Julian Dorey Podcast - #224 - CIA Spy on Diddy, UFOs, Iran & Mossad | Andrew Bustamante

Starting point is 00:00:00 The idea of a plant, and people accuse me of being a plant too. All the f*** wrong. And that's fine, they're all f***ing stupid. If you think I'm a plant, you're pretty f***ing stupid. You're very talented. You grew with very fine branches and leaves. So the idea that the government would make a plant, it doesn't make any sense to me. The also...

Starting point is 00:00:19 Ever. Here's why, here's why I'm having such consternation with this. When you cultivate a plant that's witting meaning they know that there are plants they know their job is to go out there and communicate a certain message you always run the risk of blowback if the plant goes upside down backwards and change if they turn suit yeah but then you just kill them administratively challenging them. Administratively challenging. There it is again.

Starting point is 00:00:47 That's an admission. You didn't think you were going to get that one by me. Come on. So. Well, well, well. If it isn't the CIA's used condom of the internet, Andrew Bustamante. He's back. That's a hell of an intro right there, man.

Starting point is 00:01:12 The used condom of the internet. The CIA's used condom of the internet. You've been on every show, literally like all the big ones, and you're on there all the time because there's always new shit happening in the world. And you're a guy who is maybe in the middle of some of that, but at least follows all that completely because it's the world of geopolitics. So it's always relevant.

Starting point is 00:01:33 And it's great to have you here at a rather crazy time, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. Shit is nuts out there right now in the Middle East. And, you know, I try not to be alarmist about stuff i try to keep it even keel but i gotta admit the last few days the last like 10 days once we had the the the hooties in yemen throw some fucking bombs into israel which by the way alessi jovi warwick fucking was on that and called that he was here a few months ago and then we followed that up with

Starting point is 00:02:05 israel hitting the leader of hamas understandable but they hit him in iran which is i guess problematic and then you know they attacked and killed the leader of hezbollah as well like it feels like there's like a multi-front thing going on here so are we on the verge of like an actual full-scale war beyond gaza Gaza in that region right now? So Israel is playing a dangerous game. And it's what makes – if you recall, we talked in one of our earlier interviews, right, about how brazen Mossad is. Yeah, number 150. When it comes to physical attacks on individuals, when it comes to the risks that they take.

Starting point is 00:02:47 Like what? Well, I mean, Mossad does some of the most daring raids. We've seen news reports about Mossad riding by on motorcycles and attaching sticky bombs to cabs. That is a brazen type of operation. You really only do that when you're in a position of existential threat. Right. And what we're seeing now the leader of Hamas or the leader of Hezbollah. They attacked a field commander of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the same field commander who was in charge of the rocket launches that killed the 12 youth in northern Israel. And they killed a political leader of Hamas. And Hamas has both political and revolutionary wings. Right. So we've got to be specific

Starting point is 00:03:45 because when you think about the fact that they went and they killed people in sovereign states, meaning they launched an attack into the sovereign state of Iran, into the capital of Iran, Tehran, to kill a political leader of Hamas who was in Iran as a guest.

Starting point is 00:04:07 The primary financier, the primary backer for Hamas is Iran. Yes. Right? Iran funds Hamas. Iran funds Hezbollah. Iran funds the Houthis in Yemen. Iran is the chief bank for all the people that surround Israel, all the enemies that surround Israel. So they've got Hamas fighting out of Gaza, which is essentially on the west coast of Israel. They've got Lebanon

Starting point is 00:04:33 hosting Hezbollah, that's the northern side of Israel. And then they've got Iran itself that sits on the western or the eastern side of Israel. And then they've got the Houthis that are south of Israel. So what Israel just did is in basically 72 hours, they launched an attack that gave all four of their geographical areas, enemies who sit on all four fronts, plausible reason to come back and attack. It was a stupid fucking- There are very few things that you can be certain of in life, but you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month.

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Starting point is 00:05:58 that over-deliver. But it goes to show that Israel is so confident that if somebody starts to attack Israel, if Iran attacks Israel, they're that confident the United States is going to come in and help. So what Netanyahu is really doing is he's prolonging the conflict, right? He can't win against Hamas. So he's going to prolong the conflict by expanding it against not just Hezbollah, but against Iran, because he knows that the one way he's going to be able to lock in American support independent of the president is if he's fighting against Iran. He's also coming to our congress though at a time – and speaking in front of them. I guess that was two weeks ago, something like that. At a time where he is also in political turmoil.

Starting point is 00:06:40 For sure. And one – listen. You say what you want about Netanyahu. One thing about the guy I do have to compliment him on, he's an unbelievable politician. I mean the guy is the cockroach that never dies. For sure. exactly like the breakdown of how some of the elections will happen there. So I don't want to speak out of my ass, but he knows that the approval rating is low given the ongoing war. He's supposedly the wartime leader right now, but the PR campaign that has failed. And he also still has the same problem that to your point that he was hitting us with in 2002 in front of Congress, when he's like, you have to go to Iraq and you have to go to Iran as well. What is good for Israel is good for the United States.

Starting point is 00:07:33 And it's like when he came back here last week, I heard the same thing minus Iraq because that one's done. And it feels to me like – and I understand where Israel is coming from on this. They're very worried about Iran. Fine. I would be worried about that too if I were a nation of nine million people and they were right next to me and had death to Israel as their fucking slogan. But they want us to come take care of it when they have the highest trained military in the world. So like it feels like we're getting dragged into another endless war. My question is, am I too worried about an endless war in the sense that I've seen the ones go wrong, like Iraq and Afghanistan to the point that like, I risk being isolationist because Iran really is that big of a problem. Iran is that big of a problem in the Middle East. They're not that

Starting point is 00:08:18 big of a problem. When you look at them globally, Iran's influence outside of, I mean, anywhere further beyond, say, Turkey, Iran's influence doesn't really exist much. Iran doesn't have much influence in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America. Their influence in Asia is limited, right? And that's fine because what Iran is trying to build is something known as the Shia Crescent. Shia Crescent? The Shia Crescent. Shia Crescent? The Shia Crescent. That's been their revolutionary goal since the 1950s. They're trying to build a series of Shia countries, meaning Shia majority countries that extend from as far north as Iraq all the way down and around through Yemen, right?

Starting point is 00:09:02 So in the crescent shape. That's their sphere of influence. And their primary opponent is Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is trying to secure a Sunni establishment all throughout the Khaliji, which is the oil-rich countries. So the conflict in the Middle East doesn't even really include the United States. It's a Sunni-Shia conflict to see which sect of Islam becomes the dominant sect in charge of both governments and social political purposes. So that's the real conflict. The United States is really only part of it because we need the oil from the region. Without the oil, and the oil-rich states are largely Sunni-driven states. So we partnered with Sunni states like Bahrain and Qatar and UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Starting point is 00:09:49 So that's what our interest is in that region. But because the oil from that region goes everywhere, everybody's interested to a certain extent. Where Iran folds into that, because Iran has oil, but they're not an oil-rich country. The reason Iran plays such a role is because Iran is the breadbasket for all of the Middle East. The rest of the Middle East is fucking desert. They have dates and coffee and the coffee they import from Africa, right?

Starting point is 00:10:16 So what Iran has is agriculture and they have a history of culture and art and technology and industry. That is what put the rest of the collegiate world on the map so even when you're sitting in saudi or sitting in in uae and you hear the national people the the citizens of those countries talk about iran as an enemy they go to the grocery store and everything on their shelf is coming from iran Oh, shit. So it's all fucked up because politically they disagree with them because they're Shia and they're fundamentalist, et cetera, et cetera. But pragmatically, they have to play games. They have to play nice because there's no fresher, cheaper, better built logistical supply chain than the food that comes from Iran. And

Starting point is 00:10:59 Iran knows that. The reason Iran can't successfully be sanctioned and the reason that Iran is so difficult to tame is because its primary forms of income and business have very little to do with what the United States can touch, what the Western world can touch, because most of their partnerships are with the Middle East. And the Middle East knows they're not going to cut off their toes to spite their foot. And that's what would happen if you really sanctioned Iran. Hey guys, if you're listening on Spotify right now, and you're not following me, please take a second and hit that follow button and also leave a five-star review. Both things really help my show. And I appreciate all of you who take the time to do it. Furthermore, if you're not following me on Instagram, you can get me at Julian Dory podcast,

Starting point is 00:11:39 or on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description to this episode. Thank you. I think the other elephant in the room here though is the actual, I guess the, what's the word I'm looking for? The restraint sometimes of the Iranian regime, because obviously to you and me, they seem pretty crazy and they're very radical and they go on Twitter and scream death to the US, death to Israel and all that. So they're not normal. But when they've been faced with potential escalative – I think I'm making up a word there, but escalating conflicts in the past, they have shown that restraint.

Starting point is 00:12:23 And the best example to me where I was scared, like, oh, something's going to pop off here, was the January 2020 Soleimani kill. So I think his name was Kasim Soleimani. He was basically in charge of- Qasb Force. Yeah. He was in charge of the force. He was in charge of Hezbollah, Hamas, all these other outside forces that they fund. Very bad guy. World's a better place without him. Not arguing that. But I know from a mutual friend of ours actually at the time told me because he had people wired in there that people

Starting point is 00:12:50 in the administration were really pissed that trump did that because they said this was really careless we hate that guy but like what if they start firing rockets everywhere now because you just killed one of their top dudes and if you remember remember, the Iranian Ayatollah and the president had their whole propaganda campaign, crying at his funeral, all that. But they didn't fire shit. Like they didn't load up the pieces of the nukes they may have or whatever. And they cooled off. It was all talk, no action. And when I saw that, I'm like, okay, so one of their top guys gets blatantly executed by the president of the United States.

Starting point is 00:13:24 Fine. Wouldn't you think a crazy regime would put – go, fuck you, put the finger on the trigger and try to fire? And when I saw that they didn't, I'm like maybe they actually, for all the bravado they push out there, they understand their own mortality. Well, and – I mean I don't disagree with you fully, but what I will also say is that it is Arab culture to not impulsively strike back, but to instead create a very detailed plan for revenge and for retribution. So consider the fact that Donald Trump and his entire cabinet basically went on the FBI top 10 list equivalent for Iran on that day. So there have been clear threats against not just the president, Donald Trump, but everybody else that was in his cabinet after the Soleimani killing. And that's been publicly known, that's been disclosed, that's been spread and distributed and disseminated, right? Meaning they consider them literal terrorists.

Starting point is 00:14:24 Well, not only like they consider them top targets for assassination. When it comes to terrorism, here's, I know Americans don't like to hear this, and I'm saying this within like driving distance of the towers of 9-11. The concept of a terrorist is a completely arbitrary policy-driven definition, right? It was created so that the United States could have some sort of bucket that would give them an excuse to skip a lot of bureaucratic process to get funding approved and military equipment approved

Starting point is 00:14:56 and lethal force approved. So you can skip all of that weeks of approval process if you just label someone terrorist. Well, once the fucking United States started calling everybody a terrorist, anybody who disagrees with the united states is basically terrorist if you take a look i mean alessi if you look up the list of recognized terrorist um groups you're gonna have your mind fucking blown yeah it's like 300 oh it's long it's huge we disagree with the united states terrorist like whatever so once the united states did that

Starting point is 00:15:24 that's just what everybody else did too so the united states labels the cuts the military disagree with the United States, terrorist, like whatever. So once the United States did that, that's just what everybody else did too. So the United States labels the military in Iran, a terrorist group. There you go. Start scrolling. Oh my God. There you go. Yeah. I'm not going to read all these. It's long. But you can, and as long as you scroll down, you'll see it. Yeah. So guess what Iran calls the United States military? Terrorists. Right. And in the eyes of the UN and the eyes of all the international organizations, they Terrorists, right? And in the eyes of the UN, in the eyes of all the international organizations, they're like, well, what is actually a terrorist? And then we started subdividing. Are they like a foreign terrorist organization? Or are they a terrorist sympathizer organization? Or are they funded by terrorist dollars? So there's all this craziness

Starting point is 00:16:01 going on. So the reason I bring that up is just because instead of – I don't want to give Iran the credit of saying that they are strategic or like cautious about their mortality. What I want to do instead is consider the fact that what happened with Soleimani may have been the beginning point for them to start putting more effort and resources into coming up with calculated responses to the west all out possibly october 7th oh right okay because think about the effort planning and financing that had to go into training scheduling and organizing a cross-border raid through a physical concrete wall against israel i mean, and Iran knows launching an attack against the United States, not easy. Launching an attack against Israel, much easier than the United States. Plus we can do that through a proxy.

Starting point is 00:16:54 We can claim that it's not really part of us. The whole world's gonna get distracted. We can light a match on the Palestine-Israel issue very, very quickly, knowing we've got friends to the north, we've got friends to the south, we've got friends to the east, and we sit on, or we've got friends to the west, and we sit on the east, right? So if anything, I still believe that what happened on October 7th was orchestrated and approved by Iran, and has just been fabulously successful in their eyes, because now Israel is more isolated than

Starting point is 00:17:26 ever. The Abraham Accords, which were serving the Sunni nations, have completely fallen apart, right? So now the U.S. lost momentum, Israel lost momentum, the Sunni nations lost momentum, and Iran has grown in terms of power, legitimacy, press coverage, and partnership with Russia and China and the growing axis of resistance. You said Qatar was a Sunni nation, right? Qatar is a Sunni nation. Okay. I'm pretty sure they are.

Starting point is 00:17:52 I could be wrong. Can we double check that? Yeah, can we double check that real quick so that we don't go down the wrong rabbit hole? Either way, I have the question about them, where they are in the middle of this, because we think of them as this rich, oil-collegiate nation in the Middle East where you know tourists can go into and everything yeah so it's sunni muslims make up the majority of the population so we're right about that they're the ones who are helping broker the potential peace between hamas and israel correct they all – and these would be Iran. Yep. They're also – They host Hamas' top leadership.

Starting point is 00:18:28 Yep. Who is funded by Iran. Correct. I say Iran all the time. Sorry. But like they're funded by Iran. Why does – other than maybe the supply chain thing you brought up earlier, which is a really good point, why does like Iran and Qatar fuck with each other if their goals are different? Because like Iran didn't even fuck with Al-Qaeda because Al-Qaeda was Sunni.

Starting point is 00:18:49 And yet they wanted some of the same – in some ways. They wanted some of the same things that – a lot of the same things that Al-Qaeda wanted. But they weren't necessarily like great friends to them or anything because they had this religious difference. So this is what's so interesting about when you look at geopolitics from an American point of view and geopolitics from everybody else. In the United States, we are the only global superpower. We are the only global superpower. Okay. Everybody else is trying to become a superpower, but they're not there yet.

Starting point is 00:19:21 We have the largest economy. We have the largest military. We have the best trained, most modern military, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when we look at geopolitics, when we look at foreign alignment, nobody has shit all to give us. Like nobody is the bigger kid on the block than we are. So what we try to do is we look at all of our geopolitics and all of our, all of our foreign relations and foreign policy through a lens of ideology. You need, we're coming in and giving you of ideology. We're coming in and giving you our money. We're coming in and giving you our protection. We're coming in and giving you our

Starting point is 00:19:50 access to our economy. We need you to believe what we believe. We need you to adhere to our ideological principles. If you say no, fuck you, we find somebody else, right? Everybody else in the world who is not a superpower, they don't force anyone to follow their ideology. They're looking for a pragmatic, practical return on investment. So when you're talking about Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, yes, they would love it if they were dealing Sunni to Sunni or Shia to Shia. But at the end of the day, if they get a benefit that's greater than what they put in, they're going to take it. That's exactly why Saudi Arabia and UAE do agricultural trade with Iran. Even though Saudi and Iran actually do hate each other and have been a proxy war forever.

Starting point is 00:20:34 Absolutely. Exactly right. You don't see Russian food on shelves in King Soopers or Fox or in any of the grocery stores here in the United States. So what you're seeing is the Sunni-Shia conflict, the disagreement, the disparagement there is not so great that they can't find other things that are more important to collaborate and cooperate on. So Qatar may be Sunni, Iran may be Shia, Hamas is largely Sunni, but Iran still funds Hamas because Iran is like, you know what? They might be Sunni and that's annoying, but they're not Israeli and that's worse. So we can fund them to kill them. That's a pragmatic, practical way of thinking, right? That's the way that the rest of the world works. We force people to fall under our ideology or else we pull the purse strings,

Starting point is 00:21:27 or else we squeeze their economy, we put increased sanctions on them, right? If they don't follow our democratic process, they don't believe in our Christian ideals, they don't believe in America first, whatever it might be, that's been our MO since World War II. That's not how the rest of the world works. The rest of the world, if anything, is waking up to the fact that American bullying is no longer the only option. Right. Now they can join China. They can join Russia. They can cooperate with North Korea. They can create a whole new trade pact like BRICS, right? And they can belong to that. And no one is going to forcibly make them change their ideology. You can be a corrupt African warlord and the United States will cut off aid to you, but China will extend a hand and say, hey, as long as you let us drive our trucks through your streets, we'll let you be a warlord forever. How easy, and I want to come back to China in a

Starting point is 00:22:16 second, because that's interesting what's been happening with Iran, China, and Russia, and you're a great guy to break that down. But, you know, in our American centric view, for example, we have the rules, like even on Wall Street, they'll have it like you will not do any financial financial relationships with the country of Iran, whatever, you know, you sign like a legal document with that. So there's all kinds of sanctions here with with with Iran, and you have other countries in the world who do the same thing. In the Middle East, I would imagine a lot of them are not like that as you've already laid out. But is it like a piece of cake for Iran to fund Hezbollah or Hamas without people being able to track the money as it's coming in? People track the money.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And I mean the piece of cake – if what you're saying is it easy, yes. It is easy because they're so physically close to each other. It's really just a truck delivery of cash, right? So it can be as easy as that, or it can be something that goes through a financial bank, especially when you consider some of the massive financial institutions that pride themselves on anonymity and secure transactions, whether that's- Switzerland. Or Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, right? Like you've got lots of financial centers that you can go through that pride themselves on absolutely secure transactions and anonymity.

Starting point is 00:23:37 So yes, it's easy for Iran to fund, but people are also tracking the money. So it's one of those weird tongue-in-cheek realities. Like if somebody listening right now doesn't realize that Iran funds terrorist groups all over the world, American definition of terrorism, you know, extremist groups, if you don't know that Iran funds extremist groups, then welcome to the party because everybody's been talking about it. Not

Starting point is 00:24:06 everybody. Government leaders and the press and subject matter experts have been talking about this since early 2000s. This is Iran's strategy. They prevent themselves from ever having to go into a traditional inter or interstate war, because they're able to fund proxy groups that die for their own cause but spend Iranian dollars to do it, Iranian money to do it. How well – how familiar are you with – because you know a lot. I don't expect you to know every single thing though. But how familiar are you with the say last 30, 40 years of like Lebanon history in the middle of this conflict? I mean, I know Lebanon enough to know it's been a nasty place and it wasn't always a nasty place. It is a country where Hezbollah is the elected like political party. And that was incredible to see the legitimacy of a terrorist organization take the political office of a country. So that's about the extent to which I am familiar with Lebanon. So they're interesting to me because there's a lot of different

Starting point is 00:25:11 religious demographics in Lebanon, and it's like 24 to 30% Christian, and then I believe it's 27%, I want to say Sunni Muslim, 21% Shia Muslim, and then the non-Christian, non-Muslim religions. There's like some esoteric Middle Eastern religions that people haven't heard of and stuff. But meaning it's not this one block kind of place like we talk about in Iran or something else. But to your point, Hezbollah, which is called a terrorist organization by many people across the world. And I actually, I, I agree with that one because of the way they finance themselves and who finances them.

Starting point is 00:25:49 I totally agree with that. But like they have the, they have the two wings. They got the military wing and they have the political wing and the political wing controls, as you said, a lot of the seats in their Congress. And this rose up,

Starting point is 00:26:01 I guess after like the 82 crisis or whatever in lebanon but like is there still is part of it still like there's disputed land on the border of israel that lebanon thinks is theirs and hezbollah is seizing on that as a part of their like political platform i don't know i don't know the answer to that like i don't know the answer to that. Like, I don't know the answer to how much of the explanation of the conflict with Israel between Lebanon and Israel is land disputes. Okay. Whatever it is that they do use to explain their assaults is just an excuse because in reality, Israel's the largest threat in the region to Hezbollah's goals, to Iran's goals, to, I mean, even the Sunni countries. Because prior to the Abraham Accords, none of the Sunni countries recognized Israel. The first Sunni country to recognize Israel was, I think it was Bahrain, and I think it was 2019.

Starting point is 00:27:08 2019? Think about that, man. That's five years ago, the first Sunni country recognized diplomatically Israel. Israel has been around since the 71 years before that. Yeah. So like they've been surrounded by enemies for a long time. Yeah. So we're talking a bit about, you know, what you deem to be a terrorist and is it really a terrorist group or isn't a terrorist group? The policy of it is one thing. There is a very clear definition. There's a very clear definition of terrorism and that definition has to do with seeking political goals through the act of violence that's designed to cause fear. Right? goals through the act of violence that's designed to cause fear, right? The problem is that that recipe can be interpreted a lot of different ways, right? What is it when a US aircraft carrier goes into the Red Sea to launch rockets on a Houthi rebel base? What is that? Is that not an act of force to cause violence to change policy?

Starting point is 00:28:08 And that's the argument that the world is making about the United States, or more correctly, that is simply the window that the world is watching through when they see the moves that the United States makes. And it's nasty, because from our perspective, we're fighting extremism. From the rest of the world's perspective, we're the extremist. That's right. It's tough. It's a sticky situation. And it's one that is leading to so much of the conflict that we have right now.

Starting point is 00:28:39 Because whoever takes office in 2024 is taking office in a country that is losing influence, struggling with economic uncertainty, has to manage conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. The Middle Eastern conflict is escalating. We don't know what Iran's going to do next, but they're going to do something next. They're not just going to let it sit that Israel launched rockets into Tehran. That can't just sit. But do we see a response in seven days or 70 days or seven months, right? And one of the two people running for president right now may be the president when that response actually happens. Not to mention whoever runs whoever's in office next is very likely going to be the person who sees what happens in europe next between ukraine and russia yes we'll come to

Starting point is 00:29:29 that too for sure it's a mess it's it's a fucking mess and what what you're saying though also goes back to something i believe we've talked about in every episode we've ever done together because it's just it's a mentality of the world 97 10, 107, 150. We probably talked about it with Jim and Danny when we've done those crossovers. But like what is good and what is bad and moreover, what is all good and what is all bad and is that even a thing? Because I mean you've heard the quote and people can throw this around sometimes where it's like it's being used as an excuse on things. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter or whatever, and you do – that example you give with our jets in the Red Sea firing into Yemen where people have fucking nothing. And they're just looking at the people who are taking leadership in their country and saying maybe that's the right idea and then suddenly bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I might – if I were them and I can't know what that is,

Starting point is 00:30:26 I might think the same thing. All of a sudden, a narrative. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Discover the exciting action of BetMGM Casino. Check out a wide variety of table games with a live dealer or enjoy over 3,000 games to choose from like Cash Eruption, UFC Gold Blitz.

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Starting point is 00:31:33 rationally tell yourself based off of the emotional messages that you get. So that's the thing that kills me is every time the United States takes an action in a foreign country, we don't control the messaging of what happens after that action. Local press, local politicians, local whatever, leaders, they all shape whatever happened into the narrative or into the messaging that creates a narrative. The same thing is happening here in the United States. Here's one of the things that pisses me off so much, and I'm not trying to jump ahead. Go for it. How often do you come across a headline that talks about some stupid battlefield victory that ukraine has over russia the other day i was flipping through my

Starting point is 00:32:11 my news feed and i saw a two pound a two pound ukrainian drone downs a russian helicopter they have a video too probably but i see this stuff all the time, right? What that is is a message. It's sending a message to get us like, hoorah, go democracy. Why? Because the messaging we've been told about Ukraine is that they're fighting for democracy.

Starting point is 00:32:36 So when we see a news report that says something stupid about, you know, oh, Russia lost 25 tanks in this assault on a village, or Russian helicopter shot down by two-pound drone. Those are all just little pieces of a message, an emotional message that's supposed to get us gung-ho so that we click. I'm not saying it's a government conspiracy. We're just supposed to click on the article. But you see this stuff come across, and none of those individual messages are painting an accurate picture of what's happening between russia and ukraine like they're they're marching towards stalemate at best yes

Starting point is 00:33:11 and russia gaining more ground at worst so why are we seeing click like these headline bait uh clickbait talking about these stupid battlefield victories because we're in the united states and our local news in the united states our american english language news is what dictates what we see and how we view the world the same thing happens in yemen the same thing happens in iran the same thing happens in saudi arabia the same thing happens in china the same thing happens in japan their their local national language press and newspapers are what dictate what they see and the lens that those people see the world through as well. So it's, we, we can literally be the same human

Starting point is 00:33:51 beings with completely different lenses on how we view the world, not because we're trying to be ignorant, not because we're not seeking the truth, but just because the only information available to us in our own language is being shaped by a media source that's either state controlled or commercially controlled and the commercially controlled is just going to say whatever they need to say to get a click look i've never seen a war zone myself and i'm very grateful for that it's a real privilege to live here that i i can say that i see the type of misinformation that fires from all sides in every war I've ever looked at in my life with exactly what you're talking about right here. But I also sometimes wonder to take a step farther if I were actually there.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Because, you know, war is not happening on one street. It's happening in the whole country, right? There's a million different places it is. is if i were actually there and in the middle of it and like everyone else i had internet access and could read the stories that are happening i wonder if i would actually even get to the point where i let my eyes not believe what they were seeing and instead believe what i was reading and i think about that all the time with the ukrainians and the russians in the conflict because who the fuck knows what they're being told i mean we we had mark turner in here for episode 162.

Starting point is 00:35:09 He's been training Ukrainian battalions with his organization, which is a U.S. organization, since like day one there. He was saying this last October when he was here. He's like, he's a Scottish former Marine. So the guy's like a badass. But he's like, they're fighting over like two yards of territory and it's taken two weeks and they're losing all these people. And we're just like – to use your word, it's a stalemate everywhere where it's just bodies piling up. And so if I looked back on some of your maybe timeline predictions in episode 97 and 107 and then I remember you talked about that with Lex for a long time. Some of your timelines are

Starting point is 00:35:45 off, but some of your themes were correct. You're like, okay, Russia looks like it's kind of a paper tiger because obviously they didn't roll over them in two days, but they're more powerful. They can throw way more bodies at the issue. They're going to try to get some access towards the Black Sea and do that. They didn't do it as fast with the winter like you were thinking but effectively we've been to me sold this idea that ukraine and the ukrainians who are fighting for their land right there i have a lot of respect for that like they're pushing russia back into russia or some shit and that's just not true right now maybe i'm fucked up and wrong here but i would think if if we were able to negotiate a peace today and ceasefire, which I would love to see where it is, I almost think it'd be like a win for Ukraine because they'd maintain a lot of their country. They probably would have to agree not to go into NATO and all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:36:35 But like it would it would end the possibility that eventually, you know, that stalemate will just kind of break the wrong way and Russia will take half the country. Right. And you're you're totally right. I've been kind of pounding this drum since August after the invasion happened. There is no outcome. There is no winning where Ukraine takes back the territory that Russia has taken from them. And there certainly is no winning scenario where Zelensky's promise to return Ukraine back to its like 1996 borders, there's no way any of that's going to happen. At best, what they're looking for is that the Russian advance will stop and that Eastern Ukraine will essentially fall under some sort of independent government that is favorable towards Russia. And Western Ukraine will have a new government put in place

Starting point is 00:37:27 that is net neutral to Russia, but that Russia accepts because they will not accept a pro-NATO, pro-West government. And they certainly won't accept Zelensky remaining in power in Western Ukraine. So Zelensky is coming to the United States or the UK. He's going somewhere outside of Russian reach, outside of Russian reach, like so many people have tried to get outside of Russian reach. But now that he's been this champion of democracy under the Biden administration, there's no way that we can let anything bad happen to Zelensky. So he's going to be whisked off to some Miami high rise and live out his days there. Yeah, the whole, I feel like the word democracy

Starting point is 00:38:05 has been, talk about narratives, pounded into the pavement so hard that it doesn't mean anything anymore. And people don't, I mean, it's amazing how little people understand what democracy really is. How do you define what it really is? So democracy is supposed to be the freedom of determination by the people themselves.

Starting point is 00:38:23 And that can look a lot of different ways. It can look like each individual has a vote in what happens next. It can look like representative democracy where we vote for representatives who have a decision on what we do next. There's lots of different ways that democracy can look. But essentially, at its core, it's the right of individuals to have a say in their own future, their own self-determination. That's something that we have that autocratic countries do not have. Yeah. And there's, and in some ways I don't even believe in that because the money behind all of it, no matter where you are, is usually what drives it. Like,

Starting point is 00:38:56 I can't say that's not the case here. So, I mean, look at, look at the money that piles in on both sides of these campaigns. Oh, for sure. But, and one of the things that's troubling about the upcoming election, right? Kamala Harris has never won a primary. Yeah, never had a vote and won. The American people have never raised their hand and said, we want Kamala Harris. That's right. It's never happened. She was appointed after she was put on a ticket with Joe Biden by the Democratic National Convention as their chosen pair.

Starting point is 00:39:30 So now she's running for president with nobody having ever put her in the position where she should even be able to run for president. Think about all the qualified candidates out there who tried on the just on the democratic side who tried to get to that spot where they could even have a chance to to debate and they were never allowed because biden chose to have no debates yeah right like we are we are sitting on the precipice of potentially electing someone into office who has never hit any of the pre-qualifications to become someone who runs for the presidency. It's just a person passed their endorsement, a party represented them. And even since that endorsement for Kamala Harris,

Starting point is 00:40:19 all the support that you've seen come through, it's all political supports. It's all other senators and congresspeople giving in their endorsement and PAC money coming in and delegates coming in. That's all political. None of that is human American driver's license carrying citizens voting for Kamala Harris. That has not happened at all yet. And people are maybe, depending on the outcome of the DRC or the DNC, depending on the outcome of the national convention, Americans may not have a choice to do anything other than vote for Trump or vote for Kamala Harris,

Starting point is 00:41:00 unless they want to vote some other third party. That's exactly what it's going to be. You're 100% right. I need to give a huge shout out to my man, Marcus Winsness from Sweden. He is the reason this episode happened. Why you ask? Well, when we finished recording this, for some reason, the video files were corrupted. I then spent the next 24 hours running around, around town, talking to everyone I could on the internet, trying to fix them to no avail before Marcus came in and spent the entire middle

Starting point is 00:41:25 of the night Saturday somehow uncorrupting them and voila, here we are. So thank you so much to Marcus. Number two, my man Tommy G is going to be dropping a documentary on the Trump assassination. He went out to Butler PA and I was able to send him Danny Hall and Andy Bustamante to give different takes on the assassination at the site and it's going to be really good stuff. So make sure you go subscribe to Tommy's channel to find out when the video drops. And it's like, you know, I've, I've joked before that the RNC is like organized stupidity and the DNC is like organized corruption and they're just good at it. And you, I mean, look at the last three election cycles, 2016, 2020, 24, you just described what happened in 24. Someone has never had a vote cast before them. Suddenly it was like, yep, we're all behind her. 2020, the pandemic hits.

Starting point is 00:42:10 Right before the pandemic sent us inside, on almost the same day, every candidate dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden to put him over the top of Bernie. And then in 2016, there is a very reasonable argument to say that Bernie Sanders, who tapped into a very populist sentiment that you're legit may have beaten Hillary Clinton. And we've seen the leaked emails and stuff and how they put her in there. I got news for you. I'm not saying this would have been a good thing. I think Bernie versus Trump would have been – that would have been a tough election. But like Bernie probably would have won that election.

Starting point is 00:42:42 It would have been tough. Just because he was like a little – like he was actually lik likable as a person. Hillary Clinton was not likable. And that's what had Donald Trump put over the top of her. And it's like, so you've now over the last eight years told your voters to go fuck off while at the same time making your tagline on all these different networks like we have to protect democracy, like, respectfully, shut the fuck up with your democracy, if you're not going to do it yourself. Yeah. And you know, it's funny, because as much as they as much as you hear left leaning media talk about populism, that's exactly what they're tapping into. Barack Obama was a populist leader. He was a popular person, all the like, he had books out books out. His whole tagline was hope. That is a very

Starting point is 00:43:28 populist approach. Nobody was focused on Barack Obama's policies. They were focused on African American, first-time president, young guy. I see what you're saying. All of that was populism, right? It was a movement more than it was about the job. Right. And they tried to do the same thing with Hillary Clinton. Oh, it's a woman. It's our first female president and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they tried to take the whole populist approach, which is why they probably doubled down on her and squashed Bernie Sanders.

Starting point is 00:43:57 Didn't work. They didn't need another old white man to be president anymore, right? But look what's happening right now. Yeah. Right now, it's just, know i'm i will call it out you have a minority who is both african-american and of southeast of south asian descent indian right the two largest growing population bases in the united. She's also female. And she has, she has, she's married to someone who's Jewish. So you've got like, all the major, all the major minority pieces.

Starting point is 00:44:37 Checked off, baby. Boom. Tell me that is not exactly how like, the democratic party has worked now for almost a decade it's all about finding some some uh social justification for diversity and having diversity represent the united states instead of having democracy represent the united states i'm not saying i want another old white man in office either right but what i saying is, can we please have a conversation about who's the best candidate? Yes. Instead of, we need a woman. We need somebody of Indian descent.

Starting point is 00:45:11 We need somebody of African-American descent. We need somebody young. We need somebody female. We need somebody who's married internationally. Come on. Let's just compare apples to apples instead of trying to sell strawberries and trying to sell oranges. What policy you think networks better over the population? They could do that, but they keep tripling down on this exhaust. It's exhausting. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:49 Identity politics shit. No one gives a fuck anymore, man. Unfortunately, they do. And that's the thing. That's that's the big problem. The big problem is. Winning the presidency is all about motivating people to get out of their bed and stand in a line and put a mark on a checklist once every four years. That's the race. That's the presidential

Starting point is 00:46:11 race. It's sad, but it's true. And for anybody out there, you included, how hard is it to motivate the average YouTube viewer to click on a like or click on the subscribe button or leave a comment. You go do that right now. You understand me? It's hard. It's hard, right? If you have 2% of your user base that clicks on a like button, that's, that's really good. Yeah. Well, not, well, you need higher than 2%. You need higher than 2%, but if you get 2%, like between two and 5%, or is it like 10% is top is top tier. One out of every 10 viewers clicks on a button in YouTube. Yeah. Like that's the race for president is how many people are going to click on the like button once every four years when clicking on the like button means getting out of bed,

Starting point is 00:46:57 stepping away from work, driving to a poll station, standing in line. You know, sometimes you're standing in the freezing freaking cold, right. to fill out a form where you're like in a giant whatever warehouse or school whatever auditorium right it's a big ask which is why you see at most 60 voter turnout that what what moves people to do that is what you just said personality politics what moves people to do that is not the promise of peace in the middle east it's that's fair i i will agree like people vote on the one two maybe three issues that's pushing it that they actually give a fuck about right and that could be a totally made up thing that none of us here are even paying attention to. And that's just the reality.

Starting point is 00:47:46 I understand that. And I shouldn't say the word like nobody or nobody cares. Like that's an exaggeration. That's fair. The better way to put it though is that if four years ago, eight years ago, X percent of society really gave a fuck about that at the forefront. I'm saying right now if you read the temperature it's a lot lower than x was because there are more people even if they're still not informed on certain things because again people got lives right like you know you

Starting point is 00:48:16 might be a father of three and you and your wife are both working nine to five jobs trying to spend time with your family too i don't expect you to understand all the issues here. I'm a realist about that. But like there's enough people who just keep hearing this messaging in the background. They're like, what the fuck? And they're looking around their office and they're looking around their friends and they're like, damn, I never even thought about this shit 10 years ago. Like what happened here? And they're finally like enough. And so when I see them, you know know like you said just just give a good candidate

Starting point is 00:48:46 i i don't care do it blind so you don't know who they are right like like i've like the old dating shows exactly i've often joked if you looked at kamala harris's prosecution record in california and you went to the deepest darkest most, most racist part of Alabama, and you got a rally together of people right there, you know, obviously, like, I guess, like far right individuals, if you will, and you didn't say what she looked like, or what her name was, and you read off her resume, you'd have a lot of dudes going, fuck yeah, and then she'd walk out, and they'd be like, all right, we'll get with it with it but like but she's at the forefront of this progressive policy now because like you said i agree with you she's being told what to do

Starting point is 00:49:30 and she checks those boxes she checks those boxes man she checks those boxes um there was something you said that that inspired a thought but i lost it don't you hate when i do hate it when i especially like on a on camera it's frustrating because're like, I had something that was going to be really sharp and entertaining and now I just look stupid. It'll come to you. That's why we're here all day. Eventually. Yeah, exactly. Let's go back to the Middle East a little bit because I put a pin in the Iran, China, Russia thing. Oh yeah. This is something I really need explained to me further because the way I understand it, there's some serious developments there over the past year or so where there's almost like there hasn't been like a tripartite

Starting point is 00:50:10 pact or something. Right. But there's some serious economic and therefore geopolitical interests that are now exchanging hands to separate literally like East and West. Yeah. So, Alessi, will you fact check me on this? I'm pretty sure that China brokered diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And I want to say they did that in the last two years. If you can just fact check me on that.

Starting point is 00:50:37 Iran. Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hold on. Go back. Go back. Go back. Yeah. Beijing brokered.

Starting point is 00:50:41 Iran and Saudi Arabia announced last Friday a Chinese brokered deal to restore relations. There you go. Bingo. Bingo. 2023. So, ah, nice. Nice job. Yeah, Beijing brokered. Iran and Saudi Arabia announced last Friday a Chinese-brokered deal to restore relations. There you go. Bingo. 2023. So, ah, nice. Nice job. Brain is working. So now what that means is, think about what we were just talking about.

Starting point is 00:50:53 The conflict in the Middle East, the big competition in the Middle East is between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Sunni domination versus Shia crescent. China was able to broker an agreement between the two to work together diplomatically, which had never been done before, 2023. So it means our entire lives up until 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia did not recognize each other diplomatically. That's just, it's crazy to me. This is not like post-World War II. This is the whole development of – like this is the industrial revolution, the information revolution. This is like – Forever.

Starting point is 00:51:32 This is like forever. Anyways, so what we're seeing here is ever since the West, ever since the United States essentially pushed NATO into heavy economic sanctions against Russia to penalize them or push them out of Ukraine. What we've seen from that effort is that all of the Western sanctions and the seizing of Russian assets that to give Putin a valid platform to say that his war is not against Ukraine, it's against the West, it's against the United States, it's against NATO. So all of our efforts have essentially helped Russia to economically increase their impact. Simultaneously, Russia still had resources, valid resources like oil and energy to export.

Starting point is 00:52:35 But now the United States and the West cut off all of their buying power, which meant that Russia could now sell more to other developing nations, a la China, Iran, and India. India is in a really funky place because India is an ally of the United States, but also works completely independently and pragmatically like we talked about because they don't care about whether you import their ideals or not. They have a growing population. They need petrol. Russian petrol is available, gets there faster, gets there cheaper than anything that America doesn't sanction. So let's just go ahead and take that route. So what you end up having is an economic boom in Russia. You have China who's trying to distance itself from any kind of relationship with the United States at all. Plus it wants to boost its economy using Russian resources. And then you have Iran, who wants nothing to do with the United States,

Starting point is 00:53:25 but also wants to boost its resources, and it has trade to do. So it partners up with essentially everybody who's geographically closer, ideologically independent, and they have a common enemy, which is the United States. And that's how you end up having over the last three years, ever since the Ukraine invasion, you've had this increasing proximity effect for everybody who's always hated us. North Korea cooperating with China, cooperating with Russia, cooperating with Iran. And then they're even folding in countries that have long time been our allies, but are more pragmatic because they have real needs and they don't need our ideological policing. So then you have Pakistanistan you have uh india you have even bulgaria and fucking uh there's another nato country i just lost it right now there's another nato country in southern in southern

Starting point is 00:54:20 europe that's also siding with the with essentially the new axis of resistance that's expanding, right? And all of those countries have no problem exchanging practical purposes, practical value, without having to force any sort of ideological restraints on each other. China's not trying to make Russia communist. Russia's not trying to make Iran bow to Putin's power. They're just like, hey, you scratch my back i scratch yours and at the end the giants we can take them down together is there is there anything that can be done regardless of administration just like in general from a diplomacy standpoint to kind of unring the bell that seems to have been rung starting with the 2022 Ukraine-Russia war,

Starting point is 00:55:05 where it's this clear divide, like separation. So there have been clear bell rings. I think that's very – there's a great example or a great phrase. COVID rang a very clear bell. If you think about what happened following COVID, the whole world woke up to the fact that all the supply chains of the world were going through China. China had worked very, very hard throughout the entire 20-year global war on terror. China had worked very hard not to participate in the GWAT because China didn't participate in the GWAT.

Starting point is 00:55:39 But instead – Global war on terror. But instead, they focused on creating economic ties all across the world through trade and manufacturing and whatever else. So our first big warning bell happened when COVID struck and we all realized you and I can't get sneakers in the United States because China's not shipping. Right. But then when Russia invaded Ukraine, another strong warning bell went off. And that warning bell had nothing to do with Russia expansion into Europe, even though that's all we heard about. The real warning bell there was, your money is tied to American banks, and America will take it from you.

Starting point is 00:56:13 And once that bell rang, that's when you saw the Chinese flood the market by taking their dollars out, putting UN in, diversifying their accounts. You saw all sorts of countries all over the world say, if America can do this to Russia, and if America can muscle NATO countries into doing this to Russia, then they can do it to us too. So everybody started diversifying their portfolios out of the US dollar, out of American banks, into foreign banks and foreign currency, where it's more liquid. Because now we show that we don't treat your money like it's yours if it's in our banks. If we don't like you, we will freeze it. And then we will take the interest, and then we will go ahead and say that we have a legal ground to steal your money from you and give it to your opponent, which is also what the United States is trying to do, that even the UN is saying

Starting point is 00:57:02 is illegal. The only reason the United States hasn't been able to do that is because the UN is saying is illegal. The only reason the United States hasn't been able to do that is because the UN has said, that's actually kind of fucked up. You can't just take Russian money and give it to Ukraine. We'll let you take the interest and give it to Ukraine,

Starting point is 00:57:14 but you can't just take their money and give it to Ukraine. So all these bells have been going off, which to the developing world, the developing world is 167-ish countries in the world. We're one. We're the superpower. The other 166 are all developing at different levels of development, trying to become a power, a superpower if they can.

Starting point is 00:57:36 Those 166 other countries are choosing who they want to do business with, what currency they want to do business in, who they trust, who they don't trust, how much anonymity they want to maintain in their bank accounts. And unfortunately, they've learned that the United States is not going to help them. How much, because the other question, the other country that always comes up in this because of the proximity and GDP, obviously, is China, right? And then their huge population. But how much are they also getting a little bit fucked because of COVID in the sense that so many countries, including us, around the world realized, like you said, how tied we were to their supply chains that we did and other countries did diversify their supply chains to other countries. It was only really Western countries that had the ability to diversify their supply chain. But that's still a lot. It's still a lot.

Starting point is 00:58:22 Yeah, no, it's still a lot. But let's also be very transparent here. Okay. COVID happened in 2019. 20. Excuse me, well, 2020. 2000. Technically 20.

Starting point is 00:58:35 Either way. Yeah, yeah. Either way. Shutdowns happened in 2020. Economic crisis because of those shutdowns through 2020 into 2021, right? Businesses start seeking alternate supply chains in 2021 to support business in 2022. How many years do you think businesses are going to pay 20% more for their supply chain before they're kind of like,

Starting point is 00:58:57 let's go back to the way it was and let's have a supply chain that goes through China? I mean, I know the answer to that question question but i'll ask another question to it who says they're paying 20 more in countries like bangladesh it's true they're just accepting human rights abuses and right yeah it's true i'm not arguing that so you can you can see like we're in a position now where change is the economic pressures and the political pressures of finding a supply chain alternative is going to get less and less to the place where in the future, I can easily see 10 years from now, we're right back to the same place we were pre-COVID, where 95%, 99% of supply chains touch one country, a place like China or a place like India. India is really looking to become the new China because China is looking to become the new tech hub of the

Starting point is 00:59:51 world. So we're going to just fucking repeat history all over again. And that's because it makes sense globally. It makes sense logistically. It makes sense socially. Because imagine a Kamala Harris presidency, where she then targets human rights abuses in countries that are supplying American businesses, so that American businesses now get either taxed or fined or penalized if they have a logistic supply chain that goes through Bangladesh. Now those countries are gonna be like, well, shit, where can I go? That is okay. Oh, India. Sweet. Here we go. Bustamante 2024. Do that slave labor. You do that shit.

Starting point is 01:00:32 You understand me? I'm just saying like, we, we always choose what to put our myopic focus on politically. Like we're going to focus on this. We're going to focus on that. We're going to, and we forget that there's a whole chessboard in front of us. One of the most important things you ever ingrained in my head just is like how to look at things. And it's extremely obvious when you realize it. But you said – I think it was in episode 97, the first one we ever did together.

Starting point is 01:00:56 You're like the only fucking thing that matters when you're looking at world powers and where their chess pieces are on the board is their GDP. Yep. Right? So who has the biggest GDP? We still do right now, but that gap is shrinking. And you keep talking about these different alliances that are forming, be it the BRICS on one hand, be it countries that – where it's east versus west, and you have all these weird eastern alliances between two or three different continents. And it's like at what point do we got to get worried about the US dollar ceasing to be the reserve currency, which just doing very basic math in my head would effectively mean the end of the United States as the leader in GDP in the world? It's a great question. So fact-based finance and economics, it's a long time away. The idea that the U.S. dollar would decline so much that it's no longer the reserve currency,

Starting point is 01:02:02 you're talking about decades, if ever. Okay, that's good. However, it's worth noting that the decline in the power and value of the US dollar as a reserve currency has been increasing exponentially for the last five years. So the world is diversifying away from the dollar. More trade than ever before is being done outside of the U.S. dollar. Countries that have always traditionally used the U.S. dollar are using less U.S. dollars. So even though the decline can be counted in percentages, like 1.3%, 2.3%, the increase in that decline is exponential. Because five years ago ago it was like 0.02 percent of trade that would change out of the us dollar so we're declining at a rate 10 times what we saw two years or five years ago and if that trend continues then 15 30 years from now we'll start seeing you know us dollar

Starting point is 01:03:01 valuations and us dollar trade drop 15 20 in% in a year. So that's fast. That decline, though, is largely tied to two things. One, the US dollar is stable, reliable, and insured by the United States. So there's still a lot of value in the US dollar that just simply doesn't exist in something like the Chinese renminbi or the Russian ruble. Because we've watched as those governments have completely changed the valuation of their currency just on a whim. US dollar doesn't really do that. It's pegged to more stable things than foreign currencies. So when you're a developing country, just imagine if you had $200 and you needed that $200 just to survive week to week, you're not going to invest it. You're not going to take $150 and put it in some penny stock and hope that that penny stock explodes. You're going to probably keep it in your mattress someplace

Starting point is 01:04:00 really, really stable. It's not until you have like $100,000 that you'll take $500 and throw it into a penny stock and see if it explodes. So most of the developing world wants stability. So they keep trading in the US dollar. But the wealthiest countries out there, especially the wealthy countries that don't like the United States, those are the countries that are the fastest to dissociate themselves from the US dollar. Especially now that the United States has set a precedent that if you hold US dollars in US banks, we're just going to take them from you if we don't like you. Yeah, that's not a good precedent. Not if you're trying to maintain the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world. And that's where you're just thinking

Starting point is 01:04:35 way too short term because you're pissed, maybe with fairness, about a geopolitical conflict, but you're not thinking about the precedent you're setting doing that. That's a problem. Yeah. And then the other thing to keep in mind is that when we talk, GDP is the basic poor man's gauge of power. You have more GDP, you went up in power. You have less GDP, you went down in power. The other thing that's just like a nut hair away from GDP, is something called PPP, or the purchase, I think it's the purchase power parity. Okay. Which tells you how much value you can get for your purchase power from the currency you hold.

Starting point is 01:05:15 And in terms of purchase- In English. In English. So if I had a rock, if I had a red rock here and a blue rock here, they're both rocks. They both weigh the same amount. They're both made of the same material. When I give you my red rock, I get a cup of coffee.

Starting point is 01:05:34 When I give you my blue rock, I get a cup of coffee and a piece of toast. Which one's more valuable? Even though they're exactly the same. That's what PPP or purchase price parity is. It means that with my rock, I can only get a cup of coffee. But with your ROC, you can get coffee and a piece of toast. So now if we're comparing our currency against foreign currencies, in the United States, our ROC gets us expensive groceries,

Starting point is 01:05:58 expensive fuel, and we don't get much for our dollar. But in Russia, your ruPaul gets you less expensive groceries, a full tank of gas, and an extra cup of coffee. That means the purchase price parity, the RuPaul is higher than the purchase power parity of the dollar. Make sense? Yes. So what we have already seen change in the world

Starting point is 01:06:18 is that for the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and more, their purchase power, their triple P, is higher than our triple P. That's wild. So our GDP might be higher, but what they get for their currency is higher. That is the beginning of a tipping point where if I get more for a ruple, I want more ruples. So then more people buy ruples, less people buy dollars, right? As less people buy dollars, what we hope will happen is that there will be an increased demand for the decreased supply of dollars, except that the Biden administration printed all this new money, which then threw a bunch of new dollars into the

Starting point is 01:07:03 marketplace, which adds supply, which decreases demand and decreases the value. Now, let's revisit, though, one of the things you brought up that was a mindfuck to me in episode 107. I think we talked about this like maybe an hour and 35 minutes and something like that. But you were talking about the economic smarts of creating a proxy war with Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine. And correct me if I'm putting some words in your mouth here, but essentially because of, let's just boil it down to one term, the military industrial complex being able to spend money in that region via our taxpayer dollars and then have the hooks in and the contracts to rebuild what's left when it's done,

Starting point is 01:07:45 it could effectively be a long-term value-saving hedge for the U.S. dollar and for the power of the dollar in, in that case, the Eastern world. Yeah, absolutely. And what you're saying, so you are correct. We are saying the same thing. When you fund a proxy war war is profitable whether you win or whether you lose war is profitable it creates jobs it creates uh it creates a demand for lives it increases industrial manufacturing it increases food production people start fucking when there's a war going on.

Starting point is 01:08:25 It's so bad, but it's true. It's true, man. And that's why there's incentives. Like Japan is putting out, Japan and China are literally paying money

Starting point is 01:08:33 for people to have sex, to make babies, to make future soldiers because they realize their population decline is a problem. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 01:08:42 Could you imagine if, I mean, I guess in the United States we also pay people to have babies, but that's a different thing. So war is good for the economy. What has happened now with the modern day proxy war, like what we're seeing in Ukraine and even what we're seeing in Israel, is that when you fund a conflict in another country, you get all the economic benefits without any of the lives lost yourself.

Starting point is 01:09:08 So the United States is essentially bankrolling ourselves by supporting a war in Ukraine, supporting a war in Israel, et cetera, et cetera. And we had lots of proxy wars before that too. But it is economically smart. Making currency to fund those conflicts makes sense. Making currency to backfill a stimulus during the COVID crisis did not. And that's what we did wrong. We printed a bunch of money during the COVID crisis when there was no war going on, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we – you and I were talking about all this money that's being given to Ukraine. Yes, there is money being given to Ukraine, but there's a lot more money being given to American businesses, being given to American causes. We're buying American ammunition and sending it to Ukraine and calling that part of an aid package. We're essentially

Starting point is 01:10:13 keeping US dollars in the US pockets, but sending equipment and sending materials and personnel to Ukraine. We were talking about that. Nobody in politics, no headlines, no news articles were saying that. They were all saying, this is aid going to ukraine aid going to ukraine that's right biden starts running for office starts justifying his support for ukraine and how does he justify it by finally saying hey these packages that we're writing are going to american businesses man better than america this money isn't even leaving the United States. Like, come on, support my Ukraine policy because we're going to make all,

Starting point is 01:10:49 we're going to pull this money out of the government and put it into American businesses. Joe, the camera's over there. Yeah. God damn it. That's true. I didn't even think of that. So it just, it's frustrating to me

Starting point is 01:11:00 because this is why I still say we have to support Israel because what's good for Israel is in many ways good for the United States however what's good for Netanyahu is not the same as what's good for is now what okay can you define that difference there this key there's three important differences here right so first of all it's frustrating to me how many people don't understand the difference between a Jew and Israeli. Not the same thing. What, Israeli or? Israeli.

Starting point is 01:11:32 Okay. Right? A Jew is someone who follows and believes in Judaism. That can be any citizen of any nationality anywhere in the world. They can be Jewish. You don't have to be Jewish in order to be Israeli. Israeli is a national identity, like American or Brazilian or whatever else, right? So the fact that Israel's government does not separate church and state, the fact that Israel, you know, is a democracy that doesn't differentiate between church and state, that's one thing, but it's different from saying that if you don't support Israel, you don't support Jews. Completely different things. Then you have the entrenched political

Starting point is 01:12:15 right-wing establishment of Israel. That is Netanyahu. So you've got one element of a government. That's Netanyahu. The government is the government of Israel. And then the faith of the state is Judaism. So you can be a Jew who has no connections to Israel, and that doesn't mean that we have to like – it makes me angry when people think that there's something wrong with a Jewish person because of what Israel is doing to Palestine. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's insane. But I just want to say that out loud because you can support Jews and Judaism without supporting Israel. And I'm also saying that to all the Jewish people out there who are being told that if someone doesn't support Israel, then they are anti-Semites. Right. That's not true. You can disagree with Israel's national policies and still have

Starting point is 01:13:07 zero bias against the Jewish people. You can also disagree with Netanyahu and still support Israel. Absolutely, yes. But nobody's thinking of it that way. People think that Netanyahu is Israel, and Israel is Judaism. It's so stupid. Yeah. And that's how we end up. And unfortunately, because our media in the United States is commercially based, it's a for-profit business. Yes. Anything that the media puts out that they want to get people stirred up, emotional, angry, alarmist, they'll make sure that they tie all those terms together.

Starting point is 01:13:40 And, you know, America hates Jews and wants to support netanyahu and that's because i mean you're taking the words out of his mouth he's he says he makes no distinction between anti-semitism and anything that speaks out against israel which is it i would say by definition defining himself and his policies as israel itself right and that's like when i've been talking with people about this i'm like look at all the israeli people who who are in the streets right now calling for a new leader yes and these are not like columbia protest motherfuckers like morons these are these are people who are passionate about their country who are just like yo can we just can we get a new everyone wants to be safe no one wants terror – can we get a new – everyone wants to be safe. No one wants terror attacks. Can we get a new fucking leadership in there?

Starting point is 01:14:25 Because Netanyahu is the symbol of it because he's the head of the government. But I've also said this to people. If you've looked at his cabinet, he looks like a leftist compared to some of those people. They just got to get rid of some of the current administration, which yes, also includes him. And if you get someone like a little more moderate in there, yeah, there's always going to be disagreements. There's going to be people who are like, oh my God, Israel is only going to do what's good for Israel and all this stuff. You'll always have that. But like, I feel like it could be a lot more manageable because you're not going to win the PR campaign. If you're just saying the only, the only end is, is total victory.

Starting point is 01:14:59 When you have all these, and I want to introduce this idea, all these other countries around there who there's some that are hostile. And then there's some who are not, who are sitting there saying, look, we want a two-state solution. We want Israel to exist. But you can't do it completely all on your terms, which is what Netanyahu insists on. So a guy that I look at a lot – this is why I bring this up – who is a gangster. He's really fucking cool, is the king of Jordan. This dude never wanted to be king his father was like croaking on his death but he's like you're gonna be king and he's like

Starting point is 01:15:30 what the fuck did you say and he was he passed over the older brother and so this guy had been traveling around the world wanted a whole different life takes up this you know i guess calling or whatever and in america obviously we're not huge on kings and queens and shit we kind of fought a war over that but like i'll make an exception for this dude i've had multiple people in here who are friends with him like joe b warwick tight with him and joe b's written some things that aren't great for him and the guy still likes him which i really like and remi aleke is good friends with him a couple other people are as well. But this guy, if you look at his history of all the – like he took power I think in 98, 99. So think of all the things that have happened since then, starting with 9-11 right at the beginning all he play by plays what's going to happen. And so one of the things that he said on like October 10th or something like that after October 7th is that he's like,

Starting point is 01:16:31 look, obviously our country has an allyship with Israel, but, and I don't know if he said it in these words, but he was essentially saying that doesn't mean that our current governments always have to agree with each other because there's political differences. And he said – one of the questions he was getting was, well, then why won't Jordan take in the Palestinian refugees? And he's like, I'm glad you asked that. I will give the worst parts of Israel's government exactly what they want if I do that because that will be effectively ethnically cleansing people from the land, getting it out of their hands. It doesn't have to be a genocide or something, getting them off of there, and Israel can go take that land. Right.

Starting point is 01:17:08 And he's like, I don't agree with the current administration's policies on that. And again, I don't think he said it exactly like this, but he was insinuating like, just get new leadership in there, and maybe we can get this thing done. Right. And everyone can go home. Egypt's saying the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:33 And that's – it's twisted politics because you've got Israel saying that the Muslim world won't take Muslim refugees. And then you've got the Muslim world saying we're not going to take refugees because you're going to block them out. You're never going to let them come back. And essentially what you are doing is you're cleansing Muslims from their land, from their promised land. So it's a disaster. And it doesn't help that Netanyahu gets confused with being representative of Israel when he's not. And it doesn't help that Israel gets represented as a democracy when it has been, it has absolutely been a thriving democracy in the past, but it has been showing has absolutely been a thriving democracy in the past but it has been showing signs of weakening democratic values why do you say because how many like like you said netanyahu has been in power for like in and out of power for like 25 years yeah right he has he

Starting point is 01:18:17 for people who don't know netanyahu is the israeli equivalent of all the drama that surrounds donald trump right he is also under corruption? He is also under corruption charges. He is also under criminal charges. He is also known as being like somebody who is hyper loyal to his own faction rather than to the people of Israel. There's a half of Israel doesn't want Netanyahu in power, just like half of the United States doesn't want Donald Trump to be in power. Wildly, wildly controversial figure, only somehow he has been a prime minister, moved out of the office, moved back into the office, always retained some kind of power, even when he's shrouded with criminal and corruption charges and fraudulence charges, right? There's all sorts of bad stuff around this guy, but he still has this power because like you said, his cabinet, his cronies are ultra orthodox,

Starting point is 01:19:10 ultra right. And they're the ones that are really calling the shots. The world can hate Netanyahu because he takes the bullets for everybody else that he represents. But the question is, is Israel becoming more democratic? Because they're calling for, just look at what happened after Benny Gantz, who was part of the war cabinet. Benny Gantz stepped out of the war cabinet in May, I want to say it was. I think that's right, yeah. And he said, if we don't have a solution to end Gaza, I will leave the war cabinet. Yeah, respect to him, by the way. And then he did. He said, fuck this, this you guys you don't have a plan for gaza i am leaving i won't be part of this what did netanyahu do next he dissolved the

Starting point is 01:19:51 rest of the war cabinet he was like oh well shit if banny's gonna leave we don't need it we don't need it at all i got your war cabinet of one right here and then all these what's that sound like dude that sounds a whole hell of a lot more authoritarian than it does democratic, right? So – and then what is – yeah. Jordan is a fantastic example because Jordan – they're gangster in Jordan. Yeah. Like – Mookabara?

Starting point is 01:20:17 The American military loves working with the Jordanians. The Jordanians like working with the US military. They are not oil rich. They are just legit, hardworking, like industrial, entrepreneurial mindset people in the Middle East. And they're strategically relevant because they're neighbors to Israel right there in the center of the Middle East, but they're also Sunni and pro-Sunni, pro-Islam, pro-everything else. So Israel is not the only benefit or the only benefactor that we have in the Middle East. We're on good terms with UAE. We're on good terms with Saudi. We're on good terms with Jordan.

Starting point is 01:20:54 We have other allies in the region. But the reason that Israel is so valuable to the United States is because we built that country after World War II. Like their democracy is based on our democracy, based on the UK democracy. is because we built that country after World War II. Like their democracy is based on our democracy, based on the UK democracy. Their industrial base, their manufacturing process, their natural resources are valuable to us, whether it's the gem trade.

Starting point is 01:21:18 I mean, one of the largest exporters in the world of high-tech medical equipment is Israel. Yeah. So if you want an MRI, you're getting it out of an Israeli machine, unless you want to start getting your MRI out of a Russian or Chinese-made machine. Oh, fuck that. Right?

Starting point is 01:21:31 So there's all sorts of reasons why we want to maintain, not to mention the promise that we made to the Jewish people coming out of World War II that we would make sure that never happens again. Right? So there's all sorts of reasons why we need to protect the state of Israel.

Starting point is 01:21:44 But that doesn't mean we need to adhere to this idea that there'll never be a two-state solution on the land where Israelis live. You think that we built it, though? That's an interesting comment. Oh, are you kidding, man? That was our MO coming out. Who built France? We did. Who built Germany?

Starting point is 01:22:01 We did. I agree with that. UK? We did. Japan? We did. Everybody who was devastated coming out of World War II. We did. I agree with that. UK, we did. Japan, we did. Everybody who was devastated coming out of World War II, we built their countries, rebuilt their countries with debt, financing, with democratic principles, whatever else, right? And that's what we did with Israel

Starting point is 01:22:17 too. We went in there and we were like, hey, we're going to give you this land. And on top of that, we're going to give you economic structure. We're going to give you economic structure we're going to give you trade we're going to give you aid we're going to make you dependent on us and then in the process of doing so israel became very wealthy and guess what guess what israel buys all their weapons guess we buy all their tech from us yeah yeah so i i okay i understand that yeah i mean germany is like the ultimate case study that literally like the whole western half of the country was done by us after that. That was crazy. But you and I, the last time we were sitting in a studio together was down in Tampa with Danny and Jim like a week before October 7th. So we were like two weeks off having a fireworks of a podcast.

Starting point is 01:23:02 But this is the first time we're really talking about that and litigating what the fuck happened here. And so I remember the last time we were in a studio, just you and me, was June 2023. And to your point earlier, we talked a bit about Mossad there for maybe five minutes or something about some of the tactics and stuff like that but they're at the center of october 7th to me because you know if you've studied up massad and i mean for you if you've seen it because you worked in espionage so you know a lot more than us like they're widely respected as a very talented intelligence agency for various reasons you can read books like gideon spies you can read a book like ronan bergman's rise and kill first which is really really telling

Starting point is 01:23:50 as far as the mentality and everything and then you look at something like october 7th and you're like how the fuck did they let this happen because you know you're talking about guys obviously it was a very impressively executed mission funded by iran as you laid out earlier not disputing that but like they still had to go across the border into israel which you know if you i haven't been on that border i think i was when i was 18 but i don't remember it so that doesn't count like as far as recently like when i talked to people who have been there in the last couple years you can't take a shit near that border without a fucking sniper rifle trained on you so how like what how much had to

Starting point is 01:24:36 go wrong for something like that to actually happen and for all i mean there's what like 1300 people who were killed or something like that there's a mean there's what like 1300 people who killed or something like that there's a lot there's a lot of people so the the reality is that the way that that attack happened on october 7th would have required a lot of communication and cooperation, collaboration between multiple different agencies in Israel. Mossad is charged with external intelligence, meaning intelligence coming in from outside of Israel. Shin Bet is in charge of protecting the land of Israel. Shin Bet's their internal service. It's almost like FBI and CIA. But then it happened on the border, which means that there's like a border control

Starting point is 01:25:25 element and their border patrol element in Israel is closely tied to their defense force, IDF. So you basically have three different organizations that all have to collect information and communicate and disseminate that information with each other in order to identify a threat. And then they all have to collaborate to protect and prevent against that threat. So what happened on October 7th isn't a failure of one agency. It's a failure of multiple agencies. And since the October 7th attack, what we've learned is that there were members of the IDF who saw suspicious activity and reported it up the chain. And then the people up the chain within that agency had differing opinions about whether or not it should be disseminated to Mossad or Shin Bet or the credibility of the reports

Starting point is 01:26:15 at all. Shin Bet had reports that they escalated up the chain. Mossad had reports that they escalated up the chain. But at the bureaucratic level, the communication didn't happen. And if anything, in my opinion, that is what makes October 7th similar to 9-11. It was a failure of communication between multiple agencies that resulted in a tragic attack. Yeah. Here we had the CIA and FBI famously going at it and not exchanging info.

Starting point is 01:26:42 Which led to the development, the whole creation of the Director of National Intelligence, the whole creation of TSA, the whole creation of Homeland Security. All of that. All government agencies. Because. I love that. The two couldn't talk,

Starting point is 01:26:54 so we need three more to make sure they talk. Throw another letter in the alphabet. Could you imagine? That's like saying like a husband and a wife can't talk, so what we need is more spouses. That's right. It's like, you know what I really need is I need another husband and two more wives to be part of this and that's gonna

Starting point is 01:27:07 that's gonna improve our communication oh fuck the husband we'll take a couple more wives that's it gotta have some options baby but i i don't know you know that day has been re-litigated because of what has happened politically and then on a war aspect afterwards and so you have this very very strong sentiment around the world where it's much more like yo fuck netanyahu and what's going on here because obviously terrorist attack very bad obviously there has to be defense or something like that for that problem not to exist. But people get hung up on things Netanyahu said in the past. Like in 2019, he said in the Knesset, like if you don't want a two-state solution, you have to be OK with funding Hamas.

Starting point is 01:27:59 Does that mean Israel is funding Hamas? Not necessarily. You don't know that. But when you have the leader of the party saying that, it's like, oh, you know, are you playing two sides against the middle here to get what you want? And, you know, because something bad will happen if you do that, no matter how you're getting the money there, hidden or not, doesn't really matter, you know. And there seems to be an indiscriminate, and unfortunately this does happen in war all the time we've seen it but there's an indiscriminate effect on human life that we're seeing in gaza and i and i say that with the asterisk that like you can't believe every number that comes out there's propaganda on both sides when i see the death count like i looked at the death count this morning i'm like okay it's probably not that but it's's not good. There's rockets being fired everywhere. The images are the images when you look at it from a drone. Yes, there's cities that are leveled. I get it. War is ugly, but where does it end? question um the i don't see i don't see this conflict ending soon i see it escalating before

Starting point is 01:29:12 it gets before it ends i also don't necessarily think i i don't think that netanyahu is going to get his one state solution if anything what i'm i agree what's what's tough is this is a decision that multiple countries have to make because supporting Palestine and establishing a two-state solution and making it sustainable is never going to come from just Israel. And because the United States needs Israel to be happy with the United States, it's not going to be led by the United States either. We'll sit back in a nice, like, velveteen chair and say, we think there should be a two-state solution, but we're not going to get off of our asses and go in there and help make it happen. Because there's no benefit to us. There's a benefit to us if Israel is stable. There's a benefit to us if Israel is strong. There's a benefit to us if Israel has, you know, if they have an economy that is pro-US and continues to buy US weapons. We don't need a second Palestinian

Starting point is 01:30:12 state to have all those things happen. So we'll sit here and we'll preach, but we're not going to take action. The place where the action has to happen is in the Middle East itself. It's in all of the Muslim nations. And if you start to have a banding of Muslim nations together to support it, that could move the United States because now we have larger interests at stake. If Saudi gets involved, if UAE gets involved, if Jordan gets involved, if Egypt gets involved, now the United States can't sit on their ass anymore. Even more so if we start seeing China or Russia or Iran or, you know, the BRICS nations, if we see them start to lead the development of a two-state solution, then you'll see the United States jump the fuck out of their seats and be like, oh no, we're here to help too.

Starting point is 01:30:56 Right? Let us keep our influence in this region. So the way it ends, I don't know. I will say this. Netanyahu is the one leader in the world right now who's at the largest likelihood of being unseated from within. All the talk about Putin was never really valid. The idea that Putin's cronies were somehow going to take him out or replace him or overrun him from inside. We've seen now how untrue that was. Netanyahu and the democratic process itself, he stands a real risk of actually being voted out, vetoed out, pulled out, kicked out, something. I don't think he's going to be assassinated from within, but he is a strong arm leader right now. And Israel has to decide whether they want a strong

Starting point is 01:31:42 arm leader. And they have plenty of alternates, like plenty of opposition leaders to choose from who can step up and take Netanyahu's place. And the United States doesn't want to see an authoritarian Israel. They want to see an Israel that is pro-US. And an Israel that's pro-US is an Israel that relies on the United States. Yeah. So the United States is going to back somebody in a race against Netanyahu. It's just a matter of when. In your career, how much – because like Israel diplomatically, we look at all these

Starting point is 01:32:17 different countries, whether it be Israel, Britain, countries that are like friends diplomatically. One thing I've learned talking to a lot of you guys who were in espionage a lot of times there's no such thing as a friend there's no such thing as a friend yeah in in the espionage world nonetheless there's the imagery to make it appear that way sometimes that's why we have things like the five eyes where you know they claim to share all information they probably don't but with israel did you do work with them did you have overlap with them during your career? And if so, what was the nature of that that you can talk about? Yeah. So the short answer, I mean, it's classified. It's sensitive. The United States works close. The CIA works closely with Mossad on a number of different priorities, not every

Starting point is 01:33:02 priority, right? So during the global war on terror and all of the years of that war, which were some of my core years at CIA, Mossad and CIA were hip and hip on counterterrorism issues. The United States and Mossad were hip and hip on counter nuclear proliferation issues, right? So issues of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. But on topics like the rise of China, now all of a sudden there's secrets between Assad and the United States. And you've got to keep in mind too that there's a long history of Israel spying against the United States by creating moles inside the U.S. government. Yeah, Jonathan Pollard. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:33:38 So even though Israel is an ally and a friend, they are still actively cultivating and creating penetrations of our government, our CIA, our intelligence infrastructure, our military infrastructure. Do we do that to them? We do that to everybody. That's why there's no friends. Right. Right? Everybody does it to us. We do it to everybody else. Right? Remember when Obama was caught spying on Angela Merkel in 2009, I think it was. That was Obama?

Starting point is 01:34:03 That was under the Obama administration. That was? Mm-hmm. It may have started under the Bush administration before him. I think it was Bush before him, wasn think it was. That was Obama? That was under the Obama administration. That was? Mm-hmm. It may have started under the Bush administration before him. I think it was Bush before him, wasn't it? Yeah, can we pull that up? That's clicking in my head. But yeah, point taken.

Starting point is 01:34:13 Yeah, so we don't have, there are no friends. Everybody spies on everybody else. In the intelligence world, that's just carte blanche. So that's an answer to your question. Like, did we work with Israel? Yes. The specifics, I can't disclose. Those are something that those missions, those specific avenues, the way that we liaise,

Starting point is 01:34:30 all of that stuff is still very classified. What I will also say, though, is that when you work with Mossad, they are really good at what they do. Not only in terms of, you know, bang, bang, blow it up, but also in terms of sitting across the table from you and you feel like you're with a friend like they are very very good break bread with me very very good at human intelligence collection yeah i mean i'd like i those books i recommend gideon spies and rising go first you really see it in that all right yeah we just unless you pulled this up so merkle calls obama about u.s spying on her phone no we would never we would never do germany is a friend and a democracy i wonder i've always wondered like you've said in the past that you know there's some countries where the intelligence is so good and you'd never expect it.

Starting point is 01:35:26 And you're like, oh, I was unfamiliar with your game. And then there's other countries where you're like, oh, not good. And I always have wondered if Germany is one of them. BND. BND is the German External Service, right? Are they one of them? It's really fun. They're very good at technological collection.

Starting point is 01:35:43 Apparently not. No, that's how they caught's, that's how they caught it. Oh, they, but they didn't stop it. That's the problem. Well, you can't, I mean, catching it and stopping it are two different things. Okay. Finding out that you're listening in on my phone doesn't necessarily mean I have the technology to block the technology that you're using to spy on my phone. Okay. Right. But it's still the first step. Otherwise not even knowing that you're spying on my phone means I don't even have the awareness that you're spying on me at all. So there's always two steps to an intel operation.

Starting point is 01:36:11 There's identifying it and then there's countering it. Either way, the BND is really funny because inside Germany, Germans hate their intelligence service because of the long history all the way back to like pre-world war ii where the internal german services all spied on their own people right so bnd has to carry all of that baggage and culturally the people don't like the bnd culturally they think the bnd is corrupt they think that the people the bnd is incompetent they think the bnd is their deep state right so So the Germans do not like their own intelligence service, which isn't all that different from what happens here in the United States, except there's a solid group of people here in the US who also recognize and

Starting point is 01:36:52 appreciate CIA. There really isn't a solid group of people inside Germany who'd like the BND. But the BND is very, very good at technical collection because Germany is a wealthy European country. They're one of the two top economic earners in Europe. And they put almost all of their money into technical collection, technical intelligence capabilities inside of Germany to protect German interests. The other wealthy country is France. France is the DGSE.

Starting point is 01:37:19 That's their intelligence service. Also very well funded, also very capable. But the focus of the two is different. Germany focuses heavily on technical collection. DGSE focuses on offensive and defensive industrial and economic espionage more than just technical collection. But they're both very well funded because a huge portion of their GDP gets reinvested into intelligence. That's why in NATO, the German chancellor, I think it was last year in 2023, the German chancellor said, we're going to take money away from our intelligence service and invest it into our military base so that Germany can become the new military leader of Europe, of NATO, so that we're not so dependent on the United States, which is funny to think that

Starting point is 01:38:05 Germany is going to invest in growing its military to become the new military power of NATO, because the last time Germany had a giant military power didn't turn out so good for, you know, the North Atlantic. No, it didn't. That's interesting that that attitude you point to is this psychological thing that's existed across generations in their society and it's you know the easiest thing to break is trust yeah and the hardest thing to build is trust absolutely right so you do one thing and it's gone and i think about this a lot here now because you and i've had plenty of conversations before we don't need to go through and redo some of those but yeah there's there's things that are different intelligence agencies, because there's a bunch of

Starting point is 01:38:49 them, that they do that I think are a huge problem. There is influence where I think they've gone way too far. We're talking about constitutional issues and stuff like that. Putting that aside for a second, though, I understand the blowback that many people feel like i do towards those things and then the fact that many of those people then respond how i'm talking about americans right now and i'm talking online right they respond by saying get rid of these agencies and stuff and look at them and like everything else i'm like all right can we please live right here you're going here. Bad idea. Here's a very bad idea too.

Starting point is 01:39:26 I agree with that. We don't want to trample on rights. That's why you and I have had some disagreements on like Edward Snowden who I think was in a very bad position. But he saw a lot of rights being trampled on. How do we live here? Because if you do, I don't know, get rid of CIA. See, I'm a realist. I feel like we'd last two days maybe

Starting point is 01:39:46 three right and shit would just hit the fan and and like you can't hold yourself to a way higher bar unfortunately than all these other countries do but how do we do that in a way where we don't take it too far and say you know know what? We know the constitution is important, but your safety is more important to the point that in the future you live in a society where they completely run everything. And the, the worst of those people, meaning not many of the good people that you work with, which I believe you did work with, you know, but the, the worst of those people can take advantage of those powers and turn America on its head. We started going wrong in the 1970s when we made this transition to populist and career politicians. From prior to that, people would come out of the military and

Starting point is 01:40:41 have a fantastic military career and then become a senator or congressman and they would have a second career in politics so they would have a 20-year career in the military and then they would become a congressperson for five or six terms and then they would rotate to another congressperson right like they were public servants well then we started having these freshman congresspeople and freshman senators who were young and would spend 25 years, 30 years in politics. Our country is built, to your exact point, right? Our country is built on the idea of representative democracy, like democratic principles, which means you're supposed to focus on being a podcaster. That's what you're supposed to focus on. You're supposed to focus on good content,

Starting point is 01:41:25 creative conversations, pushing the envelope, getting it published in high quality video and high quality audio. That's what you're supposed to do. And then periodically, you're supposed to vote on somebody to represent your constituency interests at a higher level of politics. You're not supposed to meddle in politics. You're supposed to be responsible and ethical in the way that you choose a representative who will represent you for the next two years in Congress and the person who will represent you for the next six years in the Senate.

Starting point is 01:41:55 And you're supposed to do that for your state and for your county and for your federal government, right, for your national level. That's what you're supposed to do along with being a podcaster. We gave up our civic duty to find the right representatives from the 70s on. We started not doing our civic duty to understand who we were voting for. We started voting for whoever was advertised to us.

Starting point is 01:42:21 We started voting for whoever was espousing the two or three priorities that we cared most about, right? And then as older people voted more and younger people voted less, then you started having this dichotomy of the only policies that people were really paying attention to or talking about or trying to move the needle on were the two or three policies that were most impactful to the older generations. That's why you always see healthcare as a debated topic. That's why you always see Medicare and Medicaid as a debated topic. That's why you always see, you know, immigration as a debated topic, because that's what older generations care about. Younger generations care about

Starting point is 01:43:00 something completely different. So as like generation after generation goes by, you have these entrenched politicians who do not represent the constituencies that they're supposed to be representing, which results in the constituency members like you and me thinking and talking more about politics when we don't have any power over politics except to vote for who could change the future of politics. So to your point, how do we live here? Like, how do we not go to the place where we disband CIA, but also not go to the place where CIA has no oversight at all? Right? How do we stay in the middle? We have to lean into the democratic process that we built here in our country and make sure that we participate in local

Starting point is 01:43:45 elections, participate in senatorial, gubernatorial, and congressional races, get people who represent our interests into office. Because once those people are in office, they become the oversight committee for CIA. They are dedicated to actually representing the constituency that voted them into office because they don't care about making the party happy they care about making their constituency happy because they know that their head is on the chopping block as soon as two years or six years is up i think i think you're i think this is great i think you're missing two words though and two words you like term limits you for what you're saying to work you have to put that into place in both the house and the senate in some fashion because you will always create too much of a high volume incentive for someone to win on a tuesday

Starting point is 01:44:31 in november and not do the right thing as long as you have professional politicians you'll never have term limits yeah because a professional politician can't put a term limit in place because it terminates their career so how are we going to get there? You and I have to vote fucking people into office who will get there and vote for term limits, right? That's, as much as people want to hate Donald Trump, Donald Trump is the closest thing to how our presidential policy or process was supposed to work since like the forefathers themselves.

Starting point is 01:45:02 Why? Because he's not a professional politician he is a business person who is stepping out of business to sacrifice four years of his life in office because or eight years of his life in office and then he's supposed to leave and go back to contributing to business that's how our country was built that's what the forefathers wanted they wanted successful business people, successful entrepreneurs, successful executives, successful doctors and attorneys and everything else. They wanted them to be successful in their career, run for office, win the election based on the

Starting point is 01:45:35 people, represent the people's needs for a term limit, and then step out of office and go right back into their job, right? What did George Washington do? Yes, exactly. That's how it was supposed to work. We fucked that system up, dude. And we became driven by professional politics. We became expert marketers and calling ourselves campaigners instead. So we, the American people, have to take some freaking ownership of how fucked up our government is because when we don't pay attention, when we don't vote, when we don't get off our ass to go to every electoral registration or every poll, we're just entrenching the current process more and more. How often do you and your CIA colleagues, like during your career,

Starting point is 01:46:29 how often when you're in the middle of missions or whatever, wherever the fuck, would you guys talk politics? We don't talk a lot about politics, frankly, because the issues that are happening around us, like the actual operation itself, demands most of our mental energy. But what we do talk about is how fucked up the nature of operations is, because it's not based on priorities that are operational. What do you mean? It's based on political priorities. Priorities that are operational. So think of a, think of, Oh, I got it. Yeah. Think of an operation as like a project

Starting point is 01:47:11 in a business, right? So your boss, you, you work in a cereal factory and they want to create a new flavor of cereal. In order for that new flavor of cereal to be approved and created, you have to have a budget committee that meets, you have to have a marketing committee that meets, you have to have the boss has to give three different bosses have to say yes. And then only after everybody says yes, some pile of money is then dedicated to the project. And then only after the pile of money is dedicated to the project, can you go about buying the machine, buying the ingredients and creating a cereal, right? There's a process to it. Same way with secret agent operations or military or clandestine operations. Somebody has to propose it. Somebody else has to sketch it out. Somebody else has to approve it. Three different levels of leadership have to say yes. Then a bucket of money comes over. And that bucket of money is usually 50% of what you actually asked for because they want proof of concept before they give you more money. Yeah. So it's just – that's the machine.

Starting point is 01:48:08 So what ends up happening is when you're the ass on the line, you're like, we're supposed to do this big thing. We're supposed to collect secrets about hypersonic missile development in Iran. That's what we're supposed to do. We asked for $15 million. They gave us $5 million. And they told us that in 365 days, we have to demonstrate XYZ progress in order to get the next installment of $5 million. So now we're trying to launch an operation that's underfunded to fulfill a priority that the current policymakers said is a $15 million priority. Well, guess what's going to happen over the next year?

Starting point is 01:48:49 There's going to be half the states are going to have new senators. There's going to be new Congress people, right? Things are going to change. So then you might be six months into your one-year op, six months into the first year of a five-year op, and then new policymakers step in and Russia invades Ukraine. And then the policymakers are like, we don't care about hypersonic missiles in Iran right now. What we care about is intelligence on the battlefield in Ukraine. And they really have that much power to say, to say we know where you're spending every single dollar?

Starting point is 01:49:17 Because a lot of people at home wonder if that's really the case. Absolutely, absolutely, man. Because there's so much oversight. Like, dude, when you meet with an asset in the field, if you're an informant in the field and I'm your handler and we meet and I slide you $50 and I'm like, thank you for your information.

Starting point is 01:49:35 Here's $50. Do you know what I have to slide you next? A fucking piece of paper for you to sign as a receipt. I shit you not. I shit you not. And then on that receipt in English, it has to say $50, my name, and then you have to sign it with something identifiable to you as the asset. So it can be an X or a Y or every time, every time, because then I have to take that receipt

Starting point is 01:49:59 back. And guess who I give it to? Uncle Sam. A budget and finance person who has to take my receipt along with all the other receipts from all the other field officers who had a meeting that day. And he has to run it against a budget that says, I gave $250 to field officers today, and I got $250 in receipts. And I can now put this $250 under a line item that says paying informants or paying assets, right? Field, slush fund, whatever it is. The same thing has to happen with every piece of equipment that comes in and out. If I want to put a GPS tracker on your boat, I have to request that GPS tracker. Always. Always. Always. Shout out to Linda at CIA doing God's work out there. Jesus Christ. I don't want that job. So that's why if we often talk, and I've said

Starting point is 01:50:45 this to you before, right? There's only 10% of CIA that works undercover, roughly. And then of the people that work undercover, it's only about another 10% that operate in the field undercover. That means the other 97% of the population of CIA is there to support those undercover operations, financially, administratively, analytically, logistically, right? We have our own cartographers that make maps. We have our own librarians that look shit up. We have our own tech people who create ways for us to have covert cell phone communication. Everybody's all that, all those personnel, all that talent, all that money is there to support a few field operations. Not because those field operations are super dangerous. Some of them are, but because it's a fucking administrative burden

Starting point is 01:51:36 to be able to communicate back to the Congress who approves the funding. Like, Hey, you gave us $5 million. We spent that $5 million responsibly. You've heard different guys, though, from those seats, like vaguely say things, not even vaguely, like, I'm thinking of one right now, Chuck Schumer, longtime senator, career politician, you know, powerful guy in DC. He said things on TV talking about like, you don't want to make enemies with the intelligence community. And the implication there is they got a lot more power than I do. So it almost surprises me that things like this would be like the intelligence community during

Starting point is 01:52:19 serious operations would actually care that much about following every letter of law because they got to report it to Senate. It's almost like, can't they report whatever they want to Senate? Absolutely. And that's the reality. That's where the rubber meets the road, right? In some parts of the world, if you're in Africa, you might pay somebody with $250 and get a receipt. If you're in more important places like Russia, you're probably not paying somebody $250. You're probably paying them like $25,000. Nice bricks of cash.

Starting point is 01:52:52 Right? Big chunks of cash. Big, big chunk. So that means all the same process applies. I'm going and getting approval to bake a little football that carries $100,000 in cash. If you've never seen $100,000 in cash, it's not very big. Yeah. Right. We get that thing wrapped up in non-sequential bills. Maybe we even have it converted into local currency. So we're doing

Starting point is 01:53:15 it in Armenia. So it's an Armenian currency. Who knows what? We wrap it up. We take it to the meeting. We hand it off. We get our receipts, that's $25,000 or $200,000 or $100,000, whatever it is, $100,000 that has now been transferred. We don't know what the fuck it's being spent on. Apparently not. So imagine 10 meetings like that. Now you have a million dollars that have just been exchanged. You come back to the Senate House and you're like, we spent a million dollars on intelligence

Starting point is 01:53:42 against Russia. And they're like, well, where did that million dollars go? Don't worry about it. Don't fucking worry about it. You understand? Even worse, even worse, we'll be like, we spent a million dollars on getting secrets from Russian assets. And they're like, but you still didn't know when they were going to invade Ukraine? And you're like, well, if you would have given us $2 million, we could have done that too.

Starting point is 01:54:04 And that's the back and forth, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of money that gets lost. Just think about what happened with the Mujahideen that then turned into the Taliban. In the 80s. We were giving them money. We were giving them shoulder-carried rockets. We were giving them ammunition. We were giving them training.

Starting point is 01:54:22 How'd that work out? All that stuff came back as receipts, but then you saw how you saw how it all worked out we got some receipts a mile away bingo jesus christ i mean the the 500 pound elephant in the room there is though does china have to get receipts when their intelligence agents are doing this shit nope russia nope iran they're not democracy i'm not gonna go through every country but again like the oversight is completely different we have sometimes i want it both ways i totally agree i totally agree and unfortunately man the the what the thousand pound elephant to your 500 pound elephant is that every american is sitting in their fucking lazy boy, sitting at

Starting point is 01:55:06 their desk, sitting on the shitter, asking themselves the same question. I kind of want it both ways. What do we mean? We kind of want to be a democracy, but get the chance to skip the democratic process every now and then. If we, as the world's superpower, if we're asking ourselves that question right now, what is every developing nation also asking themselves right now? Do we want to be a democracy or do we want to be authoritarian? And that is the real reason that we're seeing such a rise in power and popularity for leaders like Xi Jinping, leaders like Vladimir Putin, leaders like Netanyahu, leaders like the IS whole in Iran. Iran just had an election. They just elected a new president who's a reformist. Is that a real election? Yeah, I think it's a real election. I mean, the fact that he won, I remember, I remember when he was running, I sat there with my wife, who's a former CIA. Former.

Starting point is 01:56:15 And both of us were like, if that dude wins in Iran, like that's going to really upset the apple cart. Because we've been saying for a long time that Iran is not a democracy. Even though Iran does practice democratic principles, the narrative that has been adopted in the United States from all the messaging that you hear about Iran is that it's like an extremist haven for terrorists and authoritarian rule under the Ayatollah. Well, they just showed that people turn out, people vote, and then they respect the vote. They honor the vote of the people, a very small group of people. And again, the Ayatollah knew that the people voting were a small group of people and they were going to vote for this reformist. So he tried to get more of the fundamentalists out to vote against the reformist. It just didn't work

Starting point is 01:56:59 because the Iranian people themselves don't believe in their own democratic process. Nevertheless, what we have seen is that because there's a new reformist president in Iran, we lose the chance to say that Iran is not a democracy anymore, because they just had a democratic vote. They voted in an opposition leader, and that opposition leader is now working hand in hand with the Ayatollah. Does that mean that the Ayatollah has any less power no but it does challenge the messaging and the narrative that has existed about iran that's wild that we could sit here and say like oh they're a little democratic over there isn't that fucking crazy you know what they love democracy they love democracy they do they just love their ayatollah more. Oh, my God. God, that was such a fuck-up, letting that happen in 79. Such a fuck-up to let that happen.

Starting point is 01:57:50 And now, you know, we're fucking 55 years later. And you know what? The Shah's son, Pahlavi, have you followed him at all? No. Very interesting. So when that place falls in 79, the family gets refuge in the United States. So he lives here, raised his daughters here. I think his mom's here too, so the wife of the regime in Iran that he would return home and be installed as,

Starting point is 01:58:27 I don't know if it would be a shop, but as like the leader. Now, this is a guy who's lived in America for the last 55 years in D.C., you know, hobnobbing with everyone down there. And it makes you wonder, like, if there is a regime change, I'm just being a realist here, wouldn't it make sense that all the countries who are most invested in seeing that happen meaning like western countries like the united states maybe would want to plug in a guy who's one of their own like that absolutely but that's not that's not new news like oh no it's not yeah every country wants to influence an election

Starting point is 01:59:02 to get a candidate that is going to see things their way but literally someone who i i don't want to use the term like on the payroll but like i mean look where look where dude lives you know what i mean like it is what it is yeah it's i mean getting somebody on the payroll to also win the ticket is tough that. That's also a lot of pre-911 CIA stuff, trying to sway elections, trying to... Pre-911? Yeah, pre-911. What about a little post-911? Post-911, the oversight is significantly different, man. It's a different world of but when you – I started CI in 2007.

Starting point is 01:59:47 The people who were training me in field tradecraft were all people who had built their career pre-9-11, right? 10-, 15-, 20-year veterans teaching the newest class. They knew nothing about the war on terror. They knew about the Cold War. They knew about the world with no oversight. They knew about the Cold War. They knew about the world with no oversight. They knew about the world before you had to document everything. We were being trained in a new way where everything had to be documented and everything had to be approved and everything had oversight. So there was this discontinuity in the training where they would be teaching us something that they themselves

Starting point is 02:00:25 only recently learned yes and then their war stories would be war stories that we would never get to do because they were involved in like trying to poison castro and have his beard fall out and you can't do that no we can't do that now maybe maybe with the right court approval you can but i mean now it's a it's a different world now. You're a good company man. You're good. You say that with a straight face. Like we can't – we would never do that.

Starting point is 02:00:57 We'd never try to take out a world leader. That is beneath us as an organization. It's not beneath the organization. It's just administratively difficult. Okay. All right. That's a better answer. I like that answer.

Starting point is 02:01:10 It's administratively CIA killing other world leaders. Administratively difficult. Administratively challenging. I can accept that. See, that's why it doesn't feel better to be honest. I've never been anything but honest with you, brother. So the whole reason, like Snowden, and I love disagreeing with you on Snowden.

Starting point is 02:01:27 Okay, let's do it. Yeah, we don't have to do it much. It's just, it's always nice to talk about a situation where you're wrong. That was good. That was good. I didn't see that coming. Say that to John tomorrow.

Starting point is 02:01:43 Oh, dude, I can't. I am so excited. i am very excited you are two of the smartest individuals i've listened to on podcasts before you're both brilliant men you come at it we're talking about john kiryaku by the way that podcast i'm sure danny jones is doing it with you it's gonna be amazing it's gonna come out after this one so everyone stay tuned for that on danny jones podcast channel and go subscribe. But John Kiriakou is a former extremely high level CIA guy who ended up going to prison for commenting on stuff. And there's a whole story there.

Starting point is 02:02:14 And it's really fucked up what they did to him. But he likes some of the stuff that Snowden did. And there's a lot of disagreements you guys have. So that's going to be great. But I don't want to get you off track here. You're talking about your opinion on it. yeah no it's all good just the the idea that so let's just compare snowden and assange right because assange just recently got um sent back to australia espionage charges were lifted like he's a free man yes after

Starting point is 02:02:40 fucking a while 12 years i don't know if it was that. It was a long time. It was a long time between British prisons and. The embassy. Yeah, the embassy in Ecuador. Yeah, right. And the argument for both is the same, even though the circumstances for both are totally different. Snowden was an American citizen. He was a contractor for a government contracting organization that was working for NSA.

Starting point is 02:03:07 So like Booz Allen Hamilton or Raytheon or somebody. So he wasn't a sworn officer, but prior to becoming a contractor, he was a sworn officer. So he's working for NSA on a commercial contract when he comes across this program that he believes is a violation of american rights it's called heartbeat i think i forget the name of the program heartbeat for we'll come up with it right but so to to whistle blow he takes the story to a foreign news source the guardian which is a uk news source and he breaks the story in a foreign news source, The Guardian, which is a UK news source. And he breaks the story in a foreign news source and then flees to a series of countries that are not, that are American adversaries. One, I want to step in for one second. And you're correct that he went to like Hong Kong, which, you know, is under the veil of China with you there. The Russia thing thing his plane got down there vice president biden at the time

Starting point is 02:04:06 diplomatically ordered his plane down in russia so that was not his plan right but before hong kong he was in what he was in ecuador he was in cuba he was in cuba uh maybe not cuba we can can we track yeah where where did we track all the places that Snowden essentially traveled in his escape from the United States? After Hawaii. When he went from Hawaii to Hong Kong, did Snowden go anywhere in between? I don't think he went straight to Hong Kong. I think Hong Kong is... I don't think you...

Starting point is 02:04:36 Can you from there? Oh, you probably could from Hawaii. I'm pretty sure he spent years in South America. It was in like Uruguay or Ecuador. He was somewhere. So he went... Yeah, there it is. Edward Snowden's movement. How it invaded US. Go ahead and click on... Well, no. So, all right. You're not... I think you have it a little bit backwards. Hawaii to Hong Kong. Yes. Your point remains. He was trying to go to Ecuador and his plane was downed in Moscow. So he never got there,

Starting point is 02:05:04 but he was going to a country that maybe has some diplomatic issues with america correct so the the point is he was an american citizen who exposed secrets that he had been sworn to keep and he knew the purpose and intent of the intelligence agents because he was a sworn officer of the federal government before he was a contractor. That, exposing whistleblowing national security secrets that are classified at a top secret level, knowingly, when you have been charged to protect those secrets, that is completely different than Julian Assange, who was the editor-in-chief of a website that was accepting secrets from all over the world, he himself being an Australian citizen. And then Chelsea Manning, who is a army private or sergeant, something like that, low-level army person, gives those secrets to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks publishes those secrets. And now somehow the United States tries to pursue Assange under the Espionage Act, just like they were pursuing Snowden under the Espionage Act.

Starting point is 02:06:13 Completely different cases. Julian Assange, not an American citizen. Edward Snowden, American citizen. Julian Assange, never sworn to protect and keep a secret. Journalist, yeah. Right? Edward Snowden swore to protect and keep a secret. Journalist, yeah. Right? Edward Snowden swore to protect and keep a secret. Contractually, Assange never said he would hide secrets.

Starting point is 02:06:31 Contractually, Edward Snowden said he would. Right? Assange published on his own website. Snowden published on a foreign country's newspaper periodical, right? So these two people are completely different. Julian Assange, I am happy that he has gotten released and he's back home and he is doing what he has always tried to do, which is adding transparency to a world full of secrets. Whether or not that's being shaped by foreign powers, what else isn't being shaped by foreign powers? But Edward Snowden,

Starting point is 02:07:02 who intentionally violated the trust that was put in him by the American people, by his company, by the government, by the NSA, and then in the process of doing so, undid all the work of hundreds of dedicated NSA architects, programmers, strategists. He not only ruined careers, he also undermined the national security of the United States to highlight a program that had already been deemed legal by a court system that was cleared to get the details of that classified operation. The fact that another court disagreed and said that the previous proceedings were superseded and illegal that's no different than a criminal court being a coming to a guilty verdict and then an appeal court coming to a different verdict it just shows that our court system isn't consistent

Starting point is 02:07:55 it doesn't actually mean that snowden was right you see what i'm saying all right so there's a lot there and and you may you make some really good points. I want to be really fair to that too. So first of all, I think it's big of you to say that about Assange, especially someone coming from your organization where some of your colleagues kind of tried to whack that guy. So I respect that. But with Snowden, I also see where you're coming from because of the precedent it sets. So I've always looked at this, and if people have heard me say this on the podcast before, I'm sorry, but I got to reiterate this for people who haven't. I've always said he was stuck between a shit or a fart because he had two slippery slopes. Let's look at a slippery slope that you're focused on, which I think is an important one. You break your contract. You disclose information that you swore yourself to secrecy to take the job to do in the first place. And you set the precedent that someone else in any chain of command within intelligence who has access to information can now point to you when they leak something and say, but snowden late leaks so why can't i and so maybe let's say what snowden leaked was at a hundred scale of seriousness which i would say it was the next person can be at 99.5 it's still bad but you see it can work it's it's a slippery

Starting point is 02:09:18 so it works its way down eventually people are just leaking whatever the fuck they want and that's a problem and this is where when i look at it from the government perspective i understand that i do have an understanding of that the other slippery slope though is the lack of responsibility within the chain of command edward snowden did try to do it the correct way and it wasn't in like a week he tried to do it over i believe it was at least a two-year period, may have been longer than that. Go to his chain of command and say, guys, we are violating the law. We are violating what has been told that we can do. We are violating the US constitution. Here is all the proof. Please do something about it. And they always told him to fuck off. And so he was now looking at it like, okay, I can break the chain of command and leak something that is violating the

Starting point is 02:10:06 constitution i hear your point that like the technology and the processes behind this apply to a lot of other things too that's a fair point so they have to rebuild all that that's a big problem i agree with that but he's like i can do that and trust that like they're going to be able to be creative and rebuild that or i can let this keep happening and 10 years from now look up and it's way worse. And maybe you have worst case scenario big brother in America. And fuck if I know what I would do in that situation. I don't know if anyone does, but I think to – like to have your stance is fair. You can have that opinion, and I may disagree with it a little bit because I may lean on this slippery slope more than you lean on this one.

Starting point is 02:10:45 But I think any of us who talk about this situation, regardless of which side we fall on, we got to at least recognize that there were – there was a red pill and a blue pill there, and it wasn't the easiest answer. You think you should answer one way. I think maybe you it in the wrong way? I don't believe in right and wrong. You already know that. Well, yeah. Right? So Snowden's opinion that what we were doing was wrong was not everyone's opinion.

Starting point is 02:11:22 Right? There were obviously a whole chain of command of leadership that approved the project. There was a whole confidential, cleared court system that deemed it to be legal. And then there was millions, tens of millions of dollars that went into building the program. All of that thought they were doing the right thing. Edward Snowden thought we were doing the wrong thing. And let me be fair. There were many people working on that program who didn't agree with the program.

Starting point is 02:11:50 Correct. Many who did not agree with the program. Snowden's two years of complaints, or however many years it was, it wasn't the people told him to fuck off. He raised his concern within the chain of command, and he just didn't like the answer that came back. Because the chain of command came back and said, hey, we ran it up the chain.

Starting point is 02:12:09 It's approved. It's legal. We're doing it. But it wasn't legal. It was legal. How was it legal? Because the court approved it. The cleared court approved it.

Starting point is 02:12:19 And again, now I'm getting off the details because I haven't looked at it in a while. But if I remember correctly, they manipulated what they were actually doing to the – what's it? The FISA court or whatever to make it look like they were doing it within the bounds of that regulation, but they were not. They were spying on unsuspecting United States citizens, not people who like you were making the argument, hey, this might be a terrorist. Literally everybody. It was blanket. It was blanket coverage. Correct. Blanket coverage that had a very, do you, so it's like a police wiretap, right? When, when the police, when FBI, when, when local police, when city police, when they listen, when they actually tap a line, they can't just listen to the line. They have to choose, like, I think it's a 15 or 30 second segment that they can listen to. And only if during that segment, something of relevancy happens, then they have a piece

Starting point is 02:13:16 of evidence that it's admissible in court. So if there's a five minute conversation and they choose the wrong 30 seconds to listen, they don't have any proof. They don't get to keep everything, right? That's what blanket approval means. It means the court is allowing you to collect blanket so that you can create a case off of specific instances that are all defined and it's heavily regulated, right? That's the way it works. The fact that metadata was collected,

Starting point is 02:13:46 metadata, which isn't even personal information it's metadata it's can you define that yeah so metadata is all of the additional information that's created on the digital side of a digital um piece of communication all right that was good japanese let's do english So you watch a Netflix show, right? The fact that it's your account under your name with your credit card to your home address, and it's the title of the show, that is private information. The fact that it streamed at two o'clock to a zip code, that's your zip code and was watched for seven minutes before it was paused. That's all metadata. Nobody knows that Julian Dory watched fucking Coco for seven minutes and then took a shit break. Nobody knows that.

Starting point is 02:14:40 What they know is that this zip code streamed seven minutes of this data from Netflix at this time. That's the difference between – and then there's all sorts of other metadata too, right? Which internet service provider carried the actual streaming service, what the bandwidth was, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All of that's metadata, not personal information. Your cellular phone carries tons of metadata too. It's not just Julian Dory called Danny Jones on August 1st and had an 11-minute conversation about Diet Coke.

Starting point is 02:15:16 That's personal data. That's encrypted for the most part. But the fact that Sprint supported a call to Verizon for seven minutes from these two geographic, you know, latitude directions, that's metadata. So the court system said collecting metadata in bulk with an effort to correlate that metadata with known terrorist activity is legal. And then a different court, a civilian civil court, which is not a cleared court, determined later on that the cleared court made the wrong call. Well, guess what happens all the time in an appeal process? One court comes to one decision,

Starting point is 02:16:00 a different court comes to a different decision. Different juries, different judges, different districts, different precincts. So does that mean that the person who's found guilty in the first court but then innocent in the second court is still guilty? Does that mean that they did the wrong thing if the appeal court found them not guilty?

Starting point is 02:16:19 I see what you're saying. That's exactly what happened here. Right? And at the end of the day NSA still had to change their program because the court system did what the court system did and they were two different court systems cleared courts have more access to more information civilian courts have less access to cleared information it's it's not really truly apples to apples look you you make the you make the argument in a very diplomatic way.

Starting point is 02:16:45 I can't argue that. I think we've made the points on that. I really want to hear you and John go at that. John's a way better person to discuss that with you than me for obvious reasons. Real quick, real quick, because I just want to fact check this, Leslie. John Kiriakou has his own podcast, yeah? I'm pretty sure he does. Does he?

Starting point is 02:17:03 And I'm pretty sure it's sponsored by Russian state media. Oh, God. All right. That's a whole other conversation. I knew you were going there. Just wanted to fact check it because – All right. We'll fact check it real quick.

Starting point is 02:17:15 I want that to break on your show because I'm going to be talking about that. I want you to discuss that with him on that podcast for sure because he's talked about that before and what what happened there and everything i don't know there he has been i will say this whether or not this is true what you said he has been on those networks and has been paid by those networks that's not wrong but let hear him out on that that's not wrong meaning that's not inaccurate correct yeah that's what i'm saying like like you're you are accurate but i i want you to talk about that with him real quick i just have to go to the bathroom. We're going to come back. We got to talk about UFOs.

Starting point is 02:17:47 We got to talk about Diddy. We got a lot more on the bone here. So everyone just hold on one minute. Right back. All right. We're back. So you have been the star of a series on History Channel that we've talked about beyond skinwalker ranch and i know we got into that on episode 150 based on the first season and what you were doing and some of your surprise there but

Starting point is 02:18:10 i've always enjoyed your thoughts on the ufo phenomenon because i think you're a realist about it you're more data driven you've expressed that you believe there's a there's almost a statistical impossibility that there is not intelligent life out there it's just a question of are the things we're seeing reported as intelligent life here actually what they're reported as which i think is really fair because there's also been a lot of speculation righteously so i think by a lot of people that the things we're seeing are products of super advanced intelligence related technology not always necessarily our own but yeah certainly DARPA or CIA at the front end of that so having done season one what are you what

Starting point is 02:18:53 do you want are you on season three season two is already is already live and I think rat is uh is aired and season three scheduled okay Okay. So number one, has your opinion changed or moved at all in that? And number two, what are you guys, what are you guys going to be focused on and looking forward to in season three?

Starting point is 02:19:14 So I really appreciate where you're going with this. And I also really appreciate that you are so accurate and specific in the words that you use to describe my relationship with the phenomenon. Because what I have seen personally is that there is some strange shit that happens that doesn't have explanation. It doesn't have explanation in

Starting point is 02:19:39 like normal civilian terms. It doesn't have explanation. It defies explanation in known science and known scientific terms. Equipment gives results that don't make sense according to how the equipment is supposed to work. I mean, and then of course, on top of that, there's a whole world of secrets that we don't have access to. But even as we take this to my network of FBI, CIA, NSA, police, even as we expand and ask questions in my own personal network, the feedback that continuously comes back is that they are also stumped.

Starting point is 02:20:17 So there really is something strange. is some kind of phenomenon that is consistent, is measurable, is witnessable, and is happening in our planet's atmosphere, right? And sometimes that phenomenon happens underground. Sometimes that phenomenon happens on the surface. Sometimes that phenomenon happens in the sky. Now, after being through two seasons of investigating high strangeness with the Skinwalker team and the Beyond Skinwalker effort, I am more convinced than ever that there is something happening. I am not any more convinced that it is alien in nature, but I am more and more confident that it does defy science as we understand science today, right? Energy signatures, transient physical evidence, like somehow you can see gaps in GPS data, gaps in geospatial data, gaps in energy returns. Like it's the strangest thing, man. And nobody can

Starting point is 02:21:25 explain it. Experts in their field can't explain it. Technical experts with the equipment can't explain it. Physicists, astrophysicists, like scientists can't explain it, but it happens and it's consistent, not everywhere, but in certain places. So why the hell is it that when I'm in a strange ranch in Southern Colorado, I see the same weird shit that I see in the mountains of Nevada, but I don't see either of like those two things are consistent. But then when I go to someplace in Tennessee, we don't see shit. How does that happen? How is it that I can go one city over, I can go one national park or one state park over to where the terrain is exactly the same granite rock to granite rock, but energy signatures are different. Geospatial data is

Starting point is 02:22:13 different. Magnetic anomalies are different. How does that happen? Right. And why does that happen? I don't, I don't think that it's alien. The proof that I'm seeing is not that it's alien, but the proof that I'm seeing is sure as hell that it is fucking weird it's fascinating and it shows the untapped advantages that a weapon system could get if it could figure out this science and i'm i gave you a lot right there i don't know if it all made sense because in my head i'm reliving the investigation and season two goes through a lot right there. I don't know if it all made sense because in my head, I'm reliving the investigation, and season two goes through a lot of that, and anybody who watches season two

Starting point is 02:22:49 on History Channel or streams it beyond Skinwalker Ranch, you're going to see exactly what I'm saying. There's so much strange shit that happens in our country that we don't even understand that defies the laws of science as we understand them,

Starting point is 02:23:01 the laws of physics as we understand them, and it stumps not just me as a CIA officer, but a whole range of experts that I've talked to. Gun to your head, would you say it's super advanced like DARPA technology? I don't know if I would give DARPA the credit, but I would say that the 60, 40 of what we're seeing is either advanced technology or, this was really crazy, old, super old technology that we found a way to do better. Balloons, sea drones, unpowered passive devices, right? That kind of stuff.

Starting point is 02:23:44 What do you make of all the patterns, unpowered, uh, passive devices, right? That kind of stuff. What do you make of all the patterns though, of people who have around the world who have claimed to have witnessed something? And, and again, you know, you hear a lot of people now they'll come up, they'll say, I'm an experiencer and maybe somebody is, but the vast percentage of people is probably something different. But when you look at, say, the patterns that James Fox has been on the show, has created with the history of it since the 1940s, be it from China, Russia, United States, Australia, Africa, South America, all over the map, where they report the similar things small creatures similar bdis similar colors craft described in often the same ways a form of telepathy that happens for people that have encounters of the third kind that's the right term right alessi it's a fourth kind right where it's like everything all together you know i guess there's a possibility well there's certainly a possibility some people are lying but when you see all these different people from so many different places who before the

Starting point is 02:24:50 internet when these things are happening had no ability to communicate with each other what do you make of that so there's something very real there there's there's two things that i've been able to actually see for myself and measure for myself first experiencers are having real experiences from their point of view with their five sensory organs, right, their eyes, their nose, their ears, etc., they're having a very real experience. But all a sensory organ is is a series of electrical patterns to the brain. So just like we can simulate, if you touch freezing cold water on a hot day, the first sensation you actually have when you stick your finger into the cold water is a burning sensation because that's how the body interprets

Starting point is 02:25:31 the sensation, right? Same thing happens if it's a freezing cold day and a lukewarm pool of water, as soon as you touch it, it feels super hot. That's just an electrical impulse. So it's not that what you see is really what you see, what you see is really what you see or what you hear is really what you hear. It's that your brain is interpreting electrical signals and translates those electrical signals into sensory perception. So what's wild to me is a lot of the experiencers that I've spoken to have had very real experiences, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what they experienced actually happened to them the way that they experienced it they may have been touching cold water on a hot day and what they experienced

Starting point is 02:26:11 was burning so that's what's so fascinating to me because one of the things we've absolutely been able to measure is that in areas where highly strange phenomenon have happened energy readings are all over the map electrical energy meetings magnetic energy readings are all over the map, electrical energy meetings, magnetic energy readings, gravitational energy readings all over the place. So we really could like for all intents and purposes, you could stand in one place and you don't smell anything. And it feels like a 70 degree day. And then you stand six feet in a different place. And now all of a sudden you smell oranges and it feels like a 90 degree day, right? Like that's the, the impact of energy on your body and on your brain and how your brain interprets events. So when you think about true experiencers,

Starting point is 02:26:58 if they're just temporarily co-located in an area where either a extraterrestrial phenomenon happened or a very terrestrial phenomenon happened with high energy readings the experience could be the same see what i'm saying yes i understand what you're saying i think that there's still a little bit of an open-ended argument as to the exact how how many data points across how many years and how many places like just statistically from like an anomaly perspective for sure how much that lines up and it makes you think because you know people's heads go to oh are these different governments trying to put out misinformation stuff like that and that's that's a fair question to ask but then you look at the people who are coming out and and some of them smell governmenty and other people don't you know it can be both that's what i'm saying it can absolutely be both it's not an either or argument right it can be

Starting point is 02:27:57 terrestrial and natural and it can be government related. Because what has the government always done? When it was like the 1920s, the government found where nature created forests, and then it started cutting down trees. It went to the place where nature created gold reserves and gold ore, and then it started mining operations. So why would we not think that if the government found a vortex of energy that could have benefit to aeronautical aviation technology or weapons technology or free energy, right? Yep. Whatever, fusion, fission, whatever. If they were to find one of those locations, wouldn't they go there? Wouldn't they also try to cover it up? Wouldn't it also be a place that has its own measurable differences against every place else? And wouldn't people in the surrounding area also have experiences that were related to the incredible amount of energy or the unique geology of that location? I'm more and more convinced that there's a terrestrial explanation for what most experiencers see. But here's the thing that's so interesting, especially if there's a terrestrial explanation for it, intelligent life from another planet would most likely identify those anomalies here when they did a scan of our planet. So it's a bit of a double-edged sword.

Starting point is 02:29:20 Yes, yes. Yeah, I agree. Why would, I mean, if you were just, we all, every time we fly in a plane, we do this. You fly over something. You fly over the flyover states. You look out your window. You see like rocks and desert. Not that interesting. But as soon as you fly over a city and you see the lights and you see the glow and you see the infrastructure of the roads, now it's more interesting. So you're flying over a wide patch of earth and you're choosing what of the roads, now it's more interesting. So you're flying over a wide patch of earth and you're choosing what to focus on based off of something of interest in the landscape. Yeah. I've always, and I love playing devil's advocate on everything around

Starting point is 02:29:57 this topic because it is so unknown and there are so many possibilities here. And one of the things I've always brought up is I'm like, first of all, we can't put ourselves in the shoes of a highly advanced intelligence civilization who knows shit that we don't. That's number one. But if we could at least accept the fact that they just know a lot more and then use our imagination to say, so they could probably time travel or crazy shit like that. I've always wondered how they wouldn't have simulated all these things to happen if they're true like these different sightings here's what i mean by that people are like oh well if they're happening all over the place why everyone's got an iphone how come how come we're not catching it up close or something like that i'm saying maybe when you

Starting point is 02:30:37 see for example the zimbabwe incident in 1990 in 1994 where this was in the middle of you know the brush out in zimbabwe specifically by an international school where there were a bunch of six-year-old kids playing and that's it maybe an intelligence advanced civilization would have simulated oh we want this one to crash or land there or whatever so these six-year-olds can see it and we can play you know sims with how that affects what they say to the rest of the world and how the world views the potential phenomenon as like a psychological experiment if you will as opposed to having the same craft land in the middle of fucking new york city where seven million people see it all at once and they're like oh my god they're here you understand what i'm saying like

Starting point is 02:31:18 isn't it possible that if if they're so powerful to have all these possibilities, they don't necessarily crash? It's more like it could be planned out as a simulation? I don't, I think it is, I think anything is possible. But one of the things that is also becoming increasingly clear to me in my Beyonce and Walker investigation is that one of the major flaws that happens when we talk to experiencers, one of the major flaws that highlights to me that an experiencer is not as genuine is when they become hyper-focused on the fact that an alien life is interested in human life.

Starting point is 02:31:57 Why do we think that an advanced civilization... From commutes that become learning sessions to dishwashing filled with laughs, podcasts can help you make the most out of your everyday. And when it comes to everyday spending, you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits.

Starting point is 02:32:19 Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. The aliens would give two shits about human beings. You're making the Neil deGrasse Tyson argument. Why? Why do we think that they would care about us? We're inferior because they're super advanced and civilized, right? We aren't, we don't make up a large contingent of what the earth is. What do you mean by that?

Starting point is 02:32:42 Like human beings aren't as aren't as uh as prevalent as say trees or water or oxygen but we're nitrogen we're way smarter and way more interesting not to them why do we think we're interesting to them what makes you think that you're more fucking interesting than a dolphin to an alien well let me ask you this because we make cities if we were able to fly over ants make cities if we were able to fly over ants make cities if we were able to fly over a world back 6 000 years ago with pre-babylon pre egypt or whatever and see these ancient civilizations you don't think that our current society if we had the ability to do that would be interested in those people who are

Starting point is 02:33:20 in most degrees completely not advanced to us i think that there might be an interest but does that mean that's what you went for what do you mean if we created this is a if we created time travel this is a great a great mental experiment if we created time travel so that we today could go back in time to the past if we spent the hundreds of trillions of dollars to invent that technology do you think we would spend our time researching people or do you think we would spend our time and money mining resources or planting seeds that we would then cultivate you know in the in the future just we would find some way to make something much more valuable than fucking watching people but anthropology and and tracking people like look biology is one of the

Starting point is 02:34:12 least funded sciences in the in the world right now people just don't care about temporary living creatures zoologists know that that's why they struggle all the time to get funding. Anthropologists know that. That's why they all end up as waitresses, right? People don't care about, there is no value in understanding a civilization or a human being or the biology of a human being or how they all interact there's no there's no scalable value there if you're going to take on the expense of launching some sort of widespread uh mission or campaign or operation to to explore something new now what if though instead of it being an a an advanced civilization from somewhere else what if due to dimensionality that we currently can't understand here and now right now, these are actually future humans who are the spawn of us who have figured out a way to circumnavigate dimensions in time to come back and observe us.

Starting point is 02:35:18 They are essentially therefore observing the seeds that became the tree that they are. Is that not – you don't think so? Why would they do it? Why would they do it? Why would they come back to change the river of time? That's not observing. That's not observing, but you're there. You're there doing that.

Starting point is 02:35:34 It's not that you're observing, but you're like, that's why we see them because they're here trying to do that. You're interfering that. I mean, that's a possible. What if it could be some future version of us that's coming back and meddling in the past to create a future scenario or an alternate timeline or whatever else.

Starting point is 02:35:48 Absolutely. All of those things could happen. If anything, one of the results that has been very consistent in the research that I've done with the Skinwalker Ranch folks is that there is a question of time. That actual devices that measure the passage of time respond differently in these various areas where there's energy anomalies can you translate that a little bit yeah i mean i'll give you the simplest example in the world right two watches two stop watches set with the same standards of the same make of the same model one sits on a table in an area that has no anomalous energy effects. One is attached to a balloon that floats up 5,000 feet into an area where there is an energy anomaly. And when you

Starting point is 02:36:32 bring it back down from the balloon and you put it side by side, they read time differently by seven seconds. What the fuck is that called again? There's a name for that. I know exactly what you're talking about. There's a name for that. We talked about that on another podcast. I see what you're saying. So if that can happen in a three-acre area of space by being 5,000 feet different, I mean, to be seven seconds different, the only place where we've measured that kind of time lapse is the difference between being on Earth

Starting point is 02:37:00 and being in space moving at speed. And even then, it's only a few seconds right so how in the world does that happen here on earth in an area of strangeness yeah that's a fair point no explanation for it but it highlights that time or the tools that we use to measure time can somehow be affected whether it's electrical signals or whether it's something else, whether it's somehow atmospheric or mechanical or who knows what. I don't have an explanation for it, but I've seen it and I've seen it multiple times in multiple places. So again, if I was the CEO of a company that developed a time machine and I had the chance in the future to go back in

Starting point is 02:37:46 time, all I would think about as a human being is, how do I make this successful politically, economically, financially? There'd be some justification other than, I really want to go back and observe human beings. I really want to go back and observe dinosaurs. No, I want to go back and I want to, uh, you know, I want to identify an area where there's massive coal reserves that I know we're going to turn into massive diamond reserves by right now. Which, which in the defense of what we're discussing right now, we're talking about the same ends via different means potentially. Is that fair to say because you're saying in that way they they'd still be here but they wouldn't give a fuck about us right

Starting point is 02:38:30 give a fuck about this and i'm saying all right maybe that's true maybe it's not maybe they do give a fuck about us but either way they're potentially here correct it could be that's that is a solid what if i think that you know the the idea that intelligent life came back to see us solid what if the fact that it's human beings in the future coming back to see us, solid what if. There's a lot of what ifs that are fairly solid, right? But it's when you start to dig into the why, the why is what makes it fall apart. And when you start to think that the reason they came back was to observe us, that why really falls apart. Because if you're an alien civilization and you're exploring the universe, what's so interesting about human beings? Not that much.

Starting point is 02:39:09 What's interesting about the planet as a potential resource pool to allow you to continue to expand your expansion across the universe? Much more viable. Just think about how human beings go into a, look at farmland. We go to new ranches and new swaths of land thinking about what we could build there using it as a resource. We don't think about the field mice that live there and the ants that live there and the transmigrating birds that go through there in the fall. The transmigrating birds. We don't fucking care about that shit. We're like, there's 35 acres. I could turn that into a parking lot.

Starting point is 02:39:46 Eminent domain. No, look, I, and again, people don't want to hear some of the things that guys like you will say on this. And some of that's also just because your job title, to be honest, but like, you got to look at this with some logic. And even if I'm not buying some arguments, you have to realize this entire topic is quite literally a hashtag. We don't know what we don't know. So you can't sit here and say, well, it's absolutely got to be this or, well, they would absolutely think like this. We don't know that. We can look at the data we have and that also – I mentioned it a few minutes ago, but this is a topic that people have thought about forever.

Starting point is 02:40:30 Like if you look at ancient history and stuff, they think about, oh, what's up there? But in pop culture per se, it was more of a culty topic or like underground topic you will, forever within America. And then that narrative really started to shift to a more mainstream, if you will, attitude towards it in 2017 because Christopher Mellon was able to legally walk out of his job at the Defense Department and give information that he was legally allowed to give to New York Times, makes this whole story about UFOs. Then guys like the former head of the ATIP desk, Lou Elizondo come out, they talk about this stuff. There's a few things there too. And then you eventually get to David Grush coming out who, you know, came from the Air Force background and had access allegedly to all this information that was highly classified about potential sightings or things that were recovered. Again, it's not like he brought out the proof of that but discussed at length the files that he allegedly saw. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, on the one hand, let's say this was an intelligence op.

Starting point is 02:41:37 And let's say they were covering for technology they didn't want people to know about. That makes sense to me. But are there other possibilities that I'm not thinking of besides like, oh, it's actually real and they're out of the goodness of their heart doing this? Are there other intelligence related things that they could be doing that for as a cover that you can think of? You mean the whistleblowers? Yes. Any intelligence related reason why they would be sharing the information?

Starting point is 02:42:02 Yes, to cover for something besides what I'm thinking of, which is like advanced technology they don't want us to know the government has. So are you saying that the whistleblowers are orchestrated, not genuine? I'm saying if they are. I don't know. If they are. So the way I see your Lou Elizondos and your David Grushes of the world, most likely they were in a – if they were part of a sensitive program, they were in a very compartment were part of a sensitive program they were in a very compartmented piece of a large sensitive program i have worked with people who have been assigned to area 51 i have worked with commanding officers who have been given commands over experimental locations and they it's so heavily compartmented that even the commanders don't know the things that

Starting point is 02:42:47 happen under their command until after they are there and after something is so relevant that they have a need to know about the thing that they're commanding. Their job is really just to make sure that super secret room number one is funded and has staffing and has security protocols in place. You're not allowed to actually know what's happening in super secret room number one is funded and has staffing and has security protocols in place. You're not allowed to actually know what's happening in super secret room number one, because even though you're the commander of the building, you don't have that need to know. So it's so heavily compartmentalized. So if they were involved in a sensitive program, they were probably part of a highly compartmentalized column inside of a larger program. So when they see what they see, there's so much more that they don't see.

Starting point is 02:43:31 So then when they, they don't have a context for what they're, what they're putting together. So when they come out and they blow a whistle on what they did see, there's all sorts of stuff that they did not see, that they did not have access to, that they're essentially assuming or defining or whatever else, right? But they didn't have access to it. And that's by design. So they could believe that they were part of a program that, and there were other things going on that they did not themselves witness, but they did witness this one piece, and that could be what they're sharing. They could also be just – they could be believers themselves and be overstating or overblowing their own experience. What did you think of what David Grush was saying? The whole Grush example, it didn't sit right with me. I didn't feel like what he was talking about could be corroborated by a second or third, not coming directly from him himself. And media was getting all sorts of details about his background wrong, from what service he was in to what his job was to what his career was.

Starting point is 02:44:53 So if they're getting those details about him wrong, which are easily documented and easy to track down and easy to vet and verify, then how much of the actual information that he's saying are they also getting wrong? Yeah. So Jesse Michaels has a show called american alchemy which is really incredible on youtube and he's you know he's like he's a works in the teal office and everything i might have been telling you about him off camera but he's eventually going to be on this podcast but i've had a chance to talk with him a bunch really good

Starting point is 02:45:21 dude but he was like the first guy to get the interview with grush he's known grush for i think years at this point like three and a half four years and i really want him to explain it when he comes on my show because he can explain how he views it a lot better than i can but my takeaway from what he said is that he felt as someone who's not in the government to be clear he felt, as someone who's not in the government, to be clear, he felt that Grush basically had access. There were too many kernels of information that he was able to get, whether you believe it or not, that's a separate question, to be able to say that it was a planted story for someone on the squirrel route

Starting point is 02:46:04 who's curious to pick up like him. He's like there were too many things that he got to, including evidently like witnessing forms of the government intelligence want whistleblowers to pick up some kernels of information that it's like bullshit they put there so that they can push a narrative? That's like 2D chess. Yeah, right? It's the idea that there's some sort of planned conspiracy of – I didn't call it a conspiracy. What you explained was a conspiracy, right? That elements in power would plant seeds in people who might be whistleblowers so that they would intentionally go out and spread incorrect information.

Starting point is 02:47:01 That is basically the definition of of conspiracy right i accept your definition but so i i i come from a world where i very much believe that you cannot attribute to conspiracy what can be explained with idiocy right that's one of the two roles of two laws of analysis when when people come out and say something when whistleblowers come out and claim what they believe or what they're so convicted about, going back to Snowden, when you're inside secret government organizations, you never have all the information. That's how the government protects itself from having somebody like a real whistleblower come out and give all the keys to the kingdom,

Starting point is 02:47:54 like we call them, right? All the secrets at once. Right. So if people like your contact at, is it American Alchemy? Yeah, Jesse Michaels. So like Jesseesse's if someone of jesse's experience is saying it doesn't smell right if it walks like a duck and it quacks like

Starting point is 02:48:12 a duck maybe it's a duck if it doesn't smell right to him well no he's saying it does he's saying that grush couldn't have been the quote-unquote planted squirrel to get that information because he got to too much. That's his argument. Doesn't mean he's right. Right, right, right. But that's his argument. So, yeah.

Starting point is 02:48:29 The idea of a plant. And people accuse me of being a plant too. All the fucking time. And that's fine. They're all fucking stupid. If you think I'm a plant, you're pretty fucking stupid. You're a very talented plant. You grew with very fine branches and leaves.

Starting point is 02:48:44 I saw somebody. i saw you know there's something really fucking wrong with the world when people make videos about why you're a plant yeah and there are videos out there about why i'm a plant it's just it's i don't to be clear i don't think you're a plant i appreciate that i don. That's because you know me well enough. I do think there is a possibility that certainly, perhaps indirectly, a person of your incredible skill set could absolutely still be an asset to the government in other ways. But one of the main arguments I'd make against all the people out there like, oh, this guy's a psyop and shit is you say whatever the fuck you want. And I can speak from personal experience and I'll leave it at that. That you say a lot of shit that CIA isn't too happy about.

Starting point is 02:49:36 And so I don't really – I don't see that – like if people actually listen to what you said, I don't see that argument. They'll just point to say the argument of like Edwardward snowden be like look at that company man yeah but i'm like yeah but what about the next 10 things he said yeah you know so i i do think that's totally unfair but listen there's been a lack there's been a break in trust in there between government and people well beyond just the cia for for a long, but especially over the last 20 years or so, that I get why people's heads go to that. I understand where they're coming from, and they don't have to agree. People out there listening, you have every right to have your opinion, but my opinion is different than that, and obviously your opinion publicly is different than that. So the idea that the government would make a plant, it doesn't make any sense to me. The also... Ever.

Starting point is 02:50:26 If the government's going to make a plant, how would they... I mean, planting is... Here's why. Here's why I'm having such consternation over this. When you cultivate a plant that's witting, meaning they know that they're a plant, they know their job is to go out there and communicate a certain message, you always run the risk of blowback if the plant goes upside down or backwards, if they change, if they turn suit and then they admit. Yeah, but then you just kill them. Administratively challenging.

Starting point is 02:51:02 There it is again. That's an admission. You didn't think you were going to get that one by me. Come on. So that's the big... I mean, it's a huge expense with a massive risk of blowback, and you can't control the actual message

Starting point is 02:51:20 that comes across because you don't know what the actual voice, the representative representative is going to say. So plants are super dangerous, man. It's hard to put plants in governments. It's hard to put plants in economic or corporate espionage. It's hard to put plants anywhere. It's hard to put your faith in a human being to go do a job when you don't have close enough power over them that you can actually like twist the bolts and tighten the wires when you need to. It's just, it's too dangerous. We've been down that road,

Starting point is 02:51:51 pre 9-11 especially, and it didn't work out well. So like the idea of trying to get a sympathizer into a circle of influence, whether you're talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, or whether you're talking about, you know, the OSS in World War II, or whether you're talking about, you know, the behind the iron curtain, it's hard. It's hard to plant one of your own into an organization. It's much easier to find somebody who's already there, and then just amplify their voice or take advantage of their purpose. Okay, I should see that. So to your point, right? I understand that I am a, I am one of the few voices out there that while critical of CIA, I also, I also do not talk about the CIA as being some sort of corrupt secret organization that's trying to undermine American

Starting point is 02:52:36 freedom. Most of the voices out there that are, that are former CIA are just talking about how incompetent and corrupt CIA is. So if CIA has a relationship with YouTube, right? I don't know if they do or not. I would imagine that they do. But I can see how CIA might be like, hey, YouTube, kick the algorithm in his favor a little bit and kick the algorithm off of somebody else's favor, right? Because this person generally speaks about CIA in negative terms, and Bustamante generally speaks about CIA in less negative terms. So that's low-touch planting. Well, that's not even a plant. I know, I know, I know.

Starting point is 02:53:17 That's just tweaking of information. Not to mention the fact that most of the people who are actually reviewing your YouTube content for covert influence are former intelligence themselves. You know what I mean? Or it could also be that the content that you create with me just happens to be interesting content that people organically watch. When you think about Occam's razor, what's more likely, right? When you think about Hanlon's razor, what's more likely? That there's a great conspiracy or that the content is just popular there there there is there are aspects of that that I think I would agree with and in some ways are irrefutable where I run into an issue with

Starting point is 02:53:58 pointing at the different razors if you will is that you can then take the argument to use it every time. Meaning, let's, I'm just going to make up percentages. Let's say Occam's razor says, you know, 99% of the time it's this. Every time an individual story comes up, you can say, oh, this is one of the 99 and never say the 1%, which, you know, it's hard to guess the 1%. That's the needle in the haystack, right? And I know that exists. And your point about, by the way, that's the needle in the haystack right and i know that exists and your point about by the way it's easier to cultivate people who are already within i completely agree with that and i also agree that like the whole planting thing is way harder than like the general public out there likes to likes to make it i don't think it doesn't exist though i think i think we've

Starting point is 02:54:41 proven that it exists i might believe you if you're saying, especially in the current technological landscape, it's been harder to do that post 9-11, post tech boom. I might buy that. But it can exist essentially. Anything can exist. It's like what we were talking about when we were discussing UFOs, right? There's a possibility. But the probability is the real question okay fair enough well the the one that that people have been looking at as like okay where's where's the inteliness on this is the whole diddy thing so i even had trap laura ross in here who's like the preeminent hip-hop historian documentarian on youtube just eats leaves and sleeps and breathes this shit, but he obviously is in the process of reviewing all the civil lawsuits that have occurred. We don't have indictments yet on Diddy, but if you read the civil lawsuits, and if even half of that's true, it's horrible, and it's a mess, and when you look at his history, we don't have to go through the whole thing, but he was suddenly you know out of nowhere powerful of you know at age 23 in charge

Starting point is 02:55:48 of what became the biggest rap label in america like very quickly so and there's questions about the people who got him in there and everything but you know when you look at a guy who i personally view as if it had an intel angle he was a useful idiot rather than because i mean he's not the brightest bulb let's just be honest here right like if you look at a guy who maybe as a useful idiot had fucking a hundred cameras in every room cameras in the pens and stuff very epstein-y if you will could you see why people out there are saying this has to be some sort of i don't know who but some sort of government backed op p diddy had more money than you can get the government to give for any kind of op so not before he was put into power though the whole idea of him being put into power is

Starting point is 02:56:43 kind of a silly conspiracy on its own. Why? He wasn't smart. He had really proven nothing in the industry and suddenly was in charge of Bad Boy Records' biggest thing ever. So I don't – And his star was gunned down within three years. His key moneymaker was gunned down in three years. I don't know the answer, man.

Starting point is 02:57:02 I don't keep up closely with anything in pop culture. But here's what I'm saying. If Intel was going to be – if CIA was going to be involved, it wouldn't be involved in a domestic, unknown, unproven rapper in the, what, 90s, 80s? I didn't say CIA, by the start by the way i want to be clear about that whoever right if if if u.s government was going to somehow get funding you think it's foreign government like it could be if if any government was going to try to build influence it wouldn't try with uh with what you just painted to be quite a loser, right? It wouldn't start with somebody who's unproven,

Starting point is 02:57:49 who's got no skills, no background, no connections, and then try to build that person up. That's not how it works. That's not how any good op works. You find somebody who's already on the rise. You find somebody who's already established. Like you don't bet on a losing horse, especially not with big, big money in the hopes that 15 30

Starting point is 02:58:06 years from now it's going to pay off in some sort of intelligence world what if he's the in though and it's more the people around him are the people who are maybe more reliable but he's the in because he's the face of it again the useful idiot is how that's that's an access agent what you're talking about is an access agent a useful idiot is somebody like fucking what's his name that did the interview with Putin, Tucker, Tucker Carlson. That's a useful idiot.

Starting point is 02:58:32 Oh, that was that whole interview he had with Putin. All that interview did was take Vladimir Putin and give him a pedestal with the entire conservative part of the United States. And Putin could sit there and say whatever he wanted to say, and he could look strong, and he could look eloquent, and he could look intelligent, and he could look confident. He could choose what the talking points were that he talked about,

Starting point is 02:58:53 and he had a voice to the entire conservative nation. That was a brilliant move on Putin's part. Are you saying Tucker lost the moment he walked into the room? 100%. The moment he showed up, he lost then the whole i mean if you want to have a fucking phenomenal conversation we should just take that whole interview play by play and disassemble it it's all one giant powerful influence campaign putin's a master man he's awesome to watch you can't argue that he's awesome to watch and just incredibly skilled but so so Carlson was the avenue by which Putin could get to the Republican or the conservative base of the United States.

Starting point is 02:59:30 That makes Tucker the useful idiot. I see what you're saying. That's what a useful idiot. An access agent is more of what you're talking about, somebody who has a connection with people. And if you want the connection that they have, you have to go through them to get the introduction. But once you get the introduction, you kind of cut them out so you you think that and this could be a perfectly fair opinion by the way because i don't fucking know but if you were looking at it you would say diddy's more of just a sick fuck i mean he's a more likely

Starting point is 03:00:00 scenario i think there are a lot more sick fucks out there than people realize i would agree with you and the more money you get and the more confidence the more fame the more fan base that you get the easier it is to execute on your sick interests because you have the money to cover it up you have a line of people who are willing to experiment with you you have more connections with more people who are wealthy to experiment with you you have more connections with more people who are wealthy like you and guess what they all have too their own sick interests yeah like this is just human nature it's so blackmail would be human nature as a part of that too it could be yeah i mean that just you got human beings are fucking horrible creatures That's what was coming. It's what we are right when we were kids. What did we do when we found an insect?

Starting point is 03:00:58 Pull off its legs you pull out its wings you burn it with their magnifying glass unless he's nodding his head It's what you fucking do. I didn't do these things I just want to be really really clear on that. Would you like to verbalize the sick things that were unique to you? Because you can share those if you like, I'm sure. Are you one of the people- Pulling off animal legs and shit? Are you one of the people that looks at your own poop? Is that what you are? Are you one of the people-

Starting point is 03:01:13 I've looked at my own shit before. Are you one of the people that maybe smells your toenail clippings? Are you one of those people? They have a smell? People have weird tendencies that you could not imagine. There's stuff that makes it so that like the guy like dude just just look at how many varieties of there are and it gives you an idea yeah of how dive and that's only sexual and they're not even perversions those are just

Starting point is 03:01:38 a variety of sexual interests we're not even in like sexual perversions or illegal sexual perversions. And that's all within the realm of sex, not the realm of pain or the realm of deception or the realm of physical abuse. Like you can imagine how much sickness there is when it comes to the way that human beings find things curious. Because that's what we're really talking about is just curiosities that are labeled to be sick because we live in a world of right and wrong right so do i think that it's more likely that some foreign government identified a 23 year old black hip-hop artist who was in charge of a label that was failing and turned him into a powerhouse artist who became executive yeah, so powerful or whatever else, right? Do I believe that? Or do I believe that somebody just worked their ass off, climb the chain. And then as they had more and

Starting point is 03:02:34 more success to deal with the stress of their success, they leaned into their own curiosities as escape mechanisms to cope with the stress that they were carrying and funded those stress coping mechanisms with the profit that they were generating. All right. I'm going to have a question on this. I want to say this though, because it's worth saying, because I think it's part of what drives my antenna going up on this. There was someone who made a comment to me, God, this was like nine, 10 years ago. Not the kind of person you'd ever expect to be hanging out with Diddy.

Starting point is 03:03:09 Put it that way. And he would definitely tell you he went out of his way not to do that. And the reason I say that is because he very offhand said something along the lines of, if you get invited to a Diddy party you don't go and i didn't think anything i was like yeah okay because i i always thought he was a bad dude right i always thought that i didn't know what this fucking lawsuit was going to show me i didn't have any inkling of that maybe i should have if i listen to the comment but just the way that this guy and knowing who he is and how he said it in hindsight, it's fucking sinister.

Starting point is 03:03:47 And it makes me think about it because like you, you've given some really good breakdowns before of possibilities with like an Epstein or someone like that. And you've also mentioned very correctly that like, yeah, you know about Epstein. There's all kinds of fucking people like this around the world. This is, this is just, unfortunately it's an ugly world and shit like this happens. But now putting the term you just taught me on it i think maybe you had said this before and i just kind of missed it but like you've said he could be he may have been a good access information agent because he had access to information on extremely powerful people that different governments around the world could have said highest bidder and we want the info on it do you think that that that's not a possibility with diddy oh no i think it's absolutely a

Starting point is 03:04:29 possibility okay but here's the thing that's not unique to diddy oh i agree you know what i mean so what to me the thing that's important to understand is what we are seeing now with with the with the information coming out on diddy and what he did and how he carried out his parties and what information he collected and what his interests were. There's no reason at all for us to think that that's unique. That's just one person in the music industry. Imagine the film industry, pro sports industry, corporate oil industry, big tobacco industry. You name the industry, right? The rule of thumb at CIA is that every time you catch a mole, you have to assume there's two more. So when you catch a mole, a penetration inside your agency, when you catch

Starting point is 03:05:23 a Robert Hanson, an Aldrich Ames, a Jerry Lee, you have to assume there's at least two more. Because the one that you got in, the one that was there, is the one that you caught. And the one that you caught, if whoever's handling them is running at least two, so that they can always have informants about the other. I understand.

Starting point is 03:05:46 Right. Yeah. So if we caught one from the music industry, there's probably two more. And then if there are three in the music industry, it's probably three in the tobacco industry, probably three in the electronic, the electric vehicles industry.

Starting point is 03:06:00 There's probably three in the social media industry. There's probably three in the big alcohol, big beer industry, right? Like rich people are connected to other rich people. They have rich people problems, which average people can't even fucking conceptualize. And to your government intelligence services, why would you talk to a normal fucking person with no value and no access and no network when you could always get your ass in front of a politician, a famous musician, an actor, a senior executive?

Starting point is 03:06:32 Like, it's not hard to get in front of one of those people when you are an intelligence officer. And those people are guaranteed to have access to information that can be useful in your own endeavors to collect and manipulate and influence foreign countries foreign elections foreign media yeah no it's look points well taken and that's that's interesting that that that's like the rule they're putting in a law of three so you got three dimensions automatically if you catch one there's two there i mean it's you know kanye west lost his fucking mind two years ago when he was saying all that shit. I don't know how much of that you saw, but it was like pretty fucking crazy.

Starting point is 03:07:10 And like, I still can't even wrap my head around all the shit he said. However, in the middle of that frenzy, you know, this was, he was saying, you know, because he had no filter on the situation. He was like, he was like, yo, yo it's up with diddy he was calling out other names too and we were all like what the fuck he's like diddy you fucking bad shit like that we're like what the fuck is he talking about and now you know you're like holy shit and kat williams was another guy in 2023 saying yo 2024 is gonna be a problem for some of these people and you wonder how many like okay if it's not intelligence related the fucked up you know triumvirate of people if you will and whatever is beyond that you wonder

Starting point is 03:07:50 how many guys have just known about this for so long but you know for whatever reason they can't say anything about it it's it's it's scary because you you're right. And like I feel like you've seen the worst of humanity in what you do. And I understand that. That drives how you think about human beings when you say things like human beings are horrible creatures. I don't agree with you. But I agree that there are aspects of humanity that are fucking dark, sadistic, and twisted in ways that our minds don't want to think about or talk about out loud at the office i get that but you know you see stuff like this and it's hard not to feel really resigned to that fact sometimes because it's just like like i can't even fathom what these what these people do and you know like like the fact that a diddy could exist in the middle of all

Starting point is 03:08:42 these people and people know what he does no one says shit you know blackmail could be a thing but whatever I appreciate your points on that that was some good analysis but we gotta talk about an incoming prediction you've had for a while Alessi can you pull up the

Starting point is 03:09:00 Did China Invade Twitter account on Twitter oh I've seen this, yes. I'm the one doing that. I would also like to see the video of where I said China was going to invade Taiwan. I don't know that I've ever said China's going to invade Taiwan.

Starting point is 03:09:16 I think I said China would take action and move on Taiwan, but I don't think I ever said the word invade. I want to be proven wrong if I said invade. Let's check that. I remember on Concrete 127 in March 2022, that was the first time you said it. So that's Danny Jones' podcast. And then in episode 97 with me, you said it.

Starting point is 03:09:37 And again, I'm not going to – maybe the word invade wasn't used. So I'm going to paraphrase conservatively. What you said is that in the buildup to the 2024 election, let's use your words, China will take action on Taiwan. So I created this Twitter account where I ask every day, did China invade Taiwan yet? And I type out, no.

Starting point is 03:09:58 I appreciate you. Now, Alessi, do me a favor. Look up, look up Chinese meddling in Taiwanese elections January 2024. Oh, it just happened. Oh, yeah? And do you know what happened? Do you know the results of that election?

Starting point is 03:10:14 It was like the pro-China party? Yep. Pro-China party won the legislative section. All right. Let's read this real quick. All right. So Chinese interference in Taiwan's 2024 elections and lessons learned. Go down. Go down. Okay. In January 2024, Taiwan elected William Lai as its next president, ushering in an unprecedented third consecutive term of Democratic Progressive Party DPP leadership. So pause. DPP, pro-independence.

Starting point is 03:10:38 Anti-China. DPP, pro-independence. So the president that was elected is a anti-China president. So continue. So that's bad for China. Keep going. Okay. Throughout the elections, China employed a wide range of tools, including military intimidation, media interference, and economic diplomatic measures in an effort to shape public opinion in Taiwan. China's efforts to sway the election warrant studied by Taiwan, the United States, and others to draw lessons for how to limit Chinese influence activities. So my point to you was that China would move on Taiwan before the US election in

Starting point is 03:11:09 2024. They clearly were, right? And they were using military intimidation, media interference, economic and diplomatic measures, trying to shape public influence through social media, et cetera, et cetera. They did not successfully get a pro-China president in place. But they did get, I don't know if this will talk about it, does it talk about the legislation? No. Talk about, so do me a favor and look up who controls Taiwan elections for legislation, right? Which party won Taiwanese legislation?

Starting point is 03:11:48 Type in which party won Taiwanese majority government. Yeah, majority government. Yeah, that's right. Taiwanese majority government. Let's see what we can get here. Okay, no. Oh, let's do election results and implications. Bingo.

Starting point is 03:12:07 Okay. All right. So go down. On January 13, 2024, Taiwan held elections for the presidency and 113-seat legislator, the legislative Yuan. The run-up to the election drew global attention because of the growing tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Since current President Tsai Ing-wen was elected in in 2016 official cross-strait dialogue has been suspended and there is deep concern about china's growing of gray zone tactics and rising possibility of actual activities with the election now concluded in democratic progressive party dpp candidate william lye the victor all eyes are on the ongoing

Starting point is 03:12:38 transition which will culminate in lies inauguration on may 20th all right so scroll down scroll down are there results? So here's what's important. Oh yeah, this is what we want, this graph. Yep. Zoom in on that. So you can see the DPP. Again, DPP means pro-independence, anti-China. Okay. So the party for the DPP, the results by party showed that in 2024, you had fewer than ever, fewer than 2020, fewer than 2016. You had a shrinking majority of anti-China. And you had a growing majority of third-party independent KMT. So KMT is the pro-unification, pro-China party.

Starting point is 03:13:22 And if you keep scrolling down there's the legislation take a look at who loads who owns the majority of that kmt and independence yeah now can we define who the independents are the independents are basically people who are not choosing to verbally say that they want an independent taiwan so do you think that this will come whether it's on your timeline or not do you think this will at some point this movement culminate in a maybe similar to what was what was the fucking hong kong man i've always said that this is going to look more like hong kong than ukraine that's a good one it's an administrative takeover right now the legislature... So let's compare this to the United States.

Starting point is 03:14:08 Inside the United States, when the Congress is Democratic and the President is Republican, how much of the President's policies get passed? Yeah. Right. None. Yeah, not a lot. That's what happened right now in Taiwan. The President is pro-independence.

Starting point is 03:14:27 The Congress is pro-China. And the result of that didn't happen. That didn't happen until 2024 January elections, right? In the lead up of which all of October, all of November, all of December, China was pumping in covert influence, military intimidation, all sorts of diplomatic and non-diplomatic functions to try to sway exactly what's happening here. And then since this election, you've only seen more ramping up of the same thing, because what China has right now is gridlock in Taiwan. That's what they want. Taiwan can't become

Starting point is 03:15:02 closer to the United States, has no other option except to become closer to China. And the legislature, all the policy that they're writing is pro-China policy. Right. This is exactly what it was like in Hong Kong. Hong Kong, it culminated in a police protest violence. It didn't culminate in an invasion. But what Russia did in Ukraine is not proper doctrine for modern day conflict. What China's doing in Taiwan absolutely is. Money and power. Money, power, policy. Because if you change the policy, then by the time anybody wakes up, all the policy is different. That's what happened in Hong Kong. Hong Kong went, they started protesting because they woke up and realized, wait a second, what do you mean we fall under Chinese laws?

Starting point is 03:15:48 We're Hong Kong. And then China was like, actually, no, you're not. We've had an army of attorneys working behind the scenes for the last five years. And all of your legislators have said that we will now fall under mainland China laws. Right? So that's why I have said this. You've been excited about this for a long time. You started a Twitter account about it. It's fun. The whole idea of did, is China going to invade Taiwan? I really want to know if I ever said those words. Because if I did, it's my bad. It's my mistake. It's my bad choice. And your Twitter account is right. But if what I said is that China is going to move on Taiwan prior to the elections, I'm 100% right. Yeah, you're mind-fucking me with the whether or not you said the word invade because there's a lot of words

Starting point is 03:16:27 that can be synonyms in there. You might have. Yeah, I might have. You might have. So if that's the case... And I'm the first person that wants to know when I'm wrong. Okay.

Starting point is 03:16:35 Right? I love to know when I'm wrong because then I know where I shouldn't go. Are you okay with me editing into this part of the video whatever that clip is? 100%.

Starting point is 03:16:43 Whatever it was that I said. To find it? Okay. Because I want to see it. All right, so that'll be what it is so edit in now but you had said that in the lead up to the 2024 election china was going to take taiwan correct what makes you so certain about that so um i i remain uh it's not certainty it's probabilities i remain i think it's a highly probable scenario that in the lead-up to the 2024 election china takes a very aggressive military stance on taiwan even better if in if in 2022 this year the house the congress and the white house all become controlled by different parties now it's a lame duck president in office when China invades Taiwan. And on the other side,

Starting point is 03:17:28 let's give a face like, oh, you were wrong. Yeah, so here's my... Or like, oh, you were right. So here's my fucked up face. Oh, I fucked up, yeah. And here's my result in case I'm right. I'm like, oh, I'm safe.

Starting point is 03:17:42 All right. Right? But it's not over yet, dude. It's not over because, again... No, there's still time time if i'm xi jinping he's got all sorts of shit he's got to deal with right now anyways right with what's going on in china did he have a stroke by the way i don't know there's people talking about it i don't trust any of that bullshit about about the health of foreign leaders i just don't trust it remember when putin had brain cancer yeah at the beginning of the ukraine invasion whatever i don't trust that shit but what I will say is that dude has to be asking himself the question, has to be asking himself

Starting point is 03:18:09 the question. There's so much turmoil in American politics right now. Like Biden is acting, Biden's president, sitting president, already knowing that he's not going to be the next president. We don't know if Kamala Harris, we don't know if Kamala Harris... Are we sure about that? We don't know if Kamala Harris is going to even be, like, picked at the DNC. We don't know if Donald Trump is going to be elected as president. We don't know if some other candidate is going to emerge.

Starting point is 03:18:37 Holy shit, dude. Like, America's got their pants down and their cock in their hand, and we're, like, playing with ourselves, trying to get ourselves hard right now. It's the perfect time for Xi Jinping to to be like i'm just gonna take action right now i'm just gonna do something fucking crazy right now and who's gonna do dick all about it right is sleepy joe biden gonna take military action that kamala is gonna stand behind or like

Starting point is 03:18:57 who's gonna do it's like it's everything that the the stage is set for any authoritarian leader to make a decisive tactical decision and leave America in the dust right now. I think your call on that potentially being the playing field, which was what you were insinuating back then, like this is going to be total chaos. I think that's right. I mean, it's total chaos at this point. And you're still obviously like, we talk a lot about China in podcasts, which by the way, you have a new flight now, right? I don't know yet. You don't know yet? I don't know yet. If I do, it's probably going to be earlier and I probably got to go farther. It's probably going to be out of LaGuardia or whatever.

Starting point is 03:19:34 All right. So can we pause for one second? Just check that. Sure. All right. All right. We're back. Andy does have to go. You have a flight coming out. So thank you so much for doing this as always, sir. We didn't get to the Trump assassination. We didn't get more on China. Reason to have you back soon. But I appreciate always the back and forth. It's been great media is at Everyday Spy. I've got some awesome links that I drop here every time I'm with you, brother. So if anybody wants to learn more about me or how I see the world, just go ahead and check on any of those links. If you want to go share your data with the CIA, go do it. CIA's already got your data. It's already got your data. Snowden left, remember? They're already there. All right, everybody. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Starting point is 03:20:23 Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

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