcast disagreed with the mainstream narrative about COVID or whatever.

So if I get you kicked off of Spotify, I'm very. You definitely won't. We'll probably get kicked off YouTube, but that's okay. We have way more viewers on Spotify than on you. So here's the thing, right? USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.

What's happening between Russia and Ukraine, it's not news. It's not news. It's news is supposed to be new and it's supposed to be un-examined. expected. What the hell were people thinking was going to happen between Russia and Ukraine? Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. They took Crimea and they promised they'd be back. Crimea used to belong to Ukraine, right? There's been this separatist group of Russian sympathizers in Ukraine for a long time. This is not new news. Putin has made Ukraine a priority of his military and political ambitions since he took office, and I think it was 2000.

This is not new. This is just the inevitable outcome of promises that were made by a strong-armed dictator, essentially a strong-armed politician. So the fact that people are acting surprised, the fact that people are acting shocked and bamboozled, is just ridiculous because there's no reason for us to be surprised that this has happened. And it's going to keep happening. It happened in Georgia in 2008. It's happening in Ukraine right now.

Every former Soviet state is a target, especially if it is not currently backed by NATO, because that's what Putin has committed to, rebuilding not a Soviet Union. He's not trying to rebuild the USSR. He's just trying to insulate Russia from an encroaching Western and European threat. It is absolutely and totally predictable and expected. What did you, did you listen to that hour long speech that he gave the other day about why he's doing this? No, it's funny. So the other thing to keep in mind is that, is that in a country like Russia, 90% of what you hear is rhetoric.

It's propaganda. It's spoken for a population base that is largely uninformed or heavily propagandized. So they're not really a free-thinking independent group. it's like listening to Hitler talk to Nazis. They weren't a free-thinking group. They were a highly, emotional, heavily slanted, heavily biased group of kind of an ignorant mass. So I did not listen to his hour-long speech.

What I did is I took highlights out of that speech that I thought were super fascinating. The most fascinating highlight was when he talked about how the Ukrainian military, he called upon them to remember that they were Russian first and that they wouldn't be harmed if they just laid down their weapons and let the Russian military come through. What we're forgetting, again, in the whole way that this isn't news. I love talking about it because I love challenging the fact that right now Americans,

international Europeans, everybody around the world right now is getting bent over and smacked by media. We're all clicking on headlines. We're all being blasted advertisements. we're all being told information that is is accurate but incomplete right it's not necessarily mal or misinformation it's just incomplete information errant information but we're being fed this narrative just to keep us clicking just to keep us worried just to keep us afraid it's a it's a traditional what we call in CIA an influence campaign and this is what media is doing to us right now. And they're using every media outlet to keep us glued to an event that is inconsequential to 99% of the planet. What is your take being a former CIA operative who's traveled the globe,

spent time in various countries? When you see like the media, especially the New York Times and a bunch of other outlets coming up to the last week, in the last few weeks, the last month, it just seems like they've been instigating this thing or just been talking about it's going to happen it's going to happen it's going to going to happen it seems like our media has been escalating it and then not only that from Putin's perspective when you see the united states and the u.k drop billions of dollars of weapons and military training into the ukraine like what does what does that how does that make you feel when you see shit like that happen yeah so i want to be i want to be very careful here because I'm not worried about my reputation or I'm not worried about anything like that.

I want to be careful because the the narrative coming from from Putin and the secondary narrative coming out of China right now are very important narratives that I want to get into and I want to make sure the whole world everybody listening understands those two narratives. That is the narrative that says that this was escalated because of our media. There's no way you can you cannot escalate what's known as an interstate war. This is considered. interstate war. The sovereignty of one nation being invaded by another nation. Interstate. Not the same thing as a civil war. Civil wars are called intrastate wars. This is an interstate war. That cannot be escalated by media and rhetoric and saber rattling. It takes someone making

the conscious decision to invade someone else's sovereignty for interstate war to happen. So I say that because what you saw, what we all saw happen in media in the last few weeks was a major mistake on the hands of the Biden administration. And I don't think, I mean, you can think whatever you want to about the current president. His foreign policy decisions for the last two years have been flawed. And it's difficult to manage foreign policy in a country that doesn't care about foreign policy. We're Americans. We care about American policy.

We care about domestic policy. We care about economy. We care about public health. We don't really care what happens to the rest of the world. The citizens care about that. Not necessarily the politicians. Kind of the other way around. The citizens don't care.

I mean, honestly, anybody listening, as you and I sit here, we don't care about Ukrainians, dude. We don't care about what's happening in Ukraine. We don't care about it. Tomorrow morning, what we care about is, are we going to make money in our business? Are my kids safe? Can I drive to work?

What's the price of gas? That's what I meant. Oh, okay, cool. So, yeah, we're saying the same thing. It seems like the politicians are the ones that are always worried about what's going on overseas. They're not so much worried about homelessness or anything that that's going on inside education or anything like that. They're more worried about spending billions of dollars in the Ukraine. Yeah. Well, they're interested in looking like a world power.

Because when you're powerful, people see you as secure and stable. Where do people want to, where does the world want to invest in the most stable, most powerful country? So if you, the United States is rich because everybody invests in the United States. Chinese invest here, Russians invest here, Brazilians invest here, Mexicans, everybody with money invests in American companies, American property, American policy. You know, we belong, we hold a seat in the UN Security Council. We're a major player in NATO. We're the big powerful dog.

We're the global superpower. Everybody wants to put their money, everybody wants to bet on the winning horse. If you lose that frontrunner position, people are going to invest in someone else. Russia's tactics are to make themselves look big and strong so that they can win. more of the world's wealth. China's desires are to look super strong so they can win more of the world's wealth because if you have people investing in you, it's just like being the biggest company on the block. So the reason I'm kind of coming back to this is because the media narrative isn't what got people spun up. The media narrative isn't what made Russia invade Ukraine. Russia was going to

invade Ukraine. The mistake that Biden made is that he came out and publicly exposed that he had he received an intelligence report that the invasion was coming soon. If you recall, in early February, mid-February, he made an announcement. He was like, hey, we just got an intelligence report that says the invasion's going to happen any day now. Once he said that, everybody picked up that narrative, any day now, they're going to invade any day, any day, could be tomorrow, could be the next two days, could be in the next few weeks. It's all anybody would talk about. I remember seeing headlines day after day after day saying, any day now, any day now, any day now. That's not news either.

That's just what gets the whole world watching. Because now it's like if you could imagine a new Avengers movie coming out where every single day a new headline is talking about, hey, the next Avengers movie is dropping tomorrow. Everybody's going to keep checking. Oh, did it drop yet? Did it drop yet? Did it drop yet?

That's exactly what happened inadvertently because Biden decided to say he was probably trying to do a deterrent, early action, deterrent move to keep Russia from invading. But either way, in hindsight, It wasn't a great call. You think it was really to keep Russia from invading? It doesn't seem like what we did was to keep Russia from invading. It seems like it was more of a provoke.

Yeah. So that, again, this is why I want to, I want to, my company, everyday spy, is there to teach people how espionage works and how you can see it play out in everyday life. It is provocative. It is provocative in terms of it being interesting to basically come out and say, we have intelligence. that says this is going to happen. That is a provocative move in terms of it being interesting, and everybody wants to pay attention to that. I believe that the Biden administration came out and said that

because they wanted everybody to pay attention to it because now what that would do is put pressure on Russia not to invade because he just took away their element of surprise. That's what every... If you look at the strategy happening in Ukraine right now, first of all, it's the exact same strategy that was applied in Georgia in 2008 when they invaded Georgia. Almost verbatim,

almost the exact same strategy. Yep, and we can talk about that if you want to. It's very similar to what they did in Crimea in 2014, but this is the Russian M.O. We know the Russian M.O. They have a way of doing this, and it works for them.

And again, we can talk about any and all of this if you want to, Danny. But the reason that Biden and the media, they were not provoking Russia. That is Russian propaganda. That is Chinese propaganda to try to get the world to think that the U.S. is at fault

for Russia's decisions. It is not true. It is not true. But can you think of it from Putin's point of view when you see the UK and the U.S. dropping billions of dollars worth of weapons and military training on its own border? Like, wouldn't you, put yourself in Putin's shoes, don't you think that's more of a provocation? That's more of a provocation than the media saying that Russia is going to invade. You know, Biden coming out and saying Russia is going to invade. That's not a provocative move. Dropping a bunch of, bunch of money, taking Ukrainian special forces and starting to train them with U.S. troops and elite, that is a provocative move.

But it's provocative. It is actually a threatening move because Russia was already invested in the conflict for the last 15 or 20 years because they have Russian sympathizers, Russian separatists in those two communities, Densk and whatever the other one is, Lenonska or something like that. Those two breakaway groups are already essentially fighting for. for independence, fighting for separation, fighting to become part of the Russian Federation again, against the Ukrainians.

So when he sees investment in troops and when he sees actual support directly to the Ukrainian military infrastructure, that is for sure a threat against those independent nations. That was another mistake of the Biden administration to start pouring a bunch of money in training into a region that already had a legitimate military intrastate conflict. Because now that gave Russia essentially the international go-ahead to say if the United States is going to support the Ukrainians, we're going to support the separatists.

And that validated his ability to go in and essentially name those two breakaway regions as independent states, which is what started the whole conflict, if you recall, just a few days ago. And who were the separatists? The separatists were. So Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union. Right. So when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, many of the states became. independent on their own because the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore. So when those states became independent, it's almost like what happened after World War II when we started drawing these artificial lines throughout the Middle East.

Just because you claim a place as Ukraine, it doesn't mean all the people identify as Ukrainian. Inside the country of Ukraine, only about 70% of the people think of themselves as Ukrainian. 20%, 25% almost think of themselves as Russian. Right. And most of them speak Russian. Exactly, and Ukrainian is very close to Russian. So what happens when you are a Russian not living in a country that lives by Russian rules? Now you feel out of place. That is a very common problem in intrastate conflict.

It's very similar to what happened in Sudan when Sudan split, because some people believed differently than what the other people in the state believed in. Hutu's and the Toothiads. These were two groups of people going back to colonial days that were forced to live in the same region, even though they didn't identify with each other. It's what happens. It's what's happening right now in Ukraine. It's what happened in Georgia.

It's the reason the Georgia conflict in 2008 erupted. There's these groups of people who identify as Russian. But they're being forced to follow non-Russian rules, non-Russian expectations, and they're suffering already in poor corrupt governments. So when you have a poor corrupt government and it's so poor and so corrupt it looks to Russia for stability, that's how you get a separatist group. And that's what the Ukraine is. That's what happened on the west side, the east side of Ukraine.

Those two regions were full of separatists that wanted to be independent or wanted to return to the Russian Federation. But Ukraine was not willing to recognize them. That's why there's been a conflict there since 2000, early 2000s that erupted essentially that in the invasion of Crimea was just an escalation of that existing internal strife. Wow. It's much deeper than people think. And the headlines don't talk a lot about that because it's not sexy. History is not sexy. But history is what writes, it's what writes the predictable patterns for tomorrow.

Right. And that's another thing I think is so interesting. Russia took Georgia in 2008. They took a chunk of Georgia. I forget the name of the province. It starts with an O. Anyways, but with the same methodology. They invaded Georgia under the same auspice.

A separatist group inside Georgia was under attack or being threatened by the Georgian military. They called for help from Russia. Russia announced them as independent and then flooded in support. Wow. Same exact thing. And what did we do about that? Exactly what we're doing now. It was the same thing.

Nothing. Same playbook. Same playbook. I mean, I'm guessing anybody who's ever played high school sports knows that if you've got the playbook of your next competitor, you know what they're going to do. So then you're the one in control of the game. game. You choose the plays that they can't counter and you play those plays. Russian knew what was going to happen. Russian knew that the same Biden administration that pulled every troop out of Afghanistan, even against international public opinion, the same Biden who fights his own people

about COVID policies for two years, they knew that that Biden wasn't going to do anything. Just in my opinion, the next move that Russia makes will happen next year. It's going to happen in a place like Moldova. It's going to happen in a place like Tajikistan, some other, some other weak, corrupt states that borders, that borders close to a Russian-controlled haven that has a population of Russian sympathizers. It's going to happen in a place like that in 2023. And then in 2024, China's going to take Taiwan because everybody in the world, every strong man in the world, is watching the United States do nothing. Trump did nothing in Hong Kong. Nobody did anything with the Azerbaijan, Armenian War in 2019.

Nobody, like everybody just kind of shut their, shut their doors and let businesses die and let the country shut down for two years because of COVID. Nobody's doing anything in this war. It's just, this is how it works right now. We are in a phase of global policy where we're isolationist without admitting that we're isolationist. We all just care about how do we keep ourselves, you know, clean and tidy. how do we take care of ourselves here and let the world kind of take care of itself. Isn't it all about money? Because when you think about the billions of dollars being poured into the

weapons that we're giving to the Ukraine, you think of, okay, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, publicly saying that this conflict is good for their shareholders. And so you think like a military industrial complex. And then secondly, you see, okay, we're placing all these sanctions on Russia, but there was another report saying, that we also spent close to a billion dollars in fuel and minerals. We paid Russia almost a billion dollars for fuel and minerals right as we oppose these same sanctions. So it's like we're kind of playing both sides and Ukraine is caught in the middle. Yeah, it's not so much about playing both sides, but you're right, it is about money.

And understanding how the money flows is one of the things that will help you think of the conflict more through the eyes of a professional intelligence officer. whatever the reports that you're reading i don't know where they're coming from can you pull up the one the one about the sanctions and i don't know where the sources are right this is it okay oil and gas commodities aren't being uh the west each day continues to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of resources from russia and directly financing ukraine's crisis right so do you know what that means so it's talking about the west i love this is a fantastic study and this is a fantastic study in headline scroll down no no no stay right here stay right here okay because this is a fantastic example of how media messes with our heads every day. They're telling us nothing but getting us to

click and read and get all sorts of emotional about it, right? They're calling it the West. The West is the accurate term. They're not calling it the United States because do you know what the West includes? All of Europe. More than 40% of Europe's energy comes from Russia. The reason NATO won't take action. The reason the EU wants to stay out of this is because they don't have a choice. They have to play ball with Russia. Their liquid natural gas, their fuel, their crude oil, it's heavily coming from Russia. If they piss off Russia, Russia stops the flow of energy. And do you know what happens when poor countries don't get Russian energy?

People freeze to death. People die. Poor people die. Rich people don't die, right? Rich people always have a way of protecting their money. But what ends up happening is when sanctions hit a country like Russia, the poor people in Russia and Russia suffer, which then empowers them to believe that the Russian mission is a valiant mission.

And then when the sanctions hurt so much that Russia actually jacks up oil prices, like they're already doing in the U.S., they're already messing with oil prices here in the U.S., and people are driving around, you know what Americans do get upset about, paying $4 at the pump for gas? Right. How expensive is a $35,000 a year household? How expensive are they going to let gas get before they say,

come on guys, who cares about Ukraine? That's what's going to happen. Russia knows that's what's going to happen. What this is saying is that the West continues to buy hundreds of millions of dollars and resources from Russia. That is an accurate statement because Europe is dependent on Russia. They're dependent on Russia. Indirectly financing the Ukrainian crisis.

Also correct. So here is a statement that is factual, but it's actually intentionally slanted so that when you read it, you think that they're talking about the United States. So scroll down a little bit. What is it saying in the opening paragraph of this? In the 24 hours after Vladimir Putin signed the decree,

recognizing two breakaway Ukrainian territories, the European Union, the UK and the U.S., bought okay, a combined 3.5 million barrels of Russian oil. I hate you media. Do you see how the media is messing with you, man? When you actually break that out, they are correct. But when you break that out, the U.S. is like 2% of that, 5% of that. Fact check me, people, please.

Maybe you can find something on that, Austin. Because this stuff pisses me off. This is why, okay, it pisses me off, but it's why I have a job. Right. Because it's, I teach this stuff to millionaires. I was telling you earlier, I have a private group of millionaires coming in to work with me this weekend on one of my private events, on one of my private courses. Of course, I call Streetcraft. Streetcraft takes espionage concepts and applies them to mastering and dominating in your everyday life.

And if anybody cares about Streetcraft, you can find it on my homepage. You can find it on my Instagram. You can find it on YouTube, right? The reason that this stuff is valuable is because when left to our own devices, public school teaches us to read current events and trust current events. We have decades of experience trusting current events that come from reputable news sources. With the advent of social media, when information became free and you didn't have to pay 25 cents to go pick up a newspaper, these newspapers have lost their journalistic incentive to produce real news. Now, the journalistic incentive is just to get people to click and read because the more views that that website gets, the more they get to charge for the ads on that website. It's called CPM, right?

Count cost per million. Every thousand views is a certain number of dollars. So that's what they're looking for. They're looking for volume. Media has become a volume game, not a quality game. How does it make you feel when you see major news organizations like MSNBC and CNN? paying ex-Pentagon officials and CIA people tons of money to be talking heads. I mean, doesn't that make you, like, how does that make you feel? Just first of all, just seeing these

ex-people that are now retired from the Pentagon or from the CIA getting paid tons of money to be the news. Yeah, it's frustrating. They're not getting paid tons of money. Actually, I bet you'd be surprised if you know how much they get paid. I've been offered the paycheck to come out and do that stuff. Have you? Yeah, it's not much. You're talking about $8,000, $12,000. That's a lot of money to some people. Half of that gets taken away by taxes because you're an independent contract. it's really not a lot of money. What kills me is that, is that egos,

these former American officials who have almost in every case almost retired from service, they have been so heavily indoctrinated in American government and American politics that they've lost their ability to actually view, view an in a situation without a bias. They all view it from their own bias, instead of seeing the two sides of the equation.

Like you were saying, think about this from Putin's perspective. That is a fundamental intel skill. There's no reason that an ex-CIA director shouldn't be able to do that, but they don't do it. You get up there and you see General Petraeus or you see former director Hayden or you see they get up there and they parrot whatever the mainstream argument is of their political party that they support. They've lost that unbiased position.

and it's not their fault necessarily. It's because they're getting paid to come onto a certain news source that's got an audience that believes a certain way and then they have their own opinion. They have their own political ambitions too. So it's frustrating. It makes me feel sad.

It makes me feel irritated. It's why I love coming to talk to you, Danny, because I don't have any political aspirations and it's very nice to have a place where I can just come and be unbiased and tell people to their face. Like, look, if you believe the news, you're the idiot. Not me.

If you think that Russia invading Ukraine is a surprise, you should have been reading, you could read that in Wikipedia five weeks ago and you wouldn't be surprised. It's just people who aren't, people who are letting the media dictate to them what they should be paying attention to right now, which is what the media wants to do because that's how they make their money. It's all about money. That's just like you said. Do you find it frustrating when things like WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden or anything like, like, God. Oliver Stone's latest documentary on JFK portray the the general public's view of the CIA being this evil deep state organization.

What does that make you feel? That makes me feel very frustrated for sure. CIA is a conglomerate. It's a community, just like any other amalgamation of anything else, right? You can't look at General Electric and say that it's evil. You can't look at Nike and say that it's evil. You can't look at Amazon and say that it's evil.

Does it have some people who are unscrupulous? For sure. Does it have lots of people who are good, honest, hardworking people? Absolutely. CIA is the exact same way. But what we have to remember is that CIA is a government organization with a mission and a master. CIA is part of the executive branch. That means CIA belongs to the president.

That's their number one customer, their number one client. That is the executive branch. You are at the behest. You serve at the pleasure of the president. Whoever that president is, whether you voted for him or not, the mission, the duty is to do what the president says to do. You have an issue what the president says? Sure, you can take that up through internal channels.

Snowden didn't use those internal channels. He just threw a fit and did his own thing. That's against the law. So if you love Snowden, you're an idiot too. The dude broke the law. He did the right thing the wrong way. It's the same thing as like shooting a guy who's looking at your wife backwards. Like there's a better way of handling it than that.

So that's just the way it is. And if you want to think that CIA is some sort of giant, corrupt, well-oiled machine of propaganda and lies, you're giving us way too much credit. The CIA is like 90% government employees who did an averagely good job in college, an averagely good job in life, getting paid an average wage of like $65,000 a year. And all they want to do is get to work as late as possible and leave work as early as possible. They're still government employees. So they're not the world's sharpest, most evil, you know, propagandizing and conspiratorial groups. They're just everyday people just trying to make a decent wage

and work towards a retirement. What would you say the percentages of people in the CIA are, as you just described, people that are just trying to show up as late as possible and leave as early as possible compared to the people, because I'm sure there's people in there too that are just trying to gain more power and climb the ladder.

right? I would break, and I love CIA. I am not in any way trying to speak poorly about those people. When I was at CIA, I would say that there were three groups. There was the get to work late, leave early, minimum work, typical government employee that we all joke about. That's probably about 50% of CIA. Just like it's 50% of DMV, 50% of your police force, 50% of anything else. 50% of school teachers out there want to get to school as late as possible and leave as early as possible. There's not a single, that doesn't mean that they're incompetent. It just means that that their priorities are family or, you know, raising kids or whatever else. Their priority does not necessarily mean being the best that they can be at work.

So I give about 50% of CIA to just your typical, stereotypical, almost laughable government employee. Then you got like probably 30% who are true blue American heroes and patriots. People who work hard. People who stay late. People who honestly would sacrifice anything. And they do. They sacrifice marriages fall apart.

a humongously high divorce rate in CIA. Families fall apart. Children find out that their parents relying to them about being undercover and the families are broken. There's tremendous sacrifices that are made by about 35% or 30% of employees at CIA. And then you have this weird 15 to 20%

that aren't necessarily out for like world domination kind of power, but they are very much out to like CYA, cover their own backside and get as high as possible and achieve as much as possible. because they are your your narcissistic you know backstabbing untrustworthy unscrupulous folks the folks who like like director Pompeo no the the woman I just lost her name Susan Sharon who's the who's the female director at CIA can you find it female director of the CIA give me help I think she might she was right before William Burns but anyways so here's here's here's a

But she was raised from within CIA, right? She was a CIA, I think she was a case officer, had CIA for a long career. She was one of the people who, when she got the order to burn records that might incriminate people for torture at Guantanamo Bay, she burned records. And then when she was called on and said, did you burn records? She was like, yep, that was me. So the boss told me to do it, right? The only, there are people for sure. Thank you, Gina Haspell.

Gina has very openly stated that she burned and destroyed incriminating evidence from torture from torture that was carried out in Guantanamo Bay. Anybody in their right mind, if they knew they were doing something illegal, even if it was at the behest of the president and they were told to then cover up the evidence, they would think twice. She didn't think twice. She was that kind of person who was like, well, I could either invest in my career and just be part of like the in-group that covers this thing up and then I know they're going to

take care of me. They took care of her all the way to being director of CIA, right? So there are always going to be that group of people, too, the people who, who mix ethics with ambition. And that's just the way it is. That's how you end up having waterboarding and torture and, you know, all sorts of other corruptions that happen at all levels of government. Yeah, it's just sort of human nature. It's human nature. It's a, it's an, it's a overactive sense of survivalism. Right. It's not enough to just survive, you know, without inflicting damage. It's about surviving and leaving a trail of dead bodies behind you. What is the, obviously, I can tell what you think about Edward Snowden. What is your, what is the idea of Julian Assange being painted as this incredible supervillain for, for being able to release this information and while he at the same time keeps the sources anonymous and keeps the names anonymous? Yeah, that's sad. The Assange thing is sad because that dude is,

is that what he is done with WikiLeaks is if it was actually neutral. So the problem here is that is that if he were to actually be equitable in the stuff that he leaks, if he were to leak as much stuff about Russia as he leaks about the United States and as much stuff about Brazil as he leaks about Lithuania, if he leaked everything equally, then there wouldn't be, it would be very hard for people to say that he was a puppet of some evil power. but instead he leaks the stuff that everybody's the most interested in American secrets right well when you leak American secrets you become a threat to the

United States if you become a threat to the United States then you can expect the United States to to rally because remember we were just talking about how the US is the big kid on the block they're the global superpower everybody wants to invest in the United States everybody wants to be friends with the United States so when the US says okay Assange is now anti-America and we need your help everybody buddy taking him down. It's really hard for someone to be like, oh, well, I disagree with you there, but I want to keep investing in you because America starts to say, well, if you're not going to be on, if you're not going to help us with this, we're not going to help you with anything you need

help with. So that's how you end up, that's how we get into the WikiLeaks situation, where he became inordinately focused on leaking information from one target. And that makes it so that our adversaries could start funding WikiLeaks, supporting WikiLeaks, running running cases and leaking information to WikiLeaks from their espionage cases. And that's not at the heart of what he was trying to do. To keep his business alive, to deliver the maximum beneficial product to the people who love WikiLeaks, he let himself get led astray by the larger game of espionage. Right, but to be held up in the, how long has he been held up in the embassy for 10 years?

They want to extradite him and... He's stuck, man. And then you see the reports, the report on Yahoo news. it was that the CIA plotted to kidnap or kill him. So again, this is, this is, let's check the news source. Yeah, that one, yeah. Let's check the news. Kidnapping or assassination, London shootout.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the CIA secret war plans against WikiLeaks. Yeah. So it's just, and there's, and there's like they change the narrative. Like Pompeo, when he talked about WikiLeaks, he completely changed the definition of who they were. And through his words, tried to change the public narrative. about what they were doing and no longer classified him as a journalist. So there's a lot going on here, right?

So first, Yahoo News, that's not, I wouldn't call that a reputable news source. That's an information aggregation source, right? And then if you look at the headline, you can see how emotional that headline is. The CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks. I don't, like, it just, it doesn't make any sense. It's a little sensation. So this headline is doing something that we call in influence and covert influence. What this is doing is it's weeding out the wrong audience and it's aligning itself to a conspiratorial audience.

It's a tactic that you use in influence campaigns because what you want is you want to say stuff that's so sensational that your target audience just consumes it and loves it and trusts it right away. But you also want to use language that's so sensational that your non-target audience just dismisses it immediately and doesn't even read. Because like for me, I'm sure I saw this headline at some point. And I just dismissed it. And I dismissed it so quickly. I didn't even dedicate my short term memory to remembering it. It's so nonsensical to me. But to the target audience, they love this and they read more of this. And Yahoo News gets more clicks. And if you want to count how many ads are on that page, you'll get a chance to see why they do what they do. But what I'm getting at is Assange is stuck. he he had a choice maybe 10 years ago to decide how much he was going to let himself get controlled by the larger geopolitical narrative

Russia versus China versus US versus Europe right he had a chance to decide am I going to sway am I going to let myself be swayed by dollars and dollars and cents when other people when Russia specifically starts giving me information from their spies inside the United States and then letting me leak it at specific times that are to the detriment of the United States. Once he made that choice, it was all downhill. But did he not, is it true that, I mean, how do we know that he didn't leak sensitive stuff about China or about Russia? Like maybe we're just not paying attention to it. We're only paying attention to the stuff that he leaked about the U.S., claiming because we want to bring him here because it embarrassed the U.S. and embarrassed the CIA. Well, not just embarrassment. There is strong analytical, strong empirical evidence that shows that the timing at which he was releasing facts that were given him by.

Russian counterparts. It was given to him? The stuff that he was given, I thought it was proven that it wasn't. Not all of it, but a lot of it was actually provided to him by, by assets, by informants to the Russian Federation.

And then dropped specifically at times during the election in 2012, 2016. I thought he, didn't he release the Hillary emails in 2016? Yep. So, and then those weren't dropped as soon as he got him.

Those were dropped at a specific time to cause chaos in the middle of an election cycle. Right, but I think it was already proven that that stuff was already public record. It was already posted on various news sites. So that, yeah, if that's, I can't speak to that one way or the other. I'm pretty sure they disproved that that wasn't Russian. That wasn't Russian intelligence. So then you had, you had Hillary emails.

I mean, there was, WikiLeaks has dropped a lot of different information. I know I have, I have intent, I have tried to cite WikiLeaks sources in even my own publications and had CIA come back and tell me that it can't be published because it is still classified inside. So he just, your original question was, is it fair? Yes, it's fair. He, whenever you pair to picture him as, as some sort of super villain. Like, is he a villain? To the United States. To the United States. Right. Right. If somebody else out there wants to, wants to grant him exile, they can. But nobody's doing it. Right. If somebody else wants to be like, hey, we back you up, Assange. Come stay with us. Come live in, come live in, whatever, Borneo. Come live in South Africa. Come live

in Switzerland. They can totally back him up. They can grant him exile. They can grant him refugee status. But guess what? Nobody's doing that. Because they know

what he did against the United States was not it was not unmotivated by political implications. He was intentionally trying to be a threat to the United States. He was giving enemies of the United States

an advantage. That is against the best interest of the United States. So look at Snowden. If you look at the grand book tour of Edward Snowden. Where has he been? He's been to Hong Kong. He's been to Cuba. He's been to Ecuador. He's in Russia. Well, it's because he can't come

to the U.S., right? He can't go to any place that has a positive relationship with the U.S. Right, because of the threat. His life is on the line. Exactly, exactly right. Not that the U.S. is going to kill him when he lands in Germany. That's not going to happen, but the Germans are going to be like, we care more about our relationship with the U.S. and we care about you, Snowden. Do you know what I mean? That's, that is the world that we live in. That is international geopolitical collaboration. That's why you do it. It's why you have extradition agreements. It's why you have international law. That is how people and civilizations work, right? But I guess

there's a difference, I mean, is, what is the difference between, or could there be a fundamental moral difference between the way someone like Julian Assange may look at the world and the way China or the US looks at the world? Like maybe Julian, you know, the biggest, the closest thing I can compare it to is social media, right? So you have somebody who has this, you know, grandiose social media presence they put on an act or on, or on the news, rather, someone on the news who talks about certain things, pushes some sort of narrative. And then behind, when the camera's not rolling, there's somebody completely different. And someone tries to expose this person for being somebody different than who they portray themselves to be.

They're doing things that they're not actively doing in the limelight, right? There's, they're two different people. They're wearing two different hats, two different masks. that's what he was trying to do to the United States to make to make the world a better place for lack of a better term right to not say like these are three evil empires all against each other he's trying to remove the lie or trying to expose just lies like shouldn't the United States be doing that shouldn't the United States be doing what it doing exactly what it says it's doing in the public light behind closed doors no no are you a parent yes you do you do exactly what you tell your child you're going to do? No. Because you're protecting your child. The U.S. government has been put in a position where the people have said,

I raise my hand and I vote for you to keep me safe. There's a pyramid, a fantastic, if you don't know of the pyramid, there's this pyramid that talks about the creation of a state. There's three levels in the pyramid. At the foundational level of the pyramid is tribalism. Or it's individualism. where everybody's out for themselves.

This is what we were like. When we were like cavemen, I ate what I hunted. If I was hungry, it's because I didn't hunt enough, right? I ate and I drank when I could find food. That's the base level. Everybody's out for themselves.

We evolve. Societies have the opportunity to evolve into tribalism. Now let's become a tribe, a tribe of seven people, 12 people, eight people. You're a good hunter. I'm a good gatherer.

So you go hunt. I'll go gather, and then we'll come and combine our resources at the end. But I have no say how you treat your wife. You have no say how big I grow my garden. We just share resources. Second level of the pyramid, right? We're trading, I'm trading my individual freedoms a little bit so that I can be part of a collective.

Because now I can't just take your property. In individualism, I can walk into your camp, club you over the head, and drag your wife home. Right. Now we're saying we're a tribe. So we're going to protect each other, but we're going to blow up every other tribe. We're going to steal their resources, make them our resources. tribalism is the second level of that pyramid. The third evolution of that pyramid is called the creation of the state. Now what you're doing is you're letting a state organization,

a centralized organization of some sort of elected or some sort of chosen official. Maybe it's an elder. Maybe it's a politician, whatever. But you're choosing to let this small organization capture the efficiencies of everybody. You're not just your resources, which like you see with a tax, space, they tax everybody. That's a collection of resources. And then in exchange for taxation, they're giving everybody's security. Now there's police forces, there's military forces. They're giving everybody social welfare. Now you have, you know, if somebody gets sick and they're too old

for you to take care of, we'll take care of them. If you're homeless or you lose your job, we'll take care of you. There's environmental and like services, that infrastructure that's put on top of that. We'll take care of getting you clean running water. We'll take care of giving you electricity so you don't have to worry about those things. At the individual level, you have to worry about your own clean water and where your own power source is. At the state level, the third level of pyramid, somebody else is doing all that for you. How are you paying for that?

You're not just paying for that in taxes. You're paying for that by giving up your individual rights, your individual freedoms. That's the power of the pyramid. The higher up you go in the pyramid, the more civilized you get to live. But the cost is that you lose your individual freedoms. That's how it works in any pyramid, in any culture, anywhere. The only truly free people out there are your aboriginals in, like, Australia, who live in groups of two or three. And they spear their own wildhogs and do whatever the hell they want to do.

Right. But they're never going to have running water and electricity until they organize themselves into some kind of a state. So when you look at it through that way, when you look at it through that lens, you understand that everybody's, everybody has to make a choice. and if you choose to live within a state, within the confines of a state organization, you're giving up your freedoms. You're voluntarily giving those things up in exchange for all the conveniences that you get, right?

Wi-Fi, Netflix, running water, a paycheck every two weeks. You can give all that up if you want to and move down the pyramid if you choose. I see that, but how does that apply to exposing, like the leaders of the state, exposing in like rot in that organization or in those higher up levels like when you see people you know when you see bombs killing civilians because lies lies and secrets are not the same thing lies and secrets are not the same thing what wiki leaks promised to expose with secrets not lies sometimes what they exposed were lies but those lies were intended to protect the people that the state had sworn to protect the state had determined that these things were secret the people had said I choose you to keep me safe.

So you state get to choose what secrets I get to know and what secrets I don't get to know. And that's, I am, I am an American citizen. I am a military veteran and I used to work for CIA. I don't want to know all the truth. I don't. I want to know only what pertains to me. And I want to let CIA work within the confines of their secrecy so that they can prevent things that I don't even know happen. right if you actually got a text message alert on your phone every time there was a potential terrorist attack

you would live in terror all the time every time our intel report comes in that says hey terrorists are plotting an attack in Tampa terrorists are plotting an attack in seminal terrorists are planning an attack here terrorists are going to bomb the next football game you would not you would be amazed at how much intelligence comes in talking about possible threats imminent threats that are unvalidated unfounded that are you know that are aspirational at best because it's just not something they can actually execute on

you don't want to know that stuff those are secrets that need to be kept secret because they don't they don't help us they don't keep us safe they make us less safe so you think it would have been best if we never found out that the government was secretly spying on every U.S. citizen with the Patriot Act from 9-11 they so

the Patriot Act is a great example the open court system right the public court system in the judicial branch found that to be illegal. The secret court system within the intelligence community had also made a ruling on that and found it to be legal. Be legal. Yeah, that's how it passed the first time. Nothing, nothing gets passed in the intel world without going through a secret court first. Every branch gets a chance to comment on this stuff, right? What happened is But why keep it secret? You think it was best to keep that secret? Do you know why the Patriot Act existed?

Because to find terrorists in the United States, which they never actually, there's not one report of ever finding any sort of terrorist through the Patriot Act. There's not one public report of ever finding a terrorist through the Patriot Act. So you think they have found lots of terrorists, but they're just not telling us about it. Do you remember, do you remember the Central Times bombing that didn't happen? Because they found the bomb? No. Do you remember that? No, I don't remember that.

In Times Square. Oh, oh, yes. That's a perfect example. You know, if you were to do research on how many terrorist attacks didn't happen, instead of, leaning on the media to tell you terrorist attacks that do happen, you would start to get a better picture of how effective CIA really is, right? What happens is when CIA has something that's secret that they work on, that secret has immense strategic value.

Not only can they prevent something bad from happening, but they can actually hunt down the person who's creating the bad thing. So why would they make that public? In 2000, I want to say it was 2007 or 2008 maybe, the Washington Post released an article saying that they were tracking with some bin Laden, by his satellite phone. We were tracking Osama bin Laden. The dude could have been killed by 2009,

but instead the Washington Post decided to leak a story that we were tracking him through a satellite phone. So guess what he did the next day? He got rid of that satellite phone. Is that in America's best interest? That's a secret, right? Were the American people being lied to? Maybe.

Did they have any right to know that? Maybe. Did Osama bin Laden have a right to know that? No. When you make something public to the American people, you make it public to the aggressors, you make it public to the enemy. You can't do that.

Not a state that's swearing to keep you safe. They're not going to make something public that might get in the hands of the enemy. I know that people don't like hearing that, and I'm telling you right now, you can hate hearing it all you want. Go to another fucking country. Go somewhere else.

If you don't like being here, you're not welcome here. Go find something else. Right? America is going to keep its citizens safe by prioritizing American security above all other things, even if that means they're going to

of your face. That's the country I want to live in, man. Keep my family safe. Let me worry about getting to work. Don't make me worry about every possible terrorist attack. It's interesting the way you describe the pyramid. That's the first time I've ever heard it described

like that. That's very interesting. It immediately made me think of China. If you look at, like, I think we talked about this before, but if you look at all the countries as if they're in a race to be the most dominant country in the world or the strongest, most powerful country in the world, you don't really of the U.S., you would think of China, right?

Even though they are, you know, it's a, it's an authoritarian, there's very fewer freedoms in China. There's so much, everything, censorship and propaganda. But if you look at it from the perspective of who is winning, China is winning, would that be fair to say? Well, I don't know how you decide the criteria for winning. Right, I guess you would, right, you have to figure out what the, so America's still the largest economy in the world, so we're still winning there.

America still has the dominant. America is the largest economy in the world. America generates more money than China generates. China's number two. They beat out Japan recently. Right. We still have the largest, most well-equipped military. There are more ground troops in China, right?

They're more army soldiers. More people, right? More people, right? More soldiers. But we still have the predominant military force in the world, the largest fleet in the Navy. like the largest most what's the word I'm looking for deployable military

anywhere in the world so if you want to say that China's winning because their progress has been faster for the last 50 years I think that's fair but to say that they're winning overall is actually not fair really yeah they're not they're not anywhere close to being able to overcome

or outmatch the United States military or the U.S. economy if you have numbers that show me otherwise I'm super eager to see them. But the last time I checked, the U.S. still had the largest economy in the world in terms of GDP. But aren't we completely reliant on China for everything manufacturing? No.

Like pretty much everything manufacturing is reliant on China. Well, what do you, so that statement alone, right? Pretty much everything. All of our electronics, all of our phones. So in those categories, you are correct.

But our vehicles don't have to have smart chips. We have tons of stuff that we import from Vietnam, Brazil. We have things that we, like, maple syrup only comes from Canada. We're not reliant on anything in China from maple syrup. That's fine. We have tons of in-house agriculture, right?

What China provides us, what China has provided the entire world, is cheap labor for refinement and manufacturing. Because China doesn't care if their water is poison and China doesn't care if the people get abused. So in a globalized world, the mistake that we all made prior to COVID, everybody in the world, is that we were happy to let China do all the hard work, right? Australia was sending their rare earth minerals to Australia to China for refinement. We were letting China be the place where we assembled all of our iPhones. What happened with COVID, when COVID struck China and what was that, like late winter, early spring of 2020?

Yeah. When it first hit, manufacturing, the supply chain all over the world froze. Even now we're feeling supply chain. Right. Yep. So what started to happen the day after supply chains. froze. Everybody started diversifying away from China, right? China made a mistake. They quietly let everybody put their supply chain go through China, which is a strategic, super

strong strategic move. But they never anticipated that something could happen that would highlight that they had been doing that strategy. COVID highlighted that China had made themselves the epicenter of all supply chain, of almost, of the vast majority of supply chains in the world. since then massive investment in diversifying minerals resources manufacturing supply chain variations outside of China nobody ever wants another COVID to happen again they want to make sure they have supply chains that don't touch that don't touch not only just China but that that aren't reliant on a single bottleneck so China got busted hard with COVID and I would not say I would never in a million years say that the majority of our manufacturing comes out of China because it's just not true

True. Lots of cheap trinkets and lots of heavy manual labor are done in China. Lots of very toxic refinement is done in China because that's China's competitive advantage. Outside of that, they have no advantage. Most of your chocolate does not come from China, right? As an example, most of your gas does not get touched by China. Most of your metals, like, there's a long laundry list of things that you use every day that China doesn't touch. But if you want to talk about the plastic crap in your living room. Yeah, China touches a lot of that. But what did you do the majority of the things in our homes and our offices like in this room right now? We come from China like these microphones, the TVs, I mean our phones. I mean, wouldn't that be extremely

extremely detrimental if we, the supply chain from China was cut off indefinitely? Like that would be that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened in February of 2020. It was catastrophic. It will never happen again. Do you think we will bring back? some of that manufacturing to the U.S.? Like would be beneficial to that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, that's what the Trump administration was trying to do before COVID anyways, was trying to bring back more manufacturing to the U.S.

The problem is the kind of manufacturing that returns to the U.S. is going to be skilled, skilled manufacturing, not unskilled manufacturing. It's going to be expert heavy instead of labor heavy. Does that make sense? That's just the way we work. If you think of even just computer programming as a form of skill. labor. That's a lot of that manufacturing, quote unquote manufacturing,

happens right here in the United States. There's tons of very skilled laborers building things every day. All throughout the east and west coast, all throughout the center states, the flyover states. Right. The main place where China shines in terms of supply chain and manufacturing is cheap entry-level goods. I promise you, if you were to look at the most expensive equipment you have in the

studio, it didn't come from China. The nicest equipment you have in here probably came from places in Europe. Yeah, I think these actually came from Sweden. There you go. If it's cheap shit, it's coming from China. Entry level stuff, that's going to come from China. Mass produced, low quality, low survivability rate. But all your high quality goods are still created by skilled manufacturers, not raw labor. Right. But I mean, there's so many other ties that we have to China, like the NBA. Like, for example, the NBA, when an NBA executive comes out and talks about, you know, China and Hong Kong, then China cuts off billions of dollars of funding to the NBA. Like there's so many,

there's so many key ties between China and the U.S. that would destroy corporations in the U.S. that are relying on China, such as Apple or the NBA. And I'm sure there's, there's a laundry list of other ones like that. So if, if a corporation has allowed itself to become so controlled by one element of their supply chain, they're not a very mature corporation, right? So that's one thing to think about. If China does shut down the supply and Apple suffers and iPhones around the world stop being produced and they can't survive longer than six months or so, you already know I don't like Apple. You already know I don't like iPhones. Right, right. So that's just... By the way, why don't you like iPhones? Because Apple's company is not a good

company. Look at what just, we're talking about it right now. They're dependent on a supply line coming from China, right? They don't cooperate to keep Americans safe. They're an American company that, does not cooperate with the FBI, does not cooperate with organizations that are there to keep American safe. We saw that with the terrorists that were using iPhones in whatever year that was, 2012 maybe. When terrorist cells were using iPhones and then when the FBI got a hand, got their hands on those cell phones, Apple wouldn't help them unlock the cell phones because Apple said, we promised our users that they have total security. Individual privacy, right? Individual privacy, isn't that important? Well, is individual privacy important or is American citizen

privacy important. Which one do you really want? You want privacy laws that pertain to American citizens. And if the American citizen in question is a terrorist ISIS member who has taken their Americans, has given up their American citizenship to become a

member of ISIS, does that person deserve the same rights, the same privilege to privacy as you and I? Or do their decisions dictate their right to privacy? These are all the sticky, uncomfortable questions that you'll never hear about in a headline that smart people have around tables all the time, but ignorant people don't

because they sit around talking about, oh, we all have a right to privacy, yada, yada. Nobody gives a rat's ass if you're cheating on your wife with your secretary. Nobody cares except for you, your secretary and your wife. FBI is not going to waste their time on that. CIA is not going to waste their time on that. But if there's some dude hiding out in

Michigan who's an American citizen who has pledged his loyalty to ISIS through an online portal and now that person's plotting an attack in St. Louis, that person has given up their right to privacy. That's the country I want to live in. As soon as we stop looking at that person through the lens of a threat to American citizens, then that's the day that I leave the United States. But doesn't China have some

sort of extreme power over the U.S. by controlling companies like Apple or Samsung or the NBA? They're trying. Like if there's all these major corporations in the U.S. that are so tied into government and so tied in, like, they, that are so, our economy is so dependent on, and China has tons of influence over those companies. Wouldn't that be an indirect way of influence and power over us through China? It's a useless wave of influence. Yeah, because what's China going to do? This is, so let's say that China has total control over Apple. Well, they could have, they have, they could potentially have access to all of our information. They have potential to all the information if you use Apple. Right. That's it. That's all they have. What, what,

kind of, what kind of, or social media apps like TikTok? What kind of chess piece is that? Oh, great. You can now look in the pocket of every ignorant 22 year old around the country. What's the point? What's the value? There's no strategic value there, man. Like China's grasping, China's grasping at a world that is distractible. And they, they want to suck up every bit of information they can, right? That's, that's a strategy that they're pursuing. It's the same, it's a sim, have you ever heard of the pricing strategy in business? There's two, there's two, there's two pricing strategies in business. You can either price yourself so that you are the lowest priced competitor. Right. Or you can price yourself so you're the highest priced competitor. Everything in the middle is not an advantage.

The person at the cheapest price is going to get the most customers. The person with the highest price is going to have customers that pay the most and they might get the most top line revenue. If you're the idiot that prices the same product somewhere in the middle, then you've lost both advantages.

Either have millions of readers or readers with millions. Exactly. I think there's a magazine that uses that quote. Yeah, it's a great quote. So China is essentially in the bargain basement part of the world. America is in the value, the highest value proposition of the world. We want to create the most impactful, most powerful, most powerful stuff.

We want to empower Silicon Valley and Boeing and Raytheon to create stuff that the world has never seen before. We don't really care about plastic trinkets. We don't really care about TikTok. Right. But when it comes down, when you're asking, what's the value of having control over information? Not control. Not control, but having access to information such as stuff from TikTok, being, being, having the mind control of every 20 year old in our country. Well, there's the psychological aspect of it, right?

There's the war of ideas. There's weaponizing of ideas and thoughts and psychology. There is. And that's a huge thing. I mean, it's a huge. Like you think when you think of wars or whatever and you think of dropping bombs or bullets, you know, the psychological aspect of it are the, the hearts and minds. ideas, right? Absolutely.

But you've got to think about influence is not equal for all people. We've had this conversation before, too, where we talk about equal and fair, right? If every broke-ass 20-year-old in the United States who's recording themselves on TikTok picking their nose or pouring beer on their, you know, girlfriend's head, if every one of them is suddenly fully mind-controlled by China, what advantage is that for China?

They're going to get, what, a bunch of poor, broke-ass 20-year-olds to go out there and, like, protest? The decisions in America are made by the top 2% of people. You know what that top 2% of people do not use? TikTok. Think about it, man. I intentionally don't advertise on a platform like TikTok because my multimillion dollar clients are not there. They might not be able to change decisions made by the top 2% but they could they could seed chaos.

Who cares? Of course. Isn't that what Russia and China want to see in the U.S.? Is chaos? Yeah, but they want to see it. They want to see chaos at a real level. They want to see chaos happen in groups that already exist. So there's an Intel principle called the piggyback principle.

I don't know if I've ever talked about this. So the piggyback principle is that when you're creating an influence campaign against another country, you never try to create something new. You don't go in and try to create a new organization that doesn't like Catholic nuns. It doesn't make any sense. It's expensive. It's slow. It may not work.

You never create a new organization. new issue. You find an existing point of conflict and then you pour resources into the existing point of conflict. That's what you do. So you find Americans that hate Muslims and then you fund the group that says America against Muslims and then you also fund the group that says Muslim rights in America. So you start to pour resources into both extremes. Those are called sciops, right? When they do that when there'll be a protest on a corner of a street and then all of a sudden there'll be a conflict to conflict group on the other side of the street in certain parts of the world, like when they organize on social media?

Yeah. So Cyops is a military term for psychological operations that is more complicated than just that. But essentially what you're talking about is the kind of pointy end of the spear. When a group, when an influence or a deception campaign is successful in funding both ends of a group, they can do things like, hey, let's send, let's send the people. who want to protest the abuse of animals at SeaWorld, let's send them on a protest on the same day as the people who think that SeaWorld should be free to like all future generations of children. Let's get them to protest on the same day in the same place. That is an influence campaign. If the military were to do it, the Psyop, the psychological operation, would come before the influence campaign because the psychological operation would be there to kind of pave the way for the arguments. Let's give people more information. Let's give people more information. Let's give people. people more context, a lot of what you see here, like this, this kind of headline is closer to a psychological operation than it is to an influence campaign. Because an influence campaign is there to create an outcome.

A psychological operation is there to create a new way of thinking or to cement or underscore an existing way of thinking. One is action-based. One is cognitive-based. Are you familiar with China's, I think it's the 2049 plan? to become the dominant global superpower. Correct. Yep. 2049. Can you expand on that?

It's, or explain what it is? Yeah, so, so Xi Jinping is a very methodical, strong, cult of personality, right? And he has done an excellent job,

I think, of bringing the Chinese Communist Party into line with a singular vision. And he laid out his 2049 plan of where, of how Chinese, was going to become the new global superpower because they'd be replacing the United States. Why would they replace the United States in 2049?

Because they haven't replaced this yet. You see what I'm saying? So he laid out this plan. Now, plan included all sorts of things. The most important thing, I think, to keep aware of is that included the taking Taiwan and making it China again, right? All of this drama about Ukraine, what this is is a giant, it's a giant, it's a giant dress rehearsal for what China is going to do in Taiwan.

That's why China... You know who's backing Russia in the UN? Who? China. Are they really? Yep. Do you know the whole UN, all the permanent members in the UN, wanted to keep this topic, the Russia-Ukraine crisis,

wanted to keep it a public conversation so that they could use public pressure and they could use the UN as a way of maintaining peace in Ukraine. Russia wanted it to be a closed-door conversation only for diplomats, only for people immediately involved. They would have, the only person, the only country in all of the UN that supported Russia's decision,

Russia's movement, to make it a private conversation instead of a public conversation, was China. Do you know who just came out today making a statement that it's the U.S.'s fault that Russia invaded Ukraine?

Yeah. China. Do you know why the sanctions against Russia aren't going to work? because China will always be there to move money in and out of Russia. This is the way the world works. It doesn't mean China's a bad guy.

It doesn't mean Russia's a bad guy. It doesn't mean America's a bad guy. It means that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Sanctions are going to fail. You know what Russia had on them before they invaded Ukraine? American sanctions.

They've been sanctioned since 2014. They've been sanctioned since 2008. Sanctions just don't work because the elite of any country. What are you, do you ever worry about rich people finding a way around taxes? Like, will rich people ever pay the full amount of taxes? Am I ever worried about it? No, I mean, they're always, they'll always find a way around. So what's going to happen when a rich person in a foreign country gets sanctioned?

Right, they'll find a way around it. But who won't find a way around it? All the poor people who suffer. Right, the citizens. And then as they suffer, they'll just further believe. that the person levying the sanctions is the aggressor. So my point in all of this is that Russia and China are in this together. Is that not in our best interest to push them closer together?

No, it is not in our best interest to push them closer together. That's what I thought. Yeah. So the terminology that we have in the Intel world is called GPC, Global Power Competition. There's three players competing for global power competition. Us, China, and Russia. That's it. Nobody else has GPC ambitions.

We have been the global power leader since World War II. Russia was keeping up until their Soviet Union fell apart in 91. And then China really massively increased in the last like 12 to 15 years. China's 2049 plan is them saying, we have ambitions to be the number one. Like that's a big statement. And that big statement is a powerful, public display, not just of Xi Jinping's ambitions, but of his openness to put the whole world

on red alert and say, hey, everybody, we're going to do this thing. If there's a close relationship between Russia and China, and China does what they did to Hong Kong in 2019, do you remember that when they went into Hong Kong? They violently broke up protests. They consumed, they pulled, forced Hong Kong to become part of Red China. do you remember that? And then COVID broke out and nobody talked about Hong Kong anymore.

Right. Russia watched that happen. When Russia took when Russia took Georgia in 2008, China watched that happen. China was backing them then too. China was a neutral party in 2008. Instead of saying we support Russia

or we condemn Russia, they specifically said, we don't have an opinion in 2008. Even though the whole UN was saying, this is wrong. And then in 2014, they watched as Russia took Crimea, using a different but similar tactic to what they did in Georgia. And China kept their mouth shut again. In 2019, so 2014 was Crimea. In 2019, China took Hong Kong. Russia supported them, didn't say anything one way or the other. And now we're seeing Russia take Ukraine. I feel like what this is showing us is a dance. It's a

series of practice steps leading up to not just Soviet expansion, which everybody wants to talk about right now, but it's also giving China the green light to say, hey, China, guess what's going to happen if you take Taiwan? Nothing. You think Biden's going to play a role? Nope. You think NATO's going to go to war for Taiwan? Nope.

If you look at the headlines right now on Chinese social media and Chinese newspapers, the headlines right now are all talking about. how the U.S. is doing nothing. The West is abandoning Ukraine. Interesting. Are they really? In Ukraine. That's what they're saying. Is that something that you look at when you see headlines in the U.S.? Do you automatically go to other countries, media, and see what their narrative is?

One of the things I teach all of my multimillion dollar clients. I have a product called NewsHacker, a digital training service called NewsHacker, where I teach people to do this. I teach people how to find truth by looking at multiple sources. That's why when you showed me Yahoo News, I was like, not a credible source, right? If you want to find real news, you have to look at the news in the Middle East, the news in Europe, the news in China, the news in Latin America, the news in the United States, the news in Canada, the news in the UK, cross-reference them all and see where they're saying the same thing. It's so fucking hard to do all that, dude. It's hard to do it, you know what I mean? But if you want to call yourself and inform the geopolitical person, that's what you do.

If you don't want to call yourself an informed geopolitical person, you turn on CNN and you repeat what they said. Or watch some YouTube videos. Watch some YouTube videos, for real. Be like I heard Andy say this one thing once. So what I'm calling right now, right? What I'm predicting right now, and I'm going to be right and it's going to be awesome. It's going to be terrible for Taiwan. It's going to be awesome for my business.

In 2024, in the lead up to the elections in 2024, China is going to attack Taiwan. They're going to take Taiwan. In the final hours, the final weeks and days that President Biden is still president. before he has to be reelected, before the Americans go to the poll, China's going to take a pot shot at Taiwan because it's part of their 2049 policy. It's part of their commitment to their own people. And they want Biden to struggle through it. They want Biden to be seen as weak in the year that he's going to be potentially reelected. They want that because the American people are going to be just as off center as they are right now about Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine and Russia don't matter to the American people. There's no economic benefit to Americans in that conflict. There's actual economic benefit to Americans in the conflict between Russia and Taiwan. I'm sorry, between China and Taiwan. That will actually affect us. How? Because Taiwan is an American ally in Southeast Asia that actually does, is a supply chain, critical supply chain point. There are a lot of stuff from Taiwan.

In the electronics and technology. industries. That's why Taiwan matters. Plus, Taiwan has been a long-time ally to the United States. But wouldn't it be the same thing because we have the same kind of relationship with China? Would it affect us that much? What's America going to do when China takes Taiwan? Exactly. So that's what I'm saying. What is our incentive to really help Taiwan when we have the same relationship with China already? It's going to be the same thing. It's going to be exactly what you've seen Biden doing for the last, what, five weeks. We're going to put sanctions on China. Don't do it, China. Devastating sanctions.

We're going to take out your financial system. We're going to shut down your inner circle. We're going to make your elite pay. And where's China going to get relief from all those sanctions? Speaking of weirdness with China's control or stranglehold on some of these industries that we have in the U.S. Did you see the video of what was the John Sina apologizing to China for saying Taiwan was a country? I didn't see it. Because he made a movie recently.

I think it was last year. He came out with a movie. and he was doing press, right? He was traveling, doing press on the movie. And then there was a random interview he was in where one little bit of that 30-minute interview he did, he referenced Taiwan as a country. And then there was some backlash from China.

So he came out with his video on all of his social media platform. Apologizing in Mandarin. He's speaking fluent fucking Mandarin. Like, holy shit. And he's apologizing to China. And then they found out later they dissected the revenue from that movie. This is wild, bro.

Look at that. They dissected the revenue from that movie. I think if you could find out how much, I forget the name of the movie even, but I think it was the movie made like $500 million and $450 of it was from China. That's, I mean, I don't see that. So going back to your point about

just trying to have a stranglehold on industry, it has a strangle hold on one John Cena movie. Culture, culture, some sort of influence. I mean, that is influence. That is worthless. influence. That is not influence that you can use on any kind of geopolitical stage, right? It's the John Cena movie that even you don't remember the title of it. Right. I never watched it. What kind of influences that? Right. Does that influence his pocketbook? I couldn't influence a lot of little kids.

Dude, China, if you're watching, Taiwan is a country. Taiwan, if you're watching, China's a big bully, right? How dare you? Whatever. It's, we don't need to dance around this stuff. These are the realities that we all need to accept, right? China is going to take Taiwan. They're going to try. Right now, what they are seeing in Ukraine is that America's not going to do anything. The reason that China loves to see headlines on social media and in the press talking about how America is abandoning Ukraine is because it knows it's planting the seeds two years in advance. This is an influence campaign against Taiwan. What are Taiwanese people thinking right now? China, if the U.S. isn't going to back Ukraine, what are they going to do for us?

Do you know what I mean? China, the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, the U.S. abandoned the Ukrainians, the U.S. abandoned Hong Kong, we know China's gunning for us because they tell us all the time. The headlines in Taiwan tell us that one day Taiwan's going to become part of China. They're getting a very clear message in American, U.S. foreign policy, and they've been getting it for two years. And they'll get it for another two years as Biden continues to take an isolationist approach without calling it isolationist because he just doesn't want to, he doesn't want to put the U.S. in any kind of conflict like that. Is that, is that the right thing or the wrong thing? What do you think? That's his decision. He's the

president. The president is a role I will never, I will never criticize a president because it's a terrible position to be in. Right. When we were here talking about Trump, Trump was the president, like that is a burden. They have the right to make whatever decision they're going to make. I came from the executive branch. I did whatever the president said because that job sucks. You know, what I'm here to tell you is what the future holds. Because I think that there's value in knowing what the future brings. What's happening right now, this would have been valuable to know two weeks ago. But instead of having any kind of helpful insight, all we had was media reverberating, restating something that Biden said, any day now, any day now, worthless.

If somebody would have said, hey, February 23rd, February 24th, somewhere in there, there's going to be a invasion. It's going to be bombs. Everybody would have loved to have heard that. That would have been useful information. Instead, it was just, we believe Russia will invade in the coming days or weeks. That could mean anything. So with China backing Russia right now, like what does that, what does that mean for us in the near future? Like you said, obviously, it's not a good thing for for us to push them closer together. Right. It means that sanctions are going to fail. So Russia's not going to stop being a bully. It also means that all of the the wealthy people in Russia are going to be able to move their money in and out of Russia through

China, through Chinese banks, through other currencies besides the U.S. dollar. And we already, it's very unlikely that the U.S. is actually going to impact the swift banking system. That's like a, that's a devastating, that's a devastating sanction that will actually impact Americans. So they're not going to do that. Explain that one? So the swift banking system?

Yeah. So the swift system is a system that banks around the world use to transact very rapid. And like wire transfers? Yeah, yeah. A SWIFT code from a bank. That's a, okay. Correct. But like most of us are swift, if you're using a SWIFT code at all, it's because

you're wire transferring, what, $1,000 here and there to pay for something. I mean, that's also how big investment banks transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, right? So to shut down the SWIFT accounts in Russia, or to make Russia, to take Russia off of the list of people who can transact via SWIFT is basically going to cut off all Americans who have any investment benefits, any investment benefits, any investment. at all in Russia, including the American government or American corporations that have any kind of investment that is tied to Russia, it's going to shut off their ability to make money from their investment. It's not going to work. You're going to have outcries from wealthy Americans and wealthy corporations because that's all globalized. The world is globalized. You can't just not use China for manufacturing yet. You can build other supply chains, but as those other supply chains are being built, you still have to work through China. So sanctions are going to fail. And that's what we all know.

That's what any historian out there will tell you they've been failing for the last 12 to 15 years. So it's not going to change. And what it's doing is it's allowing China and Russia to have more of an investment in each other. So now instead of investing in the U.S., Russia's going to invest in China. China's instead of going to invest in the United States, they're going to invest in Russia. They're going to keep working together, just like we see them working on the U.N. security council together. And they're going to keep backing each other, which also means they're going to share intelligence, which also means they're going to share training, which also means that.

are going to, and they're closer geographically than we are to either of them. So that's the direction that they're going in. The Biden administration knows that. The whole intelligence infrastructure has been watching this for decades. And we see that that's the direction they're going. Russia is full of poor, ignorant people. China is full of poor ignorant people. They both have very strong dictators that have stayed in power many years longer than their

original purpose, their original constitution said, with no intentions of leaving that office. And they are both publicly pronounced that they have intentions and ambitions to take territory that does not belong to them. The writing is on the wall, folks. We shouldn't be surprised

when we see these things happen. Moldova is in danger. All the stands are in danger, Turkmenistan, the former Soviet states. It's just a matter of time before Russia continues to expand and take those places that are worthless economically

to the United States. But... So you're saying... It really doesn't matter to us whether it takes, whether Russia takes the Ukraine or whether China takes Taiwan. It doesn't matter. It matters to us in principle. In principle, our morals, wherever those are. Right.

But when it comes down to it, are we going to send American troops to die for Taiwan? No, but we'll send billions of dollars in ammunition and in military power so we can win more money for Raytheon and our military industrial complex. We win there, military industrial complex. I mean, we win with the media. make more, the media makes more money. And when you think about it, what do Americans, like, what are our true values? Our true values are money. How do we remain the economic superpower in the world?

Would you rather give up superpower status in exchange for becoming Taiwan's best friend and protecting them against the China and going into a prolonged seven, 10, 12 year war protecting them? Right. Or would you rather remain the world's economic superpower? Right. It's a practical decision. Everybody listening is saying the same thing.

I'd rather stay the superpower. And that sucks for Taiwan. I'm just telling you it'll happen in 2024. Okay. It still sucks. The other big thing I want to talk to you about today is the war on misinformation and speech. You got the link I sent you. Yeah, the war is not on misinformation.

The war is technically on what's now being called malinformation. Right. The intentional twisting of. factual information into a narrative that is, what's the word I'm looking for? Intended to mislead or misguide. Mal information is what the war is on.

Misinformation is technically just wrong information, errant information. If I tell you today that a Big Mac costs $1.75, but it actually costs $1.78, that's not malinformation. That's just me saying something wrong. That's misinformation. What I'm talking about specifically is what the Department of Homeland Security

just released something online saying that misinformation, releasing misinformation, is now considered terrorism. They implicitly said that the summary of the terrorism threat to U.S. and before we do this? Yes. That's not what they said. But let's go ahead and look at what they actually said. Okay, let's look at it.

So if you scroll down, yeah. Yeah, it's right there in the first couple lines. The United States remains in a heightened threat of environment, a heightened threat environment fueled by, several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories and other forms of misdiss and malinformation, or MDM, introduced and or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. Correct. So what they actually said was not that misinformation is an act of terrorism. What they said is, the United States remains in a heightened

threat environment. And that heightened threat environment is fueled by multiple factors including mis, dis, and malinformation from foreign and domestic, what was the threat actors, right?

So a domestic threat actor can mean a lot of different things. It can mean an American who's intentionally spreading disinformation or malinformation. It could also mean a foreigner inside the United States that's amplifying or spreading. those messages. That's what a domestic threat actor is. It's a, it's not just Americans. It's any,

any threat actor with a domestic footprint. So this, this is one of those things that has been widely misquoted and widely misinterpreted. Yeah. Around the, around the world, and especially the United States, to say that, hey, if you speak out against the American government, you're a terrorist now. Right. That in and of itself is an example of malinformation, if the person is intention, taking it out of context, right? Or misinformation if the person is simply making a mistake when they quote it. So let's see what it says. Number one, it says the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which so discord or undermine public trust in the U.S. government institutions.

Right. False or the proliferation, which is intentional. False or misleading narratives. Yep. So that's kind of vague. False or misleading narratives. Like if you want to talk about COVID and how COVID, the science on COVID has changed every month for the last year. That's not false or misleading. The science has changed. But they, people can claim it's false if it's wrong. If you posted something a month ago and it was, now it's changed and it's wrong. You can easily say that that's false. Okay. It's very easy to portray that. But when you're moving the goalpost like that, it's very easy to portray that is false. Similar to what they did with Joe Rogan by interviewing that guy. Right. So you're right. It is, it is in a

changing goal post, then your accurate information one day becomes misinformation a different day. Exactly. But that's, I think the important thing there is that the goal is to say right now the science says this. Yesterday, the science said that. There was a post by the World Health Organization in like March of 2020 that said, COVID is not transmittable from person to person. That was a Instagram post, a Twitter post from the World Health Organization. Exactly. That does not make that mal-information. Now, if you and I were to repost that today and send out in our social media profile, see, guys, COVID's fake. It's not even real. It can't be transmitted from person to person. Now, if we did that with the intent to deceive the American people, and that could be

proven in a court of law, then that's exactly an example of not why we're terrorists, but it's an example of why the United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by domestic actors. Yeah, exactly. Like if you would have said a month ago that if you would have said that the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission of COVID, that would have been considered misinformation. Misinformation. Incorrect or incomplete information. Now they admit it. Now the pharmaceutical companies admit it. Right. But it would have not been mal-information. And what you're thinking about is you're thinking about this through the context of a, of an American citizen with the best of intentions to spread meaningful information. What happened on Joe Rogan is a perfect example.

Joe Rogan had a guest who thought he was doing the right thing by saying what he believed to be true. That's there's no intent to deceive. There's no intent to see discord, right? What's the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in the U.S. government institution? That's the effect of it, not necessarily the intent of it. Correct. The intent is all that matters because if you look here, what they're talking about is the proliferation. So in order to in order to spread something, it means that you are intentionally spreading. If I just say something and it becomes viral, that's not intentional. If you believe it's true and you want to intentionally spread it to make the world a better place, of course you're trying to spread, you're trying to

make your narrative viral because you think it's the right narrative. Right. By going on Joe Rogan, you're fucking going to, you're going to go viral no matter what you're talking about. But this doesn't make you a terrorist. This just is an example, right? While the conditions underlying heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, right there it's saying it's been like this for the last year. The convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity environment. So the bullets that you're reading through, these aren't, these aren't things that make you a terrorist. These aren't reasons that the U.S. government's going to hunt you down. These are examples of why these. These are examples of the

factors that have increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the environment. It's easy to misinterpret this, especially... It's saying that these are the reasons that were in a heightened environment. Exactly right. Exactly right. What ends up happening here, brother? Continue called for violence. What was number two?

Continued called for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructures, soft targets, and mass gatherings, faith-based institutions such as churches, synagogues, mosques, institutions of higher education, racial, religious, minority groups, government facilities, and personnel. including law enforcement and the military, the media, the perceived ideological opponents, and three, calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States

based on recent events. Right. So what's happening is there's all sorts of things you don't even hear about, because you don't follow them, right? So if you're really into like far right, radical violent stuff, there's an algorithm that finds you

and shares the stuff with you. If you are, if you're into like radical Islam, if you're into radical Catholicism, or if you're into radical anything, there's an algorithm that's going to send you more radical stuff. Those are the people who are seeing a lot of what you see here in two and three. You and I don't see what happens in two and three

because we're not radicalized. That's not on us. The challenge has been for Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all the other social media platforms, they've had to learn how to change their algorithms so that they're not promoting, they're not helping to spread intentional malinformation, or lies, which are disinformation, right?

Disinformation is something that you know is false, and you're saying it anyways. Malinformation is something you know is true, but you're taking it out of context so that it sounds a certain way. Right. So those two things are the big threats. Foreign actors, radicalized groups,

take advantage of disinformation and malinformation all the time. But it's like we talked about it a minute ago, it's all about intent, right? So it's, I feel like what the fear is with things like this? is that this just makes it easier for the U.S. government to decide who is and who is not considered a terrorist or a threat or who can be silenced. But how can you really judge somebody's intent? Yeah, so I'm not going to agree with you on that. It doesn't make it easier for the U.S. government to do anything.

Like the same way, like the same way. They still have to prove it in a court of law, right? So if there isn't a preponderance of truth by a panel of your peers, then it can't be proven in a court of law. This makes it actually quite a bit more difficult for the U.S. government to build a case against anybody. The intention of this, the intention of this DHS bulletin is to basically send a message to everybody in an election year that there's nefarious actors out there trying to lie to you. If you recall in the lead up to the election in 2020, the Center for Counterintelligence, the head of the Counterintelligence Center, also made a public statement telling everybody, hey, everybody, in the lead up to this year's election, I want you to know, that there's bad people out there who are lying to you all the time. Right?

Don't trust what you see in social media. Don't trust what you read in the headlines. Like, double check and confirm your sources and your information. People get these warnings all the time, especially on election years, when foreign actors and terrorists and even domestic actors all over the world are redoubling their efforts to try to influence how people are going to react. What's especially difficult about midterm elections

is that midterm elections are usually decided by a demographic that votes every two years, where four-year elections are influenced by a demographic of people who only vote once every 10 to 12 years. So it's a different demographic. Specifically, it's an older demographic that they're trying to influence every two years and a younger demographic that they're trying to influence

every four years. So that changes what kind of misinformation, what kind of disinformation, what kind of platform they use. Right. So this is obviously targeted specifically, at COVID and like election fraud, right? What they call election fraud. So those are two examples that they use.

Those are the two main examples for this, right? But it's, I mean, it's aimed at more than that, too. It's going to be aimed at all the conspiracy theorists who claim that Biden is trying to hide failed COVID policies. He's not trying to hide failed COVID policies. Did the COVID policies fail? Some would say yes. Some would say no.

Some would say they weren't strong enough. Who knows? But it's a conspiracy to say that, like, that you, Ukraine and Russia happened because Biden is trying to hide something. Russia and Ukraine were going to happen. Russia chose the timing. Russia happened to choose a year when Biden, when the United States is going to the polls again, and when he wants Biden to look bad.

He wants America to look at the U.S. administration. He wants us to look at our own administration and say, hey, we look weak on the world stage. Right. Because maybe that's going to change how we vote in the midterm. Who knows? He also knows that America is not going to take a lot of action right now. and that Biden is not the kind of president that's going to do that. So that's what this is talking about.

The intentional spread of dis or malinformation that's intended to sow discord, that's intended to call for public violence, you know, those are bad, bad things. Those are fringe things. The kind of people who get censored like today on social media are anyone who questions the morals of the pharmaceutical companies or of the military or things like that. And these big social media companies are not necessarily government, but they can pick and choose who they sounds. For example, we talked about last time Trump getting banned off Twitter and people getting banned off Twitter for talking down about the negative effects of vaccines. And those social media companies are influenced by this.

They're not influenced. Those social media, those companies are being are being policyed. Right, exactly. It's not even influence. It's a direct policy. They want to stay, if they want to keep their business doors open, they have to play. by these rules. Exactly. And it's going to also require a lot of people to self-censor on what they talk about because they want to keep their livelihood. Right. Do I want to keep

this podcast going? Okay, well, I have to not talk about COVID. I have to not talk about vaccines. No, you have to not intentionally spread disinformation or malinformation. That's a big gray area. I don't think, how could you say if I'm intentional? Like, like, am I intentionally spreading disinformation right now? Like, you could easily post a, a headline, find the headline of this podcast, find one little clip of this podcast and say, oh yeah, I'm intentionally spreading bad information. If somebody were to do that, that is an example of mal-information. Right. If somebody were to do that, that's an example. Exactly. So if that goes, no, no, you're not hearing me. If you have a podcast, if we have this podcast, whatever, 90-minute podcast, where we talk about, openly talk about what is

disinformation, what is mal-information, what is misinformation, and then somebody else from like the Department of Justice or the, you know, whatever, security department of Florida, if they come in and they choose one 15-second clip, right, where it's, where, where, where out of your voice is coming, vaccines don't work in COVID, right? COVID vaccines don't work. If they take that alone and they try to shut you down, that is them being guilty. Exactly. Which means when that goes in front of a court, you win the case. Right. But are you going to go in front of court? Are you just going to get silenced off YouTube? If you get, if you get suspended from YouTube, you're not going to go to court. If you get, yeah, so then that's on, that's, I see what you're saying. If YouTube decides to go

down that road, ultimately, which they have for many, many people. That's. That's. That's going to suffer. That's going to make YouTube suffer. Right. And YouTube's already doing it. This is just going to make it go faster. And it's going to, and ultimately, those platforms are going to have to decide which direction they want to go. Because if they go down the road of silencing everybody who has an opinion that is controversial,

then all of a sudden they're going to have a very whitewashed channel and no one's going to watch that. They're going to lose the media game. That's up to them to decide, right? It's just like what happened with Twitter and parlor. Twitter shut down Trump, parlor exploded, people shut down parlor, you know, and then all the crazies went underground and now they're communicating with whatever, WhatsApp or who knows what. Right, right, right. But my point in all of this is companies have to decide what they're going to do. Just like Apple had to make a decision about how they were going, like they have to make a call about what they stand for.

YouTube has to make a call about what it's going to stand for. Google has to make a stand about what it's going to stand for. As far as business owner to business owner, if you are 100% reliant, on YouTube, you need to diversify. You are essentially guilty of the same thing that Apple is guilty of depending on their one supply chain through China. If you're one supply chain for reaching an audience is YouTube,

you need to diversify. Let's get Concrete.com up, and let's have your own channel that just exists on Concrete.com. Let's have you go be a guest on other people's podcast. That's the smart way to do it, because when you can control your own content, nobody else can shut it down. It takes a lawsuit to shut you down.

And if the lawsuit doesn't stand in a panel of your peers, it fails. And failed lawsuits are a fantastic marketing tool. Right, right. So that's the thing. We can't, it's unfair for anyone to say that a social media platform is being, is silencing voices in order to appease the American government. Because a social media platform is just a business. It's just a business doing.

Trying to make money. Trying to make money. Trying to survive. Just like you and I as business owners are trying to survive every day. And if we're doing something that the United States government tells us is going to shut us down, we're not going to do that anymore. We're going to find something else to do. So when they shut down Trump or when they shut down crazy voices one way or the other, they justify it, however they want to justify it, for every one voice that they shut down, they're pissing off 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 users. And they're going to lose those users.

They're going to lose those users. They're going to lose the revenue that comes in from those users clicking and surfing around. That's how, I mean, is, is, I can't even remember the name of the platform anymore. What was the, what was the chat platform that had a little ghost on it? Oh, Snapchat. Is Snapchat even a thing anymore? Yeah.

It's still out there. Oh, yeah. I didn't know about it. Yeah. Right. So people, I used to use it. I don't use it anymore. Right.

It lost its utility for me. So when, that's the, the direction that all apps are bound to go if they don't evolve and protect their users. The fear a lot of people talk about with moves like this, especially when it has so tied into social media and government, is this government's creep on

power. The government's never ending creep on power, just like the Patriot Act. And where does that lead us? That's the pyramid. That's where China is. Is it lead us to China? Yeah, it leads us to China. A one-party system leads us to China. So all you asshole Democrats, all you asshole Republicans, all you

asshole Republicans who think that you want everybody to be Republican or everybody to be Democrat, what you are wishing on yourself is a future state like China. Our power, the American superpower, is our democracy, is the fact that we live in conflict all the time. We need people on both sides of the fence. We need people to disagree. We need the constant churn, the constant conflict. That's what we need to remain above simple.

influence campaigns. It's very hard for Russia or China to influence our entire country. They can influence one side or the other, but they can't influence everybody because we have this constant conflict. It's the secret sauce to democracy. It's why democracy is hard. It's why it's failed in so many places. And it's what we need to lean into. We need to understand that that condemning the opposite people who think differently than us is just a path to a one-party system and a one-party system is called China. That's not where I want to go. I want to live in the muck, in the conflict,

in the consternation, because we're going to get stronger there. And the sooner that we learn to kind of embrace the muck instead of get angry at each other over the dirtiness. So if you get a chance to go to a high echelon government function, it's an amazing thing. Because on CNBC or on CNN or on the news, you'll see representative, Democratic representative,

Republican representative, disagreeing and calling each other out and making it look like they just, they can't get along. You go to the high functioning event, the high level function in Washington, D.C., they're sitting there having a beer because they're friends. Right. Because they embrace the conflict.

Right. Right. Their real challenge is getting elected every two years or every six years to stay in the Senate or stay in the Congress. That's their big challenge. Everything else is just kind of rhetoric. Let's fight and make sure that we move as slowly as possible so that we never make the mistake of building momentum and kind of letting ourselves get railroaded by our own momentum.

Right. And that's what the forefathers originally intended with the United States. And it's worked. And it keeps working. And I trust it. So I'm not going to be somebody who says that we need to shut down either side or that either side is right or wrong. Of course not. Right.

When you look at the center and you look at just to the left of center, just to the right of center, it's the bell curve, right? That's the bell curve where the magic happens. The majority of Americans live in that bell curve. The majority of your congresspeople and senators live in that bell curve. And the people on the fringes are just the loudest. Trust this. This is going to keep working. We're going to be fine.

What do you think would happen if we got rid of lobbying or lobbyists and corporations funding politicians? So getting rid of lobbyists would not be as. powerful, I think, as people think. Really? Getting, putting terms on congressmen and senators would be much more effective. Well, specifically on Congresspeople. Putting terms on Congress people would be massively effective. Lobbyists don't make that much of a difference.

Lobbyists. Or Congress people being able to buy and sell stocks. Right. So when you make professional politicians, that's a problem. Right. Lobbyists are just there to support or drive the prioritization of, whatever they're lobbying for. They're not the ones that are the ultimate decision maker.

When they get a chance to lobby in an institution where there's no limit to how long someone is in power, like you could be a democratic, a democratic congressperson in Virginia forever. Now all of a sudden it's an issue. Now it's like the one lobbyist can just go to you with the same offer. Every time there's a new policy that's about to come out that might impact big tobacco or big alcohol or big oil. And that's a challenge. So I'm not worried about lobbyists.

Lobbyists have a legitimate value ad. Congress people with no term limits do not have a value add. They're not beneficial to the United States. I hope that that's going to be our next evolution in our democratic process. Yeah. It's getting Congress people out of Congress after two, three, four terms, something. Right. But don't let them spend an entire career in Congress.

Right. I mean, what do you think about the argument of paying, politicians or people in Congress like a couple million bucks a year, five, six, seven million dollars a year and just banish law, like get rid of lobbying. So these people make enough money to where they don't have to have the outside interests.

That's not, the purpose of lobbying is not for the out. Congress people already make a shit ton of money. They make $250,000 a year. Right. But they really make millions, but their salary is like $200,000 a year, right? Which is way above the average constituent that they're representing, right? So and if you've ever met,

a wealthy person. I have been blessed to have lots of wealthy clients. Whether they make $8 million a year, or whether they make $28 million a year, or $208 million a year, it doesn't matter to them. Once you're basically like a de-millionaire, then at that level, most people they'll tell you, like, they don't have a need for money. They don't look at money as a resource anymore. It's just about winning or losing. Somebody else managed it. It's just about winning or losing. Winning or losing, whatever the thing is that they're choosing to win or lose. Sometimes that's horse racing. Sometimes that's young girlfriends. Sometimes that's, you know, stocks or whatever else. They're not thinking about money. They're just thinking about winning or losing whatever interest

area they have. Right. So the thing that's like when a congressperson becomes that wealthy, it's just about winning or losing. It's not about the money. Right. People who live at less than a million dollars a year, we think of it as money because the money, we can't afford the next biggest house or the next, the next Bentley or whatever else. We have to think about how do we get there. When you have $15 million in net worth, what can't you have? Right. Right. If you're really thinking about a multi-billion dollar yacht like some Saudi prince, then good luck. But for the most part, you can have pretty much anything you want in the American existence if you've got $15 million in net worth. Right. And that's not a lot of money in the terms of ultra-wealthyloyalty people.

Deca millionaires, people who have more than 10, that's not a lot of money. People who have more than $100 million in net worth, now you're getting into a more elite group, but there's still tens of thousands of people who have more than $100 million in that worth. So, yeah, lobbyists, small impact. And anybody who wants to focus on lobbyists is focusing on the wrong thing. Lobbyists don't have the power. The people who have the power are the congressmen. If you can police Congress, lobbying is going to have to change its tactics. And to be very honest with you, there are going to be more people willing to raise their hand. And, and run for a congressional seat,

as long as lobbyists exist. Because now, if you're like a teacher, or if you're somebody, if you're like a janitor or a airplane tech, if you're a normal everyday person and you find out that there's a congressional seat up for election because the term limit just hit, and last year in the previous congressperson

is not going to be there anymore, you might raise your hand and actually compete. If you know, you're going to make $250,000 a year plus some extra bennies if you agree with the right lobby. to represent your home district, the district that you're going to go back home to, and how are they going to greet you?

You've got to serve them. Right now, professional politicians don't have to serve their home constituency. They only have to serve the small constituency that actually votes for them every election cycle. It's not a true representation. Well, Andrew, we run out of time. Sorry, man. I can sit here and talk for another six hours with you. But unfortunately, we're going to have to bring that back for round four.

We'll save your users. Yeah, we'll save your listeners. Dude, thank you so much. I had a blast talking to you about this shit. Tell people who are listening or watching where they can follow what you're doing. Yeah, so follow me at my website, EverydaySpy.com. I have a top 1% podcast myself called the Everyday Espionage podcast. You can find it on any platform, YouTube or any podcast platform out there.

Love that podcast. Thanks, brother. Take a listen. Subscribe. I'll teach you something new every day. And otherwise, you can also just reach out to me through any of my social media channels at Everyday Spy, whether that's Instagram or Facebook or not Snapchat. Awesome, bro.

Thank you so much. I fucking always love getting your insight, especially when it comes to foreign policy and that kind of shit. I appreciate it. So fascinating. Thanks, Dan. So fascinating. Cool.

All right. Goodbye, world.